The Best of Friends Page 21

  “No.”

  “Had you ever taken a professional photograph?”

  “No.”

  “You came on a wing and a prayer.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And about two thousand dollars.”

  “That’s it.”

  And those were the warm-up questions. The fact that I was nuts was established up front. From there it got worse. Two cameras and endless questions fired at me by my best friend, who was trying very hard, if not always successfully, to pretend she didn’t know me at all.

  “How did your family feel about you living in Africa? It is a very different world from the one Dona—”

  “Cut!” Lisa shouted, leaping to her feet. “Sara, who is Dona?”

  I cut in, “She’s my sister.”

  “But we don’t know she’s Ginger’s sister, do we? Now you two stop talking to each other like you’re friends!”

  Chastened, Sara shuffled through her notes. “Did people think this was a whim, this is gonna pass, Ginger’s on a long safari, she’s coming home soon?”

  “I think so.”

  “She’ll get sick of it?”

  “I definitely think so. A lot of people thought, She’ll get over it, maybe New York wasn’t for her but she’ll come back and she’ll find out what is. But I found what it is right here.” My voice cracked. Was I making any sense at all? I couldn’t keep my nervous hands out of my hair. Meanwhile, I should have worried less about my nerves and more about what was coming out of my mouth.

  When Sara asked me about our relationship with the baboons, I told her about Nad and the black spitting cobra, how little Cleo had rescued him. “She looked him in the eye and said, WAHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” My eyes darted sharply toward the camera I’d been told to pretend wasn’t there. Would somebody please, please tell me I hadn’t just barked like a bloody baboon. What the hell was I thinking? And what was Sara thinking when she pitched the idea of this segment to her boss? Clearly promotion hadn’t been on her mind.

  Two numbing hours later, after the interview was finished and the cameras packed away, Sara and Lisa drove back to our house with the crew, leaving me alone. When I started to breathe normally again, I confessed to myself that I knew exactly what Sara was thinking. She had thought she could help her friend. Simple. She had contacts, clout, access, and she had used them to help me and other friends repeatedly. It was Sara’s friendship with Julie Bruton-Seal that led to my introduction to Jen and Des Bartlett, and that eventually led to the production of the baboon film. In New York, Sara had introduced me to her agent, to executive producers, to network vice presidents, without expecting anything in return. No quid quo pro, no tit for tat, no keeping score, and even now, no apparent regret. Never once had I felt indebted. Sara had shared the perks of her hard work willingly, and with such enthusiasm that it seemed there was nothing better for her career or simply nothing more fun than lavishing eight minutes of prime-time network television on a friend.

  I hoped she would be just as pleased when the Dateline story was completed. There was one more interview, this one with Nad and me. It was brief and, after my solo interview, painless. Sitting under a huge camel thorn tree waiting for the sun to set, Nad told Sara, “I was actually quite skeptical when we first went out because it is rough. I really thought she’d take one week of it and that would be it.” But that hadn’t been it, I thought. I was still here, seven years later. While the interview was over, I knew Sara still had a lot of questions—but questions which weren’t for a national television audience. They would come later when we were alone.

  “DO YOU LIKE this one?”

  “No, it isn’t right for the shape of my face. How about this style?”

  Lying together on the carpet in the living room that Sara and her cousin Lynn had given us after their African safari, we flipped through back issues of Vogue magazine. Perfume, makeup, haute couture. All a million miles away. Yet despite Sara’s recent adventures in turning a bombed-out house in Sudan into a temporary salon, Dateline was prime time, Today show opportunities beckoned, and on those stages, a great haircut was essential.

  “Here, this is the one. It would frame your face beautifully. It’s perfect, Sara.” She tore out the page, added it to the others in the pile, and laughed. “So what is happening? You look so happy. I keep thinking, How did you get there? It was only a few months ago that I thought we’d lost you for good. You were the most desperate bride I’ve ever seen.”

  I sighed. “Desperate is putting it mildly. How about crazy, mad, insane.”

