Dislocation
by John R. Nelson
Golden grasses feather the breeze, Earth sways. Sausage trees, named for fibrous fruits that dangle from ropey peduncles, flank a rain-revived rivulet winding through grassland. Sun blazes on the lime-green, photosynthetic bark of fever trees. Under one isolated tree, a dusty bull elephant takes a knee. Elephants were Tebow-ing here for eons before America ever heard of a 15-minutes-of-fame football player named Tim Tebow. Maasai giraffes appear on a ridge and lope alongside our open-aired Land Rover with muscled flanks and ground-eating strides.
For Aldo Leopold, wandering on horseback, the Pinyon jay, beyond all other birds, captured the essence of the juniper foothills in the American Southwest. Which bird best expresses the Tarangire savanna? Shrike? We’ve seen seven or eight, of three different species, perched like ornaments in a single thorn tree. Saddle-billed stork? Pied, elegant, contemplative, two stand together, each on one leg, in a soggy marsh. A hamerkop, builder of big nests, more anvil than hammer headed, hunches atop a cataract, its chocolate brown camouflaged against the churning current. Lovebirds and sunbirds, fish-eagles and snake-eagles, long-tailed paradise whydahs, all seem equally at home here.
We’re a happy group. Markus, our guide, boyishly handsome, easy-going yet resolute, is a world-class birder and photographer. California John bops his head to tunes on his iPod as he scans past gnarled baobabs toward the horizon. Two old hippies, we riff together in silly flights of fancy: the bonsai giraffe that can’t quite reach the trees, or the Casanova bird that aims to mate with as many other bird species as possible. Fun-loving Polly Wren laughs at herself as she coos “Baby, baby” at creatures small or huge, from cordon-bleus to buffalos. Paul, her husband, a steady, quiet guy, is a sharp spotter and fine photographer. He and Markus offer tips to my wife Mary, no mean photographer herself. Mary likes to feign ignorance of birds, and Markus teases her when she does. She likes being teased by Markus.
An elephant stops in the track and trumpets indignantly at our intrusion. A Sisyphus-like dung beetle hind-legs its ball of feces up a steep incline. California John spots our first lionesses sprawled under a tree in the midday heat, then coming our way, annoyed, as a stalking elephant forces them from shade to shade. One comes out of tall grasses and crosses the road fifty feet from us. Mary, with camera in hand, is transported.
*
I’m lying in a bed, drugged but not oblivious, in a stark gray room. No pictures on the walls, a fuzzy TV. On a little table, beside a cardboard urinal, The House of the Seven Gables. Why did I bring Hawthorne to Africa? I drift in, drift out, hear honking and shouting outside the open window, the cry of a bird I can’t identify. I wait, worry, sleep, take pills, try Hawthorne, dream testy dreams. Before dawn I hear the moan of Muslim prayers. I piss in the urinal until it’s soggy and leaking. Whether from embarrassment or ingrained frugality, I can’t ask a nurse for a new urinal every time I pee. I want a cigarette.
I don’t know what happens outside this room. I hear hurrying footsteps in corridors, voices. Yesterday a nurse mentioned an “event” on the floor but didn’t offer details. She told Mary, a nurse herself, that I’m on a ward for TB patients.
The head nurse enters. She’s not a nun, but everyone calls her Sister, and she has the presence of a Mother Superior, firm but kindly, strong-bosomed and embracing, a woman comfortable being in control. She introduces me to her charges on this shift—young black women, attentive, reserved, lined up in starched, pale blue uniforms. One smiles in recognition. Yesterday I laughed at her pronunciation of “urinal,” and she laughed at mine. She was so pleased when I offered her chewing gum.
“Where is your Mary?” Sister asks.
“I don’t know. Trying to get us home. She’s been gone forever.”
“No, no,” she says, “Mary will be fine. You know, all this must happen for a reason. It may be tomorrow, maybe a week, but when it’s time to go home, home you will go. This I can promise.”
Home, we thought we were going home. The day it happened, Mary took a taxi to the airport and pleaded, begged, cajoled, until she got us a flight that night, Nairobi to Heathrow, then on to Boston. We were picked up by an ambulance crew: a warm, self-assured woman of Indian descent, a pretty young African woman who wants to come to America, two rock-steady drivers. At the airport Mary and the Indian woman went off to British Airways. We waited and waited. No worries, the drivers told me. Then Mary, near tears, was back. I struggled to gather it in. “No stretchers,” said Mary, a furious mimic, “no stretchers. That’s all the bitch kept saying.” They wouldn’t let me on the plane because this woman didn’t believe I could sit upright, even in first class, and airline policy forbids passengers on stretchers. American Airlines, our ride from London to Boston, had the same policy. What now? How to get home? That wasn’t a concern of British Airways. Mary went back inside to get some cash to pay for the return to Nairobi Hospital. The machine ate her debit card. The drivers were gracious. No worries. We drove in silence through the city. On my back, I saw nothing but streetlights. At the hospital the ambulance crew took our hands in theirs and wished us luck.
*
When the present looks bleak, turn back, as in a dream, back to the carefree time before pain and worry, when every sight fascinated. At a pond, oxpeckers peck on tough hide for insects near the gaping, molared jaws of bathing hippos. It’s hard to identify with a hippo. What does it feel like to have birds foraging for bugs on your face?
In a bustling Tanzanian town, we pass cyclists with Obama T-shirts, a woman’s vegetable cart with a handmade sign—“Hillary Clinton Shop”’—and bumper stickers for Bob Marley and Tuff Gong. A ripped poster for a traditional healer advertises “love portion, business boost, lost items, man power, jobs, cases.”
And then we’re at the edge of the world, above the great crater, Ngorongoro, encircled by cloud-touched mountains. It’s a place wholly onto itself, so wide and sweeping that each patch needs its own weather report. Here a veil of mist, over there, dark rain falling, and far off, sun streaming down. Tomorrow we’ll be on the crater floor among elephants and black rhinos that are now not even specks. At sunset, lightning cracks the sky and silhouettes the sacred mountains. Mary, my lover of storms, stands at the rim, her face strobed by light.
