I HAD 17 HOURS IN EDEN. Then, of course, the angel came to cast me out, but
what do you expect? Lucky to get that much. But let us, at least, start
there: for all the best books begin in Eden, even if they end in apocalypse.
And Eden was all the better for being unexpected. Shuffling into a plane for
a business trip, the phone: the voice of my old friend Chris Breen: “Fixed.
You’re going to the Valley. You’ll be met off the plane.” And not many hours
later, I was present at the first morning of the world.
Luangwa mornings often, and for no very good reason, have a recurring theme.
This was an elephant morning: to be more precise, an elephant-and-calf
morning. The first tentative rains had greened the savannah after the long,
hard, hot dry season, but had done so without filling the rivers and the dry
lagoons. Still, there was at least a lessening of the ferocity of the sun
and with it, a rekindling of life. And as we drove at an easy pace, we saw
elephants and we saw elephants and then again, we saw elephants, and always
with calves. I know this place well, I am deeply at home here: these were
not elephants as revelation, but elephants as old friends: elephants as
reassurance. No, the world is not yet mad: for there are still elephants,
and their calves. And elephants bring a very special joy. How can something
so big still exist in a world that has got so small? How can something so
slow exist in a world that has got so fast? Other places, other paces: the
elephant mostly moves at the speed of her appetite: slow, unurgent, unending.
I sat at my ease, then, with Levy Banda, funny and knowledgeable, as we
motored through this just-born land, admiring an elephant small enough to
run beneath its mother and knowing that this meant it had yet to complete
its first year: the mother feeding with quiet concentration, mild-eyed, with
great breasts behind her forelegs – elephants really don’t have teats, but
grey and wrinkled, oddly disturbing breasts. In this long-familiar place, I
was naturally showing off to Levy by telling him all the birdcalls he knew
perfectly well already: the woodland kingfisher, which is Luangwa’s
rainbird; a pearl-spotted owlet still awake; a redeyed dove saying “three
cheers for the BBC” – and that’s a cuckoo, it’s a Klaas’s, surely – and
then, absurdly sweet, a willow warbler.
A willow warbler: like me, flown down from the far north. A little scrap of
feathers and a scant mouthful of flesh: and he did all the flying himself,
and now, from a patch of combretum scrub, he was singing the same song he
sang in the hawthorn trees of northern Europe: a bird simultaneously homely
and exotic.
The Luangwa Valley lies in Zambia, a southern extension of the Great Rift. It
was here I first saw lion and elephant and zebra: it was here I spent two
months on a mad, all-but ruinous unilateral sabbatical: it was here I set my
first novel. There was a time when I could recognise every Luangwa birdcall
and I was on first-name terms with a pride of lion. I have seen leopard kill
on three occasions here, in wild, lamp-lit expeditions, bucketing about the
bush in a doorless Land Cruiser. I have added grass owl to the Zambian
Ornithological Society’s list of Luangwa birds (resoundingly misidentifying
it as barn owl, but my friend Bob Stjernstedt at least knew what we were
about). I have seen crocodile strike from the water. I have seen the air
turn cerise as a carmine bee-eater colony took fright. I have been charged
by an elephant. I have stared down a furious male lion from 20 yards,
learning in the process that the paralysis of fear is a survival instinct. I
have known, then, what it is to be prey. I have seen wonders: better, I have
lived with wonders, eaten with wonders, slept with wonders, woken with
wonders, sometimes long before dawn and in a sudden funk: not at the lion’s
roar but at the sound of the lion’s breath.
I was returning, then, to an idealised past as well as a beautiful present. A
double Eden: one that exists in my mind: and which also, unlike most Edens,
exists in the flesh. Unspoiled.
Let’s dwell on that word for just a moment. These days, we use “unspoiled” to
mean “pretty”. It is an admission that a pretty place is exceptional. It is
a recognition of the fact that in the normal run of things, most of the
stuff we look at is spoiled. As a result, we need the mental Edens: but even
more, we need the solid ones, the flesh-and-blood ones, the wood-and-sap
ones. An old family story: an old family friend, in his cups, telling the
French au pair: “You remember, Domi? When the garden was beautiful?” We can
all remember those times, even if we have never lived them, for they come
from deep in our human natures.
