Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Canyon of the Vaginas

When one is on a pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas, one has to be careful about asking directions.

I mean, there’re some pretty rough ol’ dudes in west-central Nevada. One knows the ol’ dudes are rough when one observes that they eat with their hats on.

Nine days I was in the high desert between Winnemucca and Las Vegas, during which time I never witnessed a male Homo sapiens take his noontide nor his evening repast with an exposed bean. In every instance, a grimy bill or brim shaded the fellow’s victuals from the vulgar eye of light. I assumed that they breakfasted en chapeau as well, but by the hour that your pilgrim sat down to his flapjacks, the rough ol’ dudes had already gone off to try to strike it rich.

When a man’s brain is constantly heated by thoughts of striking it rich, thoughts that don’t fade much at mealtime, perhaps he requires some sort of perpetual head cover to cool the cerebral machinery. On the other hand, since they live in relatively close proximity to America’s major nuclear test site, a nerve-gas depot, several mysterious airfields, and numerous depositories for our government’s nasty toxic secrets, maybe the rough ol’ dudes are just trying to prevent their haircuts from ever flickering in the dark. If I lived in west-central Nevada, I might dine in gloves and a Mylex suit.

Naturally, one has to wonder if the men of Nevada also sleep in their hats. More pointedly, do they sleep with their wives, girlfriends, and thoroughly legal prostitutes in their hats? I intended to interview a Nevada woman or two on the subject, but never quite got around to it. However, something at the Canyon of the Vaginas gave me reason to believe that the answer is affirmative. Of that, more later.

Getting back on course, beneath those baseball caps that advertise brands of beer or heavy equipment, under those genuine imitation Stetsons, there’re some rough ol’ hangovers being processed and some rough ol’ ideas being entertained. One simply does not approach a miner, a wrangler, a prospector, a gambler, a Stealth pilot, a construction sweat hog, or sandblasted freebooter and interrupt his thoughts about big, fast bucks and those forces — environmental legislation, social change, loaded dice, et cetera — that could stand between him and big, fast bucks; one simply does not march up to such a man, a man who lifts his crusty lid to no one, and ask:

“Sir, might you possibly direct me to the Canyon of the Vaginas?”

Should readers desire to make their own pilgrimage to the Canyon of the Vaginas — and it is, after all, one of the few holy places left in America — they’ll have to find it by themselves. Were one to inquire of its whereabouts at a bar or gas station (in west-central Nevada they’re often one and the same, complete with slot machines), the best that one could hope for is that a dude would wink and aim one at the pink gates of Bobbie’s Cottontail Ranch, or whatever the nearest brothel might be called.

In the improbable event that he fails to misinterpret one’s inquiry, and/or to take sore offense at it, a dude still isn’t likely to further one’s cause. For that matter, save for the odd archeologist, neither is anybody else. The population of Nevada arises every morning, straightens its hat, swallows a few aspirin, and trucks off to try to strike it rich without so much as a nervous suspicion that the Canyon of the Vaginas lies within its domain.

Your pilgrim learned of it from a Salt Lake City artist who has hiked and camped extensively in the high deserts of the Great Basin. The man drew me a fairly specific map, but I, in good conscience, cannot pass along the details. My reluctance to share is rooted neither in selfishness nor elitism, but in the conviction that certain aspects of the canyon are quite fragile and in need of protection.

Not that genuflecting hordes are likely to descend upon it: the canyon is remote; troubled, according to season, by killer sun, ripping wind, and blinding blizzard; and is reached by a road that nobody making monthly car payments should even think of driving. Still, there are plenty of new-agers with the leisure and energy to track down yet another “power center,” and plenty of curiosity seekers with an appetite for the exotic souvenir. Surely I’ll be forgiven if I’m ever so slightly discreet.

Besides, what kind of pilgrimage would it be if it didn’t contain some element of hardship and enigma? The quest is essential to the ritual. To orient ourselves at the interface of the visible and invisible worlds — which may be the purpose of all pilgrimages — we must embrace the search as well as its goal. If our journey into the heart (or vagina) of meaning resembles in any appreciable manner our last trip to the shopping mall, we’re probably doing something wrong.

I can disclose this much: to arrive at the Canyon of the Vaginas, your pilgrim had to travel a ways on Highway 50, a blue guitar string of asphalt accurately described by postcards and brochures as the Most Lonesome Road in America. It will impress some readers as poignantly correct that so many vaginas are reached only by a route of almost legendary loneliness. Others won’t have that reaction at all.

Physically, my pilgrimage commenced in downtown Seattle. Downtown Seattle has long been my “stomping grounds,” as they say, although in the past couple of years it’s lost its homey air. A side effect of Reaganomics was skyscraper fever. Developers, taking advantage of lucrative tax breaks, voodoo-pinned our city centers with largely unneeded office towers. In downtown Seattle, for some reason, most of the excess buildings are beige. Seattleites complain of beige à vu: the sensation that they’ve seen that color before.

In any case, it was in a Seattle parking lot, flanked by beige edifices, that I exchanged cars with my chiropractor. He took my customized Camaro Z-28 convertible, a quick machine whose splendid virtues do not include comfort on long-distance hauls; I took his big, new Mercedes.

If, indeed, the reader should decide to motor to Nevada and it proves to exceed an afternoon’s jaunt, may I suggest swapping cars with a chiropractor? Chiropractors’ cars are not like yours or mine. Theirs tend to be massage parlors on wheels, equipped with the latest breakthroughs in therapeutic seating, lumbar cushions, and vertebrae-aligning headrests. It’s like rolling along in a technological spa. The driver can get a spinal adjustment and a speeding ticket simultaneously.

So relaxed was I in that tea-green Mercedes that I didn’t look around when I heard my chiropractor burn a quarter inch of rubber off the Camaro’s tires. In a certain way, it was reminiscent of the movie Trading Places. As the good doctor tore off to drag sorority row at the University of Washington, I oozed through the beige maze with a serene, chiropractic smile, braking tenderly in front of Alexa’s apartment, and then in front of Jon’s.

For days to come, the three of us, Alexa, Jon, and your pilgrim, would take turns piloting the doctor’s clinical dreamboat along tilting tables of rural landscape. Once we’d crossed the tamed Columbia and were traversing the vastness of eastern Oregon, once we were out of the wet zone and into the dry zone, out of the vegetable zone and into the meat zone, out of the fiberglass-shower-stall zone and into the metal-shower-stall zone, we would glide through a seemingly endless variety of ecosystems, most of them virtually relieved of the more obvious signs of human folly, all of them unavoidably gorgeous.

Some of the hills were shaped like pyramids, others resembled the contents of Brunhilde’s bodice. One was so vibrantly purple-black that we suspected we’d discovered the mother lode where eye shadow was mined. There were craters and slumps, stacks and slides, alkali lakes and sand dunes, gorges and passes, fossil beds, dust devils, and enormous ragged buttes that could have been cruise ships for honeymooning trolls. We followed chatty little creeks, spilling their creek guts to anybody who’d listen; we swerved to miss antelope, reduced dead jackrabbits to two dimensions, honked at happy dogs and range steers, photographed gap-toothed windmills and churches in which no collection plate would ever circulate again, inhaled sage until our sinuses gobbled, and cast self-righteous judgment on the bored adolescent gunmen and beered-up Cattle Xing terrorists who’d blown a Milky Way of holes into each and every road sign.

It delighted me that the Canyon of the Vaginas was out here smack dab in the middle of the Wild American West. How swell that in the Old West of gunfights and land grabs, massacres and gold rushes, bushwhackings and horsewhippings, missions, saloons, boot hills, and forts, there existed a culture that celebrated with artistic eloquence and spiritual fervor the most intimate feature of the feminine anatomy.

Imagine Custer’s cavalry troop thundering innocently over a ridge, only to come face-to-face with (gasp!) the pink, the moist, the yielding, the delicately curly. Imagine a Saturday matinee: Roy Rogers at the Canyon of the Vaginas.

