by Ben Feder
Wake-up on safari was generally at six o’clock, and Sam was always the first to jump out of bed. I wondered where the teenage son who loved his sleep had gone. I thought Sam was deeply incurious about anything he couldn’t view on a screen, text on a phone, or manipulate with a video game controller. If something did attract his interest, it was never before noon. Any attempt at conversation earlier than that was a struggle met with mutterings and mumbles. In the morning he did not so much walk as stumble, loose shoelaces whipping around like spaghetti.
Now Sam awoke with a start. He was playing with our small digital camera and conjuring up ways to create a fun video about our trip, creating shot lists and choreographing them with his siblings and us. When, on our final day of safari, Abu offered one last dawn roam on the plains, Sam was the first to volunteer. I was beginning to see enthusiasm from a kid who, in New York, couldn’t manage to utter a verb at the dinner table. Now I even caught a glimpse of emerging creativity.
Nava was wide eyed and hungry for knowledge about the animals. When Abu spoke, she whipped out a notebook and pencil from her knapsack. When she had filled a few pages on hippopotami, gannets, baboons, zebras, hyenas, and wildebeests, Sam encouraged her to create a video so that she could share her experience with her first-grade friends at home. At a time when polished online videos were only beginning to become popular, Sam directed Nava anchoring a newsreel video on our small digital camera and later helped her edit it on our MacBook. The gap left from the two front teeth that had fallen out was clearly visible when she began earnestly, “This is Nava Feder reporting from the Serengeti on African animals.”
Although Rita was excited about the animals and being on a family adventure, at night her thoughts turned to entering a new school and whether the kids there, like some of those back home, would bully her. In the last few days on safari, with the prospect of the first day of school approaching, Rita was getting visibly agitated. Victoria asked her to focus on the family and the adventure we were undertaking. One night, Rita wrote a song with a sweet but doleful melody that she called “It Hurts on the Inside.”
I have a great family,
And I know that’s always true,
But sometimes my heart goes the other way.
I’m proud of myself and so are others.
But when I get teased,
I consider it true.
It hurts on the inside,
It hurts on the outside.
When I think of myself, I get so confused.
I was glad she could express her feelings but saddened that she was in that state. I put my arm around her small shoulders and curled her in for a hug. I didn’t always have the words to console her, but I tried to make her feel safe and loved. She wriggled from my embrace.
For me, the Serengeti’s majestic beauty and teeming wildlife astounded the imagination. It practically begged me to ponder a world long gone. It took me three or four days in the bush to realize I hadn’t seen a single jet contrail in the vast Serengeti sky. The last time I had experienced that was on 9/11, when aviation authorities banned all flights for days. On the African plains, my sense of what was real in the world expanded and opened me to a renewed sense of wonder, which I had slowly lost over many years.
It was the terrain’s vastness, its oceans of grass, that really soothed me. It not only sustained the millions of migrating mammals but also focused my attention and calmed my mind. I stared for long periods into the far distance, where the greensward met a cerulean sky in a curved horizon.
Abu tried to explain the intricate details. The grass grew from mostly shallow soil that occasionally dropped to levels deep enough to allow a lonely acacia tree to sink its roots and spread its canopy. The wide variety of herbivores that lived in various states of symbiosis—some ate the top of the grass, others the bottom; one evolved mandibles that chomped, another that grinded; one listened for predators, the other sniffed for them—conveyed to me a world in balance. Even when one mammal killing another seemed to violate it, that was part of the balance too. It was an endlessly complex ecological system in which both plants and the animals that fed on them coevolved.
The other tourists on the savannah detracted from my experience. They were attracted to the big game and, morbidly, fresh kills. When word spread on the rangers’ radios that there was blood on the soil, they came racing from all corners of the park. While most everyone else on safari was looking for big game and dramatic action, I secretly wished we would come up empty. I sought serenity. I took pleasure in poking my head out of the open roof of our Land Rover, even as it barreled across the plains, and standing there entranced, taking in the scene as the wind and landscape rushed by. The Serengeti made New York and our lives there seem remote. I felt tensions ease, anxiety fall away, and in their place, a connection to something grounded in the primordial life of the Serengeti, the eternal cycles of animal migrations, and reminders of the steady march of evolution.
