The Lingering Savanna

I had something like a nightmare last night.

I saw the eyes of an evil queen, as large as my fists, golden, with black blades at their centers: a lioness. She was caught in the white of a spotlight; her face came toward me in blackness. I woke, shuddering, in my cold Central apartment. I’d seen the magnificent cats in my waking life last semester, close, at night, on their haunches, staring at me from the road where we’d halted our open game vehicle. The savanna has lingered in my dreams since returning to the United States, even when I manage to stop thinking of it in my time awake.

It has been a month and a half since I woke up in South Africa—at dawn or shortly after—the red dust kicked up over the sun to make the land glow pink, and the long-billed Hardy-Dars hooting outside. About two weeks after my arrival, I stopped needing an alarm clock. About three weeks in, I lost my watch altogether.

The last time I used it to check the time, I was on the top of a mountain, in ancient ruins. The site, Thulamela, had once been part of the Great Zimbabwe civilization and it stands in the north of Kruger National Park, close to Crook’s Corner, a boundary where tips of South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe all touch. From the peak I saw the valley of the Limpopo River: brown leaves on yellow grass and copper earth, none of it green except for two vibrant stripes—riparian forest—along both sides of the sandy-bottomed gouge that would be the river when the rains came.

On that mountain, when I saw my bare wrist instead of the clock face, I decided with finality that my watch was lost, as lost as a doll of childhood, not something I would ever see again even if I looked for it in the ruins. I let go of it so easily, perhaps, because it was no longer needed. My days followed a rhythmic routine that did not require me to know the exact hour.

I re-opened my Google Calendar three days before I drove back to North Carolina in January. I put my classes in it first, different ones for each day. Then I added my regular meetings, then lunch dates and dinner dates and coffee dates and parties with friends who wanted to catch up, friends who would ask, “How was Africa?” and I’d have to respond in a single conversation. I would need to remember where I could and couldn’t park on campus and even remember which side of the car to walk to when I wanted to drive. I would bundle up in a coat and scarf and boots for the treacherous cold I swore that as a Michigan girl I’d never lose my ability to brave. But I did lose it when I learned to work in 116-degree heat without electricity for a fan and no way to keep water cold before drinking it.

I did not realize how after seven months away from a place I would forget the faces that made it up, but in my first week back, I hugged people without any recollection of the context in which I knew them. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember their names. This amnesia faded quickly, but the transition to Duke social life, having my classes in classrooms and eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is taking longer.

I know in a month or so, Duke, where each day is divided into time slots that can be filled with hundreds of activities, will seem like my regular life and the savanna will not linger as vividly. I will have my favorite Loop meals at hand, in the front of my brain, not the checklist for deciding whether an insect is a Coleopteran or Hemipteran. And maybe I will no longer dream of lions. o