BAOBAB

A piece of bark given by a baobab tree sits on the altar. On it are the tracks and scrapings of beetles, worms and termites, the inscriptions of lives she once held. An elephant might have rubbed that piece of bark loose, or the tree might have lent it to the ground beneath her in the partnership of sheltering they have developed over time. In Africa, baobabs are known as ‘upside down trees’ because their branches look like gnarled roots. The elephants rub and rub against them until the trees get hollowed out. But this does not kill them. They simply regenerate from the inside out. Much of savannah life seeks refuge inside those hollow trees: birds, insects, foxes, bees, snakes and sometimes fugitives, usually poachers. Inside the hollow, the bark forms a rough skin with whorls and creases that look like the tips of elbows, or vulva, or turtle shells, each sculpted pattern a universe. In spring, the trees are festooned with huge, elongated fruits covered with circles that look like eyes looking at nothing, seeing everything.

We had been in the Ruaha game reserve in Tanzania for three days, sighing, gasping, at the edges of our seats and the edges of our breath. There were sand rivers like freshly raked zen gardens, pocked with hoof prints and lion tracks and elephant pot holes. Boulders and bushes were arranged just so, and water appeared in sudden veins and pools bluer than the sky, peeking through drifts of fallen gold leaves turning purple as bruises in the afternoon sun. A red-beaked guinea hen perched on a sable gray termite mound that rose from the scrub like a fist. A bat eared fox stared out from within a roadside cairn of stones at a crossroads. On the morning of my son’s and my shared August birthday, because we are Leos, he wished to see lions, and right away there were twelve of them feasting on a freshly killed kudu, dragged to the side of the road as if in gracious response to our longing. And in the shade of an immense sausage tree, a baboon sat motionless as the Buddha, watching us from an overhanging limb, his ash-white fur framed in tufts of dark brown, with only his eyes moving as he tracked us. Underneath the branch hung a beehive, a huge, suspended triangle of honeycomb white as the baboon, except for the glistening bees surging and buzzing around it. Even Peter Mathiessen himself appeared. We told him that we were there because of him, because we had re-read his book, The Sand Rivers, and so had chosen this place.

Gratitude casts a spell, and the force field of mystery is irresistible, so when I saw the Mother of all Baobabs and she whispered my name, I suddenly felt I had to get out of the car and walk towards her. Brandishing my camera, I asked our guide to please stop for a photo. His name was Josphat but he had the practiced patience of Job, and he stopped the car. When I asked to get out and walk a bit closer to that tree, he must have said yes because suddenly I was striding into the bush as if I had stepped onto a conveyor belt and had only to keep moving my legs while it carried me to the Mother Tree. I would soon be scrambling up boulders and clambering into her branches to rock in her embrace and look out over the plain to gaze into the far distance as she saw it. A ringing silence encased me and carried me forward as if dormant cells of her ancient roots had awakened in my belly and were suddenly reaching toward her and pulling me with them.

It was only the frantic shouts and whistles of Josphat, and then my son and everyone else in the car, that called me back. I heard them faintly at first, as if from another room. Then words like ‘Lions!’ and ‘Come back!’ filtered through, and began exerting a counterforce to the Mother Tree. I remember turning my head and seeing the looks of alarm on their faces, everything in slow motion like a flashback, then looking back at the tree, and turning away again to begin the slow, reluctant walk back to the car. I was so sure I was safe and that I was meant to go to her. Couldn’t they feel it, too? Though their upset surprised me and I regretted their worry, I regretted more having to leave her. Was it hubris, or maybe ignorance, that made me think I could just walk up there like that as if immune to danger, as if I could actually wander so far and scale that little cliff or shimmy up her massive trunk? Perhaps ignorance and hubris played their part. And yet, I know the call was real because I can feel the longing even now, fluttering in my chest like a memory of wings.