Vintage Beer, Bronze Fonz Add Nostalgia to Milwaukee Visit

            Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- the city once famous for its beer-- has come full circle. Not only is the original Schlitz now available but Pabst, too, will soon be back on tap here with its vintage  recipe.  Full bodied brews that put later production in the 70’s to shame, those weaker looking beers that led to sales slumps and years of  brewery closings, takeovers and mergers.

The decision to bring back the two beers here, at least in token amounts, to me is emblematic of what I found on my recent visit to the Wisconsin city where I lived and worked some 40 years before.  I was delighted at how Milwaukee has embraced its history and resources, transforming its downtown area into a vibrant commercial and recreational hub. 

Talk about nostalgia. The city built a nearly three-mile RiverWalk along the Milwaukee River complete with a “bronze Fonz,” the life-sized statue of the Milwaukee-based Happy Days character that was portrayed on television by Henry Winkler.

Back to the beers.  The Schlitz original brew is served, $2 a pint, all day every day, at the Brown Bottle, north of downtown in the former Schlitz brewery complex, now largely used for offices.  Only one major brewery, MillerCoors, itself a merger,  remains in the city.   But many of the old brands, including Schlitz and Pabst are now owned by Blue Ribbon Intermediate Holdings, headquartered in Los Angeles.  It contracted with Miller-Coors to brew the original Schlitz.

By summer 2016, Blue Ribbon plans itself to microbrew its original Pabst Blue Ribbon beer right in Milwaukee, at the site of its former brewery on the west side of downtown.  The company also plans a tasting room there.

The new Pabst facility will join numerous other microbreweries already in the Milwaukee area.  On my visit, I went to the Lakefront Brewery, www.lakefrontbrewery.com, just north of the downtown in what is called the Beerline neighborhood. It is named for the fact that breweries used to have their supplies shipped there along the Milwaukee River. The area is now a vibrant urban development of condos, apartments and businesses, flanked by the start of the RiverWalk.

 Lakefront, which dates to the 80s, helped lead the way to Milwaukee also becoming a microbrew beer town. Housed in a former power building for streetcars, it is known for its fun tour, where visitors for a small fee receive four tokens, for four samples. My favorite was the eastside dark. But then amber and pumpkin were also good.

New-old Milwaukee by this time had me captivated. I remember back in the 70s toasting in Christmas at one of the breweries in an old wood paneled room with longtime Mayor Henry Maier. Want more nostalgia from beer town?

Take in like I did one of the Milwaukee food and city tours, www.MilwaukeeFoodTours.com. I went on the Old World Third Street tour along the RiverWalk.  We enjoyed authentic German food tastings at places like Mader’s restaurant, try spaetzle and sauerbraten, as well as stopping at a saloon with the longest bar east of the Mississippi, cheese tastings and a late night visit to the Fonz. The gold tinted statue is short, five feet six inches, the same as Winkler. Even in darkness, its nose was shiny from all the good luck rubbings from visitors. Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli from the sit-com based in the 50s era in Milwaukee. The show ran from 1974 to 1984. A public campaign raised the $85,000 to erect the statue which was dedicated with Winkler present in 2008.

  The RiverWalk is festooned in good weather with flowers and plantings in pots, lots of benches and tables and places to sit and enjoy the river scene. The walk goes all the way down into the former warehouse area, the Third Ward, now home to a public market, chic shops and high rise apartments.

            You want even more nostalgia. Try the Pabst mansion, farther to the west near Marquette University. www.pabstmansion.com.The Flemish renaissance revival mansion was one of several owned by prominent industrialists of the late 19^th century back in the so called Gilded Age when Wisconsin Avenue was known as Grand Avenue.  The stately home, built in 1892 for the Pabst family and decorated in historical furnishings, was subsequently owned from 1908 to 1975 by the Milwaukee archdiocese. It was set for the wrecking ball to make way for a parking lot until it was saved and taken over by the not-for-profit Wisconsin Heritages, Inc.

          

  The heavy drapes, rococo Victorian insides with a fireplace in every room despite central heating (to prove Pabst could afford luxury), take you back into the 19^th century. Family portraits throughout add a haunting feeling to the rooms.

            I rounded out my brief visit to the city with a performance of Dream Girls at the Milwaukee Repertory theatre, www.milwaukeerep.com.  The city also offers a full performing arts center and numerous other theater and museum venues. Old and new Milwaukee, all so centrally located and accessible, I will have to return if only to taste that original Pabst.