*
Where is she now? Pain can be managed. Guilt’s worse than pain.
My doctor comes in. He’s African like Sister, well-spoken, wise-seeming, a man who brings calm. Yes, he says, he can perform the reduction easily, put the hip back in today, but I’ll have to spend a few weeks in the hospital before I can ride in a plane. Otherwise the hip might pop out again. If I wish to wait until I can get back to America, if I want my own doctor, he understands, he does, but this isn’t what he would advise. Another doctor comes in, younger, latte-skinned, Bollywood handsome with a crisp British Empire accent. The doctors here, he assures me, are most competent. This hospital has a fine reputation. It’s not smart to wait too long to put the hip back in. But how can we spend weeks in Nairobi? Where would Mary stay while I’m lying in bed? I search his face for flickers of insult. I want to explain—it’s not that I don’t trust you guys, it’s not . . . But no, I can tell from his unflappability, the knowing wryness in his voice, no explanation is needed. No egos at stake here, no issues of race or preconceptions about Third World medicine, no skin off their noses if I don’t take their advice.
*
At a smoky Maasai village—a cluster of thatched huts with more cattle than people—lanky bald men and women in red and blue wool dance and ululate for us. For a fee, we can take all the photos we please. Africa is the jumping continent, and these people love to jump. A former high jumper, I once had the legs to leap with them. They’re tough folks, drought-resistant pastoralists, leopard-wrestlers. Do the Maasai suffer hip dislocations? Could they stay erect on an airplane, silent, unflinching, however brutal the pain? What is their method of medical evacuation?
At Olduvai Gorge—a steep ravine with stratified layers of rock, one of the world’s great paleoanthropological sites— we ponder fossils of extinct beasts, a giant swine, some sort of humongous rhino, and, our fantasy realized, a short-necked giraffe. How old are we as a species? Did we scavenge before we hunted? Why did we leave Africa? A Maasai woman, barefoot, elongated, strides past with a walking stick. She’s as determined as a secretary bird.
Mary worries about getting us home, I worry about Mary. She makes futile calls on borrowed cell phones. By taxi, bus, on foot, she goes seeking from office to office. They can’t give her definite answers, she must wait, they send her somewhere else. At a public library, befriended by a kind librarian, she posts SOSs on Facebook, sends desperate e-mails to anyone who might help. The computer sticks, letters refuse to appear on screen, her pleas are garbled —our financial advisor, we learn later, thought somebody was running some African scam. Our other debit card has mysteriously expired. It’s a comedy of errors; we’ve got money but no cash, and we’re afraid to use credit cards because we don’t know what all this will cost. Each time, Mary comes back more frazzled. Sprawled across two rickety chairs, she can’t sleep, so she roams the corridors. She can’t shower, and she’s not eating. No one’s taking care of her. I try to save her food from my meals, but there’s not enough, the food’s bland and cold, or I forget to order the right thing, or the right thing doesn’t come. She’s testy, trapped. She needs coffee. She was having such a wonderful time. A week ago I was bringing her coffee in bed. Now I’m helpless, holding her hostage.
*
It’s drizzling at the border. In a customs office we see warnings about sex slavery, a poster with a bruised woman in chains. We drive through flooded plains and slalom around potholes spilling into ponds. We find a hippo in our yard, well, just across a fence, but close and splashing, running faster than a hippo ought to run. The rain stops. Black clouds rise. Birds come out and sing. Where all was gloom, intense light spreads over the savanna. Then we see it, between the clouds, a dark volcanic cone, snow on top—Kilimanjaro, the awesome peak of a continent, the highest free-standing mountain in the world.
*
An earnest young man takes my vital signs. He’s excited to discover I’m a teacher, a writer. Instantly I’m his mentor, for he’s a writer himself. He’s finished a novel, and soon it will be published—fame and fortune will follow—once he comes up with a thousand dollars. No, I tell him. It’s a rip-off. I explain the concept of vanity presses. His face sags. I don’t know if his novel is any good. I have no other advice to give, no business boost. I’ve written a novel myself, very good I think, but still unpublished. Now I write about birds and birding geezers. This hip dislocation was merely the most recent in a series of orthopedic insults; joints were replaced, ankles fused—I’ve tried to find the humor in it. I’m running out of optimism to share.
*
I can’t remember which bird I hoped to find as we skirted potholes on the way out of Amboseli. We’d seen almost all the birds we’d wanted to see. At first I was fixated on identification, new birds for my list, but then I started to learn the birds’ stories, got to know their habits and haunts. That stubby harlequin quail we flushed is a water-seeking nomad. The chestnut-bellied sandgrouse, like good bar buddies, will wait for their comrades to finish drinking before they move on as a flock.
I turned back for another look at Kilimanjaro. I didn’t want to leave. Markus poked California John, startled in mid head-bop, to tell him to turn down the sound on his iPod. I was feeling a bit cramped in my seat, uneasy, but the jolt came without warning. Overwhelming pain, leg facing the wrong way, I knew right away I was fucked. I had to get out of the Land Rover. Right leg on the running board, left leg askew and dangling, I panicked, swamped by sweat. I couldn’t step down, couldn’t force myself to crawl back in. There was no place to escape pain. I saw fear and pity in Mary’s eyes.
Markus had to tell me the hard truth. If I could manage to get back inside, an ambulance could meet us outside Nairobi. If not, we’d have to wait for hours until an ambulance could make it out here. I steeled myself. Markus and John lifted, pushed, and slid me until I was wedged against a door, neither sitting nor lying, the leg at a sad angle. Mary handed me two pain pills, then two more. I whimpered. We were out of the park and stuck in traffic, roads closed by flooding, trucks all around, stink of exhaust. Somehow we’d driven past the ambulance. We maneuvered around stalled trucks, troops of people with bundles and bicycles, and found the ambulance by the road. Grim farewells, instructions repeated, and then I was on a stretcher, with Mary stroking my forehead. Three cups of morning coffee coursed through me. I had to piss. The attendant held up my shoulders and gave me a plastic bag to pee in, whispered encouragement, but I couldn’t do it, too awkward an angle or too humiliated. After the third try I gave up. The pain was tolerable if I stayed flat on my back. The hospital, Markus had said, was the best in Kenya. What did that mean? We were in the city now, stop and go. At the hospital the driver tried to jack up the price he’d agreed on. Mary wasn’t having it.
