The Best of Friends Read online

  Hosting the Miss Universe pageant was a coup for Namibia, a chance to showcase the country’s beauty, diversity, and infrastructure to an international audience. One junket designed for some of the beauty queens and members of the media was a trip to Etosha National Park. But in order to file their stories, the press needed telephone lines. They got them. When Telecom Namibia installed direct-dial telephone service to Etosha, it meant reporters could send faxes and talk directly to their editors, things they took for granted. For us it meant no more straining to identify your sequence of rings, no more booking calls hours in advance, and no more sharing private conversations with uninvited ears. After five years of connecting to the outside world through radios and party lines, I could finally call my family, Sara, and other friends and they could call me. Person to person. It felt like a lifeline.

  The other source of relief was a lifeline in the most fundamental sense. One day Nad raced into the house shouting, “Come on, grab your cameras, let’s go.”

  I stopped typing and my bewildered gaze prompted him to add, “An elephant needs help. Fast.”

  Fifteen minutes later we walked around Homob, a waterhole in central Etosha, where black mud treacherous as quicksand held a huge elephant in its grip. Attempting to quench its thirst, the elephant had stepped too far out into the waterhole, landing in a quagmire. The mud gripped him and didn’t let go. As the elephant struggled, it opened pockets of air for the mud to expand into, further strengthening its hold on the elephant. The harder he struggled, the deeper he sank. Inch by inch, the mud consumed his massive body until his head, ears, and trunk were all that could be seen. The rest was buried deep in the thick black mud.

  “Can you believe it?” We shook our heads and waited as other vehicles arrived, full of men, ropes, shovels, and ideas. The elephant flapped his ears and trumpeted in vain to try to scare us away. A South African cameraman, poised to capture the scene of lions and hyenas ending this struggle between life and death, packed up his gear and drove away, disgusted. Spoiling his day felt good. Now we just had to find a way to get this massive ten-ton elephant out. We started digging.

  Hour after hour, we dug. Several of us close to the elephant’s body dug with our hands, while others used shovels, tossing thick black mud onto the bank of the waterhole. We backed away, exhausted, while the elephant remained planted in the mud, defenseless. But we had managed to ease the pressure on him, and he was about to exploit this. The elephant strained, pushing through the mud to expose the top of his shoulders. He stopped. It was our turn.

  We dug, we pulled, we labored. We waited. The elephant pushed through the mud, turning on his side, exposing part of his huge belly to the open air. Caked from head to toe in mud, we started digging again. I was so immersed in the action that I didn’t realize where I was kneeling until I felt something leathery quake beneath me. It was the elephant’s leg. And suddenly I realized just how vulnerable I’d been. At any time in the past thirty minutes, he could have lashed out, sending me flying into the bush, but he hadn’t. He waited, not moving until we were spent and it was his turn to push through the mud. It was an amazing union of effort and understanding, silent communication and shared purpose.

  Six hours after we arrived, we tied ropes around the elephant’s body and attached the other ends to a powerful Land Cruiser. “Ready?” the driver called. Tires spun, mud flew, and the elephant slid forward. As soon as his feet felt firm earth, he kicked, righting his body and standing to his full twelve-foot height. And as I looked up at that muddy, towering elephant, relishing his newfound freedom, something released in me, too. I would stop feeling so damn sorry for myself and make things happen, starting with finishing the baboon film.

  Fortunately the Bartletts had the same idea. They planned to finish their epic saga of life on Namibia’s untamed Skeleton Coast, a series that had been sixteen years in the making. They’d hired editors in England to begin the process, and the baboon film would be the fifth and final film of the series. It was a huge leap of faith. Would our images be good enough to tell the baboons’ extraordinary story? With little experience, we’d trusted our instincts, but were they in sync with the international television market from which we were so far removed? There was no buyer for the film and no guarantee there ever would be. The Bartletts would be risking tens of thousands of dollars on our film, on us. It was a vote of confidence I desperately needed. Finishing the film also meant a ticket home. I’d fly into JFK, run around New York with Sara, and then go to Richmond to visit my family, whom I hadn’t seen in a year and a half.