Mentally, emotionally, my pilgrimage began back in my late twenties or early thirties, whenever it was that it first occurred to me that the female genitals were literally divine. In the Orient, especially in the religious systems of Tibet and India, that notion has prevailed since dimmest antiquity, and as a matter of fact, there are yonic symbols in the caves of Paleolithic Europe (dating back twenty thousand years) that are indistinguishable from those venerated today by the tantric cults of the Himalayas.

When I read how, among the practitioners of tantra, the vulva is adored as the organ for the generation of world and time, it struck a resonant chord. From that day on, I have been seeking the American tantra, which is to say, I’ve been seeking American images that promote that inner intensity of feminine sexuality, whose source is the Goddess of Creation.

Among the examples that have caught my attention are the bubblegum-colored underpants that Bonnie Parker left behind to taunt the cops when she and Clyde Barrow flew the coop. I was convinced, you see, that the American tantra must be as different from the Asian tantra as we Americans — sweet gangsters at heart — are different from pious Asians. In the modern sense, I still think that’s true, but until I learned of the Canyon of the Vaginas, I’d neglected to consider the tantric contribution of American Indians.

Having meditated on and received inspiration from such ostensibly profane icons as Bonnie’s panties (she purchased them, by the way, at a small-town Kansas dime store in 1934), it fazed me only a smidgen to discover that what may be the ultimate tantric tribute on our continent is located in west-central Nevada. Even that trace of skepticism vanished when I remembered that the Goddess of Creation also serves as the Goddess of Destruction.

If something is so hazardous and destructive and ugly and spooky that we don’t know what to do with it, we stick it in Nevada. The state is blotched with “Danger Areas,” immense, guarded, off limits, concealing every imaginable kind of high-tech poison, as well as the various weapons systems that sup on or excrete those poisons. In Nevada, a fluffy little cloud can suddenly exterminate a whole flock of sheep. And Nevada is the place the Bomb calls home.

Even the brothels, sanctioned by the state because it’s believed that military men, cowboys, and miners can’t function efficiently without the help of whores, even the brothels are a sort of dumping ground. As for casinos, they could be viewed as dumping grounds for money; at least, that’s been your pilgrim’s experience.

We dump on Nevada because Nevada seems so useless and empty, because it seems that there is less there there than the there that Gertrude Stein couldn’t find in Oakland. That, of course, is an illusion. Any couch turnip who’s caught The Wonderful World of Disney knows that the desert is teeming.

There aren’t a lot of humans in Nevada, relatively speaking, but considering the lifestyles of those who are there, considering that the thickest crowds are in the barrooms and that the barrooms are open around the clock (prevailing custom among the rough ol’ dudes is that if you strike it rich, you get drunk to celebrate, and if you don’t, you get drunk to forget), considering that the chief complaint in those barrooms is, “They didn’t let us win in Vietnam,” considering that the average Nevadan resides in a mobile double-wide with nothing in its grassless yard except a satellite dish as big as a moon, considering that the majority is poised to get the hell out the instant it strikes it rich, and, finally, considering that the rock group Men Without Hats is permanently barred from the Nevada Top Forty, it’s doubtlessly a blessing that there aren’t more citizens around to further mug the countryside and zap its small creatures.

The trouble with Nevada is that it thinks it’s Alaska. It thinks it’s the last frontier, at a time when the last frontier has moved beyond Anchorage to the other side of Jupiter. Regardless, Nevada is permeated by the frontier mentality, with its love of guns and booze and its hankering for bonanza. Much of it is nutty and most of it is crude (the Nevada state song is the exaggerated belch), yet Alexa, Jon, and I were quick to agree that even these ersatz Kit Carsonisms radiated authenticity when compared to the gentrification that is sugaring the bowels of urban America.

For example, it was strangely refreshing to read in the Tonopah Times-Bonanza and Goldfield News of not one but two recent ax murders. In our more chic towns and cities, killers no longer address victims with axes. They use sushi knives on them. Or shove baby bok choy up their noses.

Actually, before my pilgrimage was over, I wouldn’t have minded a leaf or two of bok choy. Aside from the iceberg lettuce mailed in from California, there’s not a fresh vegetable in all of west-central Nevada. The state bird of Nevada is the chicken-fried steak — and the labored flapping of its gravy-slathered wings (admittedly delicious) only fans the flames of frontierism. An organism running on brussels sprouts probably isn’t as inclined to shoot up road signs or to share its habitat with bombing ranges and plutonium dumps as one that’s running on hammered beef.

At any rate, the Goddess of Destruction dances on in Nevada, fangs dribbling steak juice, the desert sun aglint on her necklace of skulls. In tantra, she is loved not one smooch less than her benevolent twin. Your pilgrim is slowly learning to love the Dark Dancer as well. Yes, but it was her flip side, the Good Witch, that enticed him to Nevada, where natural beauty struggles to hold its own against the treacherous ticky-tack spawned by the greed and fear of men. Surely, at the Canyon of the Vaginas, the Mother of Creation would prevail.

Alas, on that May afternoon when finally we neared the canyon, Ms. Destruction appeared to be directing the show. The wind was gusting at 70 miles an hour, and with every windshieldful of sand and snow, the chiropractic Mercedes whined as if its back hurt. Visibility was so poor that we asked Alexa to drive. At twenty-five, she was far less experienced behind the wheel than Jon or I, but she happens to be, first, female, and second, a gifted psychic. We reasoned that it would take more than a spring storm to prevent those sacred yonis from showing up on her radar.

She rewarded our trust by turning off the main highway and onto an even more lonesome road, a one-lane, unpaved car path that stretched across the sagebrush flats like a chalk line on the tennis court of the buffalo. For nineteen miles we followed this lane, seemingly into the Void. As pebbles pinged against its underbelly and juniper twigs clawed at its precious Prussian paint, the Mercedes sobbed for autobahns, crying out, “Die Stadt! Wo ist die Stadt?” One might say that we were in the middle of nowhere, especially if one were the type who believes midtown Manhattan to be the center of everywhere.

Through rents in the curtain of snowy dust, we could see that we were entering the foothills of a low mountain range. “According to the map, we’re only a pubic hair away,” said I, and moments later, Alexa stopped the car. Well, if there was holy real estate in the vicinity, it wasn’t exactly advertised. Nothing caught our vision beyond the boundlessness of space. The silence was so deep that even the gale seemed to be wearing moccasins. And when we opened the doors, a great essence of sage rushed in. It smelled as if every grandmother in the U.S.A. was simultaneously stuffing a turkey.

We stumbled about pessimistically in that Thanksgivingscape for a while. And abruptly, there it was! There was no mistaking it. We couldn’t make out details, but the site was so charged it practically had an aura around it. The three of us glanced at one another knowingly, then, bucking the wind, took off at a fast trot. And we didn’t slow down until we were surrounded by a plenitude of pudenda.

I looked one of the specimens right in the eye. “Doctor Vagina, I presume?”

The official name of the place is innocuous: North Canyon. It’s quite narrow and fewer than two hundred yards long. The entire canyon is rather vaginal in shape, terminating in a scooped-out basin of white alkali that those so inclined could read as uterus or womb. The canyon floor is hirsute with juniper and sage.

According to Jon’s compass, North Canyon lies on a perfect east — west axis. The entrance is at the east end, where it’s most narrow. Obviously, there’s a strong solar connection. When the sun rises each morning, it passes through the natural gateway, moving up the passage to the “womb.” The volcanic-ash-flow walls are a yellowish orangish reddish tan, which is to say, the palette of the sun.

Both facing walls of the canyon entrance are covered with petroglyphs. No, somehow “covered” doesn’t do them justice. They are singing with petroglyphs.

A petroglyph is a drawing that has been pecked, incised, or scratched into stone. Frequently, as is the case at North Canyon, the rock exposed by the pecking is appreciably lighter in color than the outer surfaces, which have been patinated by millennia of oxidation. This affords the design excellent contrast, although as the centuries hop along, the uncovered rock, too, gradually darkens.

There are innumerable examples of petroglyphs in the western U.S., some of them ceremonial in intention, some mnemonic, some totemic (clan symbols), and some, it would appear, just an outburst of pleasurable doodling. The majority of the drawings are concerned with game, for the artists who chipped them were hunter-gatherers, and they may or may not include human figures. In addition, there are highly mannered petroglyphs and examples that are completely abstract.