Yellow-billed kites, scavengers of Africa’s cities, glide above concrete. The feral pigeons congregated on ledges, the incessant, tuneless chirps of House Sparrows tell me I’m not on a savanna. Other birds caw. Hadada ibis? They’re laughing. Haw haw haw. Ancient birds, once buried with Egyptian mummies as gifts to the gods, now sorting through rubbish.
Help is on the way. The first day, Rockjumper, our tour company, sent a local agent to the hospital—a cheery guy but useless, out of his depth. He assumed we’d flown out on British Airways, and he was gone. Now a new agent, Frank, stocky, solid, with a cell phone and a can-do attitude, is beside my bed. Mary pours it out for him: the catch-22 of Kenya Airways and Lufthansa each wanting the other to confirm its flight first; the nine full-priced seats they’ll need for my stretcher; Mary’s nursing license (in a drawer in Massachusetts) so she can be my nurse escort on Kenya Airways; the private nurse we’ll have to hire because Lufthansa won’t allow family members as escorts; ambulance transfers from airplanes to terminals, terminals to airplanes. And how, Mary asked a Lufthansa agent, do I arrange all that? “I couldn’t say,” the woman answered. “That’s your problem, not ours.”
Frank nods as she explains. He can help us with our problem. We must be patient. Tomorrow is a bank holiday. Weekends, nothing gets done in Nairobi.
Mike, my closest friend, calls from Massachusetts. Mary and Frank fill him in. He doesn’t know how yet, but he’ll figure it all out, license, escort, handoffs, my surgeon back home. Whatever the cost, he’ll put it on his credit card. I promise him I’m good for it, and he laughs at me. “Oh, I’ll get it out of you some way.” We’ve been friends for fifty years. He has medical problems worse than mine.
*
Before dawn we’re at the dawn of the world, inside Ngorongoro, the planet’s biggest volcanic caldera. The darkness lifts, but I can’t orient myself, can’t connect the view from the floor to the view from the edge, can’t encompass the vastness, the range of habitats inside this single crater. Once, the grasslands of America looked like this. Young zebras rear up in mock combat. Herds of gazelles barely glance as we pass. The mammals here are “relaxed,” habituated to humans, but they get nervous when the wind shifts. Two hyenas, fresh from a wildebeest kill, drink from a roadside ditch. Their blocky heads and necks are smeared red, the fur blood-encrusted, lips dripping gore. They don’t bother to wash off their faces.
*
I’m drugged, soft-brained but unable to achieve a stupor. Now I’ve got parts no longer attached. Once I’m fixed, if I’m fixed, how long will it take to recover? One dislocation increases the risk of another: must I worry about every step I take? All the places we want to travel, birds I yearn to see in Borneo, Bolivia, birds our comrades might be watching this moment, birds I’ll never see unless we come back. What if the next time I’m on a mountain in Mongolia? I can’t put Mary through this again. Will I even be able to manage a Christmas Bird Count? And the money, all the years I didn’t bother with travel insurance, thought I was being clever. Now my penny-pinching seems unspeakably foolish. Mary looks on longingly as evacuation teams come and go, carrying off patients to Capetown or Copenhagen. For a quarter of a million dollars, more or less, they’d fly me too.
Anxiety breeds anxiety. The mind follows the body, the churning stomach. One day I’ll wake and the energy, the capacity, to write, or think, will be gone.
There’s a news report on TV of a grenade bombing in a church. Twenty more are dead from a bombing in northern Nigeria. Sudan has declared a state of national emergency. Women in chains, sleeping sickness, child soldiers, AIDS, babies dying. In a continent of suffering, my troubles are small.
I borrow Frank’s cell phone to call my friend John in Mombasa. I’ve been dreading this call, putting it off. Years ago, Mary and I sponsored John as part of a Plan International program. After he turned eighteen, too old for the program, we kept in touch, and I send him money each year, never enough. He always asks when we’re coming to Kenya. He’s waiting. In a week we’re supposed to meet him in Mombasa. He’s bringing his mother, his sisters. He’s a man now but too poor to support a family. Jobs lost, bosses fleeing the country, no funds for computer classes—he hasn’t prospered. I’ve planned to be generous with him. I know he’s counting on generosity.
His voice is deep, his accent thick and hard to decipher with the static. I tell him about the dislocation, ambulances, Nairobi Hospital. “This is sad news,” he says, as much to himself as to me. “Very sad, my good friend.” I’m so sorry, I tell him, so deeply disappointed we can’t visit. For long moments we’re silent. He might be desperate enough to try to visit me, so I lie to him, tell him I’m flying home the next morning. I glance at Frank, who slowly lifts his hand to signify that he understands why I must lie or to ward off any explanation. “With the Lord’s help you will be better,” John says. “You must come back to Kenya, my friend. You will. This I believe.”
*
Serengeti: the Place Where the Land Moves on Forever. Beside the road a bat-eared fox just sits there, staring big-eyed at us. It looks sickly, ravaged, not nearly wary enough. I feel its fear, its defenselessness. I’m a mammal too. I’ve fallen. I’m wounded, dislocated. African hunters look down on me, their eyes sorrowful, but say nothing. There’s nothing to be said. They can’t take me with them. There’s no place to hide.
*
I’ve been here five days now. There’s no guarantee this will all work out. Mary and I plot unlikely schemes. We’ll lie, do whatever it takes, make them do the right thing. I’ll suck it up like a Maasai, prove I can sit upright until we’re in the air and it’s too late to turn back. If we can just get on the first flight, they’ll have to deal with me after that. Fuck the airlines, fuck their policies, their lawyers and liability. They can’t leave me lying on the terminal floor.