  “Okay, you win. So how did you do it? What was the path from there to here?”

  “Nad left.” I smiled.

  “He what? Talk about bury the lead! You never told me that.”

  “No, he didn’t leave me; he left Namibia. He went to South Africa for three months to study for his commercial pilot’s license.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  “He never asked. I think he was trying to punish me, to get me back for all I’d put him through before we were married.”

  “Would have served you right,” Sara replied with a chuckle.

  “Maybe, but ha-ha, little did he know leaving me alone would turn out to be the best thing he could possibly do for me. It was just me. All I had for company was a pride of lions. Lazy beasts, they sleep about twenty hours a day, so I had a lot of time just to think. Finally, after all the years of having Nad to fall back on, I had the challenge of making myself feel at home alone in the bush.”

  “Gin, when you were in New York I had the sense that you were tired, that maybe this life had become—too hard, too many fights. I mean, it may be beautiful but the weather here is brutal. It’s almost as tough as what you face when you’re looking for funding for your projects. And you must get lonely. That would do me in right there. Anyway, all those things people don’t think about when they romanticize your life. I still remember when you were so broke you described a glass of Coke as good food.”

  “I’d forgotten that.”

  “Not to mention in New York there were all those guys who flocked around you, like Mr. Deep Pockets—”

  “He’s a wonderful man, but…”

  “What about that handsome admirer who—”

  “Who called you as soon as I got on a plane.”

  “Mostly just to talk about you.”

  “Anyway, he hardly knew me.”

  “Nad and you know each other very well. It still doesn’t explain why you were so afraid to marry him.”

  I turned over and watched the fan whirling lazily above us. Sara was quiet.

  “I was afraid of losing myself in someone else’s life again.”

  “That was a long time ago, Gin.”

  “I know, but that’s why being on my own here was so good for me. I realized I’m much stronger now. I’m not the twenty-year-old girl who polished her boyfriend’s trophies. I’ve fought damn hard for this new life. I miss you and my family like crazy.” I paused trying to explain my epiphany to myself as well as to my friend. “But I love the bush and I discovered that the challenge of life here and those lazy lions were all I needed. I didn’t need another man and I didn’t need Nad. So when he came back, I realized that I wanted him.”

  Sara smiled and I wondered if she was thinking about Andrew. I rolled over onto my side and continued, “Remember what they used to say when we were kids? ‘Sara will interview the senator and Ginger will be married to him.’ It sounds ridiculous now, because it’s so selfish and immature. But I think I had to forgive Nad for not being the person I had expected to marry. Once I’d gotten beyond that, I realized he was so much more than I had ever expected. It was like shedding skin.”

  FAR TOO SOON, Sara and Lisa had to return to New York, back to the world of keeping in touch by telephone and e-mail. But when they called a short time later to say the story had been edited and they just needed information for Stone Phillips’s in-studio tag to the taped piece, I had an update. With unc
anny timing, our baboon film had just been nominated in the “Best Newcomer” category at Wildscreen, what’s known in the industry as the Green Oscars. It was the perfect ending.

  A month later my parents invited a few friends over to watch the broadcast that included my life story in eight glamorous minutes. Sara’s boss was pleased, and in spite of my fears, Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones watching. My cousin Missy called to tell me that she’d heard a group of young women in a bar talking about the segment. “Gin,” she told me, “those girls loved it. They said, ‘Heck, if she can change her life, so can I!’ I was so proud of you.”

  I found that the story was almost like an extra résumé, showing people what I had done and what I could do, including the brass at Turner Original Productions. Suddenly a project that Wild!life Adventures executive producer Thom Beers and I had been developing got a green light. With Legends of the Bushmen in preproduction, there would be a professional life for me after the baboon film after all. This one would include an interesting role for me on the other side of the camera. But first we were off on a reconnaissance mission, a reccee. I needed to scout locations, gather ideas, and find talent for the film, to see if we could turn Legends into a reality.

