Bill Murray's Blog, page 56
July 9, 2018
Africa Vignette 10: Over Namibia
Late in the afternoon, as the light over the Sossusvlei turns sideways, a Cessna gains speed, pounding along the grass strip as a pilot named Lindy, an unsettlingly young girl with blond hair and blazing blue eyes, lifts us into the air for a trip out over the Namibian dunes.
Sometimes they run safaris on the beach (55 kilometers away), she explains, and it is most vital that if we see any cars we must let her know immediately!
That’s curious. Why?
They could spoil our fun, she grins. We are required to fly at 3000 feet, but out there we will joy ride at 500. Where in all this world can you flaunt the rules if not on the desolate coast of bloody Namibia?
They’ve numbered the dunes 1 to 70 or 80 by the road from the Sesreim gate to Sossusvlei. Lindy pinwheels the Cessna around Dune 45, a star dune that like certain celebrities has become famous for being famous. While Dune 45 is tall and striking in its own right, it is best known because it is close to the road and lots of people climb it.
Dune 45
Bernard, driving this morning, stopped for us to see it, too, and indeed, folks had already scaled Dune 45 and were clamoring back down. Before sundown though, dune 45 and all of the other dunes stand deserted. Everyone must leave the park at night.
We do a long turn around “Big Daddy,” which they repute to be the world’s tallest sand dune, and in the same sweep, take in the dead vlei and Sossusvlei, and the dune we climbed that morning. They call that one “Big Mama.”
The road ends here. Here to the shore, nothing but dunes, horizon to horizon. No place for engine trouble.
The coast gains focus, and in time we cruise over a fallen-in diamond mining settlement, its man-made perpendiculars entirely out of sorts with the natural swirls of the desert that resemble nothing more organized than crumpled bed sheets.
We swoop down low along the water’s edge above seal colonies, thousands of seals lounging for miles up the coast, up to the wreck of the Eduard Bohlen, a cargo ship that ran aground in fog back 1909 and still lies in place, four hundred meters from the coast.
The Eduard Bohlen
•••••
See more photos from Namibia in the Namibia Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
Africa Vignettes is a weekly series most Mondays this summer on CS&W.
South Tirol Time Lapse
One of these days, I want to live in the South Tirol for a season or two. Lovely, lovely place.
July 6, 2018
Quotes: Climate Change? Where? Here?
“Several local authorities including Hampshire, Cumbria, Kirklees, Cornwall and Lancashire deployed gritters to dust sand on roads as a form of sunscreen for the tarmac.””
– News today. From the article “Sinkhole traps truck as UK heatwave takes toll on roads.”
July 2, 2018
Africa Vignette 9: The Man-Eater of Mfuwe
It’s more of a story than a vignette this week, the tale of a man-eating lion.
THE MAN-EATER OF MFUWE
Besides being visited by just about everyone who comes to the South Luangwa Park, the little town of Mfuwe, Zambia, will forever be known for the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, a lion that killed six people over two months in 1991.
Of the big cats, there are more famous man-eating tigers than lions in the literature, maybe because tigers and people live in closer proximity in India than lions and people in Africa. In fact, there’s an estimate of as many as 10,000 people killed by tigers in India in the nineteenth century.
The Champawat Tigress was said to have killed 436 people before she was killed in British colonial India in 1911, the year British King George traveled to Delhi to be crowned Emperor.
In Kenya’s Tsavo Park two lions killed perhaps two dozen railroad construction workers, halting the project to connect the interior with Mombasa in British East Africa in 1898.
The Mfuwe man-eater was no colonial-era killer. Its attacks occurred less than thirty years ago, thoroughly terrorizing the little community, then home to scarcely a thousand, a spare hundred miles west of the border with Malawi.
The first attack occurred as two boys walked along a road at night. One boy got away, but responding game rangers found only clothing and fragments of the other boy’s skull.
The second victim was a woman. The lion crashed through the door of her rondavel on the edge of her village.
The third attack was nearly foiled by a nearby ranger, who fired his gun, but the victim, a young boy, was bitten and died of his wounds.
Three more attacks were to come. People began to believe this was no ordinary lion, but a devil or medicine man taking the shape of a lion.
•••••
Wayne Hosek wasn’t the first to try to kill it. Two other professional hunters tried, but Hosek finally brought the man-eater down.
Today the lion is on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. 3.2 meters long, 1.2 meters at the shoulder and estimated at 249 kilos, it was male, and it was mane-less, similar in that way to the man-eating lions of Tsavo.
The lack of mane led some to assume at first they were after a lioness. A lioness was killed early in the Mfuwe terror and people believed they’d got the man-eater, but then a male lion entered a woman’s hut and stole a bag of laundry, taking the bag into the village and roaring over it.