A young man is at my door. He smiles, waits for recognition, until I wave him in. It’s John. Mary hugs him. He softly shakes my hand, and I struggle to raise myself in bed. He’s come by bus from the coast. Eight hours? Ten? “No matter,” he says. “My friend is here, and he has trouble. So I come.” The bus back to Mombasa leaves in two hours. I don’t explain why I’m still here, and he doesn’t ask. He’s slighter than he looks in his photo. A leather jacket hangs loosely on him. He’s wearing his best clothes. We don’t know what to say. I’ve nothing to give him. Tears stream down my face. Mary brings out her camera and motions him to sit beside me. He sits, clasps my hand, and leans across with an arm around me. I grimace out a smile. I’m grizzled and unshaven in my hospital jonny. When the nurse comes in, she takes a picture of the three of us. “You will come back,” John says before he goes. “I know it.”
Sunday, festive folks in their finery drink and laugh on a balcony across the street. They see me watching them and wave. Mary, gone all morning, comes back and cries and laughs. “I feel like Blanche DuBois.” Nurses, security guards, Peter the librarian, they’ve all shown her the kindness of strangers. The street people around the hospital wave as she comes and goes. The night before, in a rainstorm, Nairobi was gridlocked—drivers walking away from their cars, passengers piling off stalled buses, taxi drivers jacking up prices though they were stuck too. Mary, deciding to walk, was soon lost, all her landmarks gone in the darkness, her sense of orientation invariably off. Two women pointed her in the right direction, then insisted she walk with them. Two blocks later, they turned her over to other women, then others, an African relay team guiding her back. The anchor, a tall man with a lunch pail on his long way home, was determined to walk her to the hospital door. No, Mary protested, she wasn’t lost anymore. “No, miss. Take my hand. We must go together all the way.”
This morning, Mary says, she lost it. On a curb behind the hospital she sat and sobbed. A woman sat and put her arm around her. Mary recognized her—the woman had begged her for food. “It will be all right, lady,” the woman told her now. She offered Mary a banana.
I know what people back home will think when I tell them our story—catastrophe in the Third, lesser World, stuck in a primitive African hospital, Mary on the mean streets of Nairobi. I must tell them they’re wrong. Our problem wasn’t Africa or Africans. The hospital was fine, doctors and nurses competent and caring, the place was clean, the drugs worked, the technology was good enough. Sympathy trumped rules. Day after day Mary stays in my room, and nobody says a word. Mornings, they let her shower. No, our problem was somewhere in corporate offices in Munich or London, mid-managers worried about policies and paperwork, agents who put on masks of coldness to carry out the cold tasks they’ve been assigned. Kenya Airways is waiting for the fax with Mary’s nursing license. Lufthansa is waiting for Kenya Airways to confirm. It won’t wait much longer.
*
Memory morphs into dream. Under a double rainbow arcing over the Serengeti, a secretary bird marches stiff-tailed through long grass. Silly to name it for those quills on its nape—better the Arabic name, “hunter bird.” It’s an eagle that’s grown the legs of a crane, black leggings for protection, a stalker, a snake-stomper. No creature on earth could look more focused. Yes, this is the bird of the African savanna.
*
The next morning, Monday, a week after the dislocation, Frank tells us we’re going home. We’re afraid to believe. Somehow, at the last moment, it will all fall apart.
After lunch Sister and the doctor come in to say good-bye. “I wish you both a safe journey,” the doctor says. “No doubt you will be in good hands.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.” The words choke out of me. “Everybody here has been so kind.”
“Oh, nothing so much. We might have done more, but we were able to relieve your pain.”
“You must have faith,” Sister says. “I promised you would go home. Now you will go. Maybe all this has happened to you because you were meant to find the true Africans, the ones the world doesn’t know. Our spirit of generosity.”
I’ve never believed that everything in life happens for a reason. The only reasons are those we care to invent. But this woman will never stop singing her refrain of hope and acceptance. She believes, believes—it’s all part of God’s plan—and who am I to say different? Clasping my hand, Sister brings me to tears. The compassion we’ve been shown seems like a dispensation—not, God knows, because we’ve done anything to deserve special treatment, but because, as people of privilege and ease, Westerners, Americans, we’re not accustomed to suffering. They know we’ll get home. They know I won’t die here. Others will suffer more. But they take pity because we’re inexperienced in misery. Naïve and self-centered as children, we imagine that all problems can and should be solved, quickly, efficiently. Tender mercy is needed because we’ve never been required to shoulder everyday frustration and defeat.
After nightfall the ambulance crew comes, no Indian woman this time, but the same young woman who hopes to see America, the drivers greeting us like old friends. Before we go, Mary makes the rounds, thanking nurses, hugging secretaries and security guards. We think we’ve got enough cash to pay for the ambulance, but we haven’t bargained on the hours they’ll have to wait until I’m actually put on the plane. The drivers shrug off my apologies. No worries, man. Get home safe.
It takes six men, straining up and down and around tight corners, to get me from the ambulance to the stretcher on the plane—a cot rigged up over three rows of seats, seats we’ve paid for, with my own urinal and a curtain for privacy. There will be more maneuvers at Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Boston. I’m a great curiosity to my fellow passengers.
I’m standing, with binoculars around my neck and crutches under my arms, on our deck on a woodsy hilltop in coastal Massachusetts. Sunrise to sunrise, I wear a cumbersome brace from neck to thigh. I sleep with a big yellow wedge of foam between my legs so I won’t hurt myself in my dreams. For the next three months, this deck is as far as I’m supposed to go. It’s a punishment specially designed for a birder--under house arrest, tantalized by birdsong at the peak of spring migration--but I’m not being punished for anything.
From our oaks I hear a mix of warbler songs, black-throated blue, magnolia, a ventriloquist blackpoll, a migrant wave passing through. Common birds all, they’ll be back next spring, but right now I need a look. I’ll be careful, I promise, I’m not going far. I crutch my way across the yard. The sun is on me, the same sun that warms the coursers and coucals of Ngorongoro. Though they’re far away now, tending to others, I feel warmed too, and steadied, by the kindness of Africans.