For more information, see www.visitmilwaukee.org

New Orleans After Katrina

(Editor's Note: I wrote this some time ago but wanted to share it now because I think it encapsulates a lot of the reason that New Orleans has been able to rise out of the wreckage of the hurricane 10 years ago. Whatever the controversy over whether the poor have come back as much as the rest of the city, there is still hope with the kind of spirit I feel I found there.)

The minute I landed, I knew I’d found the right place.   New Orleans.  Always on my bucket list but a dog leg away from the Pacific Northwest and this the first time I was visiting.  Took eight hours to fly there, no easy routes available and I had to change planes in Chicago.   Worth it after a rainy cold spring back home. The air was sultry with warm humidity, the smell of magnolias and other trees in bloom.  There was a balm to New Orleans that loosened my bones.  “Lagniappe,” the little extra the Big Easy promises.

 It was midnight, midweek, but the French Quarter, the oldest part of the city, was alive.  No Starbucks and rolled up sidewalks here.  The crowds, both tourist and local, spilled for blocks into Bourbon and Royal’s cobbled streets. Mardi Gras was weeks past but spring break brought out the young men and women, their fists tight around neon green foot-high drinks and “huge ass beers.”

 A man pounded on his baby grand piano with neon-lit keys, his dark head pumping with the rhythm.  The surprise was how he got there in the middle of the street. The piano sat on plump tires, the whole contraption attached to his bicycle in front.   Down the way, a young Vietnamese woman serenaded with her electric violin. On another corner, a clarinetist wailed with her Dixie band.

 Two strippers with long pink wigs and no shirts strolled along, their bare breasts exposed.  On a nearby balcony, young men dangled shiny beads at a passerby to try to get her to lift her shirt, a tradition born out of Mardi Gras.  She complied.

 Now, you may not like the college frat atmosphere of the quarter, the oldest and highest part of the city that wasn’t hit by Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaches that inundated the rest of the city.  But, you have to appreciate the laid-back tolerance New Orleans has for this kind of going on.  The next morning, early, the crews were out hosing down the place and picking up the trash.

 Tourism, which is back bigger than pre-Katrina, provides the city with major revenue, surpassed only by its port on the Mississippi River. On my visit, I still saw empty lots and some wrecked buildings in other parts of the city but it was mostly recovered, thanks in part to efforts led by actor Brad Pitt and musician Harry Connick Jr.  The brightly colored new homes were built on stilts to avoid any future flooding.

The tolerance I sensed, I believe, was driven by something more than revenue, maybe that “lagniappe” attitude that grows out of the long history of Spanish and French roots.  A gentler approach to what it means to be human, a grace in wanting to take time and enjoy the moment.  An expansion of the attitude in the Northwest that leads some to take a day off when the sun shines.

The young women, more voluptuous than their Northwest counterparts, flashed lots of tattoos and cleavage but almost always set off by some black lace, at the bodice or the trim on the leggings worn under short, flouncy skirts. I saw an entire elevator full of women off to a bachelorette party wearing chartreuse, orange and pink net tutus around their hips.

 New Orleans folk,  I learned, make a big deal out of what they eat.  “First rule,” one woman told me. “You must never go away from here hungry.” Add crawfish to their sea harvest of oysters and shrimp.  And celebrate pork -- pulled, barbecued and king on the menu. One of the leading restaurants was fittingly called Cochon.  I tasted pork face, which an earnest young waiter explained was the face peeled from the bone and left in the air to cure. It was delicious. Then, of course, there were all the famous Brennan restaurants, the originators of Bananas Foster.  Dickie Brennan, one of the many children of the founding family, had just opened a new restaurant called the Tableau in the quarter.

 Used to be folk would say while in New Orleans, you better order a Bloody Mary because the garnish was the only vegetables you’d get on your trip. But the chefs have changed with the times.  Almost as ubiquitous as pork and seafood was a side of shaved raw Brussels sprouts, albeit often with a sprinkle of bacon bits.

Coffee. There was an occasional Starbucks but more often, local outfits like the famous Café du Monde down by the river which featured coffee made with chicory and its slight bitterness.  Lines stretched around the place, open 24 hours a day, everyone waiting for the deep fried powdered sugar covered treat known as beignets. The floor around the tiny café tables was sprinkled white, along with the fronts of most customers.