The rock panels at the portal to North Canyon support a smattering of curvilinear abstractions, including the mysterious dot patterns that are characteristic of Great Basin rock art. There are a goodly number of enlarged bird tracks, apparently the symbol of the Bird Clan. And there is a rendering of a European-style house and a miner’s charcoal kiln, proving that Indians were still pecking at the site well into the nineteenth century. By far the dominant motif of North Canyon, however, is the stylized vagina.

The vagina glyph is not exactly rare on the rocks of the West, but at no other site is it found in such concentration or profusion. In an old shaman’s cave on nearby Hickison Summit, there’s a lone yoni of great loveliness, but North Canyon, oh mama! North Canyon is a festival of female genitalia, a labial showcase, a vulval jubilee, and clearly the wellspring of our indigenous tantra.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, to coin a phrase, and neither was this vaginal display. Worn, overlapped, and overlaid, the drawings were pecked over a long period of time. Human habitation in the region dates back ten thousand years. Volcanic ash is too soft to hold an image for such a lengthy period, but one of the few archeologists to give North Canyon more than a passing nod has estimated that it could maintain a vulva in fairly good condition for about five centuries. Shelley Winters, eat your heart out.

Although the Paiute may have had a finger in them, the best guess is that North Canyon’s murals are the work of the Shoshoni, a seminomadic civilization of underestimated complexity. The question is, Why? Why did they adorn the sun gate of Nevada’s high desert with scores of mannered pudenda? Perhaps North Canyon was a fertility motel that Shoshoni couples checked into in order to ensure conception. Perhaps it involved a type of coming-of-age ritual. Perhaps — and your pilgrim favors this theory — it was intended as an homage to that feminine principle that the Shoshoni recognized to be the genesis of continuous creation: Earth herself; mother of deer, mother of trout, mother of grass seeds, bulbs, and roots, mother of the ground on which they walked and the cliffs that sheltered them. Maybe, on the other hand, North Canyon was purely sexual, a horny pecking of individual lust into the enduring dimension of stone.

It’s reported that there are heterosexual males who can stare down a vulva, real or rendered, and register not an erg of prurience, but, honestly now, do you trust these guys? Would you want your daughter to marry one?

At any rate, many of North Canyon’s vaginas are bull’s-eyed with holes that have been “worried” by sticks. Assuming that the sticks were surrogate penises, there definitely was some sort of copulative magic going on. The energy of the place is openly erotic, and at the same time keenly spiritual. Presumably, the Shoshoni would have found no contradiction.

We stood there in a whirl of white flakes, eating a full ration of grit, letting the wind paint our ligaments blue, feeling somewhat sexy and somewhat religious, feeling a little like laughing and a little like weeping, until we got so cold we could no longer feel anything but the necessity of a steaming bath. Since the nearest public lodging was more than a hundred miles away, we set out for it at once, saving a closer examination of the curious canyon for a more hospitable day.

That evening, in the dining room of Tonopah’s Mizpah Hotel, the chicken-fried steak was delivered to Alexa, a vegetarian, while Jon, a raging carnivore, received the bowl of iceberg lettuce. The aging waitress grinned at the mistake, and tugged at the lapels of her dotted-swiss uniform. “Does the right table count for anything?” she asked. Apparently not, for the hot turkey sandwich that your pilgrim ordered (all that sagebrush had awakened a most nostalgic craving) landed on a table across the room, where it was instantly devoured by a man wearing a hat.

While our waitress labored to correct the mix-up, the lights went off. Then, on again. Off. On. Off. On. At least four times. “Happens all the time,” said the waitress. “Not to worry. It’s just the wind knocking two wires together.”

Jon found the explanation less than plausible, but as I suffered the long wait for a turkey sandwich to call my own, it occurred to me that here was a pretty good metaphor for west-central Nevada: two wires knocking together in the wind. In the high desert, the present knocks against the past, development knocks against nature, repression against indulgence, reality against dream, masculine against feminine, the Goddess of Destruction against the Goddess of Creation, the Atomic Proving Grounds against the Canyon of the Vaginas.

For two blustery days, we holed up in the hotel, chasing fruit around the cylinder of a slot machine and watching garbage-can lids UFO past the leaded windows. On the third day, the wind fell over dead and the temperature rose forty degrees. When we drove back to North Canyon, the sky was as blue as our waitress’s beehive, and a silky calm lay upon the land. Inside the canyon, the peace index tripled. It struck us as a haven, a refuge, a place where even the undeserving might be safe. Small and sweet, the canyon was nonetheless so powerful that its vectors held one’s soul upright, afloat, as if in metaphysical brine.

Obviously, the Shoshoni hadn’t settled on this spot arbitrarily. On a practical level, it offered protection and water, for its cliffs are high and there’s a spring at the “uterus” end. Then, there’s the matter of its solar alignment. These facts fail to explain its magic, however, an intrinsic presence that was merely enhanced by the hanging of vaginal wallpaper.

Incapable of solving the greater mystery, we were content to sit, stroll, and loll in private communion with the disembodied organs that surrounded us there. I could almost smell the sea in them, feel their merry, saline humidity against my cheek. Like a dolphin, a vagina wears a perpetual smile, a grin as sloppy and loving as the cradle we all rocked out of. Even in the desert, such bogs do not dry up but glisten invitingly enough to make one suspect that little warm marshes dominate the topography of Paradise.

Later in the day, exploring the canyon’s middle section, we came upon what might have been Paradise Swamp itself. There on the southern wall (it seemed impossible that we’d missed it earlier) was the queen of the yonis. It was eighteen feet tall (the other vulval images seldom topped ten inches), circular, with a dark vertical gash and a broadcast wattage that could’ve carried its salty song to the moon. Truly the grandma, the great-grandma of vaginas, it had been embellished by pecking tools, but apparently was a natural formation.

We debated whether this geological yoni might not have been the inspiration for the petroglyphs. It carried life in it — that life that is self-renewing and outside history — the way a bomb carries death. This goddess-size orifice might have filled the Shoshoni with wonder, binding them to the flesh that was their origin and to the earth in which their journey ultimately would end.

Jon with his camera and sketch pads, Alexa with her tarot cards, and your pilgrim with his catalog of quirks, each of us would leave North Canyon with the profound impression that contemporary society lacks any equivalent of it, and that we’re the poorer for that. We sensed, moreover, that in our remove from nature and those forces that our ancestors knew intimately yet seldom named, we’ve lost something so important that its loss is akin to literal amputation. Without a Canyon of the Vaginas in which to peck our American tantra, in which to connect our hormones to the stars, we may be becoming psychological paraplegics.

Toward the close of day, we strolled up to the western end of the canyon to observe, as the Shoshoni certainly did before us, the setting sun. Mountain bluebirds were caroling from the juniper bushes, lizards were using their tails to write love letters in the sand, and I was meditating on Lawrence of Arabia’s remark that he adored the desert because it was so clean, when I stepped in a pile of regrettably fresh antelope dung. While scraping my shoe, I glanced up an incline and spotted a suspiciously marked boulder sitting off to one side.

Upon inspection, the rock proved to have been graced with what may have been the oldest vaginal glyph at the site. It was both more eroded and more naturalistic than the stylized clusters at the entrance. That, however, wasn’t what caught my eye. It turned out that this rock, and it alone, had been pecked upon by white men.

There were a couple of English words cut in the stone. They were less than legible, but from their dark color and serif lettering, we could tell that they’d been inscribed by settlers, perhaps at the turn of the century. There was also a figure on the boulder. A caucasian figure. A male figure. And how.

The honky dude sported a massive, saw-log erection (doesn’t phallic graffiti invariably distort in the direction of largeness?), and it was pointed at the vagina like a cannon at a clam. The clumsiness of the execution, the image’s total lack of emotional subtlety or spiritual dimension underscores the difference between so-called primitive cultures and those of the European invaders. It’s the difference between harmony and aggression, wisdom and shallowness, art and pornography.

