At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  “Where are you staying tonight?” I ask her, now that I realize we’re staying in her actual home and not a second guesthouse.

  “Oh, my mother lives a block away,” she says. “I just crash at her house whenever I have a guest here. It’s okay, actually, because I have a wedding to run tomorrow and have to wake up early.” She pours us cups of tea and asks us to sit, asks questions about the details of our travels thus far, where’s been our favorite place and what’s been surprising. She asks about our plans for tomorrow.

  “Oh, you will love the Maasai Mara!” she exclaims, clapping her hands. “I used to go there on family vacations every year when I was a child. Lovely memories.” I already wish we could take her with us.

  She stands up, gathers her keys and sunglasses. “I want to hear all about it when you come back! I’ll see you soon, okay?” Pamela says good-bye, walks out the front door and down the concrete path in her yard, then turns left to walk to her mother’s house. There’s no dining room table in her diminutive cottage, so we eat pasta for dinner on the hallway floor. The kids find this a special treat and ask if we can do this all the time.

  Our flight itinerary the past few days has been excruciating: from Victoria Falls, we flew to Johannesburg, then waited two days for our flight to Nairobi by way of Dubai. We’ve been moving for seventeen hours, and yet John insists on an early departure the next morning, since the drive is long and it’ll get hot. Early the next morning, we push through exhaustion and load our bags into John’s van, ready for another lengthy, jerky ride in another rickety van.

  John makes his living guiding tourists on safari through the Maasai Mara National Reserve, a dedicated space in Kenya where wildlife roam free. It’s where Karen von Blixen-Finecke, also known as Isak Dinesen, set her memoir, Out of Africa, about her life on her beloved Kenyan coffee plantation from 1913 to 1931. It’s where Kenya makes the bulk of its tourism revenue. It’s not cheap to go on safari here, which is why John is unaccustomed to taking visitors to one of Nairobi’s sketchy neighborhoods parked on the flight path. We’ve been given a sizable discount because a friend of ours in Oregon, a former resident of Kenya, works for a socially responsible safari company, and they’ve invited us to see their work.

  John drives through Nairobi traffic and tells us about his childhood in the city, how he and his wife and kids recently moved to its outskirts to be closer to his mom, who is in poor health. “I spend half my time guiding safaris, and half my time feeding my mother,” he jokes.

  We push our way through traffic and out of town, and begin our zigzag through the Kenyan countryside. John tells us most of his clients miss this drive. “They prefer to fly a private jet to the Mara, so I drive this by myself, then meet them there,” he explains.

  An hour into the drive, he pulls over to a wide shoulder with a scenic overlook and a restaurant teetering on the edge of a cliff, held in place by support beams.

  “This is the Great Rift Valley,” John says as we gaze over the edge at an immense vista of rolling hills around flat plains in shades of umber and sepia. “And there is where we’ll be going today.” He points to a spot far in the distance, past hazy skyline and the burnt sienna valley. “And notice that satellite dish, right there in the middle,” he says, pointing next to a small white dot in the center of the vast landscape. “When we get there, we’ll be halfway to the Mara.”

  John leads us to the restaurant and introduces us to staff behind the counter. We order a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs served on stainless steel plates and chase it with a slurp of British tea in plastic cups. For three more hours the drive remains fairly blithe and breezy, and as we pass the satellite dish, a giant white man-made dome interrupting the bushland topography, I give thanks that this ride is smoother than Ethiopia’s.

  The van turns left, and here it is: a long, craggy, interminable road with no end in sight. John veers sharply to the far right of the road to avoid a pothole he’s memorized, then yells at us through the cacophony of cheery kid chatter, “Roll up your windows or you’ll eat dust!”

  Thus ends the breeze and thus begins the second leg of our drive, a two-hour traverse so shaky I pop a part of my back that’s been stiff for two weeks. Even with the windows rolled up, for the next two hours I continually flush out my eyes with drops and brush off dust collected on my pants. Ethiopia coached us to stare straight ahead to avoid carsickness. John drives and drives, flying through and skidding over washboard gravel for two hours, and then, finally, a sign: Masaai Mara National Reserve. A baboon sits on top of the sign, picking at his fingernails, ignoring us.

