Change In Plans

MOMMY AND BABY

Greetings from Damaraland, Namibia. This short post is about our relatively quiet day here. Aside from a long, and great, elephant game drive this morning, and some unproductive fretting by me this afternoon, we didn’t get up to much.

The game drive was pretty awesome. We left at 7:15, which was very civilized. In the first 30 minutes, our guide, a Caprivian named Lister, showed us a lot of bush-medicine plants, and talked about the conservation area and the nearby goat-herding residents. Most of the people moved up here from South Africa in the 1970s to escape apartheid. This is a little counterintuitive, because Namibia, known then as South West Africa, was a South African colony, and had the same odious laws. Maybe the refugees just wanted some elbow room. There is plenty of that.

We stopped at a water hole, and Lister picked up the overnight tracks from one of the desert-elephant herds. He tracked the herd for about 10 kilometers, and we came upon them in a dry riverbed. The Rosie herd we had been tracking, named for its matriarch, had met up with the Oscar herd, named for its eldest recent elephant calf

In all, there were 26 desert-adapted elephants (about 4% of the world’s population), of all ages and sizes, grazing away happily on the leafy thorn trees in the sandy river bottom. Occasionally the matriarchs eyed us with defiant suspicion, but for the most part the herd focused on breaking branches and scarfing leaves.

BABY

Seeing a host of baby elephants was incredibly special. The smallest was a two-month-old, who would have come up to Zola’s shoulder (if we were foolish enough to get out of the game vehicle). All together there were about 10 sub-adults, many of whom were too little to graze. They played by chasing each other around, wrestling a little, and occasionally taking a break to find mom and breast feed.

We watched the herds for about 90 minutes. It was by far the best elephant sighting that India or I has ever had.

On the long drive back to the lodge, I read an Artemis Fowl novel aloud to Tallulah and Zola, pausing occasionally to marvel at the rugged desert landscape.

The rest of the day was lazy. Zola and I did schoolwork. I nearly finished the biography of Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, which I started two weeks ago. Tallulah reused to nap. We sat for a while by the small pool, until the hot wind and burning sun drove us back inside.

I spent a fair amount of this lazy time fretting about what we will do when our sojourn to Never Never Land, trip around the world, comes to an end. Totally unproductive behavior, and it made me unsuitable company for the rest of the family.

India and I need to spend some real time talking and deciding and planning. Generally I am in moderate denial about this golden period in my life (in our lives) concluding, and us needing to replace it with a more sustainable arrangement.

This change isn’t imminent, but it is coming, just as surely as autumn follows summer. Soon we will face up to it like adults, but probably not tonight.

Both before and after our great adventure ends, there will be fun to be had, kids and a wife to be loved, and life’s rich pageant to be enjoyed.