 A must visit was Preservation Hall.   Can’t think of anywhere else to match it. The ancient little room in the French quarter was dark inside with just two overhead lights and benches for the audience.  Old fashioned. No amplification, no air-conditioning. Just the intimate experience of listening to the heartfelt playing of traditional jazz. The night I was there, the line of elderly black musicians clothed in white shirts and dark pants marched in to their seats and began their songs. Yes, they were so old they had to sit most of the time, except when the music got so hot they stood up. The lead trombonist, who had to weigh 400 pounds, rose, sweating from his chair and a la Louie Armstrong spread his arms and sang, “Take all of me.”

The city’s embrace of life extended all the way to their dead, buried in raised graves in cemeteries all over the city. When I couldn’t find my guide at a cemetery up in the elegant  garden district, the volunteer at the wrought iron gate said he’d fill me in. Uncanny.  The plump little man with a neat white beard wore a tee shirt stating he was against the death penalty.

  He wanted to share how the graves, dating to yellow fever times in the 19^th century, were built with a hole inside toward the back so they could be continually used by families. The graves turn into ovens during the long hot summers, reaching 200 degrees, like a crematorium, he explained. When the next family member needs burial,  the cemetery uses a big shovel and pushed the old remains to the back where they fall in the hole. Then they roll in the next one.

Back to the living. I can think of no finer place to mingle with the locals in New Orleans than the Mid-City Lanes Rock ‘N Bowl.   Last bowling alley I went to down in Portland in the Hollywood district went out of business. But the rock ‘n bowl and their Thursday night zydeco was going strong.  The musicians and their squeeze box concertina kept the dancers stomping while nearby you heard the crack of bowling balls hitting pins in the several lanes. 

Four glorious days of sunshine and temperatures in the 70s soothed my early springtime angst over the Northwest’s cold and rainy days.  It rained in New Orleans, but not until the morning I left. I took solace in the promise of even more abandon when I got home.  In my luggage, I had half a dozen sweet pralines from the French Market.

Getting There Anymore Ain't Half the Fun

     Flying has become a whole new experience, I learned recently as I returned to airline trips after a several-year hiatus.  And, as all of you know, the changes haven’t been pretty. The seats are so tightly jammed in that the person in front of me at times practically pitches back into my lap. Middle seats are never left empty anymore. On one of my flights, the person to my left in such a seat managed somehow to turn so his back was to me while he gobbled an eight dollar airplane sandwich (sticky white bread, wilted lettuce and some kind of meat).  He had to be starving to eat something like that with such relish. No doubt he missed a meal or two thanks to the long lines with TSA before boarding.

 The only food in front of me was the small packet of pretzels and plastic glass of diet coke that I’d received for free. I was not about to fork over good money for airline food.   People told me later I was lucky to receive even that.  Then there is the sound of the plane. Once we were up high and cruising, the engine noises became an all-consuming backdrop. Turns out, my hearing aids added to the cacophony.  I could turn them off. But they somehow added this layer at the top of the sound that I finally decided resembled a heavenly chorus. 

On second thought, that was something I wasn’t ready to meet. Not yet.   I scrunched my shoulder against the hard plastic of the wall around the window and tried to concentrate on the big sky outside. Little frissons of frost were forming on the pane.  The same thought kept occurring to me. We shouldn’t be up here this high.  The ups and downs of the sounds. Maybe it really was a holy chorus of some sort.

The crowds, the hunger, the noises, the bumping along, it all set me to thinking of earlier better times for airline travel.  Like my first trip ever by air. 1962 and it was special.  I was all of 18 and on the way from the Midwest to the West Coast to spend the summer with my favorite grandfather.   My old Polish grandfather, John Isidore Romer, almost 80 and no longer able to make the airline trip to see us  like he used to, carrying a brown sack filled with chicken he’d fried especially for us, grease marks blotting through onto the paper.

 That trip to see him was my first time out on my own, an adult. I dressed in the only way acceptable for a young lady of those times: garter belt to hold up nylon hose, little black leather pumps, a blue pleated skirt and a proper box style jacket and blouse.  Dressed up as much as for a dance, dressed up like I could go to church.

