Hiking Africa

If you saw the movie, Out of Africa, the travelogue I went to this week would have caught your attention from the first few slides. They were of the plantation where Meryle Streep and Robert Redford roamed around while filming the movie and where the woman who wrote the memoir it’s loosely based on lived. She was a Danish woman who ran a 4,000 acre coffee plantation in Nairobi between 1914 and 1931. Our travelogue narrator says the place hasn’t changed much since the movie was made and you can even picnic in the exact same places as Streep and Redford did for a couple of scenes, high up on Kenya’s Oloololo Escarpment looking out at spectacular, panoramic views. I used to love that movie. I loved those views and so did movie goers. The movie won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

That was the only civilized place the travelogue covered. It was the starting point to a hiking safaris called The Great Walk of Africa. It’s a trademarked travel adventure tour that covers a 100 miles of hiking 3 to 6 hours a day, for 11 days covering 9 to 15 miles a day. Daytime temperatures: 80 to 90 degrees and at night it was cold enough to need hot water bottles in their cots to take off the chill. There are eight paying guests on each tour paying $7,000 each, plus you pay your own way to get to Nairobi. Along with the guests are four guides---two armed with guns, two with spears, plus fifteen others who move the camps each day and do the cooking and who mostly stay out of sight. The tour group walks in single file, five feet apart and you’re not allowed to talk which makes it easier to sneak up on the wildlife and to enjoy the smells, sounds, sights and feel of Africa as they follow the game trails first along the Tsavo River, then the Galana River in Kenya. It also makes it easier for the guides to protect the guests from danger if they’re not spread out and are paying attention to hand signals.

The speaker, a woman in her forties who lives very close by me, says she’s always had an incurable wanderlust and she’s gone on seven hiking tours like this around the world and this one, she said, was one of the greatest experiences of her life. She’s a paramedic as were a couple of her companions which would take some fear out of being off the grid. Even so, I can’t imagine me---even in my younger years---doing a trip like that. I’d be the one who’d have to go with a medical box full of allergy pills and potions for insect bites and hives and I’d still come back with malaria because mosquitoes love me. The company who does these hiking safaris’---Tropical-Ice---has been doing them since 1987 and they’ve only had one client charged and injured badly by an animal, a rhinoceros, and they’ve never had to kill an animal. A shot in the air usually keeps them from getting too close. The scariest part, our speaker said, was crossing crocodile infested water and they’d group up as close as they could, holding on to the person in front of them, hoping to fool the crocs into thinking they are a large elephant splashing across the river. Rhinos, though, are considered to be the most dangerous of the animals in Africa. They are “grumpy” and let humans know their presence isn’t appreciated.

I will never leave the country to take a trip like that. I will probably never even leave the state. Heck, I’ve even passed on several great day trips planned for this summer through the senior hall. But this speaker was inspiring none the less. “There is nothing better than enjoying the world when you leave your devices behind,” she said, “get out and walk around the block if you can’t go anywhere else.” And I learned that elephant dung is not gross or smelly, looks like a pile of bread loaves and is mostly grass. You never know when information like that will come in handy. She told about coming upon a dead elephant and a pride of lions was waiting in the bush to feed on it, none too pleased to have their meal interrupted. They concluded the elephant had died of natural causes and they called it into the wildlife people who flew in to harvest the tusks to take back and burn as part of their effort to stop the ivory trade. She said they were so heavy she couldn’t even lift one off the ground. One of the ladies in the audience said she thought that was so wasteful to burn that ivory when it’s worth so much. She got booed by several people to which she retorted rather loudly, "Well, it IS wasteful!"

