Don't throw that red dress away

He's the man from that Coke ad. He has a generous belly, and big gold medals. He is the President. He is seated in a deck chair, surveying the open plains in front of him with corpulent satisfaction. And I cannot persuade him.

Me, I am dumbfounded. Why on earth? Numb.
But he is insistent, smug.
He is going to plant alfalfa. All this wild wasteland will become agricultured, tamed, greened.

But these are the salt pans of Chibembe. These wide open plains, where you can walk for three days in one direction and you won't see another human being. Where lions lie in shallow bleached grass, their yellow eyes hooded as they laze. To the east, mopane forests, grey and scrubby. These are the salt pans of my youth. There is no more wilderness like this. You can't just -

"Yes," he joins his sausage fingers together over his stomach. Binoculars round his neck.
"It will be good. Can you see it? Green farmlands. I can feed my people."
But. Wait. This soil, its salty. Your crops won't grow. Rather build a lodge. I'm telling you - people would pay, they would come here, to be in the wilderness - such empty space, at night you can't even see an electric light. You could charge $1000 a night. Come on, you could charge $10 000!! You could feed your people with that.

He won't be persuaded.

I turn away from that precious horizon and look at him. He has a crew of militarised dancers, about to perform for him. They are suited and jacketed and about to do drum majorette style acrobatics in his honour.

I want to go walking, one last time, to find the lions before they are all shot.

Now it is night, and I have been walking so long here, I have merged into the memories of my childhood on these plains, looking for lion. Now I am lion. There's a spotlight, wiping the darkness away in big strokes. Sweeping the bush. I must be still. It will find me. They will find me. I must close my eyes or they will find me by my eyes. I turn away. My eyes have become huge, I take in all the distance, the bush and the scrub and the tiny movements of mice. I take in the man in his safari suit and medals and his tumbling crew of cameras.

Now I want a camera. I want to record this place, capture it on film. Go to the papers. Something. But I have no camera. No one has a camera for me. When I find a clutch of them, they are old, outdated, falling apart. No match for Mr Alfalfa man.

But in that same room where they show me the cameras, I notice a pile of clothes. Old, second hand clothes, once glamourous sexy clothes. There - that one on top, its my dress. That's my red dress. Its kind of soiled and shredded, but I recognise it. I pick it up, hold it. Put it back on the pile and watch as they are carted away, to be destroyed.

--------------------------------------------

This dream, for me, is very clear. Its about wilderness, wildness and losing your wild spaces inside. Last night I had dinner with Billie, who has know me since high school, through university, through craziness and many wardrobes. We are laughing about those times, about parties under the stars and me with my black cowboy boots claiming Grahamstown streets. The late nights that she had to walk home alone because I was who knows where in my red dress or my cowboy boots. Throughout my twenties I always seemed to have a red dress in my wardrobe. I remember the soft flowing one I wore to lectures in the day. And another one I had, later, that fitted like skin, that always seemed to bring out a fire in me. She looks at me over her glass of wine, and with true Billie honesty says, "I prefer that Tamara to the one now." I know what she means. Tamed, domesticated me who worries about the dishes in the sink and the month end debits. It hurts to hear it, but I know what she means.
"Is she still there, somewhere?" asks Billie. And I think of the motorbike I sold, that I used to ride, at dawn, still drunk from the night before, shouting at mopane trees for jumping into the road. Running down to the river at dusk to watch the elephants cross. Taking the landrover out at 3 am to look for aardvark. Casually non-committal to all the boys who wanted a piece of it. Wild kisses under the moon. My collection of stories, the Red Dress, unshelved in some box somewhere.
I don't know.

I'm a nicer person. I don't break hearts any more. I don't drink tequila like I used to. Of course not. We have other things now. And what I've learned about love in the 15 years is so much more valuable to me. But the lions in the dream are about something else - the one inside who doesn't want to be nice. Hunted and threatened, by...by alfalfa!! By rolling green pastures.

A sense, when I woke up, that this is the trouble with where we are in the world. With land use policies. Environmental impact assessments. Biodiversity. Investment portfolios. We are losing our wild spaces faster than ice can melt, but we just don't really get it. And the reason, I think, is because we are not in touch with the wildness in our selves. The way a glimpse of a lion's yellow stare can fundamentally shift your chemistry.

We are being regulated out of existence. ID books and credit checks and driving licences and the way we gratefully hand over our freedoms because its for our own safety. CCV cameras and spyware.

But I know that wildness doesn't go away. That if its ignored and asked to be civilized and rapped on the knuckles and told to be seen not heard, it might go to sleep for a while, it might yawn and turn the other cheek. For a while.

