Into the wild

This week, summer ends.

Duke students sit in their first classes of the semester, print out their syllabi, have coffee at noon and begin the scholarly routines they will follow into December. In Limpopo Province, South Africa, however, winter—not summer—has come to an end.

I arrived here one week ago to start my semester abroad, and the switch to the southern hemisphere’s calendar is one of many upheavals to my previous life routine. Until December, I will study the ecology of South African biomes while living in the wilderness.

Last Tuesday, my classmates and I were driven north from Johannesburg to Nylsvley Nature Reserve. A river that runs north floods this flat land and when the Dutch-descended Trekboers first came upon it in 1838 they called the stream the Nyl, for they thought it must flow upward to the very top of Africa. They believed they had reached the southern mouth of the actual Nile River.

At Nylsvley in winter, the grasses are yellow and the clay ground is red. Gray thorns the length of my ring finger defend bushes that line the edges of trails. The reserve, like much of the continental United States, lacks large predators, but is home to many hoofed herbivores and birds whose “woo-woo” whirring and twitters wake me up too early if my jet lag does not.

I have come to admire one animal in particular. It is the impala: a butterscotch, antelope-like creature with curved black horns that rob from it all the timidity a Carolina doe possesses. It is hunted by Africa’s deftest predators: cheetahs, leopards, Cape hunting dogs and, of course, the lion. When impala bolt it is in an arc. Their flight is not skittish—they leap in a dance, each kick making a splash in the grassy expanse. When we stopped to watch them one evening from a Land Rover, they turned their faces to look directly at us, the black and white coloring around the eyes of the male striking as warrior paint.

As I faced the impala, I believed for a moment that I had entered a world of raw and ancient emotion. That here I had returned myself to the natural cycle of which human beings had once been a part. That in Africa, the wild existed. This fleeting epiphany was not original. I have grown up hearing romanticized tales of the wild in Africa, remnants of generations past and present. The belief that on a Savannah one can enter the world of an earlier age, an epoch of man and beast, of hunter and the hunted, life as it was at the dawn of man.

The reality, though, is that when I looked down from the airplane on its descent into Jo-burg I saw a city with few differences from any I had been to before. When we drove to Nylsvley, it was on a highway beside contemporary cars—the only differences the coloring of destination signs and the flipped positions of driver and passenger. And when we went far into the park on a nighttime game drive, I mistook the glimmering lights of civilization for the eyes of an animal in the bush.