I guess I’m back now. It’s been 4 or 5 days and I’m sleeping mostly at night. My cold is finally in it’s last throes. Here in the Georgia mountains, it’s Autumn. And in spite of being in the middle of the biggest drought in my lifetime, the seasons just keep on because it’s not water that determines things, it’s the tilting of the earth. Last night, it got down to 35º [Faranheit]. It’s a pretty Fall and the nippy air really hits the spot.
On our trip back, our seatmate [for 14+ hours] was an Ethiopian structural engineer making his first trip out of Africa. My wife turned into little Miss Welcome Wagon and they chattered on for hours. I recall them having an animated discussion of seasons, and of leaves changing colors. He didn’t seem to understand that. As we flew in over Long Island, he almost fell out of the window looking at the Autumn leaves below. I guess "wonder" goes both ways.
I left out a couple of places we visited while we were there. We went to Karen Blixen’s house [she wrote Out of Africa under the pseudonym, Isak Dinesen].
It’s now not too far outside modern Nairobi. The coffee plantation she tried to make a go of failed because the soil wasn’t quite right. Not too many miles away, coffee now grows in abundance. She was close. It is a quiet, beautiful setting. No wonder she fell in love with Africa.
We visited another place that had been important in my youth – the Olduvai Gorge. In college, I’d read about Louis and Mary Leakey and their excavations there. In 1959, they’d finally found the fossils of those "missing links" that pointed to Man’s evolutionary link with other Primates, and located our origins in the African Plains.
The Olduvai Gorge runs along the Serengeti below Ngorongoro Crater. I remember those books as if it were yesterday. It wasn’t so much their particular science – I was not going to be someone who dug in the African soil for old bones. It was something else – the Leakeys’ persistent scientific curiosity. When they finally found that skull, they’d been digging in the Gorge on and off for 35 years. It was the idea that what mattered was not what you found, it was in the patient day to day application of your craft. I ended up in a field where persistence and patience were the only things that really mattered. There was a block outside the museum showing the layers of sediment and volcanic ash the Leakeys sifted through over all those years. But the most amazing thing to me was the remarkable cast of footprints left by our ancestors in the volcanic ash millions of years ago.
After every one of our post-retirement jaunts, I’m sure I feel that this one was the best. It’s a silly way to think. Places are just what they are. I know that our trips have always changed my perspective about something. Like China, for example. Mao Tse Tung was just another Emperor. China has always followed the whims of their Emperors. I hadn’t known that. But Africa did feel different from the others. It wasn’t about human building and history for one thing. We learned about the comings and goings of the Arabs, the Portugese, and the British along the East African Coast. We heard about the Mau Mau, and Joseph Kenyata and the coming of Independence and freedom [Uhuru]. We learned about how the Christianity of the Missionaries fit well with the African indigeneous religions. But none of that mattered very much – not like it did on other trips. This trip was about the land, and the climate, and the animals. But more than that, it was about the Planet and how things work. Africa is right up next to the basics – sex, dung, seasons, predators, life, and death. And like their animals, the life of Africans is about the tasks in the day in front of them. At the risk of being overly dramatic, going to Africa is kind of like going home – not my home, but our home…
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