So much of my life in New York was spent living in a world of abstraction: navigating legal and regulatory rules of the game, constructing and operating within complex commercial arrangements, and generally moving pieces on the corporate strategic chessboard. I focused only on the most essential elements and discarded the details of anything that did not fit into the myopia I had deliberately cultivated.
Despite attempts to look at the big picture, focus was the only way to declutter my mind and get things done. Mostly I had walked with my head cocked downward, reading and responding to emails, my thumbs tapping at the diminutive keyboard in the way hens peck at seed. I didn’t notice anything. Here, on the Serengeti, I raised my head to look straight ahead and lifted my gaze to a horizon that, for me, had long since disappeared in the canyons of Manhattan’s long avenues.
I remembered a well-publicized Harvard study in which researchers asked subjects to watch a short video of two groups of people passing a basketball around. The subjects were told either to count the number of passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes versus aerial passes. After watching the video and reporting their counts, the subjects were asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary take place. Most said no. They then watched the video again, this time with instructions not to count anything but just to relax and watch. In the midst of the video, an actor wearing a full gorilla suit saunters across the set, taking time to turn to the camera and pound his chest. The surprised subjects said they were so busy tallying passes that they did not see the gorilla. I imagined that in New York, I would have been in that group. Now I was widening my awareness, hoping to see the gorillas.
On our last day on safari, we waited next to the Land Rover at an airstrip and, like survivors marooned on an island, scanned the skies for an airplane. We were headed out of the bush for the Tanzanian coastal island of Zanzibar, our final stop before Bali. By then, I was ready to leave the Serengeti. The need for new stimulation and moving on to the next thing, which both fed me and drove me mad in New York, pulled at me again.
At the airstrip, we were the only passengers in sight. A small dot appeared on the horizon and grew as it approached, accompanied by a rising rumble of propellers. A small, old, twin-engine bush plane landed and taxied to the Land Rover. The pilot, a thirtysomething Canadian man sporting aviator sunglasses and the familiar khaki outfit, dropped a ladder from the cockpit and popped out. He loaded our bags in the hold while we said our warm good-byes to Abu. We piled into the passenger cabin through the rear door.
The plane shuddered as it accelerated down the runway. The noise was deafening. Victoria mock-gritted her teeth and looked at me as if to ask, “Is this hunk of metal going to make it?” I shrugged. The kids howled with joy at the adventure. We rose, banked left, and winged toward a misty mountain ridge, clearing it with what seemed to me only inches to spare. Victoria pulled a nervous smile. This was unlike any plane or flight we had ever taken, and the young pilot, who was in Tanzania logging miles on his way to a commercial pilot’s license, did not in
spire confidence.
I eventually settled into the flight and reflected on our time in the Serengeti. At a time in my life when I was searching for meaning, the predation of the wild, the endless pursuit of food and shelter, the birthing and protecting of young in order to propagate genes, seemed at once both elemental and pointless.
As beautiful as the Serengeti was, if I was lacking a sense of meaning in my life, I did not find it there, at the very base of the pyramid of human priorities. But the Serengeti did remind me of the necessity of attending to basic needs without which meaning, beyond simple genetic propagation, was impossible.
When we landed in Zanzibar, the poverty of the place crashed into our world. Small huts, constructed of mud and elephant dung, lined the roads. Other structures were made of shoddy-looking, fissure-riddled brick. Everywhere, we saw partially built homes with walls but no roofs, frames but no windows, foundations but no floors. Often the bush reclaimed the foundation altogether so that instead of a living room taking shape, an acacia tree sprouted. Meager cattle and goats small enough to be mistaken for dogs roamed freely in the streets. Families grew vegetables near their huts in small patches of subsistence farms. Women by the side of the road sold just about anything: a few pieces of fruit, bundles of firewood, bald tires, you name it.