Although safely out of the state now, I still wouldn’t want to say that the figure is indicative of a “dick first” attitude that continues to epitomize west-central Nevada. Nevertheless, I should mention one further thing about the man carved on the rock. As he moves to possess the object of his sexual passion, the rough ol’ dude is wearing a hat.

Esquire, 1988

Two in the Bush

So you tell your girlfriend you’re going to take her on a holiday to one of the most romantic spots on earth, and after she has tastefully demonstrated her gratitude and delight, she asks how she should pack. For the mountains? For the shore? For the samba clubs of Rio or the boulevards of gay Par-ee?

“Oh,” you say, “just throw a few things together that’ll get you by in a swamp.”

Naturally, she thinks you’re kidding, even after she notices you laying in a supply of mosquito repellant and aquasocks. And when you finally usher her into the Victoria Falls Hotel, following a spine-numbing twenty-two-hour flight, she smiles simultaneously at the pleasing surroundings and what she believes was your little joke. The Vic Falls, perhaps the lone nineteenth-century colonial hotel still operating in southern Africa, may have a run or two in its safari stockings, a few stains on its bush jacket, but it’s as romantic as the last act of a bad operetta.

Seedily luxurious, the low, rambling wings of the Vic Falls are tickled by palm fronds, scampered over by monkeys, serviced by an attentive staff in starched white livery, and moistened by mists from cataracts so immense they make Niagara seem like a leaky faucet. Your girlfriend is really settling into the place, especially its spacious patio, but the ice has hardly melted in her second gin-and-tonic before you’ve booked passage on Air Botswana, and toward the end of the next afternoon, the two of you are flying over territory that decidedly resembles… swamp. Vast, horizon-to-horizon swamp. You’re made a trifle sad by the look she gives you.

For reasons that are typically African (where all the clocks have elastic hands and rubber faces), yet difficult to explain, the flight from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to Maun, Botswana, arrives nearly two hours late, and as you wait for your luggage, the guide who has met you at the yam-patch airport is nervously glancing from his watch to the sky and back again. “We have a ways to go, and we’ve got to get there before dark,” you explain to your companion. When she asks, “Suppose we don’t?” you shrug. You’re afraid of what she might answer if you inquire if she’s ever spent the night with a slobbering beast.

Before long you’re motorboating up a reedy, sullen river, exchanging waves with folks who’ve never so much as heard of George Bush, even though their relatives are Bushmen. Before you can think to congratulate them, they, their huts, and their goats have vanished, and your boat is alone on a waterway that twists through the aquatic flora like a spastic vegetarian through a salad bar, and whose banks are closing in on you from both sides. The river narrows into a channel. The channel into a hippopotamus path.

Meanwhile, the sun has slipped below the palm-fringed horizon and the temperature is dropping so fast you think it must have fallen off a cliff. It gets later and later, darker and darker, colder and colder, lonelier and lonelier, the route more and more crooked, the papyrus beds more and more dense, and your girlfriend has to pee so bad she must gnaw on her camera strap to stifle a howl.

Still, the emerging stars are flamboyant, the birdcalls crystalline, the frog din hypnotic, and the situation really isn’t all that horrifying, considering how lost you appear to be.

Then you hit the WALL OF GNATS!

You call it a wall instead of a cloud because clouds don’t usually give a person whiplash. You’re talking about the force of trillions of tiny bugs per cubic foot here, gnat cheek to gnat jowl, and you’re swallowing gnats and breathing gnats while National Enquirer headlines — COUPLE DROWNS IN GNAT TSUNAMI — dance before your gnat-blinded eyes. On you bore, meter after meter, into the LIVING WALL! certain you’re within a gnat’s hair of asphyxiation, until the wall suddenly crumbles away as inexplicably as it materialized, and in the distance you glimpse a flicker of light that’s of apparent human fabrication.

In ten minutes you’re docked at Ntswi Island, a campfire and a beefy meal in your immediate future. Ah, but any illusion that things are now hunky-dory disappears when you discover that your girlfriend couldn’t quite hold it until she reached the thatched latrine. There’s nothing like wet pants to throw a wet blanket on swampland romance.

Add to that some loud-mouthed hippos reciting the Hippocratic oath a few-score yards from your tent, and the savage chill that is piercing your lightweight sleeping bag (in Botswana, mid-June has turned out to be midwinter: you’d think those people south of the equator could get their seasons straight), and you have a night that belongs to misery, not to Michelob. You greet the dawn with no more glee than your significantly silent sweetie.

Gradually, however, you warm to the place and it to you. Before the afternoon is over, the temperature will have hit eighty — a fifty-degree swing that occurs each day — and the sky will have pinned blue ribbons to every lapel of the Okavango delta, irrefutably a first-prize swamp.

The Okavango is the largest inland delta in the world. It’s formed when the Okavango River, overfed by floodwaters from the rains of Angola, runs headlong into the Kalahari Desert, and skids to a stop without ever reaching the sea. The result is seventeen thousand square kilometers of channels, lagoons, reedbeds, grass pans, and islands. The water is pure enough to drink, warm enough to bathe in, although if you splash for more than ten minutes, a drooling crocodile will usually show up and demand a wine list. In a week, however, your party sees not one poisonous snake nor one squadron of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, lest anyone think to compare it with the Everglades. As for the WALL OF GNATS! it seems to have gone the way of the walls of Jericho, the Iron Curtain, and a flasher’s longjohns.

What you do see in this glistening oasis of water lilies, phoenix palms, and melapo grass are storks and fish eagles, hornbills and bee-eaters; you see parrots, vultures, lilac-breasted rollers, and literally hundreds of other ornithological showpieces. Everywhere, great wings beat the air as if it were a drum, and when the day chorus of doves and cuckoos punches off duty, the more esoteric night birds come on-line.

On the larger islands — and some are many times the size of Manhattan — there is game. Big game. Buffalo, giraffe, zebra, elephant, lion, leopard, et al.; most of the stereotypes of the African tableau, although they appear anything but stereotypical when you’re stalking them on foot, and worrying if they might be stalking you. Hiking unarmed through acacia thornbush, in fairly close proximity to the wildest of animals, gives your Okavango experience that dark edge of danger without which romance is merely the sappy side of lust.

Tranquillity is also a necessary component of romantic adventure, and there’s no shortage of peaceful epiphanies in this watery Eden. Early each morning, your party pushes off in dugout canoes hollowed out from the single trunks of sausage trees. Powered by a native guide with a twelve-foot pole, you glide noiselessly along the hippo paths, your bow knocking a shower of dew pearls from the papyrus tops, whiffs of nectar in the air, as all about you fin, fang, and feather receive the Day-Glo kiss of the slowly rising sun.

After a day of walking and marveling, you are poled back to tiny Ntswi Isle, where, at a primitive open-air bar decorated with skulls, that same sun, setting now, is reflected off cold cans of local beer. The dusk belongs to Lion Lager.

And one evening, sure enough, beneath the gloriously exotic configuration of the Southern Cross — it happens to be the night after a bull elephant drank the sudsy water in which your girlfriend had just washed out her underthings, an act that filled you with a perverse mixture of revulsion and jealousy — your paramour interrupts the Okavango concert of cricket and ibis and mystery beast to whisper, “Baby, it’s a known fact that you’ve got depraved taste, but I think you may be right about this ol’ swamp. It’s the most romantic spot on earth.”

Esquire, 1990

Note: Water with short grass growing in it is a bog. Water with tall grass growing in it is a marsh. Water with trees growing in it is a swamp. Technically, then, the Okavango delta is much more marsh than swamp. For failing to honor that distinction back in 1990, I now voluntarily surrender my poetic license for one year.

The Eight-Story Kiss

At a distance — and it can be seen from bridges and causeways more than a mile away — it seems to rise out of the sea, huge and rosy, like Godzilla in a prom dress: pretty in pink. And one can be forgiven for imagining that one is gazing at the single biggest, pinkest Big Pink thing on a planet where, admittedly, not many things manage to be simultaneously massive in scale and vivid of hue. At least, not of that hue normally associated with cotton candy, Pepto-Bismol, and girlie underwear.

