special report: back in the drakensberg

We lifted off Friday, letting the city break down into a pixelated array of rectangles, squares, and intersecting highway lines, thinning to a strip of coast, and then dark blue sea for the next ten or fifty hours. The dark blue greyed to black, and it's a shame there's still no camera fit to catch the brightness of those lonely stars that only one shining ship below could appr

eciate. It was startling just to see a light in the middle of so much cold sea, and unthinkable that a friend of mine had crossed that. I thought of the distance growing between myself and the warm little cat that sleeps curled against my body, now half a world away. Those friends, too.

Dawn came pale and orange through the plane window in Dakar, where we stopped to refuel, refood, and get sprayed by a substance that was deemed harmless by the World Health Organization. It smelled like Lysol. We rose again, and I awoke over Namibia, just past the Angola border. straight roads, dirt roads, and not one house. Johannesburg happened unexpectedly after the mountains, tiny windows glinting as we angled down, over fires and exhaust. The air felt warm and smelled grilled.

The transition to Durban was smooth, and the friendly Afrikaner man beside me, and twice the size of me, attempted to discuss 

water polo before I confessed I had no idea that the US had a national team(?); I come from a land too plentiful in sports, beliefs, and toothpaste brands than I will ever comprehend.

We spent a perfectly comfortable night at a lovingly designed b+b with good old friends of Sarah's father Gerry, and picked up a glowing Phumzile (literally, in a bright golden scarf) at the airport from where she is currently studying in Cape Town. A three hour drive north took us back past the giraffes, the doctor's clinic, the naartje/ butter-avo vendor, past the adjacent road to the hospital, and to Carol's door, where all of the dogs, the cats, and the Zulu-fluent parrot were there to greet us.
It's two years to the month we arrived for the first time. Each ridge in the horizon line, each curve of the road, and each bite of Carol's pudding was/ has been/ and continues to be real. I can't explain it, but there is great relief in all of this.