  “COME ON. It’s your last night here, let’s go for a drive.” Nad and I drove out onto the plains, stopping at Okondeka where a sliver of water disappears into a mirage on Etosha Pan. Zebras filed past, the air cooled, the sun set. A flock of sand grouse descended on the waterhole for a final drink. When they flew away, their chorus of gentle cooing and mass of wingbeats was replaced by quiet, a deep silence that one of us needed to break.

  After five years together, we could no longer drift through our relationship without a commitment. From the dramas of sharing the baboons’ lives to caring for a dying rhino, we were a good team. Our relationship had a rich, wonderful past, one that stirred feelings of love and respect. But was it enough? It was time to decide if our relationship had a future. To part seemed unfathomable, but then again, so did making a commitment. Our conversation went something like this:

  “Should we?”

  “I guess.”

  “It makes sense.”

  “Yeah, it should be okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as I’ll ever be.”

  “Okay, then, yes, I will.”

  About as romantic as a thermos flask. No phone call home to ask my father’s permission, no falling down on one knee or producing a brilliant diamond ring. An offhand proposal spoken into the wind which would seal our future. Getting married was the logical next step in our long relationship. So now not only was I going home to finish the baboon film, I was going back to the U.S. an engaged woman.

  16

  SARA (1994–1995)

  I WAS STANDING AT the Hertz rental car desk already holding the keys to a bright red Miata. What was the fun of being in California if you couldn’t drive a convertible? With the story finished, this part of my trip was for pleasure. A few months before, my trip to the West Coast had been drastically different. I’d been in Los Angeles covering devastating wildfires for Nightly News and the Today show when Dateline executive producer Neal Shapiro had asked if I could report live for his broadcast as well. It turned out to be a sort of unofficial audition, and now Dateline had assigned me to profile a quixotic, charming pioneer by the name of Peter Bird who hoped 1995 would be the year he’d finally accomplish his goal of rowing solo across the vast Pacific. The shoot had gone well, and now Andrew had joined me in San Francisco for the weekend. As Katie Couric had quipped, “He can be the transition guy.” Besides, I now found it easy to ignore the nine-year age difference. Most of the time.

  “So there’s your license, Miss James, and I’ll just take a quick look at yours, sir,” said the man behind the desk. Seconds later his official smile sagged into a frown.

  “I’m afraid Miss James will have to do all the driving.”

  “Sorry?” Andrew replied. We’d been dating for about a month and it hadn’t taken even that long to learn Andrew was expert behind the wheel of any and everything, from trucks to cars to the occasional motorcycle, which drove my mom crazy.

  “Sorry, you have to be twenty-five to drive a rental car in the U.S. And it says here—you’re twenty-four.” Andrew looked at me ruefully and we both laughed. Transition Guy, Boy Toy, I was having too much fun to notice.

  BUT THE CONTINENTAL drift became harder to ignore. A few months later Andrew moved to Tokyo to become Japan correspondent for the Melbourne Herald Sun and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspapers. I ran the numbers. There was the twelv
e-hour time difference. The thirteen-hour flight. The fact that I was thirty-three years old. The hundreds of attractive, eligible women he’d meet. Ever the optimist, I gave the relationship a 7 percent chance of success.

  But somehow we didn’t break up. We talked virtually every day, and every few months one of us got on a plane—including one flight courtesy of Dateline. Hearing that I had a boyfriend in Tokyo, Neal decided I was the perfect correspondent to send to Japan and China to report on a notorious World War II prison camp in Manchuria known as Unit 731. My boss turned out to be a lot more understanding of my relationship than many of my friends, including Ginger. Unable to lecture me in person, Gin sent a series of increasingly urgent e-mails before reluctantly accepting the situation with, “Just as long as it’s nothing serious.” The P.S.—“But don’t say I didn’t warn you”—didn’t need to be written.

