Letter from Africa: Homer Simpson Goes on Safari

I was on the road in Oregon, in the land of lumber, when I got a call from The Lorax. 

Actually, it was my good buddy, Tom, with whom I have worked side by side in both newsrooms and classrooms from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Now Tom is retired, living in Washington State. We don’t talk as much anymore, so when I saw his name pop up on my caller ID, I thought, “This better be good.”

I refer to Tom by a lot of pet names these days, including The Lorax, because, as I swear on my mother’s grave, he is the hairiest human being I have ever met, possibly on planet Earth.

He’s the missing link, a creature whose back and knuckles are so carpeted with thatch that he could blend with polar bears in the arctic and orangutans in the jungle, I kid you not.

On one of my first days at the LA Times, I arrived about noon to the paper’s suburban Vista office, a satellite of the San Diego bureau. The place was deserted, except for this thing bent over the sink in the kitchen, naked from the waist up, working furiously at what could have been a recent kill.

When the beast turned to face me, I flinched. I mean, I may be hairy myself, but this was the Wolf Man.

“Hi,” it said, extending a fuzzy paw. “I’m Tom.”

He explained that a pen had exploded in the pocket of a new white shirt his wife had just bought him at Costco and, fearing her wrath, he was trying to scrub it clean. 

This guy was obviously insane, I thought, but certainly no monster, just a cuddly Teddy Bear.

We’ve been close friends ever since.

“Dude,” I said in Oregon, plopping onto the couch for a catch-up.

My old sidekick had a mission in mind. He wanted me to join him on a bucket-list trip to a place his wife refused to go. 

Africa.

A two-week safari to Kenya and Tanzania, to take pictures of wild creatures that could easily drag us down for dinner. 

We could even be roommates, he said.

The idea filled me with dread, not because of any proximity to lions and other man-eaters, but of sharing a room with Bigfoot. God only knows what horrible nocturnal habits awaited me in the dark.

Still, I felt a duty to protect Tom. This unfortunate soul, so bewhiskered, so unshorn, so hirsute, so tufted and stubbly, so bushy and downy and fleecy, would need a loyal foot soldier to fend off the near-sighted predators that might try to mate with him.

I worried that he'd get kidnapped by some perverse medicine man and end up as some shrunken skull hanging from a head-hunter's belt.

The least I could do was be there to take pictures, and document the inevitable carnage.

So, of course, I said yes — a deeply-felt, fully-throated, “Hell yes!”

But had conditions: I would have to write something to chronicle our misadventures.

In addition to any Seussian character, Tom has always reminded me of that flatulent suburban bad boy, Homer Simpson — the way he eats, gobbling down the greasiest food, shoving it into his gullet, fearing it might escape.

I once saw him devour an entire bag of Cheetos, thrusting plump, dust-covered fingers into the bag, dropping puffs on the newsroom floor. When finally done, his lips and face were covered in a sickly orange, smeared like an animal after a kill. It wasn't pretty.

The safari stories would be latest installments in that saga of doofy Dadness that has made subversive Americans laugh for more than a generation: “Homer Simpson Goes on Safari.” 

And Tom would be the star. 

It was perfect.

But if I was laughing then, I am certainly not laughing now.

Even if you’re traveling with a good buddy on his bucket-list getaway, we could not have chosen a more-confused, precarious time to travel abroad.

The past months have involved a flurry of calls between Tom and I — and his sister-in-law, Chris, who is also going on the trip — to figure out the maze of visa applications and vaccine precautions in the middle of a pandemic.

Our tour group had cancelled its trip for two years amid Covid and now the rules had changed. Often we felt like we were on our own, because we were.

I tried to keep things lighthearted, sending Tom videos of safaris gone terribly wrong — gorillas lumbering out of the thicket to attack old ladies, elephants and hippos ramming bush vehicles. 

Hey, what are friends for?

There's an old saw when it comes to African safaris: In the wild, whatever you do, do not run.

In the Animal Kingdom, only food runs. Still, I'm packing some running shoes because, the way I see it, I don't have to outrun any hungry predator; I just have to outrun Tom.

Now, finally, in just a few days, we'll be wheels-up out of San Francisco International Airport. Homer has readied his newly-purchased arsenal of professional cameras and lenses to capture the experiences while I polish off my iPhone.

After flying through Istanbul and Nairobi, we'll be out in the land of animal documentaries, where I will at last witness the return of one hairy biped I call a friend to the African bush where his ancestors once dragged their own knuckles.

I can see him now, approaching some four-legged carnivore with a smile.

“Hi,” he’ll say, extending that furry paw. “My name is Tom.”