I’ve never spent a night at the Don CeSar Resort Hotel in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, but I’ve been there many times. I go there to lounge in the lobby, drink in the bar, wander the grounds, and partake of a Sunday seafood buffet that, as near as I can judge, is unequaled anywhere for bounty, variety, and flavor. Mostly, however, I go there to experience the pinkness.

There was a time when pink was the unofficial state color of Florida, a perfect chromatic complement to sunny skies, green palms, and turquoise waters. The luxurious Don CeSar, built in 1928 and periodically remodeled, is a proudly surviving relic of Old Florida, the paradisiacal, magnetic Florida that in the first half of the 20th century sweetened the dreams and warmed the fantasies of generations of snowbound Americans.

The hotel has its counterparts in Miami, to be sure, but Miami is a scene, man; Miami is hip, whereas St. Pete Beach is so untrendy as to be genuinely cool. And the Don CeSar Hotel, along with what’s left of the Everglades and the House of Prayer Bar-B-Cue in Ft. Lauderdale, is one of the most compelling reasons for visiting a tragically overdeveloped state that has far too many concealed weapons, far too few sane drivers, and that by and large has left its pink period behind it.

The Don CeSar’s bar — embedded in the dim inner recesses of this citadel of tropical nostalgia like a coffee bean in a kilo of aspic — is the sort of place that inspires the consumption of strawberry margaritas. One afternoon there, I was even moved to quaff pink ladies, the favorite libation of pink-haired ladies who coif pink poodles, a breed of beast not entirely absent from the hotel’s premises. In fact, the Don CeSar itself is kind of a pink poodle, although there’s nothing really frou-frou about the resort. It doesn’t sing out, “I’m cute,” but rather, “I’m relaxed. I’m on permanent holiday alongside the Gulf of Mexico, I’m comfortable and happy-go-lucky and festive and affluent and free to be any damn color I choose to be, and I choose to be — PINK!”

Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down. Pink is the boudoir color, the cherubic color, the color of Heaven’s gates. (Not pearly or golden, brothers and sisters: pink.) Pink is as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland, pink is laid back with attitude. The Don CeSar (275 rooms and all the water sports a bipedal mammal can handle) wears that attitude well. It knows that it looks as if it were carved out of bubblegum, as if it mutated from a radioactive conch patch, as if it leaked from the vat where old flamingos go to dye — but the Don CeSar doesn’t care. It simply winks, lazily flaunts its pigmentation, and like a cartoon panther who’s peddled its last lucrative roll of home insulation, turns its face to the sun.

Because pink, unique in the spectrum, is essentially paradoxical, the decorator’s paint of choice for Mexican brothel and New England nursery, it’s called upon to signify both naughtiness and innocence. Thus when I describe the Don CeSar as architecturally affectionate, a kind of structural kiss, I’m referring not only to hot and hungry honeymoon osculation but to that chaste smooch a young Esther Williams used to blow to all the shivering northern masses just before she dove into a pellucid pool way back there in a more innocuous age.

In a different mood, I’m also inclined to think of the Don CeSar as shrimp cocktail for the eyes. And as long as it doesn’t change color, I’ll keep stopping by every year or so for a taste of it. Someday, I may go so far as to book a room there. You can tell it to the CIA, you can tell it to the FBI, you can tell it to Jerry Falwell and all the little Falwells: when it comes to beach hotels, comrades, I’m a dedicated pinko.

National Geographic Traveler, 2000

The Cannibal King Wants His Din-Din

When the roosters that scratch in the yard of Brastagi’s best hotel crowed me awake that steamy tropical dawn, I, personally, wasn’t feeling all that cocky. In retrospect, however, I suppose I might be forgiven had I rolled out of bed with a bit of attitude because — believe it or not — before the Sumatran sun would set, I, an unassuming, modern, civilized commoner with a taste for donuts and garden vegetables, would be brandishing the savage scepter of a man-eating monarchy. That’s right. Tom, King of the Cannibals!

The previous day had been interesting enough, much of it spent at a jungle outpost that functions as an orangutan rehabilitation center. No, no, Indonesia’s population of big red apes isn’t plagued by drug or alcohol problems, but some of the goofily beautiful animals (imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed with Lucille Ball and the prototype for the Gerber Baby) do suffer an addiction of an even more dangerous sort. Captured as infants to be pets in the households of the rich, they develop a fondness for and a dependency on human companionship. When they grow too large and powerful to be any longer manageable around the house, the domesticated primates are turned over to a government agency that transports them to a wilding compound in the mountains where they’re gradually taught to fend for themselves and be mistrustful of men. An excellent idea, of course, since every living thing on this planet, including men, would be wise to be mistrustful of men. But I digress.

My little group was in northwestern Sumatra to raft the Alas, a remote river that cuts through the rainforest with a silver track, offering a few thrilling rapids, but, most alluringly, daily opportunities to spy on truly wild orangutans and, if we were lucky, an Asian rhino or a tiger or two. (We tried not to consider possible encounters with cobras or kraits.)

An exploratory party from Sobek, the California-based adventure company, had accomplished the very first rafting of the Alas only months before, and we — eight paying passengers, four Sobek guides, and an Indonesian forest ranger who spent his spare time reading Louis L’Amour westerns — were to be the second rafters ever to run the strand.

So serenely did we conceal our nervous excitement that morning that we could have been compared to a bag of marshmallows at a Girl Scout camp. After nibbling at the hotel’s advertised “American breakfast” (chilled fried eggs, diced papaya, and processed cheese), we hurried aboard a snub-nosed buslike vehicle of unknown manufacture to be driven to the spot deep in the leafy hills where we’d be putting our inflatable boats in the water.

Adventure travel is by definition unpredictable, however, and we never reached the Alas, alas, at least not that day. Instead, acting on a fortuitous tip from a Mobil Oil geologist that a rare daylong exhumation ceremony was about to unfold in an isolated village of the Karo Batak tribe, we detoured, parallel-parked between two water buffalo, and, following the oilman’s crude map, hiked five miles into an anthropologist’s dream.

Aside from the occasional oil explorer, timber cruiser, or misguided Christian missionary, the Karo Batak had never been exposed to blue-eyed devils. Yet, when — blue eyes as wide as poker chips — our foreign mob suddenly appeared out of nowhere, we were received as honored guests. So gracious was their hospitality, in fact, that after a confab, tribal leaders declared that a pair from our group would be crowned king and queen for the day.

Being both very strong and very sweet, the guide Beth was a logical choice for queen. Why they chose me as their king I haven’t a clue. Certainly it had nothing to do with my literary reputation, although some novelists are known to practice verbal cannibalism, biting and gnawing on one another insatiably at cocktail parties or in reviews.

At any rate, our hosts escorted Beth and me to sexually segregated longhouses where they wrapped us in regal sarongs and other colorful raiments and hung about thirty pounds of solid gold jewelry — the village treasury — from our respective necks and appendages. (They must have figured we were too weighted down to skip town.)

There was then a royal procession back to the principal longhouse, where now on display were the remains of seven persons recently exhumed from the graves where they’d lain for years while their families saved enough money to fund the ceremony that would finally usher their spirits into the Karo Batak version of heaven. The bones were lovingly washed, dried, and stacked in seven neat piles, a skull atop each pile like some kind of Halloween cherry. Then the celebration began.

Beth disappeared into a shadowy corner where she remained for hours (afraid, perhaps, that her regal counterpart might demand his conjugal rights?), but my “subjects” and I commenced to dance ritualistically around those graveyard sundaes. Danced around them and around them and around them. Energized by betel nut, the chewing of which stained my numb mouth the color of Buck Rogers’s rocketship, and inspired by two talented groups of drummers and snake-charmer flute tooters, I managed to learn the proper repetitive steps and to tirelessly dance the day away.

Now, to be quite truthful, the Karo Batak appeared innocently tame and, despite periodic reports to the contrary, are believed not to have lunched upon any of their fellows in about four generations. Many are Christian (leading me to wonder if they might especially enjoy Holy Communion: that is, “swallow the leader”). Nevertheless, when toward evening an unappetizing zombie-gray stew was served, we intruders politely excused ourselves — as an abdicating monarch, I shook every hand in the village — and took the long muddy trek back to our bus.