  But I found having a long-distance boyfriend actually fit perfectly with my pell-mell life. In those days, it seemed I was always on a plane heading somewhere, and I loved it. Almost all of the time. April 19, 1995, was one of the exceptions.

  News of the explosion at the Murrah Federal Building reminded me of the bombing at the World Trade Center in New York two years before when a truck carrying explosives had gone off in the basement of one of the buildings. Six people had been killed and another thousand injured on that day, and my throat tightened as I wondered what the death toll would be in Oklahoma City.

  But no one knew. “From the look of that building, there may be a lot of victims,” the assignment editor told me. “And, Sara—the bomb went off just after nine local time. A lot of parents had just dropped their kids off at the day care center on site.”

  I felt my stomach lurch. The fact that adults had lost their lives was terrible enough. I couldn’t bring myself to think about the children.

  I hung up and dashed for the airport, catching an NBC News charter with Tom Brokaw and several producers. Who could have done this? I wondered, and could only imagine it must have been foreign terrorists. I was wrong, of course—most of us were—but only about nationality. As America learned that day, any ideology stoked by hate and fed on anger is combustible. And terrorism can happen anywhere.

  Before and since Oklahoma City I have covered many disasters. Too many, I think, now that I am older and the cumulative weight of them seeps into dreams, makes ordinary anxieties loom larger than they otherwise might. I have never grown accustomed to the metallic, bloody taste of fear. Worse yet, the plot is invisible until long after the fact. Sometimes it feels as though you’re driving through Spanish moss, trying to glimpse the truth through trailing vines. It’s not always clear who the good guys are, much less whether they’ll carry the day.

  After so many years as a journalist I find I’ve grown less certain, less confident than I was back then, but I know this much: I became a reporter because I hoped the plot would be clearer if I saw things up close and could do my own detective work. Because I was young and brazenly certain I was fair and objective and could report anything without exposing the flank of my own feeling. Because I was nosy and passionate, because I liked to read and write and ask questions. Because I loved roller coasters and caffeine and downhill skiing and scuba diving, but the rush wasn’t enough. Because I held some twisted belief that life lived in the shadow of guns would prove more real, that in such a crucible I’d be forced to make choices which would reveal who I truly was. Because I wanted to be reporter Martha Gellhorn or pilot Beryl Markham and see the rough, tattered edges of the world before they were mugged of mystery. And I also became a reporter because I was an idealist and thought travel would confirm my prejudice that we humans have much in common and can resolve our differences if we choose. I still count myself an idealist but a chastened one, because along the way I’ve learned too much about the unenlightened self-interest of the human species. I’ve been forced to witness a creative potential for extraordinary evil which all too often obscures our enlightened, but sluggish impulse for good.

  When I landed in Oklahoma City that day, I teamed up with two Dateline producers I’d never met before, Marsha Bartel and Lisa Semel. Years later I can still hear the scrunch of our shoes as we picked our way through the broken glass from the blown-out windows of the federal building. I can still smell the acrid, sickening, poisonous air, still remember how I gasped upon seeing that once-imposing edifice up close for the first time, its façade ripped away to reveal crumpled walls, mangled steel, a desk teetering over the abyss. What had become of the man or woman who sat there, who’d been answering the phone or typing a letter? Had they survived? Who had done this? And how could it have happened?

  Fueled by adrenaline and desperate for answers, we worked day into night into the frosty, bitter dawn, emerging to rub our eyes against the glare of a sky stained like broken ice. I was unaware of what I ate, when I slept, especially since sleep was little more than a three-hour collapse, still in my suit, onto a hotel mattress, to arise, shower, and head for the next assignment.

  Because the story in Oklahoma City was immense and multifaceted, Dateline’s executive producer and senior staff in New York assigned different teams to cover each element. While our colleagues handled the investigation, Marsha, Lisa, and I reported on the search for the missing, the vigil of the waiting.