Remarkably, as a child, the man who ultimately brought down the Mfuwe man-eater studied the man-eaters of Tsavo at the Field Museum in Chicago. Wayne Allen Hosek was born in Chicago.
As a boy, Hosek spent days standing in front of the Tsavo lions, trying to imagine the feeling of being in front of the real thing, as he put it, with nothing but a few seconds separating him from their wrath. He says the Field Museum has always been one of his favorite places on earth.
Hosek’s battle with the Mfuwe man-eater stretched across nine days, from September 1 to 9, 1991. The first day he met the hunter who had shot the lioness. Everyone hoped that solved the problem of the man-eater, but days later, two days before the hunter returned home to Japan, the sixth victim was attacked.
Hosek’s description, a pdf in the Field Museum’s archives, is unclear and incomplete, reading as an early draft of an incomplete story (Hosek later wrote a book.). There’s even a place in the .pdf where his narrative reads “SECTION TO COME.”
In that section perhaps Hosek would have introduced us to his hunting companions, for later we are assumed to already know “Charl” (Charl Beukes, another professional hunter), who was with Hosek the night the animal is killed.
Hosek began by visiting villages where the lion had been spotted, talking to people, learning about the cat’s behavior. The killer had dragged the last victim, a woman named Jesleen, from her rondavel in the Luangwa valley village of Ngozo, home to Kunda Bantu people.
The day after Jesleen was killed the lion walked into her home in the middle of the day and took a white bag with some of her clothing. People frantically beat on pots and pans to scare the lion away. It was seen playing with the bag like a cat with catnip. The bag was later found in a dry river bed a mile from Jesleen’s house.
Village women would wash their family’s clothes here, by walking to the middle of the riverbed and digging down to water. As Hosek writes, on this day “(e)ven the hornbills lounging in the riverbed seemed to be giving the bag a wide berth.”
Phillip Caputo, in Ghosts of Tsavo, writes that at this point Hosek’s trackers wouldn’t look him in the eye, and two of them wouldn’t look at him, as if they resented his getting them into all this.
The village elders decided the bag was bewitched and the lion was a sorcerer or a demon, “or at least demon possessed,” and villagers would not go near the bag. Authorities instituted a curfew at 5:00 over an area of some 65 square miles.
The hunters laid bait near the bag to keep the lion near and retired to camp. Hosek’s companion Charl counseled, “Remember to follow-up HARD as soon as you make your first shot.” Hosek, a devout Christian, woke repeatedly that night, and each time, he prayed.
The next day they built a blind using bamboo and elephant grass cut by villagers. Charl shot a small hippo and laid a haunch in the riverbed. They spent an uneventful night. The lion didn’t take the bait, but by day the hunters found its tracks some fifty feet from the blind.
The following day the hunters entered the blind at 3:30. Hosek writes of what he calls ‘blind sleep” – “my eyes were closed, but my ears seemed to have acquired an ability to listen to each and every sound.”
Again they didn’t see the lion, but by now, “(t)he man-eater had become the center of my life’s purpose.”
They adopted a new strategy. They would build a new blind elsewhere, hang bait, then leave the blind empty, in hopes the lion would get comfortable at the absence of its stalkers. Others built the blind so the cat wouldn’t get the scent of the hunters.
Charl selected the site. He felt that the lion was clever enough never to let the hunters spy him standing still, and that it would be moving whenever it allowed them to see it. He counseled that ultimately, therefore, they should expect to have no more than 2.5 to 3 seconds to take their shot.
When the hunters made their way to the new blind they saw that the man-eater had torn off part of the bait and had eaten it in a footpath used by villagers. As Hosek tried to take a photo of the lion’s tracks, his camera broke.
As a Christian, he took it as “possibly a sign from The Lord.” As he pointed out, the villagers saw the lion as a witch or a demon. They had their spirituality. Hosek had his.
On the day of the lion’s death, the hunters entered the new blind, again about 3:30. In less than an hour Charl spotted movement in tall grass. The lion approached in line with the trunk of a tree, masking his visibility. Hosek writes that he was “in a quick stride, almost trotting.”
Hosek shot the lion below and behind its left shoulder, and it was dead. One of the trackers sang the Kunda lion song and villagers converged on the place, spitting on the lion and beating it with sticks. Celebratory fires lit up the horizon.
•••••
I asked Adrian Carr, a member of the Norman Carr Safaris clan, about Hosek’s account. Carr found it to be “pretty accurate and factual.”
Carr played a role in the man-eater story, but downplayed his role as minor. He sat up for him one night, saw him but never managed to get a shot.
Here is what he says:
“I had got involved because one of my workers insisted that I come and see something.
