not here

Quiver trees -- also known as kokerboom -- thrive in the southern Namibian desert.

They eat rocks and drink sand, take many years to grow, and as they expand their girth their bark splits and reveals a smooth underlayer in different shades of rock and sand. I like to think that if they were snakes they would shed their tight old bark. But no: they just allow it to crack open and stay, maybe forever. The bark is hard and smooth but the innards are surprisingly spongy and serve as reservoirs of many gallons of water sucked in by the trees during rainy seasons. This pliable softness made it easy for the Bushmen of the Kalahari to hollow out the trees' branches and use these tubular containers as quivers for their deadly arrows.

And here is what happens when John and I look up at quiver trees: we get dazzled. This is because no other trees we know flaunt such exquisite split bark lines along their bodies, the lines which twist, bend and disappear around the next turn. And when we photograph them in a sweet open shade of dusk they also shimmer and cover our lenses with a film of a waxy dust so thin you would never believe how hard it is to get it off.  We know all this, because some weeks ago we spent a whole evening out in the desert with three of them, until the evening became night. And then we had quiver dreams, too, as if unwilling to part with their beauty.

That was some time ago, but it sent us looking for more. And now we are on a quiver tree farm, reputed to preserve the densest quiver grove in all of Namibia, and coupled with some desert acreage covered by large boulders and called, as such places usually are, a playground. Of giants, I think, or some such. 

There are signs here sternly detailing “forbidden” behavior, and clean toilets and a spacious campground, and even a restaurant and a pet warthog and a couple of cheetahs. The cheetahs get fed at 4pm, sharp. Yes, this is a commercial enterprise, and we are not to forget there are certain charges. We understand the owners of this land want to present it to visiting tourists but also prevent any potential problems which often follow the opening of one's hospitable doors. And since we fell in love with quiver trees, we hope we can put up with what any commercial venture can be expected to inject into our tree experience.

We take a look at the giant boulders which are brown and unremarkable, and quickly move on to the trees. There are some walking trails here, and a good number of quiver trees of all sizes, bolstered by more brown boulders. We walk and walk. We look and look. And try, and try again. Then, as the evening darkens, we meet somewhere on the slope and silently shake our heads. No, it did not happen. No pictures. No enchantment. No music lifting our spirits. A flat void. 

Later we try to dissect the reasons. We quote the signs suggesting prosecution by the owner of the grove: perhaps our minds became too tight and worried because of these naked threats?  We also come up with the wrong age of the trees: are they too old and already outlived their most beautiful stages? I even remember a noisy tourist who seemed to be everywhere at once, talking incessantly to her two silent male companions: maybe her loud voice prevented me from concentrating and really seeing what I came to see?  We string all these and other reasons into an impossibly convoluted web of excuses. But it all sounds lame and untrue.

"Listen," I say to John, "I think I may have a picture I like. At one point, I put my head inside the canopy of a really old tree, and met a rock hyrax who came up from the other side. We almost bumped our noses, and it was totally unexpected for both of us."  We find the frame and look at it together. The hyrax, bright eyed and alert, is -- after all -- considered the closest living relative of an elephant, and even if we are not sure if this information is reliable it is nice to think you can meet it up the tree when all else is lost. 

We look again at my little picture and suddenly understand what we are missing here. We miss the enchantment which comes with solitude and not knowing what will happen next. We miss the sense that we must trust some forces outside ourselves which can make things happen unexpectedly at any time. Yes, there is the grove and the trees and the trails to walk around them. But it is all too set, too ready to be appreciated and photographed to be magnificent and dazzling. It is predictable and finite, and we cannot make it intimate and our own. And except for the little hyrax there are no surprises, the very essence of what we need. He saves the show a bit, but just enough to see that such well appointed offerings are alien to us and as many times removed from our joy as he is from his distant elephant cousins.

©Yva Momatiuk

all you do

So, all you do is take pictures?

This mildly offensive question people asked us for years used to drive John quietly nuts. And the most memorable outburst of his frustration took place many moons ago in New Zealand. 

