13/3/13
Fresh honeycomb. Either you have it or you don't. Gingerly, between two fingers and a thumb, I heft the biggest brick I've ever held. The dark honey in its complex geometric structure is quite rich, and holds together better than what you find in the market or at a state fair. It's the product of wild African honey bees, the kind that go ballistic like bloodthirsty marauders of old, and chase interlopers for miles, stinging with a long merciless memory and often killing the unlucky through sheer persistence and volume.
When we first arrived at Umkwali, our boss's house was a jumble of odds and ends, the material mishmash of a place about to undergo a renovation. The spare room we stayed in was crammed with warthog tusks, years-old office papers, vuvuzelas, cast-off toys, curtain rods, filing cabinets, a golf ball, unidentifiable odds and ends, a piston-powered airgun that I later appropriated, and a cramped low mattress. It was a relief to get into our corrugated-iron shack in the bush a few days later.
When we first arrived, the kitchen ceiling was a patchwork of soft tiles and duct tape. An ominous hum underlay the sound of printers and toasters and teaspoons clinking in mismatched mugs. It accompanied our naive conversation about conservation and culture and planning. Anthony told us the rafters above were home to a population of bees. And that the weight of the nest threatened to collapse the ceiling. It could happen at any time.
"What about your kids," I asked, nodding my chin at the high-chair in the corner.
He shrugged. "We're working on it."
Apparently there were too many bees just to fumigate the room and have done. And too many for him to rent a suit. And the handful of professionals who'd come to evaluate had retreated in horror, shaking their heads. But what was he supposed to do, just burn the whole thing down? They nodded sagely.
For our first days on the farm, any kitchen conversation was punctuated by the crack and sizzle of bees in a bug zapper. Emptying the zapper was a many-times-daily chore for the house staff. Some weeks later, they completed a renovation of the house, building shelves in the kitchen and putting up stone tiles. It was beautiful. Except the ceiling remained.
But then came the fumigation campaign. Finally they'd found some guys willing to take on the buzzing horde. In exchange, they would take the bees and the honey. Apparently there was enough to make it worth their while. With that, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
I arrive on the farm just after they've finished stripping the honeycomb from the opened ceiling, preparing to fumigate the remainder and cleanse the space. They've packed the riches in numbered boxes on stacks of pallets on a flatbed. What they couldn't fit they left for us. We revel. The brick in my hand weighs easily half a pound.
The honeycomb is almost red. I take a slow eager bite. My teeth sink in as if coming home after a long journey. Crystallized bits of honey tickle my tongue, and a natural warmth spreads to all the little crannies of my mouth, filling my soul with flavor and sweetness and gold. It's rich and faintly smoky from a previous attempt to flush out—or at least subdue—the hive. The wax is sturdy, not sticky, and keeps its integrity as I chew out the last molecules of honey. I look up, and everyone is staring. The moan dies on my lips, and I smile ruefully.
"Yum," I say.
Then I take another bite.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Circles of life
5/3/13
You can smell death from several dozen meters away. Though it's funny we call the stench death, when it's really an abundance of life. Millions of bacteria popping off; hundreds of thousands of maggots hatching and munching their way toward airborne adulthood; and however many ants can fit along a pheromone trail three centimeters wide by three or four hillocks long. Turning flesh into sugar and sugar into gas. Wretched, gag-inducing, fetid gas. The smell of life.
The smell of death is nothing. Naught. Absence. Vacuum.
But life! In teeming circles on and around this baby zebra. Awful, sweet, thick, heavy. Clinging to nostrils, to clothes, to air, to memory. I like to picture the world according to olfactory-favoring animals. I see throbbing waves of vivid color coming off this little black-and-white-striped offering. A bloom of hope for acres around, bigger than the treetops, brighter than the sun, denser than the bush. A little creature who almost was. Or rather, was for less than a season. Was for just enough to see a few glorious rainy weeks. Spared the cracking terror and daily torment of the next seven parched months of dry. He was lucky. From a certain point of view.
