An Excerpt from “Art of Life”: Safari

An excerpt from the book Art of Life by Jennifer New.

Mtu hujua atokako, hajui aendako.
– Swahili proverb
(“One knows where they are coming from, not where they are going.”)

To Western ears, “safari” conjures up visions of a hunting adventure: Teddy Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway on an apocryphal sojourn, packing a couple of Remington shotguns, a supply of good gin, leather camp chairs for gathering around the nightly fire, and an intrepid guide, surrounded by lots of wild beasts prowling ominously in the bush. But look up safari in a Swahili-English dictionary or talk to anyone who has spent time in East Africa, and the many definitions begin to disturb that romantic picture. It is a word with many nuances, a word to be understood at several levels.

Safari: departure, expedition, journey, moment, time, turn, trip.

Africans tend to use the word as Westerners use the word trip, imbuing it with nothing grander. Dan, however, fully appreciated the word’s power and multiplicity. A weekend trip to the coast with high school friends was a safari. A tube ride to east London, camera in hand, was a safari, as was a thousand-mile trek through southern Africa or a midnight drive to Las Vegas. A trip down River Road in Nairobi, stopping on the curb to snack on some ham sandwiches – in Dan’s hands that was a safari too.

A safari is about more than the sum of a trip, the getting from point A to point B. It is about the power of departure, that feeling of cutting oneself off from the day-to-day routine and entering new time zones, different landscapes, other people’s lives – all of which, at the moment of departure, are totally unknown and unexpected. Safari is also about living in the moment and the way that travel forces you into the present, be it through extreme pleasure or hardship. Being wedged into a bus for which you’ve waited hours and then having someone steal your wallet is, without question, unpleasant, but it’s every bit a part of the experience as that first glimpse of the ocean stretching out against the sky or popping off the cap of a cold Coke as you stand on a sweltering, dusty road.

Like any traveler, Dan cursed the less sublime parts of his trips, but he also recognized how they contributed to the overall experience. You could learn a lot about yourself and others by sitting around a mechanic’s shop in Casablanca for weeks on end, even if it took months to realize as much. Travel was like collage in that way: the dull and the ethereal, the mundane and the unexpected all came together, combining in the traveler, shaping and changing him.

Dan thrived on safaris; they provided him a way to enter other people’s lives. After his first day at Pasadena Community College in 1990, Dan wrote that he must begin planning his next safari. There, near Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the world, having started school for the first time in a year and a half, with new roommates, new friends, and new possibilities all around him, he was already scheming. Driven by restlessness, he needed the prospect of an adventure dancing on his horizon; without it, his enthusiasm dwindled.

Safaris were Dan’s way of constantly encountering himself and others. From his earliest days of hitchhiking to Kipenget’s or to Maralal, he was pushing his boundaries. If a safari of great magnitude (the greatest of all being to cross the Sahara Desert) wasn’t available, he was happy to make due with his immediate surroundings, going places and seeing things that others were apt to ignore. His friends and roommates soon learned that he had little patience for television on a sunny afternoon. He prodded them to get out and be in the world, something that at first annoyed them and then endeared him to them.