  We turn right, drive twenty more minutes, then reach our safari camp and tumble out of the van, sweaty, disoriented, and caked with layers of dirt. We are in the epitome of the middle of nowhere. This camp is parked in the middle of the East African savanna, a manufactured conglomeration of tents and gathering spots with little more than hippos and acacia trees as neighbors. Camp staffers unload our van and bring our bags to a covered check-in desk, and I wonder, Where do these people live? Here? We are miles from anything man-made beyond this camp, several hours’ drive from any sensible living quarters. And yet, as a woman on staff explains to us after handing out water bottles and wet washcloths, they manage to bring in several hours of Wi-Fi a day, they generate their own electricity, and there will be three catered meals per day. There is a pool. I can’t imagine how they’ve carted in the water for it. I silently speculate how much this place costs regular visitors who don’t benefit from our discount.

  The camp has several tented hotel rooms scattered on the property, each with a balcony overlooking the Mara River. Two young men on staff show us our room, and I squint my eyes to imagine Karen Blixen here on safari with her Swedish husband, Bror, only without our benefit of electricity and running water. Canvas walls roll up on all four sides and flowing mosquito nets smother four-poster mahogany beds.

  After dinner down at the dining hall, I muster enough strength to take a shower before crawling into bed. I’m shaking with fatigue. I slide between the sheets, and I discover old-school toasty hot water bottles gurgling at my feet. “If you open the walls at night, you’ll hear hippos playing while you sleep,” a luggage carrier shared earlier. All night, hippos grumble outside our balcony while we sleep in the dark, dreamless. I wake up shivering in cold morning air, looking through the bed’s mosquito netting at our canvas walls and dark wood floors. After weeks of sleeping on ten uncomfortable beds in Africa alone, in one night I feel as if I’ve caught up on sleep last seen in Australia. This is heaven.

  Last night we told John we preferred to sleep in this morning, even though we’d miss key animal-sighting opportunities, so we arrive at the dining hall for breakfast minutes before closing. Everyone else has already gone out to the savanna. We gulp coffee, devour eggs and sausage, and run out to John’s van waiting for us. He laughs at our tardiness.

  His safari van is officially locked and loaded for its intended purpose: the roof is buttressed up like a convertible van with shade covering. This means there’s room to stand on our seats, our heads popped out the top like meerkats with cameras around their necks. John drives us away from the camp and heads into grassland, tracing wheel ruts left by thousands of other off-road vehicles. Safari hat provided by John strapped firmly under my chin, coffee-colored linen pants procured from Sydney, I have officially channeled my inner Meryl Streep.

  Kenyan safari guides, like John, aren’t locals who’ve slapped a logo on their vans and recruited naive tourists out to the wilderness; they’re licensed by the government, navigators who have taken classes on flora and fauna and can answer any wildlife-related question lobbed their way. As he drives, the kids pepper John with questions, their expert on call about why hyenas prefer to lie in puddles on the path, why elderly elephants go rogue, why hippos are the most dangerous animal in Africa. John knows the answer to everything.

  We come to a herd of zebras and Reed asks him, “How can you tell the difference between the
boys and the girls?”

  “Well . . .” John hesitates, looks at me. I smile. “Well, you just can.”

  “But how?” Reed insists.

  “They have different parts.”

  “Like male and female humans?” he asks in boyish soprano.

  “Yes,” John says, sighing. “Just like humans.”

  “Hmm . . . weird,” Reed says. “It doesn’t look like it. They just look like plain zebras to me.” He zooms in his camera lens and John howls with laughter.

  John weaves seamlessly through the savanna as he talks, having memorized these obscure bush paths over years of work. He knows where to find a herd of topi, silently munching on a grass lunch. He knows of an elephant family that likes to hang around a particular cluster of trees, and drives us twenty feet from a mother and her newborn before she rustles her ears, huffs through her trunk, and tromps toward us. John shifts in reverse and spins the wheels before we zoom away backward, our guide laughing. Nearby, giraffes mimic trees, indifferent and moving only leaf-chewing jaws. A herd of warthogs traipses by our van, en route to their next feeding. Crocodiles loiter open-eyed along the waterfront, behemoth in size and still as statues. Hippos splash in a slough of water. And after miles of searching, John finds us a pride of lions, sleeping underneath a tree, ten feet from our tires and indifferent to our presence.

