Fifteen Minutes Can Last Forever

I originally published this essay in Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures:  Funny Women Write From the Road (Travelers' Tales Guides 2003).  It is a true story, although when it happened to me, it certainly wasn't very funny at the time.

The day that I nearly drowned after my raft flipped on rapid number one of twenty-six mostly Class V rapids, and I was sucked and held under the Zambezi River for what seemed like hours, I had assumed this was my one brush with death on my first trip to Africa. But just one week later, in pursuit of what a travel brochure had promised as the "complete safari experience," I found out how wrong my assumption had been.

I was on the final leg of a six-week tour that I'd taken with Sam, a friend from the States. We'd spent four days at Kayila Lodge, a private safari camp on the banks of the Lower Zambezi River in Zambia. We'd waited until our last day to take our first walking safari into the African bush with Rolf, our guide and host.

On the jetty over coffee that morning, Rolf, a Zimbabwean, lambasted the current political situation in his country of birth. He had no use for animal rights activists who threatened his part-time livelihood, big-game hunting. Nor did he care for those "damn liberals" who wanted to redistribute land by taking it from the white settlers and giving it back to the natives.

But I wasn't interested in Rolf's politics. Oozing testosterone, he gave the impression that a barehanded scuffle with a charging Cape buffalo or a thrashing crocodile was an everyday occurrence and just part of his job. Through his square-jawed, self-assured manner, he inspired complete confidence in everything he did from serving drinks to telling bush stories late into the starry evenings. Here was a man who could deliver me unharmed from the jaws of a carnivorous beast. In short, he was the quintessential man's man and safari guide.

But it wasn't just Rolf's masculine attributes that took away any trepidation I might have had about setting off into the African outback on foot. It was my ignorance. For some reason I had the whimsical notion that a walking safari would be similar to taking a stroll around the zoo, only the cages would be missing. The animals would certainly keep a respectful distance while I could admire them at my leisure. I couldn't possibly be in any real danger.

We set out early, driving a short distance into the bush in the Land Rover. Along the way, we met up with Warrix, a game scout for Kayila. Despite the fact that this grown man was the size of a young teenaged boy, he seemed formidable, armed with an AK-47 and two strings of ammunition strapped bandit-like across his narrow chest. He joined us for our trek.

We drove farther into the bush. Rolf stopped the jeep. He grabbed a .22 and a .50 caliber rifle from the trunk, tossing the .22 to Sam. We started walking.

I heard an elephant trumpet in the distance. We walked toward the sound to a small rise and saw fifty elephants in the clearing below us. It was exhilarating to be only several hundred feet away from these lumbering giants. I asked Rolf if the elephants knew we were there. He said they didn't know and that he'd hoped it would stay that way. Because of poaching, elephants have learned to associate the scent of humans with extreme danger.

But then the wind shifted.

One of the bull elephants caught our scent, panicked and trumpeted. Rolf whipped his head around and said only one word as we locked eyes, "Run!"

Run? What do you mean run? It took me several seconds to process the fact that I was in grave danger. The person I'd entrusted my life with, Mr. Oozing Testosterone, was clearly scared stiff. It took me another second or two to realize that three men armed with one weapon each couldn't do much against a herd of fifty stampeding elephants that can reach speeds of up to thirty miles an hour. But under the circumstances, with my options being severely limited, I ran.

As quickly as possible, we climbed over vines and roots, waded through thigh-level grass, skirted around bushes, and ducked under low-hanging branches. Rolf, in the lead, constantly ordered us to stay together but I kept falling behind. My heart was pounding and adrenaline coursed through my body. I heard them but couldn't see them. The sound of elephants trumpeting and charging through the bush is deafening.

One part of me knew they were coming after us, but another part of me refused to believe it. My mind played little games telling me that all I had to do was to run for a few minutes and then I would be perfectly safe. I ran as fast as I could, but like the classic nightmare where a monster is chasing you, I felt as though I was wading through quicksand.

We reached a clearing. Rolf screamed for us to drop to the ground. We dropped. Lying in the dirt, the ground reverberated, red dust swam through the air choking me. My heart beat against the earth. I could see the elephants just sixty feet away crashing through the underbrush.

We moved out again passing a tsetse fly trap. We were about twenty feet beyond the trap when Rolf screamed for us to run back to it. We stood next to the tattered cloth soaked in poison, suspended from two rods. Rolf was hoping that this flimsy piece of fabric would somehow mask the smell of four sweating, terrified human beings from fifty frenzied elephants with their acute sense of smell. I couldn't have felt more exposed had I appeared on the Larry King Live show naked.

When the thundering died down, we ran to a nearby cluster of trees. Rolf told us the herd had separated into three groups and that we were almost completely surrounded. This was information I definitely didn't need to hear at that moment since I was in a state of near-hypoxia. I did the only thing I could. I leaned my head against a tree and prayed with every fiber of my being, muttering over and over like a crazed lunatic, "Please God, don't let me die."

We had to move out again but I was frozen with fright. Rolf gripped my shoulders, pulled me towards him and held me close. It was a scene straight from a Hollywood action romance flick minus the obligatory passionate kiss and the fact that my hair was plastered to my face with sweat, my eyes bugged out with fear, and I looked like a zombie possessed.

"I know where to shoot an elephant to drop it. I've killed them before. Just stay close. But whatever you do, don't run if an elephant jumps out!" he said.

Elephants jumping out of bushes! I knew they were smart but I didn't know they were capable of hiding, lying in wait, and then launching a planned attack like a platoon of Marines.

We quietly sprinted, ducked, and tiptoed gingerly along the twenty-five-foot-high expanse of bushes, made it past, and continued on. We reached a ten-foot-tall termite mound and stopped there. Rolf said the jeep was nearby and he went off alone to get it. By this time, my emotions and the adrenaline had caught up with me and I started crying. Warrix told me I shouldn't cry because, "Madame did good."

Finally, fifteen minutes after Rolf had first ordered us to run, he drove up in the jeep. It was ten in the morning and we hadn't eaten a thing, but it seemed like the perfect time to start drinking. We each grabbed a forty-ounce Tusker from the cooler tucked under the back seat. I drank mine in about three minutes flat. It had no effect on me. I had another, not even a buzz.

At brunch an hour later, Rolf was back to his swaggering, you-call-that-a-brush-with-death self, although he'd confessed during our drinking binge that he'd had many close calls but none this close. On a scale from one to ten, with a ten described by Rolf as the four of us "looking like pieces of bacon after being gored and stomped to death," we were at nine. He'd almost shot an elephant during our ordeal so we could crawl up against the carcass to mask our smell from the rest of the herd. What a pleasant thought. Exactly how long were we supposed to stay in that position? Until the corpse began rotting and crawling with maggots? Until the vultures picked it clean? For the rest of our lives?

Many people hope for Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame. But if this experience taught me anything, it's to heed the old adage, be careful what you wish for. Sometimes fifteen minutes can last far longer than you want it to.