Midnight in Johannesburg

 

Dazed from a heavy dose of jet lag and Dramamine, I stepped off the plane and into the warmly lit airport, 7 hours behind in time and 30 years behind in decor. With just my backpack, nearly too big to have been allowed on the flight, I bumped my way through the narrowly partitioned serpentine line until I was called to the immigration desk. Without a visa, an arrival form, or even a question about my visit, the woman at the counter gave me a smile, a firm stamp in my passport, and a warm welcome, “Enjoy your stay in South Africa!”

 

Around midnight, I set out into Johannesburg, at first surrounded by other travellers and weary flight attendants until I walked far enough from the airport that the streets became sparse and quiet. The humid, cool night air surrounded my body and felt like an old, familiar coat I hadn’t put on in a while. Hypnotized by the maze of unexplored streets, I walked lackadaisically until the weight of my backpack reminded me that I would probably not find my hotel without help. I followed my steps back to the airport where I plopped carelessly onto the sidewalk under a buzzing fluorescent light and rested next to a man in a reflective jacket with whom I exchanged few words. Long legged insects danced around us in the flickering beam until a bus hissed to a stop in front of me and the man motioned that I should get on.

 

Sixteen Again

 

Around 6 am the sun stretched across the east, over the warehouses, highway overpasses, parking lots, and into my bed, gently waking me for the day that I would begin my Earthwatch trip. I put on my crisp and unworn earthwatch t-shirt, salvation army jeans, two sizes too big, and once-white converse sneakers made brown from the two weeks I had just spent in the dusty city of Yangon. Without a clue of what to expect, I got back onto the bus I sleepily stumbled on two nights ago and headed to meet my Earthwatch team at the airport. One by one, we found each other and formed a group of unlikely travel companions. As we were making friendly but shy introductions, a man dressed in a rugged khaki outfit loudly pierced through the conversation with a heavy South African accent and a whole lot of charisma. He introduced himself as Hank, a bus driver and well-seasoned safari guide, and lead us to his vehicle with his aggressive, raunchy humor.

 

As we drove past the city limits towards the research site, about two hours Northwest of Johannesburg, we passed through a toll booth where Hank greeted the attendant, “Dumela mma, o tsogile jang?,” passed her a few rand, and yelled “sharp, sharp!” before he sped on. Hearing his familiar words, I later asked him how he learned Setswana, a language from a neighboring country I spent some time in a while back. As the wind whipped between the hills surrounding the highway, we talked in the parking lot of a hard to come by gas station and he explained that he’s been all over southern Africa, picking up languages from the bordering counties. We exchanged a few words in Setswana, and as the words passed through my lips, it brought me back to when I was sixteen…living in a village outside of Gaborone, falling in love for the first time, surrounded by miles of grasses speckled with acacias, and finding out that my heart is full when it’s in the field. I felt a sort of simple and pure joy as we continued to drive towards the bush, excited to once again brush through the grasses blowing in the dry, red soil that 6 years ago nudged me towards a path of seeking to understand the natural world.

 

From the backseat of a buckie

 

On our first evening at the research site, the name of which I will leave out for reasons I will explain later, we met the team of camp site residents that we would be working with us for the next 14 days. With sun soaked skin and well worn clothes, they greeted us with a casual sort of welcome and showed us to our tents and cabins before pushing us towards the open vehicles for a game drive before sunset. We climbed aboard the back of a white pickup truck, or buckie as they called it, whose bed was fixed with three rows of metal frames and thick army green cushions, each row slightly higher than the one in front. The truck bumped along the red dirt road until it picked up speed and I felt the warm air weaving between us.

We cruised along the gentle slopes of the landscape, lush but open, paralleling the rise and fall of the power lines in the distance. Just as the sun was about to set, the filtered light reflected off the fine clouds of dust, creating a surreal glow, as if blue and orange were vying for just a moment in the sky. As we drove, we came across a group of rhino running playfully amidst a herd of panicked zebra. Their collective shape was broken by the silhouettes of giraffe, staggered in height, running along them further in the distance. I thought I could hear David Attenborough’s voice penetrating through the clouds but it was just my sleepy imagination melting into the dreamy reality around us.  

