Close Encounters: Navigating Fear and Inspiration in the Wild

When a moment of crisis turned self-blame into self-discovery in the Serengeti

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Wouldn’t it be great if we could be intuitive at will?

To find sparks of inspiration and guidance effortlessly?

Feels like a tall order.

And yet, over and over, we hear stories about people who do extraordinary things, guided by an inner compulsion. Where does this certainty come from?

Well, unexpectedly, I received a little lesson around these questions last week in East Africa. An African safari has been No. 1 on my Bucket List for a decade. After a year in the making, my dream became a reality when I went to Tanzania with family.

Little did I know that alongside amazing animals I would be getting a bit more than I bargained for.

So, This Happened on the Serengeti

It’s 4:00 am and pitch black on the sixth day of our safari. We are lurching forward following muddy wheel tracks that cut through Serengeti grass and woodlands. We are trying to hurry. We have a 7:00 am hot-air balloon liftoff to make.

Right away, we discover there’s no such thing as “hurry.”

Lurching up and down, our open-air jeep bobs and bounces across foot-high tire grooves in the muddy road, slowing our speed to an aching 5-10 mph. Our driver, Samuel, expertly navigates the sludge, jerking the steering wheel back and forth to control our slithering slides and wrestle us onto narrow dirt planes, only to slip into the deep troughs again and again.

This year’s rainy season was unusually long with record rainfall. Dirt roads haven’t yet had a chance to dry out. As a result, dark pools still flood the trenches and mud splashes up five feet to freckle my slicker.

I’m sitting in the middle row of a six-seater vehicle. Like a mini bleacher, there are three rows of two seats each rising behind Samuel. My husband sits to my left. My daughter and son-in-law are in front of us, our son and daughter-in-law on the top row behind. Now and then, I hear a muttered grunt. Those top seats bear the brunt of each jarring lurch.

In unison, our heads jostle left, right, up, down. It’s as if our jeep showed up straight from a late-night party and is still drunk.

We’re buckled in, of course, but still, I irrationally clutch the inside armrest as if my two-handed grip will stop the vehicle from tipping over.

We are all wide awake. Despite the early hour, it’s impossible to doze off with that jolting, but no one’s talking. The only sounds are grinding gears and spattering mud. With only fathomless black on either side of the narrow road, we all stare forward, mesmerized by the headlights’ narrow tunnel of light stretching ahead.

“Jackals!” Samuel punctures the quiet.

“Hyenas!” In the headlamp beams we catch their jogging ghostlike shapes before they disappear into high grass.

“Gazelles!” Off the road, faint rounded shapes cluster under a lone tree.

“Lion!” Here Samuel slows down, but the massive cat slips into darkness.

Suddenly, hulking shapes hurtle in front of us. Samuel hits the brakes, and the jeep wildly fishtails. Two beasts burst into the high beams, trotting side by side down the track before ducking off into underbrush. Cape buffalo. Resting on top of their heads, their distinctive horns look like giant handlebar mustaches, or a little girl’s flipped-up hairstyle.

Except these animals are not childlike innocents.

No one’s ever domesticated cape buffalo.

Not these wild brutes known for violent, unpredictable aggression.

Yeah, we give them right of way.

A breeze brushes my face. Unaccountably, I shiver. It may appear to be empty night, but this place is teeming with nocturnal life. And death. It is lonely. I am literally on the other side of the world from my tame Missouri home, and I am gripped with the precariousness of it all.

What if we lose our way? What if something happens to Samuel? What if we get stuck? Topple over? Hurt?

No cell tower reaches here. Human habitation is hours away. We are far, far from our lodge and even daylight. Samuel’s radio signal is scratchy, intermittent.

This is not our home. We don’t belong here.

So, it’s right now. Right in the middle of this swirl of skittishness that I’m seized by a new frightening thought.

I Blew It, Badly

Our extra cash, our passports, the xerox copy of our passports, the tanzanite gemstone I’d bought in Tarangire to create a necklace, our bush plane airline tickets. . . I left them out in our room.

Why did I take the valuables out? I don’t remember. Looking for socks? I do recall I threw my pajamas on top of the pile while groggily dressing at 3:00 am.

All so easy to be slipped into a pocket.

Idiot!

It’s not any specific individual that scares me of robbery as much as the narrative we bring with us as being Western tourists with money. I am simply one more tourist face of thousands who have preceded me and thousands who will follow. I am anonymous. Even though a part of me begins to rationalize next steps if there’s theft, the crazy part is freaking out.

What if. What if. What if.

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

We are lurching forward again. A cool breeze brushes my face, but I am sweating. In that moment, I am helpless to my wrenching self-blame and carelessness. And we won’t return to the lodge until late, late, late in the day.

Which means I have at least fifteen hours ahead of me of glorious landscapes and remarkable wildlife on a Once-in-a-Lifetime Day on my No. 1 Bucket List Trip to completely ruin with haunting, gripping, crippling self-ridicule and doubt.

Nice going, Joan.

I am so, so sad.

If there’s a time for inspiration—any intuition—this is it. I’m at a loss. I desperately want to act in some way, some how, but there is nothing, nothing I can do.