This summer our speaker is giving another lecture about the efforts being made in elephant conservation and I signed up to go. She told us about one of their guides who had spent several decades working for Kenya’s wildlife department and had personally killed twenty-three elephant poachers which is legal there to kill them on sight. And don’t get me started on the fact that Trump quietly reversed a law Obama put into place banning big game trophy hunters from importing the spoils of their kills. The photo of his son proudly holding up an elephant’s tail he’d just cut off still disgusts me. In my book, trophy hunters are pond scum. Hiking a 100 miles across Africa and only bringing photographs back home is more “manly” than killing majestic creatures just for the “fun” of watching them die and hanging their heads on your wall. ©

A National Geographic’s article about The Great Walk of Africa  

The Nature of Friendships

My Gathering Girls group--seven of us who spun out selves off from an official, monthly event down at the senior hall for people looking for friends---has been meeting twice a month for brunch since last May. And occasionally we’ve gotten together to do other things around the community. I was worried we wouldn’t hold together over the winter because the weather here in Michigan puts a kink in everything we do and, sadly, our ages are also playing into the equation. One of our ladies has breathing issues and is resisting going on oxygen, another has back issues so these two often bow out of going places that requires a little walking. Another in our group is starting dialysis and doesn’t know how that’s going to affect her free-to-gather time and we have another who just this week joined the Widows’ World where the rest of us have been living for a long time.

The ladies mentioned above are on average ten years older than the three of us not mentioned. Once this winter it was just we ‘youngsters’ who showed up for brunch. And someone commented that our absence friends are a cautionary tale telling us that we need to keep moving, keep having fun together for as long as we can because when we see what they are going through with heath issues we are looking at ourselves in ten years. And since dark humor is often served at our brunches we joked about having to go back to the senior hall to troll for more friends to entice into our group if it gets too small. That led to a discussion about how friends come and go through-out our lives for various reasons---some moving on literally, other moving on metaphorically as we grow in different directions. “All our lives we’ve had to keep making new friends,” someone said. And that’s never easy to do whether in grade school or at the senior hall. 

I’ve been lucky that I’ve had two best friends in my life. One I met in kindergarten and we were best friends until she got married after college and moved out of state, but over the years we’ve stayed in touch first through letters and now with email. I must say, though, at one time I resented her husband for taking her away from me. I missed having a best friend in my life until Don came along and took on that role. Now, looking back I wonder if N.B. and I had lived in the same city all this time how that might have affected our relationships with our husbands. We taught each other how to be best friends and we transferred what we learned to being best friends with our spouses. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think it’s possible to have two best friends at the same time. And a spouse will usually (and rightly so) come first because you’re building a family and life together. I say “usually” because I’ve known a few women who have giggled, cried, plotted, and passed more secrets back and forth with their girlfriends than with their spouses. I’m guessing their marriages weren’t all they could have been because, in my book, spouses who are best friends have the best marriages. Still, no one can be everything to another person so I may be wrong about the ability of people to maintain two best friends at the same time. Oh, I’m so confused! The only thing I know for sure is I ignored the whole issues of maintaining a circle of friends until the loneliness of widowhood drove me to face the fact that I screwed up in thinking I’d never need more than Don. Oops. 

The word ‘friend’ is hard to define without an adjective, isn’t it. We pigeonhole friendships. We have casual friends, work friends, fair weather friends, cyber friends, church friends, common interest friends, family friends, close friends and best friends but what is a friend really? A best friend is easiest to define: it’s a connection that binds our spirits together, an unbreakable trust that we can be ourselves around that person, no matter if our moods are joyful or pitiful. Best friends can talk about anything and trust one another not to past on anything personal or told in confidence. They know where all our bones are buried, know our strengths and weaknesses and they only use that knowledge to help us be the best version of ourselves. 

Monday was my Gathering Girls First Mondays Brunch and only four of the seven of us attended. That makes me so nervous! I don’t want our circle of budding friendships to break up or get smaller before we even get to our first anniversary. And the TED TALK below with life-long friends Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on the nature of female friendship inspires me to keep trying to building our sisterhood group. Their humor, like that of my Gathering Girls, comes together like peanut butter and jelly---so natural and easy---and I don’t want to lose that! O. Henry said, "No friendship is an accident” which is probably another way of saying, we have to work at maintaining our friendships. Okay, that’s my summer marching orders. Again. It was the same last summer and look what I’ve gained in the trying...and how much more I can gain if I keep on trying! ©

Book Talk, Texting Dogs and Five times Married

Thursday when I got home from being away from the house all afternoon I felt like taking a nap, but I toughed it out hoping I could get through until bedtime without falling asleep during The Big Bang or Young Sheldon, the highlights of my weekly TV viewing. Plus my cleaning girl was due the next morning and I had to get ready for her. I don’t “clean” before she comes as much as I “hide” things that I call too tempting to pass up should she develop a case of sticky fingers---my purse, cell phone, Kindle Fire, prescription drugs, house keys, jewelry, and mail with sensitive information inside. I trust her but sometimes the service has last minute substitutes. Better to be safe than sorry.