At the very worst, the stew meat was dog, and probably it had come from upcountry cousins of those Hotel Brastagi roosters who had cock-a-doodled our reveille. Be that as it may, I shall never cease to insist that once upon a time, in the tiger-haunted hills of Sumatra, I reigned as King of the Cannibals. And at those who might dispute that claim, I’m fully prepared to hurl the ancient and traditional curse of the Karo Batak: “I pick the flesh of your relatives from between my teeth.”

The New York Times Magazine, 1986

The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs

The first time I was bitten by a tsetse fly (Ouch! Son of a bitch! Those suckers hurt!), I was convinced that in days, if not hours, I would be nodding out, snoring on the job, dreaming at the switch, yawning like a heavy-metal rocker stranded in Salt Lake City, just another droopy victim of the dreaded and sorrowful “sleeping sickness.”

During my two weeks in the Selous, my tender flesh was subsequently stabbed, my vintage blood swilled by at least forty tsetse flies, so far without dire consequence — although I must confess that as I begin this report, I’m starting to feel a teeny bit drowsy. Should I doze off in the middle of a sentence (an experience probably not uncommon to some of my readers), I want it known there’s no regrets. The lethal lullaby of an infected tsetse (the most romantically named of all flies) is arguably preferable to the anesthetic drone of computers, freeway traffic, and television sets; and the wild, hot beauty of the Selous is worth almost any risk.

The Selous is the largest uninhabited game reserve in the world. Located in central Tanzania, a couple of hundred miles south of Mount Kilimanjaro, the Selous is no national park where tourists sprawl on rattan sofas, sipping gin and listening to the BBC as from the air-conditioned safety of posh lodges they spy shamelessly on mating lions. In the Selous, one doesn’t catch a safari bus to the corner of Zebra and Watusi. To see the Selous, one hikes and one paddles. And when an aggravated hippopotamus is charging one’s rubber raft, one paddles very hard, indeed.

When I announced to family and friends that I was going hiking and river rafting through a vast patch of African cabbage, they didn’t ask why. They must have realized that after three years bent over an idling and backfiring novel, skinning my knuckles on every bolt and wrench in the literary toolbox, I needed to blow a little carbon out of my own exhaust. Perhaps they also sensed that after my recent dealings with editors, agents, lawyers, producers, and reviewers, I might be primed for the company of crocodiles.

Nobody was particularly concerned that I was off to walk with the animals, talk with the animals, squawk with the animals. After all, I once turned down an offer of manatee steak in a weird restaurant in Cuba, and I have made it a lifelong practice never to date women who wear leopard-skin pillbox hats. My beast karma was pretty good.

Nevertheless, having heard AMA terror stories of schistosomiasis and malaria, of elephantiasis-enlarged testicles so huge the poor owner has to push them around in a wheelbarrow, and yes, of the narcoleptic legacy of the tsetse fly, family and friends fretted one and all about tropical disease. Apparently, the evident scares us less than the invisible: we figure it’s easier to outrun a bear than a bugbear.

Well, folks, not to worry. First, I was stuffed to the gullet with malaria prophylactics and pincushioned with inoculations against the most prevalent tropical maladies (unfortunately, there’s no [yawn] serum that wards off “sleeping sickness”), and second, the very fact that the Selous is unoccupied by humans or farm animals means disease is rarely contracted there. In the Selous, the tsetse is all pester and no siesta. Ah, but I’d overlooked one thing. The Selous itself is a tropical disease: feverish, lethargic, exotic, achy, sweaty, hallucinogenic, and, as I’ve learned since coming home, recurrent.

Just when I think that I’m over it, that rush-hour gridlock, income-tax audits, and two viewings of Amadeus have worked their acculturizing cures, I suffer yet another attack of Selous flu. It comes on with a humid vapor, with a vibration of membrane, with howls and hoofbeats that nobody else in the room can hear, and although I might be in the midst of something truly important, such as choosing which brand of burglar alarm to install on my newly violated front door, it never fails to distract me with memories of a sweeter, cleaner, if less comfortable place; a place where clocks dissolve, where even death is honest, and primitive equalities prevail….

It’s our first day in the bush. At this point, I’m still a tsetse virgin. From the port city of Dar es Salaam, we have traveled into the interior on a toy railroad: one locomotive, one car, and narrow-gauge track, all three built by the Chinese. It was definitely not a main line. It was a chow mein line.

Okay, okay, but the chow on the train was pretty good. We bought it through our windows at brief village stops. There were cashew nuts, absolute state-of-the-art mangoes, and thumb-size bananas that melted in our mouths. Prices were so cheap they made us feel like muggers.

During the five-hour rail trip, we’d gotten acquainted with our leaders, employees of Sobek Expeditions, a company of, well, reasonably sane adventurers from Angels Camp, California. The Sobek people had chased thrills, chills, and spills all over the globe, but they were as excited as the rest of us when, halfway into the ride, we began to spot a few animals: a baboon here, a warthog there, a small herd of distant bushbuck, and in the ponds and marshes (lavendered with water lilies the color of Oscar Wilde’s hankies) yellow-billed storks taller than most Little League second basemen, poised there among the lily pads as if waiting for a throw from center field.

Yes, it was exciting, but there was a bit of a theme-park atmosphere about it as well; as if those random creatures had been placed in our field of vision by a San Diego entrepreneur. Then, suddenly, a pair of giraffes bounced into view. When the engineer mischievously sounded his whistle, the giraffes panicked. Stiff stilts churning, necks waving like rubber bands, they bolted toward rather than away from us, and in their confusion very nearly crashed into the side of our car. One wheeling giraffe was so close I could have flipped a cashew into its terrified muzzle. Oh, Boy! Oh, Cheetah! Oh, Tarzan and Jane! This was Africa, baby, this was the real thing! But it was not yet the Selous.

Our first day in the bush finds us up at dawn. Having only seen dawn from the other side of the clock, I never imagined daybreak might actually be pleasant. The tsetselike sting of 5:00 A.M. is softened by the sight of an elephant family, Mom, Dad, Bud, and Sis, carelessly mashing a million dewdrops as they jumbo down a deep green valley to a water hole.

We watch the elephants from the rustic veranda of the Stiegler’s Gorge Safari Camp, the last outpost of humanity we’ll enjoy before we venture into the Selous. We had slept at the camp, or rather, tried to sleep, for an all-night newsboy choir of hyenas periodically sang us awake. Late the previous afternoon, the train had deposited us at a village called Fuga, the end of the line, where we — eighteen of us, including the guides — were met by a trio of Land Rovers and driven for a couple of battering hours down an Armageddon of a road, a moonscape of a lane to Stiegler’s Gorge. By the time our gear was stowed in our respective huts, it was dark and a rusty gong had summoned us to a dinner of green beans and steak.

Dave, a veteran guide, had hoisted a morsel of that steak aloft in the lanternshine. “Impala,” he had said authoritatively, studying his fork. “At first I thought it might be sable. Africa is an adventure in meat.”

At any rate, it’s our first morning in the bush, and a detachment of us hike for three hours from the Stiegler’s Gorge complex, beneath a blue sky that’s already hissing like a blowtorch. Down in Tanzania, it’s July in January, and if the sun has anything to say about it, there’s a fireworks display all day, every day.

The savanna grass is green but dry, and it crunches underfoot. J’nanga, our native game guide, steps noiselessly on the bare patches between clumps of grass, but we cement-footed Americans sound as if we’re breakdancing in a silo of Rice Krispies. Our gauche sneakers scuff at fresh cheetah tracks, at shiny licorice drops of wildebeest dung, at impala skulls as bleached as a surfer’s eyebrows, at midget wildflowers, and a mega-Manhattan of ants.

Scattered about the plain are trees that resemble huge stone jars; trees that resemble dendritic delicatessens festooned with salami and pepperoni; trees that appear to be growing upside down; trees that look like 50’s haircuts, their foliage organically barbered into Sha Na Na flattops; and — outnumbering all the rest — leafless trees bristling with thorns so long and sharp they could pierce the heart of a bureaucrat.

