Gorillas in the Namib Desert - Why Writers Need Solo Time

“No, mémé, you should not do that.”   The matron at the school stood looking at me, her brows furrowed, shifting from foot to bare foot in the courtyard sand.

“Why,” I asked, “is it dangerous?”  

She hesitated, pulling a the strings that fell down from her collar.  “A woman can’t….a woman does not do this alone.”

I did not quite know how to respond.  It was clear she was worried about me, but whether it was about my safety or my reputation was not clear.   I’d been working here, at the Eluwa Special School (‘special’ because it was for deaf and blind children) for four months, and it was time for me to leave.   The group flight carrying the forty volunteers in the country back to the States did not leave for  two more weeks, but my school  ended its term more quickly than the other schools in-country that took volunteers, so I had time on my hands, and I wanted to go out to see the south Atlantic and the African coastline.  I also knew that the two women who supervised the American volunteers in country - Maggie and Josie, both considerably younger than I - regularly drove around the desert, from village to village where volunteers were placed, alone.  Perhaps that was acceptable because it was for their jobs, condoned by the Namibian government - but I intended to go adventuring, and that was different.

I’d already found a place to rent a car - I’d rented one once before to take a group of fellow volunteers to visit the nomadic Himba tribe in the northeastern reaches of the country.  In nearby Ongwediva - a semi-westernized town with markets and a few stoplights (called “robots” by the locals),  the office of a rental-car company whose name I recognized from American ads was  in an upstairs office in a cement block building without elevators or AC.  The young man behind the desk recognized me from the first rental, and was happy to take my American credit card again - as it turns out, continuing to submit charges on it for six months after I had left Namibia, until I finally had to close the account.  I believe that I got the same car both times - a little white coupe of some European make that I didn’t recognize, with deep red upholstery inside.  

I suppose there was danger.   Two of my fellow volunteers had suffered attacks and thefts in the city of Windhoek during our initial orientation, and certainly there were dangers in the desert.  Long stretches of lightly maintained roads, in a countryside filled with wild animals and few people - but a childhood in Montana, where vast reaches of land could be driven without encountering another soul, and which was also filled with its own share of wild animals, did not make this particular caution seem too problematic to me.  I had never felt unsafe in Ongwediva, the town where I worked, since I’d arrived, and I’d enjoyed the other (briefer) trips I’d taken around the countryside by myself or with other volunteers from nearby villages.  I’d walked the six mile stretch of desert road between Ongwediva and Oshakati alone, I’d been to cuca shops alone, and ridden in back of bakkes (pickup trucks) bouncing across the desert, and risked my life many times in the rusted metal carcasses referred to by the locals as ‘taxis,’ once accompanied by five other travelers, a stack of luggage that would make a burly baggage handler  blanch, and a goat.  I wasn’t afraid of driving around myself in a relatively recent model rental car.  That  was, perhaps, foolish, but, nevertheless, off I went.

Three days - and a considerable amount of adventures - later, I arrived at the wild south Atlantic coast unharmed.  I had a destination -  Walvis Bay - but took my time.   I was raised in the high mountains of Montana, and there were sights that, as a child, I never would have been capable of foreseeing:   thousands of pink flamingos gathered in the shallow water of a sheltered bay; an enormous gorilla sunning himself in the middle of the desert road, not seeming to realize how

completely out of place he was in the desert;  the amazing red dunes of the Namib sweeping down to the foam-white Atlantic.   I’d stayed overnight at a roadhouse meant for those on safari, where the doors didn’t lock and all night the hot breezes through the window shifted the necessary mosquito netting around the bed.  At breakfast the following morning, I’d spoken with travellers from all parts of the world.  I’d passed through multiple road blocks with men in camoflauge and rifles slung over their shoulders.  I’d encountered three women in an unlikely roadside stop which had an ACTUAL bathroom, and who spoke the remarkable “clicking” language that area of the world is so famous for, but spoke no English at all, and yet we were able to communicate.

So many memories - accumulated on a trip taken entirely solo.  It isn’t the only solo adventuring I’ve done - and it wasn’t my first.  I recall once, travelling to an archeological dig, I discovered that there was not a campsite for the volunteers (or ‘diggers’) but a few local camp sites were

recommended by the assistant archeologist organizing the dig. Checking in to one near the river, a small campground surrounded by deep forest, the somewhat grizzled  site caretaker looked over  my shoulder, checking out my jeep and its contents.  “You’re camping alone?”  I nodded, digging the campground fee out of my back pocket.  He shook his head.  “Well, you’re brave.”  There were adventures on that trip, too - some in the daytime as I worked with fellow volunteers at the dig site, others in the solo dark nights at my camp.

This morning I was saying to a friend from my Africa trip that it would have been nice to have someone to share memories of that solo trip with, but, almost immediately, I realized that I was wrong.  It was their very solo nature that has made those memories so much to be treasured - that I am the only one who knows what happened with the gorilla, or at those roadblocks, or what conversation was passed around the breakfast table at that safari-inn.  None of these memories will be passed around a bar table over beers shared with friends, laughed at and shared in mutual memory, because there is no mutuality to them - they are mine.

It is these kinds of memories the writer needs - the un-shared ones, as much as the shared.  Perhaps needs even more.  It is these memories which shape us in the privacy of our minds and hearts. Not just the big memories - gorillas and guns on an African highway - but the little ones - the stretched-out-in-bed alone time, or the sitting-on-a-park-bench thinking time.  It is through these moments, taken and experienced alone, that we understand who we are, which is the only thing that makes it possible for us to understand who our characters might be.