Kalahari

Kalahari

The last thing Daryl Oates remembered, at least the last thing he thought he remembered, was the left front wheel of the Land Rover had caught a rut in the dry river bed and flipped the vehicle onto its roll bar cage. In fact, what Oates did not remember was the vehicle being airborne before it landed and before the left side of his head grazed a boulder the size of his Rover as it rolled three times and came to a rest upside down. Oates was not completely awake but he knew his head ached and was wet and sticky on one side.

***

He crawled from under the Rover after he found his duffle and retrieved a towel from it along with a gallon water jug. He wet the towel and applied it to his head; it came away bloody. He repeated the process, wringing out the towel after each application. Eventually, he was able to see that most of the blood had been mopped away. The medical kit, along with six gallons of water, which he was required to have when he left the Johannesburg airport, contained bandage material and antibiotic cream. He was able to dress his wound using the large side mirror and satisfied himself that he would survive. He took four Ibuprofen caps from the kit and swallowed them with water from the jug. After a bit, he collected himself and began to assess his situation and the next steps.

***

He tried several times to pull the upended vehicle onto its side but it only leaned. He knew that he would not be able to right the vehicle. 'What the hell,' he thought. 'I'm in the middle of the freakin' Kalahari Desert, a hundred thousand miles of sand. Where the hell did that rut come from?' Actually, the Kalahari covers about 350,000 miles, that is, most of Botswana in Southern Africa. Oates, an English adventurer from London, had some money from an inheritance and had taken a bartending job offered online by a company with a camp on one of the thousands of islands in the Okavango Delta, a 6,000 square mile wetland on the northern edge of the Kalahari. It was about a 12-hour drive from J-Burg, where his plane landed, to the camp, at a 50-mile-an-hour average, but across a very large area of nothing. Oates had been doing about 65, too fast, he recollected, when the rut appeared.

Why did he want the bar job? 'Hell, I don't know' he thought. Sounded good and he'd never been to Africa where many Britishers lived. He was raised in a city with a few green parks but not much sand. And the job at the Ivory Tusk Camp sounded even better. Supposed to be fancy, a friend in the travel business told him. And Africa was an absolutely stunning place to visit. But Oates also was a realist and he thought “fancy” was a relative term when applied to an operation in the middle of an African swamp. But even so, the adventure was the goal here.

And while all that was terrific, Oates thought, he had some more immediate problems to solve, not the least of which was how to get to Ivory Tusk Camp, which was still about eight hours away if his basic computation was accurate. He knew about survival, how to make water out of plants, how to start a fire with sticks and twigs. But he had almost 6 gallons of water and a sleeping bag and some beef jerky and a couple boxes of matches, so those were not issues for the moment. And he had a couple vinyl tarps that he planned to spread on the upside bottom of the leaning vehicle on which to rest; he did not want to sleep on the ground. It would be dark in a couple hours but he could see a faint bump on the northern horizon, which could be anything, or nothing. Mirages in a desert were a given. He wasn't hungry, but he ate a couple sticks of jerky, just because.. His cell phone crackled a little when he turned it on but there was no response to his initial Mayday call and he turned it off. There were a few sun-shriveled plants in the area but nothing that would feed and maintain a fire so he unrolled his sleeping bag, crawled onto the bottom of his Rover, and spent the most uncomfortable night of his 33-year-old life (a differential does not make a great bed pillow), dozing infrequently while shifting his body position every 10 minutes.

***

First light showed a series of animal tracks around the vehicle, including lines in the sand that indicated lizard-like critters, and one long series of “S” shapes that told him he made the right decision to sleep off the ground. Now, what to do? The traditional theory is to stay with a disabled vehicle because sooner or later you will be reported missing and search parties will be formed. For chrissake, in the middle of a barren 350,000-mile sandbox without phone service, seeking help when no one knows you are missing in the first place? And you didn't tell the car rental people when you might return or that you had a job that might keep you away for months, which seemed like a good idea at the time; and the camp may rightly assume you changed your mind and start advertising for another bartender. Plus you don't know if the bump on the horizon is real and, anyway, how in the hell are you supposed to carry 6 gallons of water and your necessary survival equipment?

***

Oates rigged a sunshade with the tarps attached to the Rover, took a couple gulps of water and ate another stick of jerky. He was hungry and realized the jerky contained a lot of salt that would make him more thirsty. Then his former stoicism and confidence began to crumble. He concluded he was screwed, and that he would either starve to death or die of thirst; screw the knowledge of how to make water form plants. He thought of his mother, who lived in Leeds in the north, and his buddies at the Jolly Roger Pub in the West End, and his girlfriend, Lucy, who wanted to come with him but was politely refused and now probably had already decided he was a bad risk long term. He felt cold in the rising heat of the desert. Was it fear? Probably. And then, he was sure the isolation, the impossible future, the ultimate agony of slowly dying of hunger and thirst had forced him into a state of hallucination. Because he thought he heard the whirr of a helicopter but dismissed it. 'You're going crazy and you've only been here less than 24 hours,' he thought. Then the whirr got louder, and 50 yards from where he was sure would be his gravesite, an olive drab chopper was settling onto the sand. He would learn later the helicopter carried a group of wildlife rangers and was part of an area-wide effort by the Botswana government to control poaching.

He started to laugh. He was sitting on the sand, leaning against the overturned Land Rover. The laugh became a side-splitting roar. He could not contain himself. The tears were coursing down his cheeks: He was shaking and coughing and laughing and gagging and he decided, between coughing fits and very loud nose snorts and giggles that, even if the helicopter was a mirage, even if he would die and no one would find his skeleton for weeks or months or ever, and maybe would never piece together how he got where he was and what he planned to do; that, he was thinking between convulsions, was a goddamn riot.