by Joseph Wallace
When I was fifteenI traveled to Africa
for the first time. I was determined to see everything, to
absorb the country through my pores. And I decided to write
everything down, to keep a detailed journal, to learn how
to write on the fly. I knew even then that I'd see things
that I'd want to remember forever.
The trip itself was so vivid that it almost seemed hallucinatory.
We camped out in the wildest corners of the savanna, chased
rhinos, survived close encounters with lions and buffalo. We
watched Ugandan police beat a confession out of a man suspected
of stealing our travelers checks, and then we barely made it out
of Uganda alive ourselves.
We climbed Mount Kilimanjaro during the height of the Perseid
meteor shower; I still remember lying on my back on the final
steep slope beneath the peak, gasping for breath at 19,000 feet
as streaks of light bloomed across the sky.
We snuck across the border between Kenya and Tanzania at
midnight, just because we could, watched only by the glowing
orange eyes of a leopard.
We encountered a haunted outhouse beside a lake ringed by four
million gabbling flamingos; the footprints of an elephant in
rainforest so dense we didn't think we could get through it; a
memorial to Queen Elizabeth that was filled with wriggling
cobras; gorillas at the feet of the Mountains of the Moon; and
more, and more.
And I wrote it down. All of it, scribbling away in hotels and on
the road and beneath canvas late at night, with unseen animals
snarling a few feet away. Pages and pages of a journal that was
the first real writing I'd ever done.
I came home, back to a life that seemed gray and dull, and most
days I'd pick up the journal and read through parts of it, just
to be reminded.
And then one day it was gone. Vanished. I searched and searched,
but I couldn't find it. Had it fallen into the trash can by
mistake? Had it gotten jammed into a library book and taken away?
Had someone stolen it? I didn't know. I still don't know. For
years afterwards I'd search through the same boxes, the same desk
drawers, expecting each time that it would be there. But it never
was. My parents moved, and I packed up my stuff into cartons and
sent it along, and the journal didn't turn up.
I took that trip to Africa twenty-seven years ago, and I know
that it's past time for me to get a life and stop thinking about
it. But as my memories of that time grow more fragmentary, I miss
that window into my distant thoughts as much as ever.
On some level I still hold out hope that someday I'll walk into a
storage room and see a box I've never noticed before. I'll open
it, and there, just like that, will be a spiral notebook with a
cover stained by sweat and red savanna dirt. Inside, in my
childish handwriting, will be: "July 1, 1972. It's my birthday,
and I'm on a flight to Kenya with nine people I don't know...."
