September 2010

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In search of truth at Lake Paradise

Friday, September 10, 2010 in Africa, Kenya, Mathews Range | 6 comments

Calvin and I don’t know each other well enough yet to exchange secrets. We’ve shared a few meals and we’ve sat around the fire at his camp in the Mara drinking whisky and chatting but I wouldn’t really say we’ve had that big breakthrough conversation yet where you say to yourself, “Aha…so now we’re going to start speaking the truth.”

What he knows is that I’m a writer who is here on assignment to do a story for National Geographic Traveler about Osa and Martin Johnson and a mysterious lake they discovered that sits atop an extinct volcano in one of the most rugged and inhospitable sections of Kenya. He also knows that I asked him to lead this expedition because it was his great uncle, Bud Cottar, who originally led the Johnsons to Lake Paradise back in the ‘20s.

But this is where things get a little sticky, where story and reality get mingled, where what I think I know about Osa and Martin Johnson and their journey to Lake Paradise might be a downright fraud at worst and simply apocryphal at best. Calvin keeps hinting that I don’t really know the true story. But he hasn’t told me what that is. I think he’s worried I can’t handle the true story.

Osa watches NYC mayor Fiorello LaGuardia sign a giant mock-up of I Married Adventure in 1940 (NYT Pictures).

Here’s what I know: On May 17, 1940, Osa Johnson’s book I Married Adventure, with its distinctive zebra-striped cover, was published to great critical and commercial success. Its selection as a June Book-of-the-Month Club choice helped make it the number one national best-seller in nonfiction for 1940. Within the first eight months of publication, 288,000 copies were sold, which was a ton considering that the country had not yet recovered from the Great Depression. Eventually 500,000 copies were sold within the first year of publication.

I own one of those copies. I got it as a gift just after Christmas last year. And it was Osa’s description of the Johnson’s discovery of Lake Paradise that set me on the path that, eight months later, has me sitting in a crowded Land Cruiser with Calvin Cottar, bumping and grinding our way over horribly potted roads towards the Mathews Range in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. In her best-seller, Osa Martin describes a visit from one of Kenya’s most famous and well-respected game hunters, Blaney Percival, who discreetly told them about a “crater lake which is on no map ever made of this country.”

She writes: “Martin stared at him. “You mean there’s a lake around here nobody knows about?”

“Nobody, and you may be certain I’ve kept my ears open.”

“But you’d think some of the natives would have run across it,” I said.

“It’s probable; but if they have, they’ve guarded the secret just as carefully as I have and probably for the same reason.”

“A lake,” Martin said with mounting excitement. “Why, animals must go there by the thousands!”

Blaney nodded. “Yes, and probably from hundreds of miles in every direction—a sort of sanctuary, undisturbed by the white man and his gun. That’s why I’m telling you about it, Martin. I’d like to see you go there some day with your camera and come back with a record of what animals are really like in their natural, undisturbed state.”

Martin was beside himself with excitement. “Well, man alive,” he shouted, “let’s go! Why waste time on the Athi River? Why waste time on anything?”

And so they went on an incredibly difficult safari to the north, crossing the fields of volcanic lava and the Kaisut Desert, having no idea exactly where this lake was supposed to be or if it was even really there until, weeks later, after days and days of marching “over some of the roughest country I’ve ever crossed…completely without warning, we were at the edge of a high cliff overlooking one of the loveliest lakes I have ever seen.

“The lake was shaped like a spoon, almost a quarter of a mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, and it sloped up into steep, wooded banks two hundred feet high. A tangle of water-vines and lilies—great African lilies—grew in the shallows at the water’s edge. Wild ducks, cranes and egrets, circled and dipped. Animals, more than we could count, stood quietly knee-deep in the water and drank.

“It’s Paradise, Martin!” I said.

He nodded.

That was how Lake Paradise was given its name.”

Lovely story. Except little of it is true. I know the truth. I think. But I haven’t told Calvin that yet. As far as he knows, I’m just this American writer come to Kenya to recreate Osa and Martin Johnson’s expedition to Lake Paradise and repeat the various stories, true or not, I read about eight months ago in a book ghost-written by a New York journalist (and not by Osa Johnson—that’s one of the truths) 70 years ago. But before I tell Calvin what I know, I want him to tell me the stories he’s heard about that expedition. Handed down through his family from his great uncle who was with Martin and Osa Johnson. And then, together, we’ll try and find the truth between the two versions. I have a feeling that everything about this journey is going to be complicated. Which I’m rather looking forward to.