And so were the cheetahs, who happened upon the little guy at the edge of his herd. Perhaps he'd wandered after a butterfly, curious about this new world around. Perhaps he'd been spooked by a scorpion and run off. Perhaps he'd stumbled during a life-and-death chase. Perhaps he simply was slow.
Either way, his luck and the cheetahs' luck were inverse. Finite balance points in the universe, a tangible clockwork neutral. In the mottled shadows under the bush next to the kill lie two bloated forms, mottled shadows rising and falling in pained panting. They're resting and digesting, between stuffing themselves as full as possible. Literally as full as possible. Because who knows when their next meal will be. So they eat and rest, eat and rest, panting and lifting their heads just enough to check their surroundings, layering shreds of meat into stretched bellies, laying in calories for the next several days or weeks.
At night, hyenas close in for their turn. Too full to defend their kill, the cheetahs watch as the big slouching carnivores tear into the remains, crunching bone like rock candy, gulping greedy hunks and shredding the corpse even further where nimble little nocturnals can nibble and gnaw in safety.
By next day, the kill is little more than a stain, a trample spot in the tall grass. Splintered bones are carried off by teams of ants. Butterflies slurp up the leftover moisture. Flies return to the scene, perhaps remembering their first and final feast as maggots. A dung beetle scrapes and rolls someone's evacuation from the night before, tidying up the site. The original players are nowhere to be seen, vanishing back into the bush. Cheetahs hiding whole and fat, baby zebra split and shared and returning to dust.
You can smell death from several dozen meters away. Though it's funny we call the stench death, when it's really an abundance of life. Millions of bacteria popping off; hundreds of thousands of maggots hatching and munching their way toward airborne adulthood; and however many ants can fit along a pheromone trail three centimeters wide by three or four hillocks long. Turning flesh into sugar and sugar into gas. Wretched, gag-inducing, fetid gas. The smell of life.
The smell of death is nothing. Naught. Absence. Vacuum.
But life! In teeming circles on and around this baby zebra. Awful, sweet, thick, heavy. Clinging to nostrils, to clothes, to air, to memory. I like to picture the world according to olfactory-favoring animals. I see throbbing waves of vivid color coming off this little black-and-white-striped offering. A bloom of hope for acres around, bigger than the treetops, brighter than the sun, denser than the bush. A little creature who almost was. Or rather, was for less than a season. Was for just enough to see a few glorious rainy weeks. Spared the cracking terror and daily torment of the next seven parched months of dry. He was lucky. From a certain point of view.
And so were the cheetahs, who happened upon the little guy at the edge of his herd. Perhaps he'd wandered after a butterfly, curious about this new world around. Perhaps he'd been spooked by a scorpion and run off. Perhaps he'd stumbled during a life-and-death chase. Perhaps he simply was slow.
Either way, his luck and the cheetahs' luck were inverse. Finite balance points in the universe, a tangible clockwork neutral. In the mottled shadows under the bush next to the kill lie two bloated forms, mottled shadows rising and falling in pained panting. They're resting and digesting, between stuffing themselves as full as possible. Literally as full as possible. Because who knows when their next meal will be. So they eat and rest, eat and rest, panting and lifting their heads just enough to check their surroundings, layering shreds of meat into stretched bellies, laying in calories for the next several days or weeks.
At night, hyenas close in for their turn. Too full to defend their kill, the cheetahs watch as the big slouching carnivores tear into the remains, crunching bone like rock candy, gulping greedy hunks and shredding the corpse even further where nimble little nocturnals can nibble and gnaw in safety.
By next day, the kill is little more than a stain, a trample spot in the tall grass. Splintered bones are carried off by teams of ants. Butterflies slurp up the leftover moisture. Flies return to the scene, perhaps remembering their first and final feast as maggots. A dung beetle scrapes and rolls someone's evacuation from the night before, tidying up the site. The original players are nowhere to be seen, vanishing back into the bush. Cheetahs hiding whole and fat, baby zebra split and shared and returning to dust.
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