We had to go out on the tarmac at Billy Mitchell field in Milwaukee and climb up the aluminum stairs to enter the big Northwest airlines jet.  I remember feeling like I was getting into a rocket. The idea that we would shoot into the air and traverse half the nation in a few hours.  I was most excited to see the city and then farmland finally give way to the view from the tiny porthole next to my seat, yes, I got a window seat, of the vast Mississippi River flowing some 37,000 feet below me. A year of studying geography my first year in college, I was excited to share with the lady on the aisle, the one removed from me by the vacant middle seat, what I knew of the river’s course. 

Little stars of frost on the window.  The wonder of it all, cruising along at 600 miles an hour.  Then meals, okay I don’t recall even what we ate, but I know there were full trays of food served by bouncy young stewardesses dressed in uniforms that looked like the suits women wore in old movies.

                                                                                                               

Then dozing a bit and finally, lowering over the Portland, Or.,  area, Mount Hood in the background and the plane following the Columbia River. We bumped along, my excitement growing.  My uncle was in the terminal, waiting for me.  No big security. My suitcase, a square beige bag I borrowed from mom,  coming around the conveyor belt, no extra charge.

The wonder of it all, the feeling I was now a real adult, setting off on a life, albeit still with relatives watching over me, but setting flight as it were. A nestling on her first flight.

There was romance to it all.  A romance that is so long gone.   The population of the world has doubled in the last 40 years and what used to be a big occasion is now commonplace for so many more people flying.  Maybe that is why our airliners have come to feel more like trips by Greyhound bus than luxury voyages.

No wonder the airlines have compartmentalized it all, to move so many more of us along in this cattle call.  That was the other thought that struck me on my return to air travel.  We now get into little boxes to complete this uncomfortable transition of getting from point “a” to point “b” with the speed of air travel.

The first big box is the air terminal. In many places it is so large you have to transition by getting into some smaller box, like an interior train as they have at SeaTac, to get from one concourse to another. Once you finally find the part of the airport where you wait for your plane, you are finally jostled forward past the ticket agents to board. Of course, that is another box. The big rectangular tube with accordion pleats that gets you into the airplane.

You enter the long silver tube of the aircraft.  As many of you as can fit. You still bounce around in this rocket for hours, blasting out a gazillion bits of carbon dioxide.  Only the impact is so much worse, given the number of flights.  Some estimates say by the middle of the 21^st century airline travel will account for 15 percent of global warming.

And when you arrive, you don’t get out on the tarmac, you unfold in the long exit, row by row, so many jammed in with their carry-ons smashing into people’s heads.  And through the folding exit box back into the big box of the terminal.

Yes, it is a wonder to travel so far so fast. But the romance of getting there is long long gone.

Danger in Animal Parks

The recent death of a tourist in a South African lion park brings home the dangers in visiting wild animals in their home.  On my safari in Tanzania with Overseas Adventure Travel, the guides we traveled with more than once reminded us of this fact.  It is too easy to become blase, surrounded by so many animals.  Until things get dicey.

Our group traveled in converted four by four pickups, high enough off the ground that you had to pull yourself up the few steps to enter. Once inside, we were able to stand on the seats to photograph out the pop-up roof which also served as a good sunshade.  (See photo in Serengeti blog entry).

We were never admonished not to open our sliding windows but they were so high nothing could enter.   At one point, we were in the bush, moving closer to two elephants, busy foraging among trees, stripping leaves off branches with their trunks.   We moved closer and the elephant nearer to us turned toward us, looking menacing.   Our guide warned us all in low voice to keep quiet. Elephants are known for unpredicatability.  We stopped our chatter and photo taking and waited. After a bit, the elephant turned back to his task and we slowly pulled away.

The guide later shared with us that he had seen a large elephant charge a more open jeep once, his tusk piercing right through the metal of the vehicle.  Happily, there was no one sitting there.

Even worse, one time in an open jeep, the safari group was watching a lion chasing a leopard. The leopard decided a leap would be a fast getaway and it jumped into the jeep, landing on the floor.  Everyone froze, including the leopard. The lion left and the leopard leapt out.  There was more than one wet seat in the jeep, the guide said.

Just weeks before my safari, our guide said a guide friend of his was gored so badly he was left paralyzed. He was at a camp, attending to one of the vehicles and had not seen the Cape buffalo that charged him.

JFK Memorial Provides Emotional Trip Through Time

When I knew I was going to travel to the Dallas area, I thought why not stop in at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  After all, I had lived through those turbulent times in the early 1960s.

Historic visit, so I thought. Just a tragic curiosity now.  It all happened so long ago.  Boy, was I in for an emotional surprise.