  STATIC CRACKLED IN my ears and for a moment I hadn’t a clue where I was. I looked at Nad, who was spinning a dial on the airplane’s instrument panel.

  “Good snooze?”

  “Where are we?”

  “About a hundred miles out. Go back to sleep.”

  Instead I rested my head on the scratched window and gazed down below. Etosha Pan was a hundred miles behind us; below lay gentle hills, clusters of tall trees, and small depressions in the sand, a monotonously beautiful landscape. From a thousand feet up, it looked soft, pristine, safe. The reality was very different. Black mambas slithered through the sand, sharp thorns jutted off the branches of seemingly benign trees, while leopards stalked silently under the cover of darkness. How ironic that this land, a place of rare beauty, fantasy, and deception, is home to the Bushmen, a group of people shrouded in the same mystique.

  The original people of Africa, the gentle people, the first people, hunter-gatherers, the Bushmen are many things to many people. Traditionally, their lives are rooted in the earth, at one with the animals in a relationship of respect, harmony, and predation. Today, some Bushmen still hunt with incredible skill; they still gather foods from the bush, and for the most part, they still understand and revere the land as if their lives depended upon it, because sometimes they do.

  But in a world rushing into the twenty-first century, the Bushmen haven’t been completely left behind. Sadly, they’ve been propelled into the margins by land laws that declare areas off limits, stripping them of their ancestral hunting grounds, driving them from the bush into squalid townships where, without formal education and training, alcohol abuse and complacency have created a culture of deep, dark depression. The myth of the wild, gentle Bushmen is just that—a myth, and not one we wanted to perpetuate.

  I turned from the window to the backseat of the plane, refocusing on why we had flown here, and mentally ticked off our gear: video camera, stills cameras, film, tapes, a box of canned tomatoes, a six-pound bag of pasta, and two boxes of wine, our provisions for the week. When I turned around, the ground was rising up to meet us.

  After coming to a stop, the airplane was surrounded by familiar faces, shy smiles, and laughter. We climbed out of the plane, passing boxes and cameras into willing hands. “Kaiza, Nica?” Are you well? the only word I knew in Ju/’hoan Bushmen, but it worked. Nica, a strong Bushman woman and respected tracker, stepped forward and shook my hand. “Ah, lovely,” I smiled, touching a collection of ostrich-egg beads twined around her slender wrist. Nad greeted Gui warmly, looking over his tiny frame to where the bow and arrows hung low on his back. As was now the norm, the Bushmen were dressed in clothes that reflected the uneasy meeting of the Western and Bushmen worlds, a torn Nike T-shirt worn next to soft duiker skin, brightly colored beads against faded plaid skirts, a visible reflection of a cultural clash.

  “Howzit, Flip.” Behind the Bushmen, wearing his standard khaki shirt, blue shorts, and cap, Flip took his pipe out of his mouth and grinned. “Hi, how was the flight?”

  Dr. Philip “Flip” Stander, a colleague of Nad’s, had been working with this small team of Bushmen trackers for the past five years. A Cambridge graduate, Flip was humbled by the Bushmen’s knowledge of animal behavior, likening their wisdom to “the equivalent of many Ph.D.s.” A year ago, when Nad and Flip were flying a game census in the area, I’d made a tentative connection to this small band of Bushmen trackers. Now, two months after my original meeting with Thom Beers in Atlanta at Turner Original Productions, Nad and I were back to discuss the filming project with the Bushmen.

  Our goal was to make a film that celebrated a positive part of the Bushmen’s history, one that is very much alive today: their connection to the land that remains beautifully deep and true, resonating in their legends. In a culture with no formal written language, the Bushmen’s spoken words passed from generation to generation, gaining in power and significance. Their legends speak of a rich history and a proud heritage with gentleness and humor. They are the links to their past and a way of guiding their children forward in a world where it’s increasingly easy for them to lose their way. We were asking the Bushmen to share something that was essential to their spirit, and it was important that they felt they could trust us to tell their stories with reverence and sparkle.

