MWAGUSI

Arriving in Tanzania, we went straight to the Ruaha game reserve, the country’s second largest, in the less-traveled southwest of the country, a magical landscape festooned with baobab trees and woven with sand rivers. 

At Mwagusi Safari camp, where we stayed, we meet Adrian. He is in his mid-twenties, my daughter’s age. He is a second generation Tanzanian, born, like his father, in Dar es Salaam. Adrian has a gift for tracking animals. Every morning before dawn as we head out on safari, we see him with the local guides bending over fresh tracks in fierce concentration. He is gentle and soft spoken: a clipped British accent, swarthy good looks and impeccable manners. He is descended from Syrian slave traders, a family secret so shameful that no one will speak of it. He wants to know the stories so he can know what to do with this part of himself but his parents and grandparents refuse to tell him.

Mwagusi camp consists of ten thatched-roof tents perched at the edge of the Mwagusi sand river in the Ruaha reserve south and west of the Serengeti. Each room is unique. Each has a sturdy wooden bed and two solar reading lamps, a writing desk, a hammock, and a small sunken lounge with a sand floor and huge pillows where you can sit and peer over the curved ledge and watch the animals without being noticed. 

In the bathroom of my banda, the bones of a giraffe’s spine are embedded along a low, curving wall of river stones, and there are two giraffe skulls next to the shower. In the patio overlooking the sand river, tiny birds alight on the trunk of a fallen tree then hop over to drink from the hollow stone that is lovingly refilled with fresh water each day. It is so quiet I can hear their wings and tiny feet as they arrive and flit away. Listen. You could sit in that silence for the rest of your days, just murmuring the name of this place, Mwagusi, rolling it around on your tongue. To be able to say it, you have to purse your lips tight then open them wide to get your mouth around it, like a giraffe wrapping its lips around the thorny branch of a fever tree.



Back home, I sit on the bluff above a beach that held my children and me for so many years. Sand castles and pirate ships, dog walks and tears, dolphins, sea lions and whales. In summer there is soft, gray-white sand. In winter the sand washes away, exposing jagged slabs of rock stacked like the scales and spine of the dinosaur earth-mother herself. There are boulders with cross-sections of ancient bones that are likely dolphin vertebrae, or spines and fins of small, prehistoric whales. There is a man who sometimes drives a tractor along the beach and steals the fossil stones for his garden.

I watch the reflection of the late summer, late afternoon light. Listen: the gulls are calling below the cliff. The patterns of wind and currents on the ocean are pulling towards the shore and away, up the coast and down, below the surface and on it at the same time. The late afternoon light of Africa can’t help but be golden, but here in California, at the same time of day, the low sun backlighting the leaves of that rock rose over there is soft and chalky white. Even the red terracotta urn glows white. It is from West Africa. It is round as a globe, and covered with pointy bumps (antennae, actually) like raised spirals except the handle, which is a knob shaped like a man’s head. He has fine features and a steady gaze. He stares out over the ocean as if looking towards home, seeing nothing, seeing everything. Soon it will be dark. The sun is sinking and the wind is about to change.