Notes From A Bear's Journey

The rondavels where we stayed...      Let's face it, there is little that can describe that first time you see a giraffe or a zebra in the wild; it's as if you rounded a corner and realized that such animals DO exist and that somehow there they are now there, right in front of you.  It's as if all your life you've been told about this, lions & tigers & bears, oh my!-- and yet actually seeing them in real life, in their natural habitat, is pure Wizard of Oz stuff.  Other than at a zoo, or in a documentary or some photo, I had never "seen" a lion, a tiger, or a bear.  Heck, I get a thrill if a deer runs across my path when I'm hiking, even if it just as quickly disappears.  These are animals being where they should be, gracing our lives with a quick glimpse before we head back to our fenced yards and locked doors (presumably to keep them out).  This is pretty much what happened with that other part of Africa's animals, the part everyone tell...

Cheetah paw      Welcome to Hoedspruit (pronounced "hood-sprite"), they said; you're likely tired after the long flight so settle in, maybe take a nap, have some dinner, they said.  We'll see you at 6 tomorrow morning to feed the cheetahs.  Wait, what?  Did they just say 6 as in 6AM?  But by 6:30 the next morning we were hands deep in meat, all 7 of us churning away as if we were rejected pastry chefs now being punished and put on meat duty.  Each of the larger cheetahs would need over 5 lbs. of raw meat in their bowl, with each batch carefully weighed and topped with exact measurements of powdered nutrients and water.  Mix thoroughly, they said; cheetahs are very picky; if they find even one unmixed pebble-sized chunk of powder in the bowl then they will reject it entirely.  So back we went, mixing as if we were making meatloaves for a crowd.  They needed 60 bowls   SIXTY!  Did I mention that this is done every morni...

Baby cheetahs at HESC         I must have been tired, or frustrated, or depressed, for it was so unlike me to preach doom and gloom on any subject.  We already have far too much of that in the world and it is little wonder that when I talk with some younger people, they are somewhat maxed out with media and what may wait for them in the future.  As a piece on climate change in Scientific American said: If people are convinced we're doomed --that there's nothing we can do-- why would they bother trying?... (But)  As climate activist Greta Thunberg of Sweden so aptly put it, " When we start to act, hope is everywhere."  That was what I really wanted to say, that just about everyone I met was not giving up at all.  There were so many people in South Africa who were the animals' hope; they were in truth our hope.  Raising feelings of hope involves boosting a sense of efficacy -- that what we do as individuals and as a society can truly mak...

      For the most part,  I don't care for writing that appears in a series format, the Part I, II, III-type thing.  And at first, I had planned to present this as words as a split page, the "good" version on one side and the "bad" version on the other.  But I felt that that would prove confusing, and besides I had more reflections than just the good and the bad.  Writing, at least for me, comes down to a few "styles," one of which is the almost purely emotional type that has little editing; this type of writing is the raw, the touching, the shocking thoughts that come flooding into one's head and have to be "dumped" quickly lest they be lost.  Often some writers will falsely convince themselves into thinking that they'll remember such feelings and relive the intensity of the moment; but such vivid initial writing usually becomes lost or diluted.  The other style (in my opinion) is the reader version, the draft copy that becomes a fin...

     Each morning at precisely 5 AM, the birds outside provide nature's version of an alarm, a peaceful way for us to awaken, and then fall back into that glorious extra hour of deep sleep.  We sleep with our doors open during this time of year, the cool 60F air providing a hypnotic-like chill to our heads while our bodies are comfortably warm under the covers.  All of that would change in a few days however, for the "wild" things at our destination would be truly wild, as in predator-wild (and we humans, the prey).  We were on our way to Africa.      I should back up a bit for Africa was far from being some place we had on our travel list.  No matter where you are starting your journey from, Africa (at least the southern part of Africa), is a long ways away as in a full day's travel (or 2 days if you're breaking it up).  15 hours from Los Angeles to Qatar, then another 9 to Johannesburg; or if going from Salt Lake City to Atlanta t...