The lost garden is part of us. Eden is something we have lost: Eden is
something we long for: Eden is something we hope for: but most important of
all, Eden is something we need to touch. We need time in Eden, when the
garden was beautiful, and Domi perhaps there too, as lovely and as naked as
you would expect on this first of all mornings.
We need Eden in our minds; we need Eden in the special places; but more even
that that, we need Eden everywhere. Little touches of Eden, little hints at
Eden, brief vistas of Eden: in a rose, in the patting of a dog, the stroking
of a cat, in the sound of a bird.
And there in Luangwa, there was for me, for anyone, an extreme sense of Eden:
a near-total exclusion of the manmade, a place where a straight line comes
as a visual shock. A place where almost nothing has been spoiled. A place
where you can go and, in this unending abundance of the nonhuman, know what
it is like to be properly human. Not a species alone and ever lonely: but
one among many. FOR THREE STRANGE WEEKS that winter, I had felt like the
human race. I’d become nature-deprived. It had happened a couple of months
after I got back from Africa. Nature deprivation is a hard thing to achieve
when you live on the edge of a village in Suffolk. I have seen kingfisher,
barn owl, marsh harrier, and whooper swan at my place; my wife has seen
little egret. But I became cut off from all that. I woke, turned over in
bed, and the world performed a triple salchow. Oh God, I thought at once, I
know what that is. I was right, too: a problem with the inner ear; the
balancing mechanism, the semicircular canals, affected by a virus. The
result is to make you seasick on dry land. I walked clutching walls: I sat
with a Zen-like stillness. I ceased to turn my head to acknowledge my
family. I learned to move like an adept of tai-chi. But mostly, I stayed in
bed, rereading favourite thrillers, my head carefully arranged on a pagoda
of pillows; or I watched the Winter Olympics with my head jammed into the
corner of a wingchair. I did not go out: did not dare. Car journeys filled
me with nausea; walking required me to sink to my knees every 20 yards.
Absurd. I didn’t feel too bad: unless I moved. So I accepted stillness as my
lot. Housebound. Barred from Eden. The odd thing was that I didn’t feel
nature-deprived unless things broke through my imposed stillness. A sharp
drum-roll from the little copse behind the house, and I was startled: good
God, great spotted woodpecker. Something must be happening out there. It
seemed that spring was starting without me. I was watching the Nordic skiing
on television, still mired in winter, reading about Modesty Blaise. Then
through the curtain, the sound of great tit: that strong, defiant call:
teacher, teacher, teacher. Great tits are brave birds, and like to see the
winter off good and early. And I remember the sudden wild skirl of mistle
thrush, perhaps my favourite song of them all, whistling the winter away
with a witch’s spell of spiralling defiance. But me, I had lost my balance.
And the earth was stirring and the year was turning, and it was doing so while
I watched the televised triple salchows in perfect stillness: but I was a
person for whom the seasons had stopped. Like the human race, I was too much
taken up with my own small problems, my own small consolations. The wild
world was something separate from me: not a place where I lived, but a place
I hoped vaguely to visit sometime soon. I lost track of the daily comings
and goings: lost my feeling for the larger patterns, and I was scarcely
aware that I was doing so, save when some sharp reminder came through the
windows: a rare bit of sun, and with it, the flat merry burble of dunnock.
Little by little, without my noticing, almost with my consent, I was losing
touch with nature.
It was a deeply disquieting experience. And it’s why I am writing this book.
To keep my mind on the job. To make sure that it doesn’t happen to me
again.To make sure that it doesn’t happen to you again. To remind us all to
keep things open: eyes, ears, hearts, minds. And souls, I suppose.
UNLIKE the human race, I got better.
© Simon Barnes 2007
How to be Wild by Simon Barnes
Short Books, £14.99; 352pp