I had the resources to be able to take time off—although not to drop out of my career altogether. While I was not living from hand to mouth in the way a lot of people do, I did take significant career risks by doing what I did. But they paled in insignificance beside the poverty of Zanzibar. Yet I couldn’t say that most of the people here looked unhappier than Manhattanites.
The prize of Zanzibar was the port city of Stone Town, which attracted young backpackers with its tight, meandering alleyways peppered with art galleries and mosques. Tourists filled the restaurants and flopped on the pillows of hookah lounges.
At five thirty in the morning, I woke to the sound of the muezzin. I appreciated the music of the place and the sweet, soaring song of the Muslim call to prayer. Perhaps my own traditional Jewish background helped me appreciate the song of supplication. It was a glimpse into the softer, easy spirit of the place that I had imagined.
In Africa, my family and I began sharing our day-to-day experiences, both the searing and the mundane. For my children, it was an opportunity to observe and ask questions about a world that was utterly foreign to their Manhattan experience. For all of us, simply eating dinner together every night, a practice that had been lost to us in New York, seemed to matter a lot. In the evenings, we played Boggle and other games to fight boredom and distract the kids from periodic bickering. Inspired by the Serengeti, Sam ramped up his predatory gamesmanship.
From Zanzibar we flew to Doha, Qatar, for an overnight layover on our way to Bali. If the airport in Ethiopia was a jolting introduction to the developing world, the transfer lounge in Doha inflicted a shock of material excess. It was reminiscent of some of the best hotels I’d stayed in as part of the trappings of traveling for a large company. Out of the corner of his eye, Oliver saw a lounge for kids that featured free video game consoles. He shouted in excitement, dropped his bag, and ran. The other kids gave chase. Victoria and I took turns for the first hot shower we’d had in a long time. We sat down for a meal in the lounge while we waited for our next flight.
On the plane, Victoria and I talked about Rita. We were worried about her. We hoped the situation in her new school would be different and she wouldn’t feel bullied. By the time we’d boarded, I’d already noticed a change in the way our kids related to each other and how we behaved as a family. Sam was engaging more. Nava began to lose her baby-like way of speaking. Oliver and Rita were getting along better than they had been in New York. It seemed to have dawned on our children that for the next long while, they might have only each other as company.
five |
The percussive thrum of gamelan, Bali’s traditional music, piped through the airport speakers greeted us as we stumbled off the plane in Denpasar, Bali. Exhausted by two days of travel, we ambled through the airport’s corridors to the immigration hall. A large sign notified us that we needed to pay a tax to enter the country, payable at a cashier’s desk only in Indonesian rupiah, the sole access to which was an ATM beyond the customs borderline. Victoria had planned ahead and had already exchanged currency. We headed to the long queue of travelers waiting to be processed by customs and immigration.
As we drew closer to the customs counter, I saw a German man hand over a fifty-dollar bill to a customs official who slid it into his pocket and stamped the man’s passport with quick efficiency. In all my business travel, I had never seen such a blatant bribe, but I knew enough to keep quiet. I resisted the temptation to elbow Victoria and say, “Did you see that?” A split-second calculation of stakes, upside and downside, made me wonder if I might one day need that trick.
When we exited baggage claim, Oliver spotted, amid the throng, our handwritten name on a placard. We approached the man holding the sign, who flashed a wide, toothy grin and introduced himself as Nyoman. He was the manager of the home we rented. He led us to his car, and we piled in. He’d brought along a friend with a second car to deal with our bags.