  Appearing as streaks of blaze orange and brilliant yellow, rescue workers combed through the treacherous rubble, using their dogs to search for survivors. I jumped at the wail of sirens, and ached at the sight of heads bowed in prayer. Each action, each sound became intertwined, until the hours turned into days, the temperature plunged, a cold rain fell, and as the term “rescue” gave way to “recovery,” it became clear these men and women risked not only their lives but their equally fragile hearts. When we caught up with a rescue worker named Russ Bovay, he pulled aside his breathing mask to talk and his bright blue eyes were ringed in red. “If my family was in there I would want…” He paused, composed himself. “I’d like every last effort made. But after it gets so long and this type of collapse—it’s tough.”

  After four long days, a devastating answer could be better than no answer at all, as we learned from Betty Lewis after the body of her forty-three-year-old daughter Charlotte was found. With great composure Betty told us, “I feel better now we don’t have to worry that she’s there in the cold with all those bodies. So I have more peace.”

  I thought it couldn’t get any harder. I was wrong.

  Our team was assigned a story about the first day in a new location for the children who’d attended the day care center in the basement of the Murrah building. Counselors were on hand, including one who had brought a pet monkey. I thought of Ginger. She would have loved how the bright-eyed chimp captivated the little boys and girls and helped them settle in. And while it was hard to see so many little kids with bandaged heads and bruised arms, multiple stitches covered by Lion King Band-Aids, we knew they were the lucky ones. Nineteen children had been murdered that day.

  Twenty-three-year-old Edye Smith was a secretary for the IRS, and her children attended the America’s Kids day care center just a few blocks away. When the truck bomb exploded, Edye’s three-year-old son Chase had died immediately. Two-year-old Colson was pulled from the wreckage but died in a rescuer’s arms.

  “Since they had to die, I’m glad they died together,” Edye told us brokenly. “I couldn’t have dealt with seeing one of them grieve over the loss of the other one, and it would have been hard to try to explain it, especially to the older one.”

  As I listened to this young mother, a woman ten years my junior, speak of her beloved sons, I found it increasingly hard to breathe, and felt I might suffocate from the weight of so much sadness. But Edye wasn’t finished. She told us that as difficult as it was to talk about losing her boys, it was also a way for her to heal. And she wanted to pay tribute to her children, both for all they had been and for all they had not been allowed to become.

  In the warm, inviting home Edye and
the boys shared with her parents, Kathy and Glenn Wilburn, we were entrusted with precious home videos to use in our story. There were the boys, splashing at the beach. Making their first snowman. And, just two weeks before the bombing, toting twin blue baskets as they hunted for Easter eggs.

  “You know, Chase always wanted to be a star,” Edye confided. “So everybody is going to know what he looks like, and know who he was, and that he was special.”

  But it was when she spoke about dropping them off at school that morning that I thought I might splinter like the windows of the federal building. She spoke of how the boys had been eating donuts all the way to school, and how when she’d dropped them off and prepared to leave, Colton at first had refused to give her a kiss. “So I pretended to cry and I turned around to walk out and he goes, ‘Kiss, hug, Mommy kiss.’ So I gave him a kiss and he wanted to kiss me again so I kissed him again and I got crumbs on my face.” As she paused, I could imagine it all, my tears stung, then she continued, “I walked over to where Chase was playing on the floor with the other children and he wanted to give me a kiss, and he gave me a hug and he said, ‘I love you, Mommy.’” By now the broken voice had faded into a whisper. “I turned around and that’s the last time I ever saw them.”

  I could barely hold it together as we said our good-byes, overwhelmed by this intimate encounter with grief. What had happened was senseless, tragic, devastating, wrong. But those were words, just words, clumsy and insufficient. Words could not return those two darling boys. Words couldn’t give their mom snuggles under the blankets and Christmas mornings, unexpected kisses and class photos and refrigerator art. Words couldn’t replace T-ball and soccer practice, high school dances and diplomas, milestones now marked by some other mother’s child. In the end nothing could make up for buckling a pair of sandals on a squirming toddler, tousling his hair and bundling him off, only to see one of those sandals in the rubble, your child gone. Your children gone. Hide and seek never to return.