  Under a canopy of shade offered by a large leadwood tree in Flip’s camp, we gathered with an extended clan of Bushmen. I had a notebook and pen. The cameras were still in their boxes. This was the Bushmen’s chance to watch us. I looked down at the questions I’d listed in my notebook, and up at expectant faces. I wished that Sara were here, for many reasons, not least of all to share her interviewing skills.

  I began, “Who is stronger, the lion or the lioness?”

  Flip translated my words into Afrikaans, and then a Bushmen tracker, Kachee, in a series of staccato clicks, spoke to the gathering. Laughter spilled out and Kachee shook his head. The interpretation was reversed until Flip told me, “They said, ‘You must be crazy. One is not stronger than the other. They need each other to survive.’” As I got to know them better, I would see that this is how—when times were good and when alcohol hadn’t interfered—Bushmen men and women respected each other, gently, unselfishly, without chauvinism.

  I looked around at the open faces of the men and women. Many of the men had small black dots of ash between their eyes. I nodded and asked, “Why does Toma have a dot between his eyes?”

  The answer came back, “It is so Toma will have the same keen eyesight as the animal he is hunting.”

  “Are there any other animal markings used by the Bushmen? Anything for strength or beauty?”

  This question was followed by silence, until Old Dixo slowly raised her long patchwork skirt.

  “You see the markings there, the stripes on her legs?” asked Kachee.

  I nodded, mesmerized by her slender, strong legs. A running pattern of black lines burned into brown flesh, and now partially hidden by aging skin, was etched across her thigh.

  “When Old Dixo was a young girl, she thought the zebra was the most beautiful animal in the bush. Even now she wears the stripes of a zebra on her skin.”

  I imagined a zebra bounding across the plains, a black-and-white blur of strength and grace, an image so inspiring you wanted to hold it, feel it, be it. Old Dixo dropped her skirt and looked up at me. The sun and a long, hard life had left her skin worn with the patina of old leather, but her eyes shone brightly, and on her legs she wore the memory of her youth, her beauty, and her kinship with zebras. It was ageless, timeless, and so was she.

  In the five days we spent with the Bushmen, their answers became more animated and more voices were heard as lines of a story were passed around the fire. I was told an old person who doesn’t know a story
doesn’t exist. It was impossible. Life was about sharing—sharing meat, sharing fears, and sharing stories. To be selfish was the worst sin of all. Against the firelight, the children’s faces glowed as the legends came to life, their history to be absorbed and retold around other fires as they grew older. Old Dixo said, “Telling a story is like taking an old skin, adding beads, and making it new each time.”

  We left the Bushmen with the promise that we’d be back. Three months later we were, and with us was a small film crew from New York City and Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, eager to capture the legends on film.

  “GINGER, GET UP.™

  “It’s too cold. I can’t get out of bed.” I pulled the blankets up over my head. Nad pulled them down.

  “Come on, get up. You’re the star.”

  “I am not. The Bushmen are the stars of this film.”

  “Well, they are out of bed and waiting for you, so get up.”

  “Throw me my jeans.”

  I got dressed under the covers, layering a sweater and jeans over long underwear. When I went outside to wash my face, the water in the bucket was frozen solid. “So much for makeup. Let’s go.”

  The shooting script revolved around scenes that, added to the wildlife footage I’d shot in Etosha, would help us tell the Bushmen’s legends. Before sunrise until long past sunset, the crew trailed the Bushmen and me as we dug for roots to eat, prepared the bows and arrows for hunting, and played games with the children. Spilling yellow beads in the sand, Dixo told us how the giraffe helped the sun find its way across the sky. Young Gui, a respected hunter, told us how the cheetah was rewarded with great speed for its unselfish acts. And Old/Gui, such a gentle, wise man, told us the story of how the Great God created life. The Bushmen were so animated on camera that it made it easier for me to relax and enjoy my on-screen role as the film’s guide and narrator. There was a special connection, one that I’m sure Sara had made with interview subjects through the years. The camera was forgotten and a trust was born. It was of such depth that it took my breath away.