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A sad tale of two women

Thursday, September 9, 2010 in Africa, Kenya, Mathews Range | 3 comments

Joan and Alan Root filming a spitting cobra. Of course, she's the one that got the venom in the eyes.

As we drive past the shrouded slopes of Mt. Kenya, I keep thinking of Joan and Alan Root. As well as Osa and Martin Johnson. So many similarities. Both couples were glamorous wildlife cinematographers, the Johnsons in the 20s and 30s, the Roots in the late 60s and 70s. They both pioneered new ways of seeing wildlife, the Johnsons by filming Africa from their amphibian planes, Osa’s Ark and The Spirit of Africa in 1933, the Roots by being the first to fly over Kilimanjaro in a hot-air balloon in 1974.

Osa Johnson standing in the way of elephants at Lake Paradise while Martin films the confrontation.

And then there was the similar dynamics in their marriages. In both cases, the women pretty much ran the business, organized the many filming safaris, and put themselves on the front line of action (Martin would often have Osa intentionally enrage a rhino or elephant to make them charge while he filmed the exciting sequence; Alan, while filming a spitting cobra, had Joan bob back and forth in front of the deadly snake which then unleashed a stream of venom straight to her glasses and into her eyes).

Yet it was always about the men. It was their egos that had to be stoked, their names that were always the more prominent (in some early films made by the Johnsons, Osa didn’t even get a filming credit though she often operated the cameras as much as Martin), and the men that got most of the adulation and awards.

And in the end both of the women got left behind. Osa when her husband died in a plane crash in 1937 just as they’d begun a nationwide lecture and radio tour, and Joan when Alan left her for another woman in 1982 shortly after the release of perhaps their most successful movie, Two in the Bush, about the couple’s extraordinary life and times in Africa. Joan Root was murdered in her bed in her home on Lake Naivasha; Osa Johnson became an alcoholic (her agent said after her death, “She would go into bars and quickly attract a crowd of admirers by telling people who she was. She entertained them with stories, and they bought her drinks.”) and was found dead, at the age of 58, in an empty bathtub at a room she’d rented in a New York hotel.

I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s just that here is a tale of two extraordinary women, both pioneering filmmakers in Africa, and they both had tragic endings. Their stories aren’t really linked. Yet for some reason I can’t stop thinking about them.

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The short happy life of Joan Root

Wednesday, September 8, 2010 in Africa, Kenya, Mathews Range | 3 comments

The new crossroads of Kenya, the Nanyuki airfield. Photo by David Lansing.

They used to say that sooner or later you’d run into everybody of importance in Africa at the Thorn Tree Café in the New Stanley Hotel which has been there, more or less, since 1902 (I say more or less because the original Stanley Hotel burned down in 1905 and was reopened a few years later as the New Stanley). The hotel was where Hemingway recuperated from a severe case of amoebic dysentery while on safari in 1933 and where he began imagining the story that would become “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

The real crossroads of Kenya, if not Africa, these days seems to be Barney’s at the Nanyuki airfield. Okay, I can’t see Prince Charles and Camilla being feted at Barney’s the way Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth) and Prince Philip were at The New Stanley back in 1952, but in the hour or we spent there having lunch while Calvin ran around Nanyuki buying final supplies for our drive north, a lot of interesting people came through, nobody more so than the wildlife cinematographer Alan Root.

During the ‘70s and ‘80s, Alan and his wife, Joan, were to wildlife movies what Disney is to animation. As Vanity Fair writer Mark Seal wrote in his book about Joan Root, Wildflower (which is supposedly being turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts even as I write this), “They were pioneers, filming animal behavior without human interference decades before films such as Winged Migration and March of the Penguins were made. Their movies were often narrated by top movie stars, including David Niven, James Mason, and Ian Holm, and in 1967 one of their films had a royal premiere in London, where the couple was presented to the queen.

“They introduced the American zoologist Dian Fossey to the gorillas she would later die trying to save, took Jacqueline Kennedy up in their hot-air balloon, and covered much of Africa in their single-engine Cessna and their amphibious car. Then, for reasons the public never really knew, they suddenly vanished from the screen as mysteriously as some of the endangered species they had documented.”