 

Beetle juice, beetle juice, beetle juice

 

Early in the morning, the grasses still held onto the icy drops of dew before the sun had a chance to relieve them of their cold burdens. As I brushed through the blades, flicking the drops onto my khaki pants, pilling from one thorn after another, a light drizzle coated my dark hair with glimmery droplets until they soaked through to my scalp for a rude awakening. Trying to keep a straight line, I saw a flapping blue latex glove in the distance, barely discernable from the blue sky behind it. Tied around a thin bamboo post, the glove signified a sample plot, among 11 others arranged in a grid just outside the main campsite. I kneeled next to the post and looked into the pit dug next to it a few days ago. The pit was fitted with a blue gallon jug with the top cut off and lined with a blue plastic bag, the kind you might expect to be used to hold biohazards in a lab or hospital…and this one held nothing short of a biohazard. I took a breath, bravely reached into the pit, pulled out the bag, and swiftly tied it shut. After visiting a few more plots, I reluctantly clutched the bags in both hands and headed straight for the ‘classroom,’ a dimly lit cabin filled with skulls of animals past.

As I walked, the sound of the rough grasses and crunchy dry soil was not enough to drown the haunting ambient noise, radiating from the bags in my hands. It was like some combination of a steady rain, the background music to a horror movie set in some not-so-PC Hollywood vision of an Amazonian village, and the static from the television set of even Stephen King’s nightmares. When I got back to the campsite and rejoined a few other Earthwatch team members, I tossed the bags into white plastic trays where the sounds became louder from the acoustics of the room and the silence of the stagnant air. It was the hellish orchestra of several hundred beetles, scraping their serrated legs on the hard exteriors of their fellow captives, clawing and biting desperately at each other to make way towards the edge of the bag only to be trapped and crushed under the weight of several kilos of sloshing, wet dung…

Every morning and every evening we repeated this processes. We’d fill the bags with rhino excrement, weighed to a precise 150 kilos, and set them out in the plots. As condensation filled the plastic, the steamy aroma would wander out of the pits, charming thousands of beetles like a lurid temptress singing her siren’s song. After collecting the bags, we’d empty them into trays, separate the overwhelming masses of insects from the pungent, wet feces, stuff the beetles into vials, and store them in the fridge…right next to where we kept our six packs of beer…cause who doesn’t need a drink after that?

 

Place of the Leopard

 

Her emerald eyes, framed by long, dark hair made gold by a lifetime under the sun, hold years of adventure-filled, intimate, and haunting stories that lay just behind her gentle but confident demeanor. Her name is Lynne MacTavish. She is one of the most persevering, strong-minded, brave, and compassionate women I have ever met. In the dark classroom, we listened in silence as she shared a piece of her heart with us:

On a typical day in October of 2014, she woke up at 4 am. Before even the birds braved the cool dawn for their morning rituals, she began her daily drive around the reserve. Just as any other morning, she was moving along the perimeter of nearly 5,000 hectare preserve, scanning the landscape to ensure that each of the white rhino have made it through the night. To her horror, she received contact from Charles, the reserve manager, with chilling news. Her voice wavered and tears welled up but she did not hesitate as she told us about the day that two of her rhino were killed, one of whom was pregnant. Wholeheartedly, she shared the emotions that surrounded the bloodshed of the beautiful creatures that she dedicates her life to protect. It was that day that she decided to remove the horns of all her other rhino, to free them from the $400,000/gram fortunes, unparalleled in price by even the most coveted opiates, they unwillingly bear on their big, beautiful heads. Removing the horns was the only way to deter poachers, tangled in an international web of under table opportunities that takes advantage of localized economic and political constraints, who have the resources and intel to know the land just as well as Lynne does. Between the time of the poaching and the scheduled removal of the horns, she and her team remained more vigilant than ever, keeping 24 hour surveillance of the perimeter. During the unforgivingly costly procedure, another rhino, weak from a lodged bullet, unbeknownst until the anesthetic was administered, could not be resuscitated. Soon after, a calf, who had lost her mother to the poachers, was unable to survive alone at only several months old.

Yet, Lynne continues her fight, on the ground and at the frontlines. Through organizing networks with other rhino conservationists in South Africa and speaking out to international communities, she shares her story and demands the political authority to have agency over the species whose time on this planet is running out at an increasingly rapid rate. Aside from working day and night just to make ends meet and using her funds with only the best interest of the wildlife in mind, she forgoes many of the things most of us take for granted; enjoying Christmas dinner with family or sleeping in on a Sunday morning. There’s no rest for the wicked, so she can’t afford any either. Yet somehow, she tackles everyday with new vigor, love for all life, and countless moments of laughter.     

Over the course of the next fourteen days, she continued to share pieces of her life with us, always smiling and with eyes full of expression. Lightheartedly, she spoke of days not so unusual for her; when a warthog raided her kitchen, when an ostrich laid an egg in her living room, and when she braved a bull elephant, unsurprisingly named Steroid, that crashed his deathly tusk through the passenger side window of her vehicle. Captivating as they were, it wasn’t just her stories but her actions henceforth that illustrated her bravery, humility, and unyielding strength. “If we give up,” she said, “they will go extinct.”