  None of the animals pretend to give us notice, in fact. We are human observers of our own nature documentary.

  “Can we get out and take a family photo?” Kyle asks.

  “Afraid not, no,” John says. “Kenyan law says no one but a licensed safari guide can exit a vehicle on the Mara.”

  We head back to Nairobi tomorrow morning, and we want to surprise Tate, who will turn ten. Her birthday—the day we’ll do nothing but drive in dust for five hours. When we arrived at the camp, I asked the front desk woman if it were possible to order a small birthday cake as our dessert. Tonight over dinner, I still haven’t gotten word from the safari camp, and I wonder if they’ve forgotten. It’s after eight o’clock in the evening, and Finn is sound asleep, drooling facedown on the table. We’ve finished our meal in the communal dining room, and we’re desperate to head back to our room and crawl into bed.

  I hear a faint beat of drums, and in the distance I see a faint glow of torches perforating inky night sky.

  The sound grows louder and the light bounces closer, taking a few steps forward then reversing backward, then side to side, then another step forward. These drums and torches are dancing. I hear a murmur of rhythmic voices. As the fire glows brighter, so does the volume of drums and voices, locals chanting a song in cadence with bobbing torches.

  “What’s going on?” Tate asks.

  “It sounds like a battle’s about to start,” Reed observes. “Or maybe a concert.”

  Closer and closer, a mob of singers heads into our open-air dining room, led by a man in a white chef’s hat wielding a chocolate cake in one hand and machete in the other. Guests at the other tables around us whip out their phones and start recording. They’re heading straight to us.

  Tate’s face beams scarlet and she glares at me, mortified, with eyes big as saucers. The song ends, and the mob promptly begins a new one, another Swahili incantation. Two minutes pass of chanting and bobbing around our table, swaying with flame-lit torches and drumbeats. Finn hasn’t moved, and drool has collected on the table under his lips. He snores.

  The chef places a chocolate cake in front of Tate, and I notice it’s sized for a full-scale birthday party. A woman lights ten candles with her torch, and the serenaders croon, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Tah-toom, happy birthday to you!” Tate blows out her candles and the surrounding audience bursts into applause. The chef hands her a machete half her size, and she carves the first slice, then hands the knife to Kyle to finish. Finn is immobile, drool now dripping to the floor.

  We pass out cake slices to the surrounding diners and staff, eat our own share, and save an extra slice for Finn. Earlier this morning around four o’clock, Kyle had woken up Tate for a sunrise hot-air balloon ride and father-daughter breakfast on the Mara. Tonight, she is serenaded with torches, dancing, a cake, and song. I tell her that for my tenth birthday, I visited my dad’s office in downtown Austin and his secretary gave me a blank legal pad of my very own. And for her eleventh birthday, we will probably order pizza and watch a movie on Netflix.

  It’s early the next morning, and we’ve left heaven and are driving back to Nairobi with John. When we pull into town, at sunset, he joins us for dinner at a roadside diner, drops us off at Pamela’s for one final night, then heads home to care for his mother. We have another flight tomorrow.

  I wake up in the middle of the night in Pamela’s bed, disoriented and overwhelmed with sensory overload. Her next-door neighbor’s sewers have flooded her yard, and the stench is so foul, it’s as if we’re wading in Nairobi’s sewage pipes. Kyle opens the front door and finds the yard impenetrable, with all but a few inches of Pamela’s walkway floating with raw sewage. We try, impossibly, to go back to sleep.

  Pamela calls the house in the morning: “I am so, so very sorry. Please let me refund you your money.” We insist against it, and leave a small tip on the kitchen counter as an assurance, and as an offering for what chores must inevitably be on her horizon.