So, with both hands, I re-grip the armrest. Close my eyes. Tell me what to know, I silently ask the Universe.

All is well.

Just like that. Swift. A wisp of a whisper. As though it is a complete phrase instead of three separate words.

All is well.

And in that instant, while swaying in my seat, the paralyzing fear and loneliness from seconds before is simply. . . gone.

Stunned, grateful, I sit in it.

This strange calm.

What Happened Later

So, we make it on time for the fantastic hot-air balloon ride. Afterwards Samuel hands us over to Logo and Bonay, a game driver and an animal tracker who both come from the indigenous Massai tribe. Friendly. Knowledgeable.

We begin a long meandering trip back towards the lodge while searching for a leopard, the only animal left on our list of Africa’s iconic Big Five animals.

We circle and re-circle through tall green grass flourishing from all that rain. Our jeep’s tracks now scratch widening Venn diagrams. We encounter a line of elephants, herds of impalas, clusters of giraffes. But no cats.

The high savannah fields are a good cover.

I imagine a leopard sprawled in hiding, languidly licking her paws while watching us from a distance.

Potentially stolen passports are long gone from my mind.

We tire. It’s late afternoon now. Reluctantly, Logo and Bonay finally admit defeat and turn back onto the rough road. Wouldn’t you know - just as Logo accelerates, Bonay spots the tawny golden back of a female lion lying in a tree’s shade. Excited, quick quick Logo jerks left climbing an embankment to turn back when suddenly we jolt forward, slam back. With a thud, the right rear tire drops into a hole.

Logo revs the engine, the tires spin.

We’re stuck.

Twenty yards away the lion gets up to look.

“No one leaves the vehicle,” says Logo who is tossing about blankets stuffed behind his front seat to pull out a giant tire jack. Bonay leaps onto the road, eyes sweeping the savannah. Logo lugs the jack to the buried tire.

“I can help,” says my son.

“Stay in the jeep!”

“Let me get out. Take weight off this corner. . .”

“Stay in the jeep! No sudden movement! Those lions are not alone. There’s a pride of lions here.”

With perfect synchronicity, our eyes swivel back to the female lion just as a thick-maned male rises from the grass next to her.

We freeze.

My heartbeat speeds up. This is real. That’s my daughter and husband closest to those cats.

The lions lift their faces, sniff the air.

And that’s when two things happen at once.

All is well. The phrase instantly reappears.

Simultaneously, a wildebeest (a favorite lion dish) bolts out of the underbrush and dashes straight toward the cats. Startled, the lions swipe but just miss it. Immediately, they take up the chase. Down a gully, up the other side, the three charge in a death sprint over the hill and out of sight.

“Well, that was lucky,” says Logo, panting as he heaves the jeep’s sunken corner up with the jack. “Our jeep must’ve startled the wildebeest. He didn’t know the lions were there.”

By the time the lions come loping back (wildebeest-less), the tire’s out of the hole. “Let’s get a closer look,” says Logo, and safe in the jeep, we do.

Back at the lodge, all of our stuff is untouched.

Inspiration. Intuition. What Guides You?

Call it instinct. Call it clairvoyance or intuition.

I think when we hear amazing stories of underdogs who beat the odds by challenging the status quo (like my novel’s true story of Jo van Gogh and how she saved Vincent’s paintings from obscurity), we’re awestruck not only by their bravery, but how they could be so clear. . .especially when the so-called experts they’re up against are determined to prove them wrong.

Even with nothing to reassure or guide them, they take the next step anyway.

Follow an inner direction.

Why did the wildebeest startle in that moment? Draw the lions’ attention?

Why would I feel all is well when nothing had changed?

Is that what Jo felt?

I don’t know.

But then again, an inner direction just can’t always be explained.

Warmly,

P.S. For more ideas on following one’s inner voice, see

Jenn Todling

’s posts on Soul Ignition. For glorious posts on nature’s consciousness see

Julie Gabrielli

on Building Hope. And for some of my Africa photos, follow me on Instagram to check out a recent post of pics.

Book Recommendations: Two unforgettable classics about women adventurers in Africa. I read these in high school and both still sit in my bookshelves.

Follow me on Bookbub for Free book promos and recommendations: at Joan Fernandez

Order from your favorite bookseller or check out from your local library.

West with the Night

Memoir of classic female bush pilot

This 1942 memoir (not a complete autobiography) by Beryl Markham chronicles her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s, and her stellar careers as racehorse trainer and bush pilot.

Markham was the first woman in East Africa to be granted a commercial pilot’s license, piloting passengers and supplies to remote corners of Africa. She became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

Considered a classic of outdoor literature and ranked #8 by National Geographic Adventure in 2008 on its list of the 100 best adventure books. [review from Goodreads review site]

Order from your favorite bookseller or check out from your local library.

Out of Africa

Astounding memoir made into a movie classic with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford

Published in 1937 Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade."

In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century."

Isak Dinesen (1885–1962) was born Karen Christence Dinesen in Rungsted, Denmark. She wrote poems, plays, and stories from an early age, including Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass and Ehrengard. Out of Africa is considered her masterpiece. [Review from Goodreads reader review site]