We drove out of the airport toward Ubud, a town at the base of the dormant volcano Mount Batur. As we made our way, we peered out the windows at a dirty urban sprawl: strewn garbage, traffic, and discount retail outlets. Large billboards shouted brands like Rip Curl and Billabong. Smoke filled the air and burned our throats. Bali seemed denuded of the verdant rice paddies and carved irrigation canals I’d seen on the internet. In their place, rivers of motorbikes streamed along, some with whole families of four or five riding the saddle. The irrigation canals that channeled water from the highlands were consolidated into large rivers, dug deep, banked by concrete, and filled with refuse. The feeling creeping up on me was reminiscent of a postapocalyptic video game I had considered developing.
Driving on cracked, unlit roads, it took an hour to reach Ubud. One house we passed as we drove into town had about two dozen motorcycles parked outside. “Someone having a party?” I asked Nyoman.
“Oh, no, Mr. Ben,” he said politely. “Someone died, and the villagers are there to be with the family and show respect.”
I made a mental note to pause before I made any more cultural assumptions. But the sheer number of motorcycles said something about the communal support this family must have received. I couldn’t help contrasting it with the more insular way I lived. I flashed to my father’s funeral two decades earlier and the outpouring of love I witnessed there, then for a split second imagined my own funeral and wondered about the size of the crowd, as if somehow it would measure the success of my life.
Just beyond Ubud lay the village of Junjugan, where Victoria had rented what the local real estate agent marketed as Villa Tirta Tawar, Holy Spring Villa. We pulled up to a house surrounded by a high security wall.
Nyoman tooted the horn, a night watchman opened the iron gate, and we drove through the gateway to the front door. Nyoman killed the engine. Victoria called out, “Everyone please take a bag.” Our children had become seasoned travelers, and none of them complained. Even Nava pulled her weight, taking whatever bag her little body could lift.
Nyoman entered first, spotted a large spider on the terra-cotta floor, and instead of squashing it, quickly shooed it out the door. “Please, before you come in, take off your shoes.”
Dim light fell on the floor of the shadowy entranceway. “Can we turn on some lights, Nyoman?” I asked.
“They are on, Mr. Ben.” Electricity was expensive in Bali, and extra wattage came at a premium.
Nyoman showed us around. One wing of the boomerang-shaped villa had two bedrooms with queen-sized beds, each adorned by mosquito netting. The other wing had a Japanese-style dining area with an elevated platform, a low-slung table, and cushions on which to sit. The walls facing the interior of the boomerang were made of glass and opened to the back garden and pati
o, not visible in the night.
We walked outside to a separate small building a few steps away that housed the small kitchen and laundry. A third bedroom was in yet another building, again just a few steps away. The boys would share that room.
“Please keep the doors locked to both buildings,” Nyoman said.
Victoria frowned. “Must we? What if they need to come to us in the middle of the night?”
“It’s for safety, Miss Victoria.”
We worked out a serviceable system of keys that allowed the boys to come get us if they needed to and vice versa.
When he finished the brief tour, Nyoman smiled and said in a Balinese singsong way, “I’ll go home now. I’ll return in the morning, yah?” We were alone in our dark home, feeling more than a little lost.
We put our tired children to bed, careful to drape the mosquito netting around their beds the way we had learned in Africa. Malaria had been eradicated in Bali, but dengue fever, also carried by mosquitos, had not. It was an extremely painful and potentially fatal disease.
The kids were asleep in minutes. In total silence, Victoria and I collapsed on the benches in the living area. On the dining table sat a bowl filled with fruit I couldn’t name, a gift from the real estate agent who had insisted we pay rent for our entire stay in advance. In the dappled light and with the experience of that grim ride from the airport still crackling in my mind, the full weight of our situation fell on me hard. I turned to Victoria.
“What the fuck did we do?”
Victoria never let me see her sweat. “Remember your twenty-four-hour rule,” she said in a level-headed way that I knew hid her own nervousness. Whenever I got some phone call or email that felt like someone had just dropped a steaming problem in my lap and made me feel exposed, before I reacted or tried to find a solution, I gave the situation twenty-four hours to percolate. Better yet, I tried to find a distraction. Somehow, solutions always presented themselves as my unconscious mind worked the problem.
