My First Night in Africa
Africa had lived in my imagination since childhood—abstract, distant, almost mythic. I arrived years later, not chasing a dream, but carrying the weight of an ending. My marriage had unraveled into something unfamiliar. I was raising two young boys, searching for steadiness, unsure of what I was walking toward.
I arrived with uncertainty, not expectation. And yet, almost immediately, the land offered a truth I would come to recognize again and again: beauty and pain are not opposites. They coexist. In the wild, nothing is separate.
That first night still lingers.
Some places must be felt, not described. Africa is one of them. To stand among its wild creatures, to witness life in its purest form, is to be forever changed. I could never have imagined how deeply it would mark me. Even now, my first night in the African wilderness lingers.
Some places arrive quietly and never leave
Ithumba
I arrived at Ithumba, deep in the northern reaches of Tsavo East, and noticed the gate before anything else.
The date carved into it—12 May 2004—the day my son was born.
I didn’t assign meaning to it. I simply noticed.
The road stretched ahead in red clay, dust lifting into the late light. The sky widened. By nightfall, it would feel impossibly close—dense with stars, as if the dark itself were listening.
Ithumba moves at its own pace. Galana stone floors cool underfoot. Thatched roofs soften the heat. Nothing insists on your attention, yet everything holds it. Time loosens its grip. The land unfolds without announcement.
Tsavo East is vast—one of the last places where scale humbles you before spectacle ever can. This is elephant country. It belongs to them, and to the smallest lives darting through brush and shadow. Stillness here is not empty. It’s full—waiting.
At midday, the sun presses down, unrelenting. Heat shimmers. The air thickens. And then, almost imperceptibly, the light begins to soften. Dusk settles like a held breath.
This is a place that speaks quietly. You learn to listen.
Between Dark and Light
My tent stood apart from the others, canvas walls breathing with the night air. Acacias surrounded it. The wild moved freely beyond the thin line of fabric. There were no fences, no separation.
The open-air shower was built into stone, water spilling from a weathered spout beneath the sky. I chose daylight to shower. I wanted to see. This was my first time showering outside. At first, I feared a leopard might scale the rock wall.
That night, the dark arrived completely—dense, absolute. The kind of dark that doesn’t allow imagination to wander far before it becomes awareness. As I walked back to my tent, I noticed eyes in the distance. Small points of reflection. Watching.
I didn’t know what they belonged to. Only that I was seen.
Fear arrived alongside something else—excitement, maybe. Or recognition. I moved quickly, zipped the tent closed, resisted the instinct to look back. My heart raced. And yet, I had never felt more awake.
Fear, I learned that night, is a threshold.
Inside the tent, the wild pressed close. Hyenas called. A leopard moved somewhere beyond the canvas. Hooves and paws passed quietly through the dark. The sounds weren’t threatening. They were simply present.
Wrapped in that vastness, I lay still. Not protected—held.
I woke without an alarm. Birds announced the day first, then the subtle movement of herds gathering, the land stirring back into light.
Stepping outside, the earth was warm beneath my feet, rust-colored and soft with age. It felt older than language. Older than explanation.
Something in me settled.
Not healed. Not resolved. Just present.
That first night did not change my life all at once. But it shifted something fundamental. It taught me how to stand inside uncertainty without turning away. How to listen. How to remain.
Africa did not offer answers.
It offered attention.
And that was enough.