Interesting, no? But it gets better. They divorced and Joan retreated to her home on 88 acres along Lake Naivasha “where she devoted herself to saving the ecologically imperiled lake just beyond her home. It was there, in her bedroom at one-thirty a.m. on January 13, 2006, that she was brutally murdered by assailants with an AK-47. Screaming in Swahili that they would fill her with so many holes she’d “look like a sieve,” they pumped bullets through the glass and the bars of her bedroom windows until Joan—who, at sixty-nine, had become one of the most indomitable conservationists in the world—lay dead in a pool of her own blood.”

The murder was never solved, though most everyone, including the police, had a pretty good idea who did it. And what the motive was (hint: it has something to do with roses). Which is why, I suppose, Julia Roberts is making a film of the story. Sort of a more violent, but undoubtedly just as beautiful, Out of Africa.

The murder was four-and-a-half years ago. And now here was her ex-husband, Alan Root, sitting at the table next to me at Barney’s drinking a Tusker and eating a cheeseburger. Just like me. You can imagine how badly I wanted to introduce myself and have a little chat. But just then Calvin and Keith pulled up in front of where we were eating, honked the horn, and the four of us climbed into the Land Cruisers, leaving Alan Root to finish his lunch in silence.

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Endless sky

Tuesday, September 7, 2010 in Africa, Kenya, Maasai Mara | 1 comment

Flying over the flamingos at Lake Nakuru. Photo by David Lansing.

We flew west into the Mara, following the migration route of tens of thousands of wildebeest and zebra below us as they crossed the Sand, or Longaianiet, River following the border between Kenya and Tanzania. The Masai word siringet, from which we get Serengeti, means “vast place” and why they called it that becomes apparent when you fly low over it. In front of us was an endless horizon of tawny yellow grass, sometimes so tall you could see the wind flowing through it like waves, interrupted only by the dark green vegetation along the Sand or the distinctive island kopjes, little rock islands poking out of the yellow grass that, like coral reefs on an ocean floor, become their own little mini eco-systems supporting birds, lizards, hyraxes, and maybe a resident leopard or a pride of lions.

Sandwiched as we were between heaven and earth, what you become aware of, besides the vast numbers of wildlife beneath you, is the way all the colors of the Serengeti compliment each other: ocher-colored earth; grass going from khaki to umber to chartreuse; the deep green of trees and bushes along the riverbanks. All set off by a very pale blue sky that just seems to stretch out in front of you endlessly.

Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife, in writing about the Serengeti, talks about the vastness of this sky, how it seems to have “no boundaries, no end,” and how this is almost more than she can handle. “The machinery that keeps me going is not geared to cope with infinity and eternity as so clearly displayed in that sky. After sunset, the Africans jam into their round huts and close everything up to keep out the night; if I understood nothing else about them, I understood that.”

Flying over the same terrain, I knew exactly what she was talking about.

The Sand River eventually merges with the Mara River at the southeastern corner of the Mara Triangle and here we turned north. Below us were what looked like a dozen or so big black rocks in the middle of the mud-colored water—hippos. This river is the banquet hall for crocodiles and lions and other predators for it’s where the lemming-like wildebeest cross in order to get to the lush grasslands in the Mara Triangle. Thousands and thousands of the animals will come to the steep banks of the Mara, stop, nervously look around, grunt in frustration, and wait for a leader—anyone, anyone?—to finally dive into the stream and swim across to the other side. Once that single wildebeest makes his move, the entire herd follows—first slowly, then in a nervous panic, like fans at a sold-out soccer game, stampeding from behind so that animals are trampled to death or break their legs running down the cliff or simply drown in the pandemonium. Meanwhile, the crocs and the lions wait, no doubt with smirks on their face, for an easy meal.

From here we flew over the Mau Forest whose rivers, like the Sand, are the water source for the Mara (as the trees go—and they are being free-cut at an alarming rate, as we could see flying over them—so goes the plains) and up to Lake Nakuru, flying low over the western edge as we watched an ungodly number of bright pink flamingos rise up out of the salty soda lake, circle, and land back where they started.

Then up over the verdant Aberdare Forest to the western edge of Mt. Kenya, cloaked in a dark cloud, to the airport at Nanyuki where Calvin and the boys were sitting on the tarmac in their Land Cruisers waiting for us.

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Farewell to the Mara

Monday, September 6, 2010 in Africa, Kenya, Maasai Mara

William and Heidi come to say goodbye. Photos by David Lansing.