  John arrives early this morning, and he and Kyle gingerly carry our luggage over their heads to his van, one piece at a time. Tate, Reed, and Finn each take turns aboard Kyle’s back, and I pray none of their shoes touch ground—I imagine the putrid smell on their soles lingering on our long-haul flight up to the top of the continent. I tiptoe across Pamela’s walkway, balancing between the few dry spots left, and pray for mercy for both me and her.

  Several hours later, during our layover in Dubai, I receive a text message from the housing service we used to book Pamela’s place, letting me know we’ve received a refund of thirty-five dollars, the cost of one night’s stay at Pamela’s house. A few minutes later, I get a text from Pamela herself: “In case you are wondering, I moved to a new house today. I’m settling in well already, and tomorrow I think I’ll paint the walls purple. It was nice to meet you!”

  14

  MOROCCO

  Casablanca is bone-chilling. From the feel of the moisture of the train cabin’s window, so is Fez. Our friends told us we might want to rethink our original plans of staying in a tent in the Sahara Desert this time of year; they said it’d be so cold we’d scarcely leave the tent. February in the desert is no joke, especially with thin windbreakers and no hats, gloves, or wool socks. We skipped the Sahara idea, and are now heading onward to our friends’ house in central Morocco after our flight into its largest city.

  After an eighteen-hour serpentine flight to Morocco from Kenya via Dubai, our old friend Nick looks like a wavering mirage in the desert at the Fez train station tonight. He’s wearing a thick wool coat and winter hat, and we stand shivering in our paltry jackets. Nick graciously lets us sit in silence while he expertly drives us home through the city’s shadowy streets; then we walk through the door and in sleepy stupor, I hug Erin, another old friend. The five of us collapse in their beds, barely knowing where we are and quivering with chilled limbs and fatigue. I slide on my two pairs of socks under pajama pants. Normally I detest wearing socks to bed, but desperation has trumped the luxury of bare feet against sheets. It’s midnight, and we’ve been traveling for twenty-two hours.

  I close my eyes, and one minute later, it’s the next morning. I wake to the smell of coffee and home, and sure enough, I pad sleepily downstairs and there’s my friend Erin, slicing fruit for her young boys and waiting on a French press. I haven’t seen her in the flesh in almost a decade. During these six months of travel, we’ve either known absolutely no one or been with friends we’ve made only in the past few years—even when we’re graced with companionship on the road, there are far more days when it’s been just the five of us. Now I am standing in the ki
tchen of one of my bridesmaids. We’ve known each other since high school, and Nick is an old friend of my brother’s. The four of us have all known one another since before we were married. I hug her again, much longer this time.

  Nick and Erin now live in Morocco, and because we lived in Turkey before they moved, our paths haven’t crossed in a long time. They are a sight for sore eyes. They are part of our soil.

  We’ve wanted to visit Morocco for years, but this morning we’re infected with a bad case of travel weariness. My muscles ache, my brain feels as if it’s running on autopilot, and the boys wake up happy to be in a regular house with childhood rooms and toys. Erin is a professional cookie decorator and she knows how to knit; Tate has wanted to learn how to do both. Kyle wants to just sit. It’s cold outside, coffee is ready, and Nick has started a fire. We’re in Morocco, but we could be anywhere.

  We stay here in their house. All day.

  We want to explore Fez, but we want to see old friends more, and so today we do what old friends do: we drink coffee, we drink gin and tonics, we order pizza, we watch questionably downloaded American television, we bake cookies, and we talk. We talk future plans and cultural frustrations, mutual friends and their whereabouts, work glories and woes, and of course, kids. We catch up on life from the past few years. We talk about Texas, how we’re all from there, and how it no longer feels like home.

  Tonight, sleep comes like a tsunami. I wake the next morning in the same position that I drifted off to dreamless sleep, and I head back downstairs.

  “Good morning! Ready to see Fez?” asks Erin.

  I feel much more like myself after a day of lounging and another night of sleep, and for some reason, I woke up this morning hyperaware that in three months, we will be back in the United States. Heck yes, I want to see Morocco with old friends. I want to wander the old streets of Fez.