The trees, the flowers, even the piles of gnu poo are attended by butterflies, some as tiny and yellow as buttercup petals, others as big as pie tins and colored like Shanghai silk. There are also a great many bees. They’re not killer bees, but we haven’t learned that yet, and it is while fending off one of these buzzers that Flo falls, cameras and all, into a warthog burrow.

Warthogs aren’t killers, either, except maybe when cornered, but with their curved tusks and flatiron faces, they look like the nightmares of a lapsed Jew who’s just had his first bite of ham. The steel-wool warthog, not pink Porky, is the pig that ought to have the job of announcing “That’s all, folks!” Who’d argue? On another game walk, a week later, seven of these fearsome swine suddenly came barreling, one by one, out of a deep burrow that we were innocently passing, nearly knocking the pins from under a startled Yvonne and planting the fear of the Ultimate Bacon in each of us. On our calendars, that day became known as The Day the Earth Spit Warthogs, and Yvonne, for one, will probably devote January 21 to prayer and fasting for the rest of her life.

On this, our first day in the bush, there are no pigs at home, however, and nothing is bruised except Flo’s dignity. It is while she’s brushing herself off that J’nanga sights a herd of buffalo.

There are about two hundred of them, weighing in at three tons each (and it doesn’t take Ronald McDonald’s calculator to figure that that’s a whole lot of McBuffalo burgers). Fortunately, we’re downwind of the herd, so we’re able to move within forty yards of it before we’re noticed.

There’s a large fallen tree in our vicinity, and J’nanga directs us into its dead branches. We watch the buffalo and they watch us. It’s difficult to tell who’s more nervous. The mature bulls station themselves at the perimeter of the herd, glowering with almost tangible menace. They paw the ground and snort short Hemingway sentences, resonant with ill will.

J’nanga is thinking he might have made a mistake. The Cape buffalo, rotten-tempered, heavy of hoof and horn, is among Africa’s most dangerous animals, and here he’s gone and got a half-dozen honkies treed by a herd that could reduce Grand Central Station to gravel. The buffalo are indisposed to retreat, and we seem to have lost that option.

Jim, an environmentalist cowboy attorney accustomed to stalking Sierra sheep, grinds happily away with his video camera while J’nanga ponders the situation. In Jim’s ear, I whisper, “Hatari!” I suspect Jim has seen more John Wayne movies than I, but if he remembers Wayne’s 1962 film and recognizes the Swahili word for “danger,” he doesn’t let on. “Big hatari!” I whisper. He goes on videoing.

It’s hot enough in our tree to broil escargot, and even our daredevil guides are beginning to see mirages. Over there to the left: is that a grove of thorn trees or a Club Med swimming pool? Perhaps J’nanga is getting light-headed, too. He commences to whistle, shrilly, through his fingers, as if at a babe in a bikini. At the sound, the buffalo stage a semistampede. They thunder to a spot beyond the phantom tanning beds, a good eighty yards away, before stopping to resume their Cold War diplomacy.

Taking immediate advantage of this partial withdrawal, J’nanga hustles us out of the tree and, covering us with his rifle, dispatches us toward a low hill — on the opposite side of which, a few minutes later, we are charged by an adolescent elephant.

Between meals, as well as at table, Africa is, indeed, an adventure in meat.

The next morning, the real fun begins. Bleary-eyed from the insomnolent effects of hyena serenade, we put our rafts in the water and paddle into the Selous. For the next two weeks, we’ll see no other humans, just animals, birds, fang-snapping reptiles — and, of course, the gods of the river.

Sobek employees are quite familiar with river gods. Anybody who does much rafting gets to recognize the invisible deities who rule each particular river, sometimes each particular rapid in a river. The very name “Sobek” is borrowed from the crocodile god of the Nile. It was chosen as both a charm and an homage.

Rivers are the true highways of life. They transport the ancient tears of disappeared races, they propel the foams that will impregnate the millennium. In flood or in sullen repose, the river’s power cannot be overestimated, and only men modernized to the point of moronity will be surprised when rivers eventually take their revenge on those who dam and defile them. River gods, some muddy, others transparent, ride those highways, singing the world’s inexhaustible song.

In terms of white water, the Rufiji, the river that drains the Selous, is a pussycat. Once free of the confines of Stiegler’s Gorge, it hums a barely audible refrain. Ah, but though the gods of the Rufiji are fairly silent gods, we are soon to learn that their mouths are open wide.

Actually, the Rufiji is part of a river system. As it approaches the Indian Ocean it separates into channel after channel, forming a plexus of waterways so confusing no explorer has quite been able to map it. At one point it vanishes into the palm swamps of Lake Tagalala, only to slither out on the eastern side like a many-headed serpent.

Through Stiegler’s Gorge, the Rufiji gives us a fine fast spin, comparable, say, to the waves of the Rogue, if not the Colorado. One rapid, in fact, is so rowdy that our cargo-rigged Avon rafts dare not challenge it; thus, less than an hour after we’ve put in, we’re involved in a laborious portage.

A few miles downstream, the Rufiji takes its foot off the accelerator, never to speed again. It just grows lazier and slower until there’s virtually no current at all. Deprived of the luxury of drift, we’re forced to paddle the entire distance — forty-five steamy miles — to our take-out point. Moreover, the rafts are so heavily loaded with equipment (including Jim’s four video cameras) and supplies (including Chicago Eddie’s starched white tennis outfits and gold chains) that it requires a marathon of muscling to move them along.

None of us passengers is an Olympic paddler, exactly, and the guides might have had to provide more than their share of the locomotion were it not for the impetus of hippopotamus. Every languorous labyrinth of the Rufiji is choked with hippos, and for a full fortnight those lardy torpedoes were to dominate our lives.

There’re plenty of crocodiles, chartreuse and ravenous, in the Rufiji as well, but like the CIA, the crocs are funded for covert actions only. Camouflaged and stealthy, crocs are masters of the sneak attack. The nastiness of hippos is magnificently blatant.

Apparently, among animals as among human beings, we entertain misconceptions about who are the good guys and who are the villains. The horned rhinoceros, for example, enjoys a public reputation equivalent to that, say, of a Hell’s Angel. “Lock up the children, Elizabeth! Big hatari!” The hippo, on the other hand, having been filmed in frilly tutus by Disney, its gross grin having been cutie-pied by a thousand greeting-card artists, is regarded as affectionately as a jovial fat boy.

Basically, however, the rhino is a quiet, shy, gentle creature. Sure, it will halfheartedly charge a Land Rover, but that’s because its eyesight is so poor it mistakes the vehicle for another rhino, with whom it would mate or spar. Like many a biker, the rhino is mainly just out for a good time. The hippo, on the other hand, is loud, hostile, and aggressive. Extremely territorial, it pursues with fury anything audacious enough to encroach upon its neighborhood. Nothing, neither lion nor leopard, python nor crocodile, will tangle with a hippo. The unattractive rhino is the victim of bad press. The cherubic hippo kills more people every year than any other animal in Africa.

When we discover rhino tracks one day, on a plain a few miles from Lake Tagalala, our native guides literally jump for joy. They had believed all rhinos gone from the Selous, destroyed by poachers, who market the powdered horn to Oriental businessmen with waning sex drives. Conversely, we paddle past a hundred hippos daily, not one of whom offers us anything but trouble.

Cries of “Hippo right!” or “Hippo left!” ring out every few minutes from the guides. Should one of the surprisingly swift monsters prove particularly threatening, a guide slaps the water with his paddle, making a resounding swak! that, being an unfamiliar sound, frequently will halt a charge, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, everybody else in the raft paddles as if his or her life depends on it.

When we put into shore for lunch or to camp for the night, we’re exhausted. Panting, arms aching, percolating in our own perspiration, we stumble from the rafts and flop down in the nearest shade. It’s Miller time, right? Wrong. No beer, no ice. The refreshment we’re served is Rufiji punch: raspberry Kool-Aid made with river water that has been purified via medicine kit. The water is eighty degrees, buzzing with silt, stinking of iodine, and no doubt heavily laced with crocodile drool and hippo pee. We welcome it as if it were French champagne.