We spent a long mid-winter night in an unheated and unlit shepherds' hut, waiting for the punishing predawn hour when John had to get up, find his frozen boots in the dark and, hungry and cold, drive to meet Henk DeBroekert. Henk, a former air force pilot and a high country farmer, was about to look for his Merino sheep stranded in the fresh snow on the upper slopes of his station. And since we were working on our high country story for National Geographic magazine, we had to follow sheep farmers up the gorges and ridges of the Southern Alps, ride their sturdy horses bred to withstand glacial river currents, and generally try to stay alive.

John already learned from Henk this early morning slog was to take but a few hours and the men would walk fast, and I decided to attend to other matters. But the quest for the stranded woollies occupied all day and took the men across many exposed snow fields polished blue by gale force winds. Eventually they made their way down in the gathering dusk and Henk drove away, while John tried to return to our bone-freezing hut. He did not go far: a flat tire. Hungry, tired and cold, he managed to wrestle his spare on, but within a short distance got another flat: the sharp gravel of high country back roads was legendary for shredding rubber tires as if they were marshmallows. He had to walk.

"I will kill the next bastard who asks us if all we do is take pictures," were his first words after he came in. It was said calmly but had to be said.

Our flat tires meant we could not use our car, and next morning a shepherd who was going to town gave us a lift so we could have them fixed. Nursing a big hangover from the night before, he was nevertheless a chatty man. As soon as he learned what we were doing in this remote corner of the McKenzie Basin, he earnestly asked: "so all you do is take pictures?" We had to laugh, and since then it never bothered us.

And now, about 38 years later on the coast of Namibia we suddenly remembered this no longer irksome question. 

We arrived on a crescent gravel beach the night before, tired enough to turn in after many hours spent in the bright desert light and sharp whiffs of the sand-packed wind. The sea was just barely slapping the dark coastal rocks and lifting strands of kelp in a fluid motion of a breathing giant expanding his chest now and then. I perched on a low ridge and photographed the red sun sliding magnificently behind the wet fog bank. And John, who spotted flamingos patrolling the surf, stretched out on the sand and followed their slow to and fro progress parallel to the coast until no number of pixels could do them justice. 

The night came. We cooked and ate our supper, downloaded the day's pictures, looked at them with our eyes already gluing shut, made our narrow bed, and tried to follow another luminous fragment of Helen Macdonald's new book, "H Is For Hawk" read aloud by John. We slept.

And this morning our rented camper would not start. Its main battery was as flat as a pancake. How? Why? Never mind. Flat is flat. It means no juice. No spark. In Africa. On the coast. Miles from the nearest town.

I do not understand electricity and I fear it, so I was no help: if anything, I was a hindrance. What would I do? Wait until someone with a functioning battery and jump cables showed up. Relying on someone's help is not my usual mode of problem solving, but the only one that came to my mind. But -- will someone show up? And -- when? And will they have jump cables?

In the meantime John, who approaches electrical problems as if they were polite and harmless LEGO pieces, wanted to jump the defunct object from our auxiliary battery stored in the back and feeding our camper's inside lights. But we searched, and there were no jump cables anywhere. Trust John, I said to myself. Just -- for Pete's sake -- trust the man. Remember the time you lost your glasses in the Arctic river while crossing it on foot, fished them out, discovered one side piece was gone, and John carved for you a new one from a caribou antler using his Swiss Army knife and tied it to the frame with some dry sinew? And the time -- perhaps more pertinent to our predicament now -- when he rewired our entire house right after we bought it, because it had to be done? Trust him!

And he solved it. He removed the dead battery and brought the auxiliary unit from the back. And since the auxiliary was twice the size and would not fit, he tilted it sharply and wedged one of its corners into the small space vacated by the old battery until he could attach the PLUS terminal lead. Then -- in order to connect the short ground lead to the tilted auxiliary -- he spanned the distance with one of the tools he always carries, a simple pair of vise grips, and extended its length with the lug wrench, solid enough to do the job.

Then -- while holding the ends of both tools together to assure conductivity -- he said: " Get in and turn the engine on."  The engine roared back to life.  As we hit the gravel road, we remembered the question which used to drive John nuts. 

And all we still do is take pictures.

©Yva Momatiuk