Grasslands
Ten years after watching the grasslands crackle through static on the screen, I am staring at them in Kruger National Park, South Africa. When the first elephant comes into view as we cut across the park, I want to tell him that I do see it, but the videotape doesn’t listen.
My dad went on safari. I know that because I saw him when fast-forwarding through family home movies. Burned onto the same tapes as our birthdays and bath times was my dad looking out at grasslands of southern Africa, narrating his trek from a Jeep window. The footage was scratchy and static; and it began abruptly, truncating my sister’s dance recital. The camera pans across the tall grass, catching giraffes and zebras grazing.
The footage is old. No one remembers when he made the trip. The stretch of tape lasts for only four minutes, but I rewind it and play it again. His voice comes on each time to talk about the landscape and the animals. He talks into the camera.
“Look how dry it is here. Not like home.”
Home is wet, rainy, and ten-thousand miles away. He will come home, and he will forget this. He will forget the flat plains and the thick baobabs. He will forget the yellow-tinted Fever trees and the Leadwood trees, their splintered, sprawling, tangled branches reaching out against the sky.
“Can you see it, can you see it over there? It’s an elephant I think. Do you see it?”
Ten years later, I do see it. Ten years after watching the grasslands crackle through static on the screen, I am staring at them in Kruger National Park, South Africa. When the first elephant comes into view as we cut across the park, I want to tell him that I do see it, but the videotape doesn’t listen.
“What’s it doing? What’s it doing over there? Do you see it?”
When elephants grow tired, the professor in my program explains, they rest their monolithic heads against trees dwarfed by their size. They lean into them, looking to share their two-ton weight, but more often than not they are too much for the tree. It will snap in half at the burden, and the tired elephant will lumber on to the next one. That is what the elephant on the tape is doing. Leaning, tired, into the tree. I wonder how long it will be before the thundering crack of the tree trunk’s snapping, but the tape cuts, and Kruger is replaced with a soccer field, as my mother films a game in which my brother does not score a goal.
I spent two weeks in Kruger, staring out the windows of the kombi at every bird and bush and buffalo. I made long lists of everything I saw. European rollers, saddle-billed storks, impalas, bushbuck, Vervet monkeys, mopane worms, watering holes, baobab forests, the grave of a fourteenth-century queen laid to rest with her head pointing home.
Even if I tried to see everything, I can’t know what he saw. I don’t know what that it was, what he sees out the window of his Jeep years before I’m there. It could be a giraffe silhouette in the distance, or a lion asleep in the heat. It could be the three-foot-wide weavings of a Golden-Orb spider.
“And wow, what is that? Do you see that? Can you tell what that is?”
No. I can’t. The tape cuts to small children chasing a ball.