He had got up in the night and gone outside for a wee. The lion had tried to catch him but somehow he got back in to his hut – the lion followed him in and he miraculously managed to get back out again – though the door. All this in the pitch black with all the terrifying growling. It was a small mud hut without windows and luckily he had been alone. The doors are on the inside opening inwards – so when he got back out he pulled the door closed and the lion was stuck inside. This is what he wanted me to see. It was like a bomb had gone off inside – the lion had totally destroyed everything including the roof from where he had eventually got out.
I then put a bait up nearby (a hippo haunch) and the same lion fed on it that night – he had a big distinctive track.
I decided to sit up for him the next night.
My plan was to commandeer one of the cylindrical grain storage bins (kokwe) around the village as a blind or shelter.
It was September (I think) and the grain storage bins were mostly empty. Traditionally they are made from split bamboo and woven together very tightly. They are quite heavy, very strong and I felt (in the daylight) impregnable. I would plonk myself down on the ground 30 yards from the bait – the basket, 6 feet in diameter and 8 feet high would be placed over me, I would cut a little window to shoot through and await developments….
I was a bit late arriving that afternoon, – a small crowd gathered. I dispatched 5 strong men to go and collect a kokwe and received some quizzical looks…
I watched as one guy sauntered up to the kokwe and effortlessly lifted it up above his head!
Oh dear…. !! Made of millet stalks instead of bamboo! That’s like pith and balsa wood with no strength at all.
Too late however to do anything else if I was to retain my casual demeanor and reputation of aloof imperturbability and disdain for the magical beliefs that are always associated with man-eating lions.
Privately, of course, I was seriously doubting the wisdom of the whole enterprise!
He came soon after midnight. Or at least that’s when I first became aware of him. I could hear his footfall circling my paper-bag fortress. My two heavy rifles, three flashlights and a handgun were little comfort. It went quiet for a bit and then I heard him feeding on the bait. I let him settle in to the feeding for 20 minutes and then put the light on him. I still have the mental image of him standing up on his hind legs, very big and tall, maneless and pale. I was ready to shoot but the instant the light hit him he dropped and was gone. He never came back and Charl and Wayne got him two nights later.”
•••••
Quotes from Adrian Carr come from email correspondence kindly arranged some time ago by Norman Carr Safaris. My thanks to the Carr family and Adrian Carr.
See lots of African wildlife in the Animals and Wildlife Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
Africa Vignettes is a weekly series most Mondays this summer on CS&W.
June 30, 2018
Quotes: Our Leadership, Our Peril
No good shall come of this,
“an instance of the president of the United States offering an incentive to dismantle an organsation of America’s allies, against stated US government policy”
– From Trump is trying to destabilize the European Union in the Washington Post. It describes “a private meeting at the White House in late April, (in which) Trump was discussing trade with French President Emmanuel Macron.”
An individual American leader unilaterally dismantling alliances is not normal, and Mr. Trump’s inclination flies in the face of virtually all opinion among policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic. The Trump/Macron meeting was followed by an acrimonious summit in early June with the leaders of the big western economies and Japan, after which the American president tweeted ad hominem attacks aimed at his Canadian host, calling Justin Trudeau “very dishonest and weak.” His tweets came as Mr. Trump flew to his summit with the North Korean dictator.
Next comes the NATO summit, in which
“European and some American officials say they dread the same pattern — a noisy, divisive NATO summit, damaging deterrence, followed by a chummy meeting with a dictator, in this case Mr. Putin, whose long-term goals are to destabilize the European Union, undermine NATO and restore Russian influence over Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans.””
“Even senior American officials said they had no clarity on Mr. Trump’s intentions for this meeting. They have told senior European officials that a lot will depend on Mr. Trump’s mood as he arrives and what is being highlighted on his favorite American news media outlets such as Fox News.”
This, too, is not even approximately normal and shows an American leader apparently intent on dismantling the structure of the North Atlantic’s backbone postwar alliance against the advice of just about every serving American and NATO official.
Then there is this:
“Mr. Trump’s past comments suggest that he thinks that there is some NATO treasury to which members owe dues, and that allies are behind on their payments.”
– From the same article. If this statement is true it reveals an elected American president in no way prepared to engage intellectually with his allies – or adversaries.
And a headline today:
“U.S. assessing cost of keeping troops in Germany as Trump battles with Europe“
•••••
Meanwhile on the home front: in The Collapse of the Never-Trump Conservatives, the Trumpist American Spectator argues that
“With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era….”
This on the strength of Mr. Trump simultaneously holding office and breathing, because his party served up his first Supreme Court appointee for him to choose on taking office and his second came because of a retirement.
I’m afraid Mr. Trump’spresidency is indeed consequential, not because he is conservative, for he demonstratively has no core ideology, but for nothing more than his luck of the Supreme Court draw.
