at the waterhole

John and I drive across the parched skin of Botswana, passing small farm dwellings resembling round bird nests made of clay and crooked branches closely embracing each other. Then we sail across open grasslands, following a narrow track deeply carved in the bed of sand. The darkness comes way too soon -- it is winter -- and we need to stop, for these roads at night are alive with people and animals walking, resting, and just being there. 

We turn into a simple bush camp serving mostly overlanders like us, but even its rough edges do not hide a flat TV screen over the bar, and a curio store, and an array of drinks served to parched travelers. There is also a waterhole, filled nightly, which attracts a family of elephants, by now well habituated and marching through the camp day and night, often within feet from flimsy tents. 

I go to the bar to grab a beer, and see the elephants drinking muddy water so close I smell the digested grasses and leaves of their giant droppings, a pungent horse scent I always loved. Yet not all is well, and before I finish my beer the matriarch turns abruptly on her great soft feet and, with her trunk raised, takes a few steps toward the people on the wide terrace of the bar.  They move back quickly, I hear some nervous laughter, and she slowly retreats, but the illusion of her acceptance of the emotional price her family must pay every day is shattered.

The day closes well, the night air is smooth, and the camp is simple and nice. But suddenly I feel that our human presence and our cabins, our cold beers and our laptops planted right where the elephants must come to drink in order to survive, is deeply obscene. I know this is Africa, where bush camps and lodges are often constructed near such life-giving holes and even supplementing them with water during dry season. I know that considering the absence of poaching in such locations makes them a pretty safe place for animals. And I know that visitors traveling from all over the world to behold these huge pachyderms and other famed animals of the continent come to such waterholes to have a great experience and bring home pictures and memories. And if not for these visitors and their tourist dollars, there would have been no desire and no funds to protect these lands and these animals. 

Yet I feel shamed and also angry, and not at all resigned to "that's the way it is." We should not be here, and I am not just talking about a couple of hard drinking bike riders who just arrived in a posse of roaring motors and now make fools of themselves and annoy others. I am talking about myself, and quietly whispering and respectful people, and silent onlookers, and families with small kids, and everybody here, assembled in this camp at night and paying to watch a spectacle, a circus act, a great awesome show Africa is putting on to entertain us. 

I suspect I may get over my sorrow. I may see there is nothing I can do for this depleted, dissected, and war-torn continent, and its scattered and ever diminishing groups of animals which still survive, restricted by fences, roads, plowed fields, depleted forests, sucked out waterways, and rapidly mushrooming human dwellings. But I hope this deep sense of shame will not leave me for as long as I walk the earth. 

©Yva Momatiuk

Kubu Island, Botswana

Somewhere in the enormous expanse of Makgadikgadi Pans in central Botswana there is a sickle-shaped island of pale rocks piling up like waves on its raised beaches formed by an ancient lake. It is called Kubu Island, and since in Setswana kubu means a hippopotamus, perhaps this old lake used to be kind to the biggest of all aquatic African mammals, who need water to protect their poorly pigmented skin from the burning sun. The salt pans form the driest and the most desolate part of the Kalahari Basin but after much rain they can turn into a milky blue lake of still water and reflect billowing sails of passing clouds.

But this is a dry season, and the pans are bone-white with salt and very dusty. We arrive late, welcomed by a whole family of big-bellied baobabs growing on the rocky ridge and resembling hugely oversized potatoes crowned with a bundle of roots. Some of them may be several thousand years old but, since they do not develop typical sequences of growth rings, no one knows how old they really are. You can carbon date then all you want, and still come up empty. 

But their actual age is not everything: it is the importance of a baobab that matters. If I were a Bushwoman, I would know that this tree had once offended God who, seething with anger, grabbed it by the top and planted it upside down, so its convoluted roots became the sky-scratching branches. And that if I ever picked its flower after it blossomed during a warm spring night, I would soon be torn up by lions. Yet there is also a faint hope of salvation: if I soak the tree's seeds and drink the infusion, all crocs will avoid me forever.

No water anywhere, and no crocs tonight. The evening sky flares up orange, and then deepens into a pewter soup with shimmering lights of the Milky Way. The air cools. We find a baobab which hugs the most stars and settle for the night. John disappears among the rocks to ponder the sky and tree spectacle, and I play a luxurious animal and savor the cold, some red wine, and the desert breeze.

Next morning we wake up well before dawn but the baobab which embraced the night sky is already glowing ruby red. It is an old tree, its trunk scarred by the sand blowing from the winter-dry salt pan we slept on, and by the mind blowing length of time it took to raise it from the seed against all waterless odds. And some of its broken branches, heavy enough to flatten any living thing passing under their falling weight, litter the ground below: a battlefield of growth and gravity.

I see -- with the sun still under the flat horizon -- that I am shadowless, with only my feet touching the ridge. This is a magical time, with the colors saturated and strong, and I want it to last forever, even if I must donate the rest of my life's daylight hours to anyone who wants it. Here, in the blinding light and deep shadows of Africa, such moments are rare.

I walk up and touch the tree. The baobab is smooth and dense and cold, like a column of steel, and as I rest my back against it I feel the night's coolness radiating from the core of the trunk. I look across the miles of the white salt pan toward a huge expanse of Chobe National Park with its many animals and the people who come to see them. But here, in the raw center of the country, all is quiet, remote and self-contained. And when the sun emerges, faster in the tropics than anywhere else, all the birds -- did I mention the birds?--go silent, too. 

©Yva Momatiuk