John R. Nelson, of Gloucester, MA, was awarded a Pushcart Prize for his essay “Funny
Bird Sex,” the lead article in the Winter 2016 issue of The Antioch Review. His essay “Brolga the Dancing Crane Girl” was awarded the Carter Prize for the best non-fiction work published in Shenandoah.
by John R. Nelson
Golden grasses feather the breeze, Earth sways. Sausage trees, named for fibrous fruits that dangle from ropey peduncles, flank a rain-revived rivulet winding through grassland. Sun blazes on the lime-green, photosynthetic bark of fever trees. Under one isolated tree, a dusty bull elephant takes a knee. Elephants were Tebow-ing here for eons before America ever heard of a 15-minutes-of-fame football player named Tim Tebow. Maasai giraffes appear on a ridge and lope alongside our open-aired Land Rover with muscled flanks and ground-eating strides.
For Aldo Leopold, wandering on horseback, the Pinyon jay, beyond all other birds, captured the essence of the juniper foothills in the American Southwest. Which bird best expresses the Tarangire savanna? Shrike? We’ve seen seven or eight, of three different species, perched like ornaments in a single thorn tree. Saddle-billed stork? Pied, elegant, contemplative, two stand together, each on one leg, in a soggy marsh. A hamerkop, builder of big nests, more anvil than hammer headed, hunches atop a cataract, its chocolate brown camouflaged against the churning current. Lovebirds and sunbirds, fish-eagles and snake-eagles, long-tailed paradise whydahs, all seem equally at home here.
We’re a happy group. Markus, our guide, boyishly handsome, easy-going yet resolute, is a world-class birder and photographer. California John bops his head to tunes on his iPod as he scans past gnarled baobabs toward the horizon. Two old hippies, we riff together in silly flights of fancy: the bonsai giraffe that can’t quite reach the trees, or the Casanova bird that aims to mate with as many other bird species as possible. Fun-loving Polly Wren laughs at herself as she coos “Baby, baby” at creatures small or huge, from cordon-bleus to buffalos. Paul, her husband, a steady, quiet guy, is a sharp spotter and fine photographer. He and Markus offer tips to my wife Mary, no mean photographer herself. Mary likes to feign ignorance of birds, and Markus teases her when she does. She likes being teased by Markus.
An elephant stops in the track and trumpets indignantly at our intrusion. A Sisyphus-like dung beetle hind-legs its ball of feces up a steep incline. California John spots our first lionesses sprawled under a tree in the midday heat, then coming our way, annoyed, as a stalking elephant forces them from shade to shade. One comes out of tall grasses and crosses the road fifty feet from us. Mary, with camera in hand, is transported.
*
I’m lying in a bed, drugged but not oblivious, in a stark gray room. No pictures on the walls, a fuzzy TV. On a little table, beside a cardboard urinal, The House of the Seven Gables. Why did I bring Hawthorne to Africa? I drift in, drift out, hear honking and shouting outside the open window, the cry of a bird I can’t identify. I wait, worry, sleep, take pills, try Hawthorne, dream testy dreams. Before dawn I hear the moan of Muslim prayers. I piss in the urinal until it’s soggy and leaking. Whether from embarrassment or ingrained frugality, I can’t ask a nurse for a new urinal every time I pee. I want a cigarette.
I don’t know what happens outside this room. I hear hurrying footsteps in corridors, voices. Yesterday a nurse mentioned an “event” on the floor but didn’t offer details. She told Mary, a nurse herself, that I’m on a ward for TB patients.
The head nurse enters. She’s not a nun, but everyone calls her Sister, and she has the presence of a Mother Superior, firm but kindly, strong-bosomed and embracing, a woman comfortable being in control. She introduces me to her charges on this shift—young black women, attentive, reserved, lined up in starched, pale blue uniforms. One smiles in recognition. Yesterday I laughed at her pronunciation of “urinal,” and she laughed at mine. She was so pleased when I offered her chewing gum.
“Where is your Mary?” Sister asks.
“I don’t know. Trying to get us home. She’s been gone forever.”
“No, no,” she says, “Mary will be fine. You know, all this must happen for a reason. It may be tomorrow, maybe a week, but when it’s time to go home, home you will go. This I can promise.”
Home, we thought we were going home. The day it happened, Mary took a taxi to the airport and pleaded, begged, cajoled, until she got us a flight that night, Nairobi to Heathrow, then on to Boston. We were picked up by an ambulance crew: a warm, self-assured woman of Indian descent, a pretty young African woman who wants to come to America, two rock-steady drivers. At the airport Mary and the Indian woman went off to British Airways. We waited and waited. No worries, the drivers told me. Then Mary, near tears, was back. I struggled to gather it in. “No stretchers,” said Mary, a furious mimic, “no stretchers. That’s all the bitch kept saying.” They wouldn’t let me on the plane because this woman didn’t believe I could sit upright, even in first class, and airline policy forbids passengers on stretchers. American Airlines, our ride from London to Boston, had the same policy. What now? How to get home? That wasn’t a concern of British Airways. Mary went back inside to get some cash to pay for the return to Nairobi Hospital. The machine ate her debit card. The drivers were gracious. No worries. We drove in silence through the city. On my back, I saw nothing but streetlights. At the hospital the ambulance crew took our hands in theirs and wished us luck.
*
When the present looks bleak, turn back, as in a dream, back to the carefree time before pain and worry, when every sight fascinated. At a pond, oxpeckers peck on tough hide for insects near the gaping, molared jaws of bathing hippos. It’s hard to identify with a hippo. What does it feel like to have birds foraging for bugs on your face?
In a bustling Tanzanian town, we pass cyclists with Obama T-shirts, a woman’s vegetable cart with a handmade sign—“Hillary Clinton Shop”’—and bumper stickers for Bob Marley and Tuff Gong. A ripped poster for a traditional healer advertises “love portion, business boost, lost items, man power, jobs, cases.”
And then we’re at the edge of the world, above the great crater, Ngorongoro, encircled by cloud-touched mountains. It’s a place wholly onto itself, so wide and sweeping that each patch needs its own weather report. Here a veil of mist, over there, dark rain falling, and far off, sun streaming down. Tomorrow we’ll be on the crater floor among elephants and black rhinos that are now not even specks. At sunset, lightning cracks the sky and silhouettes the sacred mountains. Mary, my lover of storms, stands at the rim, her face strobed by light.