Characteristically, hippopotamuses make a noise that is a cross between scales being run on an out-of-tune bassoon and the chortling of a mad Roman emperor. Throughout the night, we are treated to their ruckus. The guides say that the hippos, being nocturnal feeders, are protesting because we’ve set up our tents in their dining room. Personally, I think they’re making fun of us for the way we guzzle that punch.

Our food is a James Beard — size improvement over our beverage. Under very crude conditions our guides manage to turn out delicious spaghetti, chop suey, and, amazingly, banana crepes flambé. (Have the native guides any doubt that we Americans are crazy, it vanishes as they watch, eyes wide with horror, as Dave sets fire to a quantity of perfectly good rum.) True, toward the end of the journey, supplies running thin, we might fantasize about one of those little osterias where, with a smear of garlic and a squirt of wine, an Italian can make a dead fish sing like a nightingale. But we haven’t come to the Selous to eat and drink.

Even were there restaurants in the Selous, the cuisine of greater Tanzania consists primarily of ugali, a pasty dough that is torn into pieces with the fingers and dunked in sauce. Sauce d’impala, sauce de sable, sauce de dik-dik, sauce de flying termite. An adventure in meat. And although there are sweltering moments when I’d gladly trade my firstborn child for a frosty bottle of Safari Lager, that brand of beer, the only one available in Tanzania, is no gold-medal winner.

No, we haven’t come to the Selous to wine and dine, nor to sightsee and shop. We’ve come to seek an audience with the river gods, to show ourselves to them and accept their banishment or their boons. We’ve come to test ourselves against water dragons with ears like wads of hairy bubblegum and gaping yawns like a thousand cases of “sleeping sickness” rolled into one. We’ve come to the Selous to outrace the hippos.

Did I say that we are exhausted at the conclusion of our morning and afternoon paddles? True, we’re tired, but we’re also exhilarated. We’re so elated our bones are practically singing in their weary sockets, and, narrow escapes or not, it is with eagerness that we wrap ourselves against the homicidal sun and go out on the river again.

Because of the naughty habits of the crocodiles, we’re forced to bathe onshore, showering with buckets of muddy water drawn cautiously from the stream. Now, Chicago Eddie might whine that he’d rather be soaking in a marble tub in some fancy hotel, but nobody really believes him. The Rufiji pantheon, lurid of feather, strong of tooth, has tripped an ancient wire in Eddie’s cells, and, like the other seventeen of us, he broadcasts secret signals of ecstasy — Radio Eden — as, gold chains swinging, he penetrates ever deeper into the Selous.

Perhaps it would be helpful could I inform you that the Selous is the size of Rhode Island with a crust of Connecticut tossed in. Unfortunately, such facts are not at my disposal. My East African guidebook contained that sort of information, but I lent it to a fellow rafter and it was never returned. She hints that when our supplies ran low, she’d boiled it for breakfast; talk about your adventure in meat. That same woman also claims to be watched over by the ghost of her recently deceased dog, Juliet, and that it’s this spectral poodle, rather than guides and gods, who’s steering us safely through the hippos. That’s the kind of lady Kitty is, and I, for one, am happy she’s along.

All I can report is that the Selous is extensive, its wildlife density is astonishing, and if its heart (a heart of brightness, to contradict Conrad) is invaded by other than scattered poachers, the annual Sobek expeditions, and an infrequent government inspection team, the evidence is missing. We meet strange insects here, including a sort of miniature science-fiction flying fortress as glossy black as Darth Vader’s mascara, with long, thick, school-bus-yellow antennae, but there isn’t a trace of litterbug.

The Selous is savanna: short-grass, middle-grass, and tall-grass savanna. Some of the plains seem almost manicured, so meticulously have they been mowed by the mouths of munching herds. The green hills roll like surf into a distance, where they turn slowly to purple. From Tagalala on to the sea, elegant palms line the various banks of the river. Occasionally we come upon a Tarzan-esque glade, complete with pool and vines.

Johnny Weissmuller, the consummate movie Tarzan, was the tallest hero of my boyhood, and more often during my life than is socially acceptable I’ve been moved to imitate his famous yell. To some, the Tarzan yodel is corny, campy, childish, and vulgar. To me, it’s more stirring than the bravest battle cry, more glorious than the loftiest operatic aria, more profound than the most silvery outpouring of oratory. The Tarzan yell is the exultant cry of man the innocent, man the free. It warbles back and forth across the boundary between human and beast, expressing in its extremes and convolutions all the unrestrained and holy joy of ultimate aliveness.

In the past, unfortunately, I’ve usually bounced my Tarzan yells off the insensitive ears of cocktail-lounge commandos, invariably attracting the wrong kind of attention. Here, at last, in the glades of the Selous, it is released in proper context. It gives me that old Weissmuller Saturday-matinee primal chill as it comes quavering out of my throat to mix in the Selous twilight with the smoker’s coughs of a distant pride of lions, the spooky erotic murmurs of a treeful of waking bats, and that ceaseless, ubiquitous pulsebeat of body Africana, the echoing hoot of the emerald-throated wood dove.

Our last day in the Selous is structured much like the others: up at dawn for a game walk into the bush, breakfast, break camp, two hours on the river, lunch, rest, two more hours playing Dodg’em car with the hippos, set up camp, another game walk before dark, dinner, bed. At the end of such a day, one requires no tsetse injection to speed one’s slumber. On this final eve, however, many of us lie conscious, listening, holding on to every note of the ninety-piece orchestra of the African night. It is as if we dread the morning and our return to what we moderns like to think of as “civilization.”

I’ll bet that Chicago Eddie, supine amidst his ruined tennis whites in the adjacent tent, is recalling the impalas we had seen that dusk, crossing a narrow ridge single file, so that we could count them the way a child at a railroad crossing will sometimes count boxcars. Incidentally, there were exactly sixty-five of them silhouetted against the setting sun.

And I venture that Kathy, an erudite woman with a library of wildlife manuals in her knapsack, is still puzzling over the blank stare the aging guide M’sengala had given her when she’d asked whether the rare hartebeest we’d spotted was Lichtenstein’s hartebeest or one of the other varieties. After that, M’sengala cracked up every time Jim and I inquired if we were looking at Rauschenberg’s wildebeest. Rosenquist’s bushbuck. Wesselman’s waterbuck. Catskill’s borschtbuck. Or Goldberg’s variations. Knowing not ten words of English, he couldn’t possibly savvy the cultural references, but M’sengala got the point.

Certainly M’sengala, with his goofy, infectious laugh, is in my thoughts. I’m remembering how shocked he’d looked when Curt had slipped the Sony Walkman headset over his leathery ears and turned up Huey Lewis and the News, and how quickly he’d begun to grin and then to dance, as if he could not stop himself from dancing. M’sengala got down! The Selous, itself, gets down. Down to basics, to the curious if natural rhythms of life.

And death. For if there’s abundant life in the Selous, there’s abundant death as well. We’d seen a pack of wild dogs cripple and devour an impala; a bloated hippo corpse being ripped to shreds by twenty crocodiles; the remains of a feline-butchered wildebeest, black clouds of flies buzzing like paparazzi around its instant celebrity of blood. We could hear those flies from thirty yards away.

Yes, there are ongoing dramas of death in the Selous, but except for the small amount imported by poachers, there’s no unnecessary violence, no greed, no cruelty. Nor is there politics, religion, trendiness, ambition, hype, or sales pitch. Perhaps it’s the very purity of the Selous that makes us cling to it, reluctant to let go.

For two weeks, we have traveled in the realm of the eternal. There is escape from the prison of the past, disinterest in the promise of the future. There is no other place. The Selous is here. There is no other time. The Selous is now.

And as we lie in our tents on the grassy plain of eternity it must occur to each and every one of us that the Selous is the way the world was meant to be — and that everything else is a mistake.

Nonetheless, we do return to carpeted home and electronic hearth, and I have to tell you, folks, now that I’m back, I’m ready for a nap. If it should prove that a tsetse fly has, indeed, drugged my vital fluids, then, O river gods, grant me a graceful fall into the sleep of the Selous. The bright slumber of Africa. The snooze of Kilimanjaro.

Esquire, 1985