But of course there’s more. Last quote:
Vladimir Putin looked Trump in the eye and lied to him. We negotiate with Russia at our peril
This is the headline from an article written last summer by current National Security Advisor John R. Bolton. The article appeared in the conservative London Telegraph and was reprinted by the business-friendly American think tank the American Enterprise Institute. Yet there was Bolton on Wednesday in Moscow announcing the Trump/Putin Helsinki summit “in hopes of soothing U.S.-Russia tensions.”
This is the same John R. Bolton who made The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First in the Republican house organ, the Wall Street Journal. But that was back in February, when Mr. Bolton was just an interested observer.
Shall we believe Mr. Bolton’s previous lifetime of work was all just posturing to ingratiate the bellicose American right? That now, since March, Mr. Bolton understands the need to overriding need to have tea and photo-ops with dictators?
What is it with power?
June 29, 2018
Weekend Reading
A few more interesting articles for you to sink your teeth into this weekend:
How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port by Maria Abi-Habib in the New York Times. Graft and intrigue in the southern resort town of Hambantota, Sri Lanka.
The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber by J. B. MacKinnon at Nautil.us. Alex Honnold doesn’t experience fear like the rest of us.
The great firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s internet shutdown by Elizabeth C Economy in The Guardian. The largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world.
A Rattle with Death in Yosemite by Kyle Dickman in Outside Magazine. Don’t ever, ever, ever get bitten by a rattlesnake.
After the Fall by John Lanchester in the LRB. Lanchester is such a great writer. Yep, even on the aftermath of the 2008 credit crunch.
I’m compiling a few worrisome quotes by/about our, um, leadership for over the weekend, and we’ll be back to Africa with another vignette on Monday. For now, a good weekend to you.
June 25, 2018
Africa Vignette 8: Dining with Elephants
Luangwa Park, Zambia
We’re dining at a long table set on the lawn under the stars. The proprietors, Georgina and Denis, lived in the remote northern town of Broome, Australia (population then 9,000), and Georgina is telling improbable stories about people thereabouts who compete in competitions using whips, extinguishing candles and the like. People, says she, like “Jack the Whipper.”
It’s all silly and we are laughing and gabbling on when, from the other end of the table, Denis cuts us off in an urgent voice. “Georgina, Bill, will you please be QUIET. There’s an elephant right THERE.”
And there are seven. One at the edge of the trees, and as she grazes her way onto the lawn, another and another, then another follow. Denis commands that everybody, including a table of Lusaka bankers drinking over at the pavilion, sit perfectly quiet and still.
They say elephants can’t see much but shapes in the dark, but they can see movement. So there the nine of us sit, immobile and transfixed. The bankers flee to a chalet and watch from a window. The elephants eat their way to not ten feet from the table and you have never thought elephants were so big until you’re looking up at them, stuck with your legs under a table, hoping nobody sneezes.
The night crackles alive. Hyenas call and we can’t flee to our room because the elephants have stopped to eat between here and there. Earlier, a hippo took over the road. Abraham observed laconically as we sat waiting, “You have to give a hippo room to maneuver.” Words to live by.
Once we’re home the elephants put on a hard-to-sleep-after show, tearing at the trees behind the patio, even putting the occasional elephant foot on our stairs just an arm’s length away as we cower and watch through the cracked-open door.
•••••
See photos from Zambia in the Zambia Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
Africa Vignettes is a weekly series most Mondays this summer on CS&W.
June 23, 2018
Quotes: Victory Diet?
“We are making corn tortillas that taste like glory.”
– Mexican soccer team nutritionist Beatriz Boullosa
The Mexican team brought two tons of food with them to Russia.
June 22, 2018
Weekend Reading
Searching for some meaty articles to sink your teeth into this weekend? A few suggestions:
Address by Minister Freeland when receiving Foreign Policy’s Diplomat of the Year Award at the Canadian government’s web site. An appeal to America’s better angels from Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.
Disposable America: A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw. Seriously. by Alexia C. Madrigal at theatlantic.com
Cleaning up Chelyabinsk, at meduza.io
Some revealing background on Matteo Salvini, now Italy’sinterior minister and deputy prime minister, b Stephanie Kirchgaessner at The Guardian, and
Going nowhere fast. Is particle physics in crisis? by Ben Allanach at Aeon:
“null results are now encrusting the hull of the Standard Model, like barnacles on a beautiful old frigate, and dragging her down to the ocean floor. It looks like the centuries-long quest for top-down unification has stalled, and particle physics might have a full-blown crisis on its hands.”
Have an entertaining weekend. See you next week.
June 21, 2018
30 Days at Sea
30 days in ten minutes.
