In the Bush: Wild Things on the Loose
Last in a series
On an average day, the prevailing drama inside the game reserves of East Africa involves not death, but life. Rather than merely predators taking their prey, the bush is more scene to family bonds and wild creatures going about their natural business.
Recently, two of those wild things were Homer and me, a pair washed-up journalists, bozos on safari, class clowns high-fiving their own minute place in the world.
Tom and I have been friends for decades. He even officiated my marriage years ago. We’re like an old couple in that way, knowing one another’s highs, habits and faults.
I refer to Tom as Homer Simpson — an oafish, cartoon character — in a loving, fraternal form of respect.
Whenever I point the video camera at him, demanding that he perform on cue, Tom delivers. When I call him Homer and hum the Simpson’s theme song in a sort of mocking tribute, he smiles.
Tom endures me.
And like any predator, I often cannot help myself. I see Tom being Tom and pure instinct kicks in. I pounce, not for any kill, but for a few laughs — at Tom’s expense, sure, but often at mine as well.
So I laughed at the Istanbul airport when an orderly took one look at Tom and pointed to his motorized wheelchair. Chris, our 82-year-old traveling companion, required a chair to negotiate the humongous airport.
But Homer was just along the ride. Whizzed through the crowds, Tom laughed like an inmate sprung from the asylum. He took pictures and video. He cracked jokes. The wheelchair boys loved him.
And so did I.
At our Nairobi hotel, when we met the first of a dozen safari-mates, Tom offered an insider story about how he had just fumbled with the lights in our room.
He was in the bathroom, he said, his pants dropped to his ankles, doing a goofy frog walk in the dark during a desperate attempt to find the on-switch.
The couple looked at him blankly, but I understood.
I got my friend’s bawdy tale and his compulsion to tell it. Because, if nothing else, we are two old storytellers. And without our wives around to edit and hush us, we become a pair of run-on sentences.
Ah, Homer. Only you.
Only you would belch loudly at a group dinner and announce that you were going on a diet from that moment on. Or boyishly tell the flight attendant in business class that you were opening a drink tab, your way of saying to keep the free booze coming.
Good old Tom. He says his goal in retirement is to make someone laugh every day.
And that he does.
Mostly me.
There was the thing about the cameras on this trip.
When Tom asked me to tag along on a two-week adventure to Kenya and Tanzania, he told me that photographing wildlife was high on his life’s bucket list.
He’d already bought some new camera equipment and was perfecting his skills.
Me? All I had was my punk-ass iPhone 12.
I didn’t think it would make much difference, but it did.
It was like that New Yorker cartoon that features a tourist attraction sign that points camera-toters in two different directions: Real photographers, this way, and snapshot losers; you guys go over there.
Unfortunately, I was a snapshot loser.
Most of the other safari-goers were like Tom — serious photo-meisters with mammoth zoom lenses, while my camera could fit into my pocket.
I’ll admit it, I had lens envy.
Standing side by side, Tom and I often compared photos we’d just taken of animals in the mid-distance. Tom’s images featured artistic closeups of wild creatures in motion. My feeble efforts were blurry and pixelated, those same animals looking as fuzzy as those Internet screen grabs of Sasquatch lumbering through the woods.
With my puny camera, I was a freshman showering with the senior athletes, a blind man in a porno theater.
In a way, Homer knew this.
In Nairobi, at a park offering closeup contact with orphaned giraffes, I handed Tom a cup of food pellets staff gave us that would coax the animals to come close.
“You hold it,” Homer said. “I’m going to be taking photographs.”
Doh!
So what was I, dude, the baggage handler?
Once in the bush, I shifted gears. I resorted to taking videos that were better lit and somehow more focused. I pointed my smartphone at the animals, to be sure, like capturing the pride of lions walking toward our vehicle, ignoring our presence.
But I focused on other things as well — our Masai guides, the ethereal landscape at both dawn and at dusk.
And I pointed my camera at Homer.
I might as well have just pointed it at myself. I threw my dark humor at my safari pals like an unwanted dog blanket. Whenever I opened my mouth with some uncouth observation, one woman winced sharply.
“Oh, that’s just terrible,” she'd say.
Her husband, a clinical psychologist, joked that he was writing a clinical paper about me. At dinner, he started asking me pointed questions about my childhood.
I invited this scrutiny, of course.
One day, as a group of us watched a couple of sleek big cats cautiously ford a surging river, I announced that the two creatures were not loyal beings.
“Because they’re cheetahs,” I said, to silence.
Then a member of our group expressed frustration over a messy travel itinerary to reach the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater.
“I don’t care if we even see the Serendipity,” she said.
“But then you’d miss the Gonorrhea Crater as well,” I quipped.
Again, crickets. I was a standup hearing the bar glasses clink at the back of the room.
One morning, when a safari-goer spotted Chris, Homer and me seated together at the breakfast table, she made a comment that was probably on everyone’s mind.
“Gee, I’m sorry, Chris,” she said, “that you had to eat with these two."
We laughed at ourselves, of course.
I told Homer that I’d eaten so much that I could actually hear my stomach stretching like a taut rope at its breaking point, or tectonic plates rumbling as they shifted.
Homer nodded. He understood. (Remember, he was on a diet.)
When our bush vehicle became hopelessly mired in the the mud, I helpfully pointed out that the truck’s lowest point, the wheel that was giving us the most trouble, was l located directly beneath Homer’s seat.
We laughed at each other’s failings. Between the three us, Chris, Homer and I had one single intact memory. Every airport checkpoint sent us scrambling for documents we’d supposedly held in our mitts, at the ready, only moments before.
We lost backpacks and jackets, left travel pouches with crucial documents right there in the open, ripe for pilfering. When it came to Homer and me, important stuff seemed to slip between our sausage-like fingers.
And Chris, the grand dame of our adventure, was not above question.
One morning, we were eating breakfast after having checked out of our Nairobi hotel, when a travel colleague presented a small bag he’d been told that Chris had left behind in her room.
We all watched like it was Christmas morning, as Chris slowly opened this gift.
What she pulled out was most definitely not hers, and just the sight of it made her gasp and then giggle.
Two pairs of satiny, slinky women’s panties.
As I say, we were all wild things, every one of us, just not that wild.
In the end, the East African safari has made me want to change my walk in life.
From now on, I want to move like an elephant or giraffe, slowly, gracefully, taking my time to move through my surroundings.
No, not like my present schtick — that of a baboon flushed from its tree perch and out into the dangers of the open grasslands: Itchy, scratchy, constantly looking over my shoulder like a vagrant in search of a cigarette butt.
On one of our last days, we witnessed the full cycle of life and death on the East African grasslands. We saw a mother wildebeest give birth to a calf, which sprang to its feet within minutes, bounding into life.
Not far away, we watched a hyena stalk (and later kill) a month-old Cape Buffalo calf, helpless to intervene, watching nature take its unyielding course.
Near dusk, we saw a crew of buzzards pick at the remains of a lion’s kill, squawking, screeching, snarling.
The day made me somehow feel humble, glad to be alive. I was gratified to have been able to share it all with the indomitable Chris, and with my dear friend, Tom, who was more than happy to finally return to his life in the Pacific Northwest.
Because, the root Homer is not HOMO as in Sapien, but H-O-M-E.