*
Where is she now? Pain can be managed. Guilt’s worse than pain.
My doctor comes in. He’s African like Sister, well-spoken, wise-seeming, a man who brings calm. Yes, he says, he can perform the reduction easily, put the hip back in today, but I’ll have to spend a few weeks in the hospital before I can ride in a plane. Otherwise the hip might pop out again. If I wish to wait until I can get back to America, if I want my own doctor, he understands, he does, but this isn’t what he would advise. Another doctor comes in, younger, latte-skinned, Bollywood handsome with a crisp British Empire accent. The doctors here, he assures me, are most competent. This hospital has a fine reputation. It’s not smart to wait too long to put the hip back in. But how can we spend weeks in Nairobi? Where would Mary stay while I’m lying in bed? I search his face for flickers of insult. I want to explain—it’s not that I don’t trust you guys, it’s not . . . But no, I can tell from his unflappability, the knowing wryness in his voice, no explanation is needed. No egos at stake here, no issues of race or preconceptions about Third World medicine, no skin off their noses if I don’t take their advice.
*
At a smoky Maasai village—a cluster of thatched huts with more cattle than people—lanky bald men and women in red and blue wool dance and ululate for us. For a fee, we can take all the photos we please. Africa is the jumping continent, and these people love to jump. A former high jumper, I once had the legs to leap with them. They’re tough folks, drought-resistant pastoralists, leopard-wrestlers. Do the Maasai suffer hip dislocations? Could they stay erect on an airplane, silent, unflinching, however brutal the pain? What is their method of medical evacuation?
At Olduvai Gorge—a steep ravine with stratified layers of rock, one of the world’s great paleoanthropological sites— we ponder fossils of extinct beasts, a giant swine, some sort of humongous rhino, and, our fantasy realized, a short-necked giraffe. How old are we as a species? Did we scavenge before we hunted? Why did we leave Africa? A Maasai woman, barefoot, elongated, strides past with a walking stick. She’s as determined as a secretary bird.
Mary worries about getting us home, I worry about Mary. She makes futile calls on borrowed cell phones. By taxi, bus, on foot, she goes seeking from office to office. They can’t give her definite answers, she must wait, they send her somewhere else. At a public library, befriended by a kind librarian, she posts SOSs on Facebook, sends desperate e-mails to anyone who might help. The computer sticks, letters refuse to appear on screen, her pleas are garbled —our financial advisor, we learn later, thought somebody was running some African scam. Our other debit card has mysteriously expired. It’s a comedy of errors; we’ve got money but no cash, and we’re afraid to use credit cards because we don’t know what all this will cost. Each time, Mary comes back more frazzled. Sprawled across two rickety chairs, she can’t sleep, so she roams the corridors. She can’t shower, and she’s not eating. No one’s taking care of her. I try to save her food from my meals, but there’s not enough, the food’s bland and cold, or I forget to order the right thing, or the right thing doesn’t come. She’s testy, trapped. She needs coffee. She was having such a wonderful time. A week ago I was bringing her coffee in bed. Now I’m helpless, holding her hostage.
*
It’s drizzling at the border. In a customs office we see warnings about sex slavery, a poster with a bruised woman in chains. We drive through flooded plains and slalom around potholes spilling into ponds. We find a hippo in our yard, well, just across a fence, but close and splashing, running faster than a hippo ought to run. The rain stops. Black clouds rise. Birds come out and sing. Where all was gloom, intense light spreads over the savanna. Then we see it, between the clouds, a dark volcanic cone, snow on top—Kilimanjaro, the awesome peak of a continent, the highest free-standing mountain in the world.
*
An earnest young man takes my vital signs. He’s excited to discover I’m a teacher, a writer. Instantly I’m his mentor, for he’s a writer himself. He’s finished a novel, and soon it will be published—fame and fortune will follow—once he comes up with a thousand dollars. No, I tell him. It’s a rip-off. I explain the concept of vanity presses. His face sags. I don’t know if his novel is any good. I have no other advice to give, no business boost. I’ve written a novel myself, very good I think, but still unpublished. Now I write about birds and birding geezers. This hip dislocation was merely the most recent in a series of orthopedic insults; joints were replaced, ankles fused—I’ve tried to find the humor in it. I’m running out of optimism to share.
*
I can’t remember which bird I hoped to find as we skirted potholes on the way out of Amboseli. We’d seen almost all the birds we’d wanted to see. At first I was fixated on identification, new birds for my list, but then I started to learn the birds’ stories, got to know their habits and haunts. That stubby harlequin quail we flushed is a water-seeking nomad. The chestnut-bellied sandgrouse, like good bar buddies, will wait for their comrades to finish drinking before they move on as a flock.
I turned back for another look at Kilimanjaro. I didn’t want to leave. Markus poked California John, startled in mid head-bop, to tell him to turn down the sound on his iPod. I was feeling a bit cramped in my seat, uneasy, but the jolt came without warning. Overwhelming pain, leg facing the wrong way, I knew right away I was fucked. I had to get out of the Land Rover. Right leg on the running board, left leg askew and dangling, I panicked, swamped by sweat. I couldn’t step down, couldn’t force myself to crawl back in. There was no place to escape pain. I saw fear and pity in Mary’s eyes.
Markus had to tell me the hard truth. If I could manage to get back inside, an ambulance could meet us outside Nairobi. If not, we’d have to wait for hours until an ambulance could make it out here. I steeled myself. Markus and John lifted, pushed, and slid me until I was wedged against a door, neither sitting nor lying, the leg at a sad angle. Mary handed me two pain pills, then two more. I whimpered. We were out of the park and stuck in traffic, roads closed by flooding, trucks all around, stink of exhaust. Somehow we’d driven past the ambulance. We maneuvered around stalled trucks, troops of people with bundles and bicycles, and found the ambulance by the road. Grim farewells, instructions repeated, and then I was on a stretcher, with Mary stroking my forehead. Three cups of morning coffee coursed through me. I had to piss. The attendant held up my shoulders and gave me a plastic bag to pee in, whispered encouragement, but I couldn’t do it, too awkward an angle or too humiliated. After the third try I gave up. The pain was tolerable if I stayed flat on my back. The hospital, Markus had said, was the best in Kenya. What did that mean? We were in the city now, stop and go. At the hospital the driver tried to jack up the price he’d agreed on. Mary wasn’t having it.
