Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

owing to the risk of bilharzia. Not to speak of larger creatures. In the diary I kept on the trip I recorded some of the animals we saw that day: baboons, impala, many zebras, hippos, giraffes, wildebeests, monkeys, warthog families, sables.

      ~

      I am alone halfway up the side of an enormous dark rock the size of a small mountain.

      When I realized Mary planned for us to climb it, I stared up at the rearing mass above us and wondered. Vu was scared too but his two young friends, one plump and one skinny, both very black compared with racially mixed Vu, were game and so was Mary.

      We all set off and I was fine for some time as we scrambled upwards using both hands and feet like monkeys. My rubber-soled walking shoes gripped the rock securely. In some places I crawled on my knees but I was perfectly safe.

      Then suddenly I can go no farther. I am overcome now by the nausea and swimming head that too-high places give me. I take deep breaths but can’t control my pounding heart.

      So here I am. The rock rears above me under the humming heat of the sun and I can’t see Mary or the boys any more. They have gotten above the great bulge of stone by working sideways and then up. I can’t even hear their voices.

      It is still early in the day — we left the farm at six — but it is already baking hot. I squat on the bare rock. I am no longer dizzy. I am fine now that I know I am not going farther. I am wearing my Tilley hat but can feel the sun through it. I remember the pictures of my father wearing two hats. I can also feel my bare arms and legs toasting. I decide I can inch sideways and wiggle along on my bottom until I get to a small cleft where there is a tiny patch of dappled shade. I settle there, my legs hanging down, and lean back and am more comfortable — until I think of snakes and sit up straight again, pulling up my legs and clasping my knees.

      I am looking over Africa. I can see for miles and miles, past the strange surreal stone hills that are near at hand, and past a few low and scrubby moisture-starved trees, to the bushveldt. It goes on forever and forever, until it is lost in haze.

      It is entirely strange.

      I have seen a million pictures and hundreds of films of it. I have heard about it always. None of that was a preparation for its vastness. The unknownness of it.

      What animals are out there? What animals are — watching me, smelling me, about to pounce?

      I have an inner tremble all the time in this country when I’m somewhere where a snake may slither over my foot. I can almost see its patterned skin and feel the dry rasp of it against my own. Or a baboon may leap on me, chattering. Or a lion I can’t see but which is close by, right now, camouflaged in the shadow, may spring with extended claws. This is unlike watching a nature program on TV. Utterly unlike.

      I am glad I am alone at this moment. I want to be aware, keenly aware. I want the full thrill and fear of being here, without the distraction of another human.

      I think of how in Canada I am used to being surrounded by wilderness and walking and skiing everywhere on my own. I am used to knowing that bears or moose may well be near me and I am never nervous. Here, I am hyperconscious every second of beauty and of danger. One sharpens the other. I think of the hippos we saw a little earlier, how they rolled in the water, sleek and black and fat. I think of the rhinos for which this area is famous. What animal could get up on this rock where I am? Not likely a hippo. But a lion could.

      And suddenly my father feels close, as if I can reach out my hand and he will take it. I close my eyes for a moment and he is here. Almost. I am where he was when he was young, out on the veldt. He is so near I am almost him.

      It is so beautiful being in Africa at last.

      ~

      My life has been about noticing beauty. When I was in that scene, high on that rock in the Matopo Hills, I was excited and frightened, every sense on its toes. I was beauty-struck. At the same time I was aware of my awareness. I knew that I was not just on that rock; I was at a particular point on my own life’s path and within my family’s history.

      I felt my father. But as if I were the parent, I knew more than he did about where we were. He arrived in Rhodesia in 1927 and I was in Zimbabwe in 1992. It was the same place and a different place. I had a much longer historical knowledge of Africa than my father could have had in the late 1920s. And since 1992 it has changed further, and for the worse. I have taken multiple Oxford courses on the rise and fall of empire. I have a vantage point impossible for my father to have had.

      What my father was doing in Rhodesia was finding and mapping copper deposits. His work would lead to mines — that was its purpose. He could not have seen the implications. He was a very young Canadian man in a place utterly new to him and was somehow responsible for men of whom he knew nothing beyond their black skin, their teeth filed into points, their tattoos, their tough bare feet. In his diaries of the time, which I have, he recounts every detail of what they encounter. He does not speculate on the future nor does he tell of his emotions. His “boys” constantly urge him to shoot so they can have meat. He is the boss-man, the one in charge, the only one with a gun. In reality they are the ones who know the land. Forever they have successfully brought down game with their assegai spears. They could survive without him; he could not, without them. The land is theirs! But it is slipping away from them and quickly and my father is part of that.

       8

      My father’s early life seen as a book was almost always firmly closed. Occasionally by some odd chance it fell open and we glimpsed a line of text, never having time to scan a full page. But a phrase — “the belt soaked overnight in brine,” for example — would stick, and sting, forever.

      My mother’s book fell open at many pages, its text brimming with adjectives and adverbs, creating for us images, anecdotes and people we could almost hear and see. I feel about her childhood as if I’d been there too, almost.

      I am with her in the buggy behind Leo’s swishing black tail as he trots through the village of Buckingham. We are accompanying her father on a parish errand, as she loved to do.

      I am sitting on the piano bench beside her as she practices her scales and later when she plays on the radio when she is thirteen. I stand with her as she watches her father shaving the day after the cable arrived from the War about Edward. Papa is crying, his hand trembles and he nicks himself. Blood, tears and soap drip from his chin into the sink.

      I am with her when she is nine, on the first day at her new school in Montreal, while she stands with her back tight against the high brick wall of the playground. She is holding her whole body clenched with fear and shyness, until a girl with bouncing braids runs up and says, “Are you our new Minister’s little girl?” And it is Mabel who becomes her best friend from that day and forever.

      Mother is older but still living at home when I run with her, our hearts beating fast. She is on her way home to the Rectory from her first day of teaching at Miss Dunlop’s and she is escaping from a runaway hog outside the Montreal stockyards, while all the men laugh and cheer the pig on.

      And then of course there is my mother as “my mother.”

      A memory from when I must have been about two: I am waking in my crib from an afternoon nap. I am happy because I know my mother had wanted me to sleep so she could nap herself. I climb over the crib rail and run along to her, and we are both pleased with me. How soon did I use words to keep hold of things by naming them? Did the names come right away or jell a little later? I don’t know.

      And then there was the darkness of a winter morning, yellow light falling into my room from the hall, and my father lifting me up in his arms. My sisters’ faces are looking up at us and they are saying, “There are dollies downstairs. One for you!” It is Christmas but I don’t know what that is yet. Do I learn the word that day? I understand my sisters; I understand new dollies.

      Often these were lovely moments, but not always, or they were mixed. My mother sits holding me on her lap in the operating room while the surgeon and nurses