The downtown museum is housed in the very building, a turn of the twentieth century brick warehouse,  from which Lee Harvey Oswald is accused of shooting the president.  The museum occupies the top sixth and seventh floors of the former Texas School Book Depository, the rest of the floors occupied by local government offices .  The permanent exhibit examines the life, death and legacy of the president through hundreds of photos, films and artifacts. 

The crowd the day I visited on a holiday weekend was thick.  Young couples, teen-agers, children all eager to soak up the history.  There were the iconic photos, John-John under the president's desk, Jackie looking so glamorous at a state dinner, JFK himself, tall, handsome with his shock of red hair and big smile.   The now naive looking campaign posters and buttons. None of the glitz of the internet age.  Still, all the drama of race riots, the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis unfolding before us with flickering black and white films and photos.

But, nothing prepared me for the shock I felt when I got to the sniper's perch next to the sixth floor window from which Oswald is said to have shot.  The corner is enclosed in glass, the boxes of books stacked strategically to provide cover. The original rough wood flooring is still intact.  I could imagine Oswald, himself assassinated shortly after being arrested, crouched at the window with his rifle, the very rifle displayed in another glass case nearby.

That I could be standing there, where but for time and space I could be witnessing this infamous act. I felt myself gasp, the hairs on my arm rise.  My own history. I remembered that day Nov. 22, 1963. I was an exchange student in France.  Kennedy the image of hope and youth.  The news of his death, it felt like the bullet had gone through my heart.  Then, the fear.  What could this mean, especially for people like me living abroad? This urge to want to go home.

My indignation at not being able to find a copy of the International Herald newspaper, all sold out.  The rumors that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had also been shot.  All the turmoil.  But, in the end a peaceful passage of power. Still, all the mourning, the grief.  The loss. That is what came back to me standing there, looking at that sniper's perch.

From an adjacent bank of windows, you could look down at the place where JFK's motorcade had passed on a campaign visit to Dallas.  The big white "x" marks the exact spot where he was hit.

All that hope shattered in a moment.  And, all the controversy that followed.  The museum also houses the actual 10 by 10 foot model of Dealey Plaza prepared by the FBI for the Warren Commission in 1964. It ruled that Oswald was the lone assailant but that has never stopped the conjecture that followed.

Near the white "x" outside the museum, you will find all the conspiracy proponents who gather to this day to debate who exactly killed Kennedy.

The museum, which is run by the non-profit Dallas County Historical Foundation, presents all the theories but takes no position, seeing its mission as being an impartial forum to explore the memory and effects of the event.

All the conjecture. I didn't take the time to study it all, figuring no one will ever fully resolve the matter. But, one thing stood out for me as a result of my visit.  The horrific event marked the end of at least part of American innocence.

Serengeti/Africa

            The red dust of Tanzania’s iron-rich soil still clings to my athletic shoes.  I’ve been loathe  to clean them, wanting in this small fashion somehow to preserve the way the country, its wildlife and people, touched my soul. 

Just as friends who were veterans of similar trips had promised, the two-week game-viewing safari was life-changing in the fresh perspective I gained, despite some potentially hair-raising moments. And, well worth the nearly 24 hours of plane travel from my home in Portland, Or., direct to Amsterdam and then another direct flight to the East African country, a convenient if exhausting journey. Also well worth overcoming all the frightening if hyped fears of ebola,  the West Africa epidemic that did not hit Tanzania, all the way on the other side of Africa, which is three times the size of the United States.

  How to tell you now what it felt like to drive in northern Tanzania out onto the Serengeti, an experience that even our seasoned guides said has to be lived to understand. The word in the language of the Maasai, a predominant tribe in the area, means “endless plain.” As far as you could see, all the way to the distant horizon where they appeared as dark dots, (the national park is the size of Connecticut), herds of animals cavorted on the flat grasslands. 

Near our jeep, two young wildebeest, so inelegant in their beards, high front haunches and horns—some say God created them out of leftover parts—kicked up their rear legs with joy at the fresh green grass. Though it was only October, the rains were a month early and the annual migration had begun of wildebeest and zebra from the woodlands where they spent the dry season back onto the Serengeti, the largest single movement of wildlife left on earth.