Yellow-billed kites, scavengers of Africa’s cities, glide above concrete. The feral pigeons congregated on ledges, the incessant, tuneless chirps of House Sparrows tell me I’m not on a savanna. Other birds caw. Hadada ibis? They’re laughing. Haw haw haw. Ancient birds, once buried with Egyptian mummies as gifts to the gods, now sorting through rubbish.
Help is on the way. The first day, Rockjumper, our tour company, sent a local agent to the hospital—a cheery guy but useless, out of his depth. He assumed we’d flown out on British Airways, and he was gone. Now a new agent, Frank, stocky, solid, with a cell phone and a can-do attitude, is beside my bed. Mary pours it out for him: the catch-22 of Kenya Airways and Lufthansa each wanting the other to confirm its flight first; the nine full-priced seats they’ll need for my stretcher; Mary’s nursing license (in a drawer in Massachusetts) so she can be my nurse escort on Kenya Airways; the private nurse we’ll have to hire because Lufthansa won’t allow family members as escorts; ambulance transfers from airplanes to terminals, terminals to airplanes. And how, Mary asked a Lufthansa agent, do I arrange all that? “I couldn’t say,” the woman answered. “That’s your problem, not ours.”
Frank nods as she explains. He can help us with our problem. We must be patient. Tomorrow is a bank holiday. Weekends, nothing gets done in Nairobi.
Mike, my closest friend, calls from Massachusetts. Mary and Frank fill him in. He doesn’t know how yet, but he’ll figure it all out, license, escort, handoffs, my surgeon back home. Whatever the cost, he’ll put it on his credit card. I promise him I’m good for it, and he laughs at me. “Oh, I’ll get it out of you some way.” We’ve been friends for fifty years. He has medical problems worse than mine.
*
Before dawn we’re at the dawn of the world, inside Ngorongoro, the planet’s biggest volcanic caldera. The darkness lifts, but I can’t orient myself, can’t connect the view from the floor to the view from the edge, can’t encompass the vastness, the range of habitats inside this single crater. Once, the grasslands of America looked like this. Young zebras rear up in mock combat. Herds of gazelles barely glance as we pass. The mammals here are “relaxed,” habituated to humans, but they get nervous when the wind shifts. Two hyenas, fresh from a wildebeest kill, drink from a roadside ditch. Their blocky heads and necks are smeared red, the fur blood-encrusted, lips dripping gore. They don’t bother to wash off their faces.
*
I’m drugged, soft-brained but unable to achieve a stupor. Now I’ve got parts no longer attached. Once I’m fixed, if I’m fixed, how long will it take to recover? One dislocation increases the risk of another: must I worry about every step I take? All the places we want to travel, birds I yearn to see in Borneo, Bolivia, birds our comrades might be watching this moment, birds I’ll never see unless we come back. What if the next time I’m on a mountain in Mongolia? I can’t put Mary through this again. Will I even be able to manage a Christmas Bird Count? And the money, all the years I didn’t bother with travel insurance, thought I was being clever. Now my penny-pinching seems unspeakably foolish. Mary looks on longingly as evacuation teams come and go, carrying off patients to Capetown or Copenhagen. For a quarter of a million dollars, more or less, they’d fly me too.
Anxiety breeds anxiety. The mind follows the body, the churning stomach. One day I’ll wake and the energy, the capacity, to write, or think, will be gone.
There’s a news report on TV of a grenade bombing in a church. Twenty more are dead from a bombing in northern Nigeria. Sudan has declared a state of national emergency. Women in chains, sleeping sickness, child soldiers, AIDS, babies dying. In a continent of suffering, my troubles are small.
I borrow Frank’s cell phone to call my friend John in Mombasa. I’ve been dreading this call, putting it off. Years ago, Mary and I sponsored John as part of a Plan International program. After he turned eighteen, too old for the program, we kept in touch, and I send him money each year, never enough. He always asks when we’re coming to Kenya. He’s waiting. In a week we’re supposed to meet him in Mombasa. He’s bringing his mother, his sisters. He’s a man now but too poor to support a family. Jobs lost, bosses fleeing the country, no funds for computer classes—he hasn’t prospered. I’ve planned to be generous with him. I know he’s counting on generosity.
His voice is deep, his accent thick and hard to decipher with the static. I tell him about the dislocation, ambulances, Nairobi Hospital. “This is sad news,” he says, as much to himself as to me. “Very sad, my good friend.” I’m so sorry, I tell him, so deeply disappointed we can’t visit. For long moments we’re silent. He might be desperate enough to try to visit me, so I lie to him, tell him I’m flying home the next morning. I glance at Frank, who slowly lifts his hand to signify that he understands why I must lie or to ward off any explanation. “With the Lord’s help you will be better,” John says. “You must come back to Kenya, my friend. You will. This I believe.”
*
Serengeti: the Place Where the Land Moves on Forever. Beside the road a bat-eared fox just sits there, staring big-eyed at us. It looks sickly, ravaged, not nearly wary enough. I feel its fear, its defenselessness. I’m a mammal too. I’ve fallen. I’m wounded, dislocated. African hunters look down on me, their eyes sorrowful, but say nothing. There’s nothing to be said. They can’t take me with them. There’s no place to hide.
*
I’ve been here five days now. There’s no guarantee this will all work out. Mary and I plot unlikely schemes. We’ll lie, do whatever it takes, make them do the right thing. I’ll suck it up like a Maasai, prove I can sit upright until we’re in the air and it’s too late to turn back. If we can just get on the first flight, they’ll have to deal with me after that. Fuck the airlines, fuck their policies, their lawyers and liability. They can’t leave me lying on the terminal floor.
