The Journal and the Elephant

The Journal

Preparing to leave for Ghana last June, I spent (as I always do) a lot of my packing time sitting quietly and going through my old college things. There were t-shirts from forgotten weekend events; bent and dusty memorabilia from this and that organization; tubes of chapstick once escaped and now recaptured in exodus; faded folders stuffed with handouts, class notes, graduation announcements, recruitment fliers, group photos. Deep in a shoe box with battered edges and a faded Nike logo, among sparse mementos of my more distant past, I found my very old journal.

It lay quietly at the bottom of the shoe box, its misty familiar cover sharp with old memories and forgotten feelings. In its pages, the handwriting progressed from bewildered to merely indecisive, and the words evolved oppositely.

On a page close to the end I came across something from almost eleven years before. The writer, barely a month into high school, had been effusive with nerves, confusion, and – most of all – delight at the new environment. The school itself was enormous: It’s so much bigger than my middle school, I don’t know if I’ll ever memorize its hallways. But I think I will. The environment was open and free: It feels like you could be whoever you want to be, and everyone will be okay with it. The classes and teachers were exciting: We’re already doing hard stuff, and I think my teachers know I’m one of the best. (The journal as a whole was short on humility.)

I closed it, a bit amused and a bit perturbed. That wasn’t how I had remembered high school. Except for scattered flashes of events and people, I only retained how I’d left it – a dull holding cell of gray and brown, its hallways monotonous, its people rigid and ruthless, its lessons slow, its teachers lukewarm. Friendships were fleeting and flaky. The football team was a bunch of meatheads, the baseball team a bunch of hotheads, the soccer team a bunch of airheads, and as for the fine arts kids, I didn’t even know what kind of heads they were because they held them so damned high. I had wanted out, out, to better and bigger things, away from those tiled floors so stale with familiarity.

I looked at the journal. What happened?

The Elephant

It was enormous and gray, iron, a thunderhead, pondering across the dry savannah clearing. On four rootless trunks, rough with stony hide, it held itself high over dusty shrubs; one felt rather than heard those footfalls – gnnn, gnnn – rolling outward from the muted giant. Two ivory lances thrust out from under ancient black eyes, and from between them hung an arm of wrinkled personality – idle, pensive, probing – as two veiny sails swept back to its heavily hanging belly. It was wrapped in oldness, in contented calm, not the king of the wild but the watcher, the grandfather, the land itself.

It was the fourth such elephant I’d seen that morning.

The sun, climbing high into the hazy blue-gray, lay like a heavy hand on my steaming hair. A stickiness had seeped underneath my clothes. My feet tingled itchily as thin dead grasses prodded obstinately through my sandals. An insect the size of my thumbnail bumped into my lower lip, making me briefly reconsider quenching my thirst outside the vehicle. My phone’s battery was almost dead, and I spent a long while gazing at a hairline crack in its screen, lamenting my gross negligence to the machine.

A small group gathered a few feet in front of me was listening with rapt attention to the guide, who was explaining with soft enthusiasm this and that about the elephants around here. In a hushed voice, he added to awed observations by the sunglassesed tourists, and answered with gusto questions about lifespan, offspring, behavior, roaming patterns, diet, the environment, the region, the country. Barely suppressing a sudden desire to ask some follow-on question, not for the answer but to demonstrate my knowledge of the subject matter, I sighed and scanned the semicircle of adventurers – clothes like mine, skin like mine.

My eyes fell and fixated on a nearby pile of what the guide labeled elephant dung. It smelled faintly like grass and livestock, buzzing with a gathering cloud of flies. One of the group aimed her phone downwards, paused, blinked, then returned her attention to the guide.

Quietly I wondered what I would miss about this place which had so quickly become normal, even mundane, like a grocery store or a city street. Surely not the baking heat, surging down from on high during the day and radiating from every molecule of air during the night. Surely not the quirks of a foreign culture, strange in its structure, invasive in its welcome, wide-eyed with religion and respect. Surely not the inconveniences of fetching water, of a fragile electrical grid, of a stumbling transportation system, of cooking rough, of daily cleaning in the midst of a perpetual dust storm.

And yet…

And yet the heat gives meaning to the cold, even the cool, even the warm. Never before have I relished the shade, basked in the freshness of a lazy breeze, paused inside the door of an air-conditioned bank building. And the different way of life here, beyond making me reconsider my own, is hypnotizing and calming in its cyclic rhythms. The mullahs’ earnest tones floating in from countless sculpted spires five times every day; the call-and-response of greeting and meeting. Rising with the sun, retreating as it hovers, returning as it falls, retiring as it dips low under a harmattan haze. And all of these daily inconveniences, though hurdles in my daily path, make the American torrent of hours slow to a tranquil drift.

Sometimes they worried me, those tourists, so bright and excited.

Chewing slowly on a dry cookie, staring down through the rusty ground, I missed the mountain’s plodding exit. The group spilled into pleased chatter, and I looked up suddenly at the empty clearing.