It was almost as though you’d come upon the Garden of Eden, a place where nature and the animals rule, not man.  The only humans allowed are tourists with guides in permitted jeeps like ours and park rangers who work to stop poachers after meat and trophies. Even the Maasai are kept out with their herds of cattle, sheep and goats.  Since man largely poses no threat, the animals seemed oblivious to us, restricted as we were to the rough gravel roads that traverse the park.

The plains were thick with strings of the moving animals, the striped flanks of the zebra jostling into the browns and greys of the wildebeest. Zablon Sunday, the head Tanzanian guide on our safari with Overseas Adventure Travel, said some park officials estimated the number of wildebeest at three million, double earlier counts, and nearly half a million zebras. Strung head to tail they would stretch all the way from New York to Hawaii.

 The two species enjoy a symbiotic relationship.  The wildebeest smell that the rains have come but they don’t have the zebra’s brain power to remember how to get there so they team up, Sunday said.  They come for the grasses which contain the minerals needed for their offspring. The zebras are due in December and January while the wildebeest give birth in February. They stay till May and June when they again move on to greener pastures.

  There was a palpable feeling of relief among the dust-covered animals, the smells of the sweat from their long journey and fresh dung everywhere. They joined the year-round resident animals like antelopes, giraffes, elephants and Cape buffalo.  Warthogs with their small tusks ran among them, their tails high in the air.

  There are over 450 different birds on the Serengeti, including exotics like the ostrich and the pink flamingo. Here in the tropics, even the lowly Superb Starling is bright with its metallic blue green upper parts and contrasting red orange belly.

But, just like our lives, this was not all paradise. The large predators were also here. We saw one rogue male, scars on his nose and blood on his teeth, with his fresh kill, a young Cape Africa buffalo, next to the gravel roadway. The leopards were in wooded sections of the park, stretching out on the limb of one of the tall thorned acacia trees, waiting for nightfall and their hunt. In the tall grass, a cheetah patiently eyed a Thomson’s gazelle, the black racing stripe on its side. We didn’t wait long enough to see if it could outrun the cat.

We encountered more than one lion sleeping off a heavy kill.   One male, his mane ruffling in the wind, lay spoon fashion with his scarred mate in a small sequestered area among rocky outcroppings.

Their ears occasionally twitched at insects but they appeared undaunted by our presence in our jeep.

The scenes stirred something in my bones, my blood, my very genes.  This sense of witnessing how the world must have been once at the very beginning.  The Serengeti is not far from the Olduvai Gorge where Mary Leakey in 1978 discovered the footprints of our earliest known ancestors, the hominids known as Australopithecenes from more than three million years ago.

No cattle drivers or farmers here.  The animals were doing quite well at maintaining nature’s balance all on their own. I felt humbled and reverent and in awe.

 But, I also recognized how raw and dangerous and right there in front of us all this was.   The camp for our group of 16 was in the Serengeti in a clearing up from the woods along a river.  We had lots of amenities, including three-course meals.  But, we stayed in tents, movable tents erected over wooden stays. Each came with a flushable toilet and a shower of sorts (solar heated water tumbled out of bucket on top of you).

But they were still tents.  That meant the thickness of cloth, between us and the wilderness.   Tents that zipped shut, top to bottom and side to side.  That first night after our meal in the dining tent, I asked one of the Tanzanians operating the camp, “You do patrols during the night, don’t you?”

  “Oh, no,” he answered.  “We don’t have any guns.  If something attacks, then we are doing something very wrong.  After we zip you in, we don’t go out.  This is the animals’ home.”

Instead, they gave us a whistle, a little silver whistle like bobbies once had in England. But, we were under orders not to blow it unless “an animal is in your tent. Or we could get killed when we come running.”

All that was in my head when the camp staff, sweeping the path with their flashlights,  walked us back to our tents in the darkness.  Right before I was zipped in, the man asked me, “Do you hear the lion?” He reminded me, just like the written instructions inside the tent, not to go out till daylight.

No worry on that part.  Foolish as it felt, I stuffed a dirty sock in the little hole left between the perpendicular zippers. I’d read about black mambas, the fastest snakes on earth. Didn’t help that the guides said the snakes don’t want to be around us. I‘d also read that 20,000 thousand people die every year in Africa from snake bites.

