Okavango Journal Day 8

My son turns 1 today. I wrote this letter this morning for him.

Pilot,

I have this dream that I’ll sit on this island one day with you. Maybe in the same place I sat yesterday, sheltered under a long bow of a sausage tree, looking out onto the floodplain. We’ll sit together and we’ll watch a group of elephants across the stream. It’ll be the same group of elephants that I watched yesterday. The matriarch will be older then, into her 50s, on her last set of teeth. Her three daughters, still with her, will have calves of their own; the family group numbering six or seven– maybe even nine or ten.

You and I will sit quietly and watch. I’ll tell you why the elephants are shaking the grass back and forth in their trunks before they ate: to get rid of the sand, which damages their precious teeth. I’ll tell you about how the calves nurse, by curling their trunks up above their heads, out of the way of their mouths, so they can get at the nipple.

I’ll tell you how this island was named after a bleached buffalo skull that was found in the mud, decades old, its horns eaten by worms, the bone bleached white in the sun.

I’ll tell you that on the day you were born, your friends took a picture for you from Buffalo Skull Island to welcome you into the world. These friends were tired, dirty, exhausted, after 110 days on expedition. But you can see the joy in their faces, the warmth and the love for this little person they’d yet to meet.

And I’ll show you this picture, from this morning, on you first birthday. I’ll tell you how much I missed you that day, how I cried when I wrote this thinking about how far away I felt from you.

And then we’ll go back to watching the elephants.

I’m filled with confidence that this dream will come true. That those elephants, that place under the sausage tree, this island, this incredible wilderness will still be here in twenty years for you too see. But the dream hangs in a precarious balance, Pilot. While the Delta itself is well protected, the river catchment in Angola and Namibia is under threat. Mining, charcoal production, unregulated hunting, out-of-control farming, water diversion– unless controlled these things will destroy the delicate source lake ecosystems and irrevocably damage the Delta itself. The situation is dire. In ten years we could lose one of the last remaining pristine ecosystems on earth.

I’m so very, very proud of our friends in this picture. Because this is how you fight against long odds to make a dream come true: you get up in the morning, every day, and you work. You sweat and you pull and you pull leeches off your legs and you work. You write and you talk and you listen and you share and you work. You plead and you argue and you persuade and advocate and you work.

You work, and you dream, and you hope.

Happy Birthday, Pilot.

Love,

Dad.