A young man is at my door. He smiles, waits for recognition, until I wave him in. It’s John. Mary hugs him. He softly shakes my hand, and I struggle to raise myself in bed. He’s come by bus from the coast. Eight hours? Ten? “No matter,” he says. “My friend is here, and he has trouble. So I come.” The bus back to Mombasa leaves in two hours. I don’t explain why I’m still here, and he doesn’t ask. He’s slighter than he looks in his photo. A leather jacket hangs loosely on him. He’s wearing his best clothes. We don’t know what to say. I’ve nothing to give him. Tears stream down my face. Mary brings out her camera and motions him to sit beside me. He sits, clasps my hand, and leans across with an arm around me. I grimace out a smile. I’m grizzled and unshaven in my hospital jonny. When the nurse comes in, she takes a picture of the three of us. “You will come back,” John says before he goes. “I know it.”
Sunday, festive folks in their finery drink and laugh on a balcony across the street. They see me watching them and wave. Mary, gone all morning, comes back and cries and laughs. “I feel like Blanche DuBois.” Nurses, security guards, Peter the librarian, they’ve all shown her the kindness of strangers. The street people around the hospital wave as she comes and goes. The night before, in a rainstorm, Nairobi was gridlocked—drivers walking away from their cars, passengers piling off stalled buses, taxi drivers jacking up prices though they were stuck too. Mary, deciding to walk, was soon lost, all her landmarks gone in the darkness, her sense of orientation invariably off. Two women pointed her in the right direction, then insisted she walk with them. Two blocks later, they turned her over to other women, then others, an African relay team guiding her back. The anchor, a tall man with a lunch pail on his long way home, was determined to walk her to the hospital door. No, Mary protested, she wasn’t lost anymore. “No, miss. Take my hand. We must go together all the way.”
This morning, Mary says, she lost it. On a curb behind the hospital she sat and sobbed. A woman sat and put her arm around her. Mary recognized her—the woman had begged her for food. “It will be all right, lady,” the woman told her now. She offered Mary a banana.
I know what people back home will think when I tell them our story—catastrophe in the Third, lesser World, stuck in a primitive African hospital, Mary on the mean streets of Nairobi. I must tell them they’re wrong. Our problem wasn’t Africa or Africans. The hospital was fine, doctors and nurses competent and caring, the place was clean, the drugs worked, the technology was good enough. Sympathy trumped rules. Day after day Mary stays in my room, and nobody says a word. Mornings, they let her shower. No, our problem was somewhere in corporate offices in Munich or London, mid-managers worried about policies and paperwork, agents who put on masks of coldness to carry out the cold tasks they’ve been assigned. Kenya Airways is waiting for the fax with Mary’s nursing license. Lufthansa is waiting for Kenya Airways to confirm. It won’t wait much longer.
*
Memory morphs into dream. Under a double rainbow arcing over the Serengeti, a secretary bird marches stiff-tailed through long grass. Silly to name it for those quills on its nape—better the Arabic name, “hunter bird.” It’s an eagle that’s grown the legs of a crane, black leggings for protection, a stalker, a snake-stomper. No creature on earth could look more focused. Yes, this is the bird of the African savanna.
*
The next morning, Monday, a week after the dislocation, Frank tells us we’re going home. We’re afraid to believe. Somehow, at the last moment, it will all fall apart.
After lunch Sister and the doctor come in to say good-bye. “I wish you both a safe journey,” the doctor says. “No doubt you will be in good hands.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.” The words choke out of me. “Everybody here has been so kind.”
“Oh, nothing so much. We might have done more, but we were able to relieve your pain.”
“You must have faith,” Sister says. “I promised you would go home. Now you will go. Maybe all this has happened to you because you were meant to find the true Africans, the ones the world doesn’t know. Our spirit of generosity.”
I’ve never believed that everything in life happens for a reason. The only reasons are those we care to invent. But this woman will never stop singing her refrain of hope and acceptance. She believes, believes—it’s all part of God’s plan—and who am I to say different? Clasping my hand, Sister brings me to tears. The compassion we’ve been shown seems like a dispensation—not, God knows, because we’ve done anything to deserve special treatment, but because, as people of privilege and ease, Westerners, Americans, we’re not accustomed to suffering. They know we’ll get home. They know I won’t die here. Others will suffer more. But they take pity because we’re inexperienced in misery. Naïve and self-centered as children, we imagine that all problems can and should be solved, quickly, efficiently. Tender mercy is needed because we’ve never been required to shoulder everyday frustration and defeat.
After nightfall the ambulance crew comes, no Indian woman this time, but the same young woman who hopes to see America, the drivers greeting us like old friends. Before we go, Mary makes the rounds, thanking nurses, hugging secretaries and security guards. We think we’ve got enough cash to pay for the ambulance, but we haven’t bargained on the hours they’ll have to wait until I’m actually put on the plane. The drivers shrug off my apologies. No worries, man. Get home safe.
It takes six men, straining up and down and around tight corners, to get me from the ambulance to the stretcher on the plane—a cot rigged up over three rows of seats, seats we’ve paid for, with my own urinal and a curtain for privacy. There will be more maneuvers at Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Boston. I’m a great curiosity to my fellow passengers.
I’m standing, with binoculars around my neck and crutches under my arms, on our deck on a woodsy hilltop in coastal Massachusetts. Sunrise to sunrise, I wear a cumbersome brace from neck to thigh. I sleep with a big yellow wedge of foam between my legs so I won’t hurt myself in my dreams. For the next three months, this deck is as far as I’m supposed to go. It’s a punishment specially designed for a birder--under house arrest, tantalized by birdsong at the peak of spring migration--but I’m not being punished for anything.
From our oaks I hear a mix of warbler songs, black-throated blue, magnolia, a ventriloquist blackpoll, a migrant wave passing through. Common birds all, they’ll be back next spring, but right now I need a look. I’ll be careful, I promise, I’m not going far. I crutch my way across the yard. The sun is on me, the same sun that warms the coursers and coucals of Ngorongoro. Though they’re far away now, tending to others, I feel warmed too, and steadied, by the kindness of Africans.
John R. Nelson, of Gloucester, MA, was awarded a Pushcart Prize for his essay “Funny
Bird Sex,” the lead article in the Winter 2016 issue of The Antioch Review. His essay “Brolga the Dancing Crane Girl” was awarded the Carter Prize for the best non-fiction work published in Shenandoah.