That afternoon I had gone to a lecture and while I was sitting there I got a text message from Levi, my dog, saying it was time to give him his monthly meds. Levi is smart but his toes are too big to text and it took me a few minutes to remember I’d programmed that in my Kindle Fire’s calendar app and it must have gotten populated across all my devices and somehow that ended up in an auto text. The lecturer was a woman from the library with the title of ‘Adult Paraprofessional.’ I have no idea what that is but she’s an energetic and dramatic storyteller and she talked about fifteen books and their authors, with the common thread of all being books that have won prestigious awards. I hadn’t read a single one of them. 

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry was on the list which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone but the book that holds the all-time record for winning the most awards is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susan Clarke---seven awards in all. It’s set in the 19^th century and is about dueling magicians. It sounds as boring as dish water to me, but the librarian claims it’s a fun read. Another book, one with a strange concept won the 2017 Booker Prize and it's titled, Lincoln in Bardo by George Saunders. It has 166 characters, all ghosts, and the entire book takes place in one night in a cemetery---the night President Lincoln spent the night sitting by his eleven year son’s casket. He really did do that but the rest, of course, is fiction. The book has been compared to the Our Town and the librarian claims it’s a hoot to listen to in the audio version. I will pass. But I will put News of the World by Paulette Jiles on my want list. It's about a crusty old guy after the Civil War who makes his living going from town to town reading the news from back East and who agrees to deliver a mute little girl across several states to Texas. The librarian called it "sweet, fun and heart-warming."

Other books she talked about were: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Full of allegories and mythology but it also works as a straight on thriller; The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, an oral history of the dust storms in the Great Plains during the depression. We were all shocked to hear the soil from those storms made it all the way to New York City and onto ships 350 miles out at sea; Little Fires Everywhere by Celese Ng won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award, the only award that is nominated and voted on by readers; Evicted by Matthew Desmond about poverty in America; Behind the Beautiful Forever by Katherine Boo about poverty in India; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mandel about King Henry VIII; Crossing Purgatory by Gary Schanbacher, about the American frontier in 1858; and the next four are mysteries: Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny; Before the Fall by Noah Hawley; A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee; Ordinary Grace by Willian Kent Krueger.

After the lecture I met a friend for lunch where we talked about topics neither one of us can discuss with most people in our families. She asked if I remember our country ever being this divided that we risk alienating family and friends just by talking about the issues in the news and all I could come up with was during the Vietnam War when younger war protester were pitted against the older generation. But that was only one issue separating people. Now there are a half dozen or more.

We also talked about an acquaintance of mine who just got engaged. She and I were widowed within weeks of each other and this will be her fifth husband--- she divorced her first and buried the others. It boggles my mind, that anyone could get married so many times. Why do people do that? Are they hopelessly optimistic or are they trying to get it right and haven’t made it yet? She’s not marrying for money, she’s well off nor have I ever gotten the impression that’s she lonely or unhappy with her busy life. What is wrong with me that I can’t accept this woman’s happiness on face value? That’s a rhetorical question, idol curiosity because even though I believe you can love more than one person in your lifetime I can’t imagine me falling deeply enough in love to marry five different guys! But none of us likes being judged, we want others to see and believe we are capable of making good choices for ourselves. Even if we are running our choices past good friends, we don’t want them to add their disapproval or drama if, in the end, they disagree with our final decisions. So I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be walking up to this woman and say, “That’s a beautiful engagement ring but are you crazy!?” ©