After breakfast I went back to my tent and packed. Calvin and his crew had left the day before and the other guests, a young family from Italy I think it was, had departed before sunrise because they were taking a domestic flight from the Keekorok airstrip, about a two hour drive away. We were flying out on the Caravan from Calvin’s private airstrip, about a 20 minute drive from camp.

The camp seemed almost deserted. Next to the mess tent was a little round building, like the huts the Masai live in, with several elephant skulls in front. A handmade sign said Dapper Flappers 1920s Shop. In the whole time we’ve been here, I’ve never seen it open but I found Heidi, the camp manager, in her office next door and asked her if they had any maps in the shop and she said they did and got on the 2-way radio to ask someone to bring her the key.

There wasn’t a lot in the shop. Toiletries, medications for upset stomachs, a few books, and some Masai trinkets: carved wooden elephants, beaded bracelets, woven baskets—the typical sort of curios you could get at the Masai Market in Nairobi for a fraction of the cost. I was looking for a map of the Masai Mara but all they had was one of Kenya. Heidi said she’d been trying to find a good Masai Mara map but there just weren’t any. So I bought the Kenya map which was $26. It was far and away the most expensive map I’ve ever bought in my life. When I unfolded it inside the mess tent, I saw that in addition to a beautifully rendered map of Kenya that included wonderful illustrations of a Masai moran, or warrior, cheetah, elephant, and a baobab tree, among others, the flip side also had very detailed maps of not only the Masai Mara but also Laikipia, The Great Rift Valley, and Nairobi. I don’t know that it was worth $26 but it was a very nice map.

I have been remiss in not mentioning Heidi before now. She and her husband Josh run the camp in Calvin’s absence. They are both in their twenties and both extremely capable and attractive people. Heidi handles everything from organizing the Masai guides for game-watching to hosting dinners with the clients each night (which, as you can imagine, could get extremely tiresome when you don’t have guests like Uma Thurman and Ed Norton, as they have had). Josh, it seems, does everything Heidi doesn’t—organize the many game-watching vehicles, repair equipment, build new tents and other structures, and also run guests to the airstrips. In fact, Josh was taking us this morning to meet our plane.

The marungu Pete bought from the Masai.

Heidi, dressed as if she were an extra in the movie Out of Africa, came with William, looking dapper as usual in his crimson vest and red fez, to say good-bye, and then Josh organized our luggage and we were off to the airstrip. The morning was beautiful and we passed any number of dik-diks and gazelles, wildebeest and zebra, and even a few giraffes on the short drive. When I saw the Caravan, guarded by two Masai crouched beneath the shadow of its wing, I felt a mixture of excitement and sadness. We were headed up towards Mt. Kenya and into Samburu country and it is always exciting to be heading into new country in Africa or anywhere else for that matter, but we were also leaving this special little corner of the Mara behind and I would miss William bringing me a gin and tonic in the late afternoon and the cry of the raptors floating in the thermals over the camp and the heady smell of leleshwa when walking in the bush.

While Hamish checked over the plane the rest of us loaded our luggage, except for Pete who, while taking photos of the Masai, decided he quite liked one of the simple but nasty looking weapons they all carry, called a rungu, which is nothing more than a carved hard wood club about two feet long with a knob on the end. The rungu is used for hunting and for protection, both from animal predators and human ones as well (in fact, former Kenyan president Daniel Moi liked to be seen with his elegant silver-tipped rungu which he would sometimes pound on a table or his desk when he was angry as a form of intimidation, much like Nikita Krushchev’s famous shoe-pounding episode with Richard Nixon I suppose).

The Masai wanted something like 400 Kenyan shillings for his rungu, which is like $5, but none of us had anything smaller than a thousand note so he ended up buying both of them. And then letting them keep the extra 200 shillings since the one thing the Masai do not carry around with them is a wallet or change. Pete didn’t mind. He was quite happy with his marungu (the plural of rungu) since they were truly authentic if not as elaborately decorated as those sold in tourist shops in Nairobi.

And then we shook Josh’s hand and climbed into the Caravan, me sitting in the co-pilot seat in front and Pete in the very back so he could lower a window and hang out the plane and take photos as we flew over Masai Mara, and Hardy and Fletch in the middle. Hamish guided the plane over the bumpy airstrip, turned the nose into the wind, and we lifted off, Josh waving goodye and the Masai morani watching stoically as we cleared the far hills and disappeared over the horizon.

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