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An atomic clock is accurate to within 1 second in 1,7 million years
And Now You Do
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3:9, Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase:
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The Serengeti Game Preserve is a long way from Elm Flat, and the last 100 miles are all dirt and washboard gravel roads. Come to think of it, the roads in east Africa are just about like those we grew up with in Elm Flat in the decade of the 1940s and 1950s, only more so. Unless you have a helicopter, however, a rough ride down these dusty roads is the price you pay for going on safari from Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, out to the Serengeti Plains.
During the 1980s and 1990s, I supplemented my university employment by conducting various consulting missions for agencies such as the African Development Bank, the United Nations, and the International Trade Center in Geneva, Switzerland. Africa was a frequent destination, and the east African country of Tanzania was the usual landing spot.
My mission in Tanzania was to assist the nation in developing the export sector of its economy. I presented export seminars. I met with every business firm in the country. I assessed the capabilities of the international banking sector, the ocean port, the standards commission, the national export insurance agency, and the export promotion bureau, and offered suggestions for improvement. I aided in establishing a foreign direct investment agency, and helped two different universities in developing courses in international business.
None of this helped very much. The country’s one-party government pursued a socialist policy that smothered individual initiative, and tied the country up in so much red tape that progress was impossible. “Poli, poli,” Swahili for “slowly, slowly,” was the watchword of the day! Consulting in this context was a little frustrating. The people and agencies that I dealt with generally agreed with the suggestions offered, but in the existing milieu were powerless to implement them.
All of the above is nothing more than prelude to explain how a Texas boy from Elm Flat wound up in East Africa . . . or maybe it is verbal padding to make the little incident I wish to relate fill up a little more space! (Even today, my university students all write term papers, and the first question asked by many of them is how long the papers should be. My answer is that the paper should be long enough to cover the subject, and that when they finish writing, they can just count the pages—and that is how long the paper should be!) These little Tales from Elm Flat should all be one to two pages in length, so a little padding is sometimes necessary.
Anyway, consulting duties always left a little time for sightseeing, or perhaps more accurately my activities could be deliberately arranged in such a manner as to allow for a bit of tourism . . . so that is how I wound up in Serengeti. Tanzanian roads at the time were rough, and the vehicle of choice in conquering them was the trusty Land Rover. Top speed was around 45 miles per hour, and these hardy vehicles were bereft of such modern-day comforts and conveniences as automatic transmissions, air conditioning, radio and CD, navigational systems, and electrically adjusted seats. If you have never spent a day traveling down a dusty dirt road aboard a Land Rover, you have never really done tourism the rough way!
The whole point of this little story has to do with an experience inside the Serengeti Wild Life Preserve—a huge unfenced area given over to wild life in the western-most part of Tanzania. We arrived in the late afternoon, and we slept overnight in a “genuine” safari camp—one reminiscent of Ernest Hemmingway’s tales from east Africa. A breakfast of fried eggs, pork-and-beans, Indian chapatti, and hot black coffee brewed over the coals got us up and moving. Our driver-guide organized some sack lunches, got us packed and loaded up, and we were off for a day of sightseeing.
The sights were noteworthy, and vivid scenes remain in my mind yet today of herds of elephant, African antelope, water buffalo, zebra, and giraffe . . . of ponds filled with hippopotamuses and crocodiles . . . of monkeys and black rhinoceros. Truly, this was more than a trip to the city zoo!
I sat in the back of the Land Rover alone—a real luxury as many of the other touring vehicles were packed with tourists to the point of discomfort. As the Land Rover moved slowly along the park road, I experienced a strange sensation. The back of my neck began tingling, and a rush of adrenalin set my heart to racing. I cannot say how I knew, but something inside alerted me to danger—not just danger, but to the presence of lions!
I informed the driver, but he immediately corrected me in his enchantingly Swahili-flavored English: Yes, bwana, there is no lions here. This was scant reassurance to me, however—I knew what I knew. It was not a matter of evidence gathered by the normal human senses, but of something more basic, a kind of primordial sensing perhaps born of an ancient means of self-preservation. Whatever its source, I knew without the possibility of doubt—and I watched. We continued on apace, maybe one-quarter mile, down a dry stream bed called a wadi, and up the other side.
There they were, just off the right side of the road, a pride of lion stretched out and resting beneath a tree, four or five large adult females and at least as many cubs. They had recently finished dining, and the bare bones of their recent prey presented a sanguinary sight a scant few feet away. We felt safe inside the vehicle, and the driver pulled near, perhaps 15 feet away from the pack, so we could observe.
An African safari lets you see nature in the rough, and the sights are alternatively exhilarating, terrifying, and awe inspiring. A tourist in a Land Rover is perfectly safe, however—at least so long as one manages not to antagonize an elephant or black rhino. These lions could do us no harm, although I will say that it was reassuring to see the remnants of their prey and to realize how satiated they were from their recent feeding!
Today I remember this event in part as just an interesting tourism experience—but more than that, the experience causes me to reflect upon how we as humans perceive, think, and behave. Perhaps deep within us there lie dormant capabilities—means of acquiring knowledge, of sensing danger—of which we are only vaguely aware, and which manifest themselves only in the course of extreme exigency.
Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net
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Average Score: 5
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