But that's also when it subverts. Meekness turns into passive aggressive manipulation. Contentment masks boredom which masks a pacing snarl. The goddess will find her way out if you don't give it to her. She'll take it. I'd rather stumble on a lion in the bush than a lion that's been in a cage for ten years.

Sure we can deny our wildernesses, incarcerate our wild spaces, tame our flaming hearts. Sure we can. But isn't that when they become really deadly?

Your thoughts, o wild ones?


pics courtesy of Freya Reder.

man eaters

The one who would not be king


I went to the Lion Park with Freya, her friends from America and young Lillian (7) and Kai (10) who were delighted to see wild dog pups, to touch and play with cubs, and feed a giraffe with a long sticky tongue.

Freya was playing messenger, as often happens when someone knows someone who is traveling 'down south' from Zambia. I think that's why people in my family are so incredibly secretive about their travel arrangements, lest they be asked to play courier. But that's another story. Freya was taking a laptop from Gail(who speaks lion, apparently) to the Lion Park people. The Lion Park people were deeply traumatised because the day before - a Sunday - there had been a hold-up and armed robbery there and a visitor had been shot. As one does on these occasions, you try keep the overseas visitors in the dark, downplay the situation, shut the child's ears.
Lion Park Guy: It was terrible. There were four carloads of them, and they took all our takings. Why they had to shoot someone I don't know...
Me: Come, Lillian, lets go check out the wild dog pups
Overseas Visitor: What was that they said about shooting someone?
Me: About what?
Freya: I think it was a guard
Me: look, Lillian, you can feed a giraffe

I find out later just how nasty the whole affair was - the robbers herded everyone into the restaurant area, presumably to take cameras from them, and a young guy steps out of the toilets holding his toddler and is shot dead.

I learn this from Alex the lion-trainer who has grown up in the circus and really does speak lion. He's full of quips like
'sure you can get out the vehicle but it'll be the last time you do it.'

In the meantime, the kids have a wonderful time and Freya the big game walker and ace safari guide gets to be guided. Alex takes us to see the white lions, who melt into the highveld bleached grasses and stare diffidently from icy blue eyes. They are amazing.

He also hugs and roughs up the glorious maned brothers who treat him like a sibling. All my years of lion training make me shudder to watch this. Yes, he has developed a relationship with them over 7 years. He grew up training big cats, treating them like family. But I'm with Ruby and Jemima, my cousins who, when they were both very little, went to the Joburg zoo. The blank-eyed lioness there was checking out a group of squawking gawking, jellytot eating city kids. She went into a crouch and her tail started to flick. My mom turned around to talk to Ruby and Jemima and they had disappeared. She found them hiding in the nearest bush, having slowly backed away. Yep, well trained girls. That's the school I come from.
This group here, these are the man-eaters, says Alex casually. Really. Someone got into the enclosure the other day, for whatever reason, and staff found the lions munching on human femur. He blames the cheeky lioness. But said that only one of the boys, one of the bigmaned pair of brothers was boycotting the whole affair, and had his back firmly turned, at a distance, passive resistance. Conscientious objector.
"how do you know they won't eat you?" squeaks Lillian.
"I don't. You never know that."

I'm not a big fan of places like this. I get a tight chest watching those cheetahs pacing round and round their ring, barely a paddock. They've got some beautiful gemsbok, some springbok, giraffe, hyena. All in separate enclosures, apartheid for animals. But I do respect Mr circus trainer, who clearly has a deep empathy for cats and loves his movie-star supermodel pride.

Over a picnic lunch the kids ask Freya to tell safari tales. She is like an ATM for stories. I tell them how my grandfather raised two lions and taught them to hunt. Long before I was born. How he 'returned them to the wild'. In the mellow light of the late afternoon, the conversation turns to hunting. The kids think its brutal, can't get the nuances of it all. I tell them my grandfather was an elephant control officer. That if he hadn't killed crop-raiding elephants for people to eat, people would have starved because the elephants had eaten their entire years' worth of food. They have just spent two weeks in the Luangwa and have had a thorough education from Freya and can tell the difference between giraffe poo and puku poo. But they're not sure about this hunting thing.

The light dips. I think of Alex telling me how the wife of the shot man fell to her knees when she came around the corner and saw her husband on the ground. I recognise the tone in his voice when he tells me. Its something you learn when you understand your place in the foodchain. It goes deeply beneath the niceties of civilized caring. Its compassion for predator and prey, no judgement, no disgust.

On the way home, the headlines of the Star assault us at every robot - "Lion Park visitor shot by robbers."