I had no choice but to trust my guides.  Once I turned out the weak solar powered lamp overhead, my world was totally dark.   I didn’t move the first few hours, listening and yes, heard the “hrumph , hrumph” of the lions calling to each other in the coolness of the night.  Followed by the skittish “whoop, whoop” of the hyena. The spotted version, the very kind we’d seen during our game ride, can weigh up to 180 pounds, and they eat their prey while still alive. Then parts of the tent, rolled up to create windows out of screening, flapped in the wind.

I slept only sporadically on the hard camp bed, ruing my choice of having a single on this trip.  Finally, I got up the courage to go to the toilet. I sat on the contrived seat looking out the screen, sure that the lumps I saw outside in the tall grasses were Cape buffalo. They liked to sleep between the tents, seeing them not as tents but as protection, we were told.  The animals are unpredictable and among the most dangerous of African animals to hunt. My throat tight, I scurried across the uneven floor back to my bed.

By early morning, I must have gotten some sleep. Drowsy,  I heard the gentle urging outside by a member of the camp staff, “Jambo, Jambo,” hello in Swahili. Then, a “heh, heh,” he seemed to be enjoying my early awakening.  “Jambo, jambo,” I replied or he wouldn’t stop because we needed to rise early for our game drive while it was still cool and the animals active.

The added incentive for my compliance was the warm water I knew he was pouring in a basin outside. I unzipped the tent and stuck my head outside to look.  Steam coming up in the basin.  No animals around, I emerged. With caution I turned to look around the side of the tent, to the place where I'd feared the buffalo slept.   Those humps I saw, they were nothing but bent over grass.

I don’t know if it was fatigue from the long days riding on dusty bumpy roads viewing animals or trust in the guides’ reassurances of our safety,  but by the second night of  our four in the Serengeti, I was falling asleep listening for the sounds of the animals.  It came to me later that I would not have felt as close to the animals if we hadn’t camped that way. A guest in their home.

Only later did I learn from one of the guides that at times, they had to drive in the jeeps to pick up the guests at their tents because of danger. Either because they saw a lion and then it disappeared or they saw the tell-tale droppings of the buffalo.

When I recall my trip, the animals are foremost in my mind since it was a safari. But, I need also to say a few words about the Tanzanian people. Everyone I met was kind and welcoming and generous, despite the fact the country is poor. Eighty-five percent of the people still live off subsistence farming, the life expectancy only 53.

 Safari tourism is a major factor in their economy but we must have looked ridiculous to them at times as we moved from parks to animal preserves in our jeeps, converted four-by-four trucks with pop-up roofs for game viewing, that would converge in clusters near an animal.

We followed rules to never interfere with an animal or a hunt. Still, I saw one group at a water hole pull out tables, red and white checked cloths and bottles of wine to have a party, a line of softball-sized elephant dung right before them and the big animals off not far away in a clearing. It occurred to me that we tourists, most from the United States, had probably contributed in our travels to the global warming that adds to the threats to the wild animals and that probably also contributed to the month-early return of the rains.

There was a generosity to the Tanzanians’ welcome that went deeper than money, a sincerity I found among the people I met.  To celebrate my birthday on the Serengeti, the camp staff, members of the Bantu tribe, donned silly costumes and did a dance as well as making me a birthday cake. I shall never forget it.

The 53 children in the sixth grade class at the Rhotia primary school near the main city of Arusha stood for us and sang the Tanzanian anthem, proud in their worn maroon and white uniforms. They knew how to say “hello” in English and thanked us for the school booklets we were able to provide.

Poverty is everywhere, including the open market near the main city of Arusha where all the rejected clothing and shoes that Goodwill and other charities can’t sell even by the pound in America finally land.  I saw one woman in a Michigan wolverines sweatshirt and endless children in tattered tee-shirts with designer names like Calvin Klein still visible.

The Maasai—members of one bomo where families live in the old way in mud-dung houses with thatch roofs—invited us to visit.  We watched as they milked their herds of cows, sheep and goats, their whole settlement protected only by a large circular thornbush fence.  Their diet is all from the milk, blood and meat of their animals. They are tall and quiet and elegant.

Our guide pointed out the bomo of one old man, now almost 100, who had 22 wives, so many children that the country had to build him his own elementary school..

I came back home elated but exhausted, to yet another appliance in my newly purchased condo having gone on the fritz.  Unfortunately, it was my washing machine and I’d already spot cleaned all my safari clothes in anticipation of washing them.   

At first, I was dismayed. But, then I thought of the Serengeti and the life and death struggles that go on there every day.  I looked at the red dust on my shoes and I managed to smile.