by Elissa Caterfino Mandel

If you don’t wear your glasses and have a wonderful imagination, the Quarry, which backs up to our townhouse, looks like the Grand Canyon.  Because of the way our half-of-a-house sits — at a safe distance from where the birds and other wildlife congregate — experiencing nature through the windows is like watching it virtually. It’s theoretical; it’s distant; it almost seems fake. For the leery, it’s perfect.

The elephants, however, were real.

We’d spotted them one chilly afternoon 8,000 miles from the Quarry, an entire herd, and they were using their trunks to drink from the plunge pool that sat behind our unit. All that separated us from about 20,000 pounds of elephants was a tenuous sliding glass door.  Could the elephants see us?  More aptly, what did they want from us beside pool water?

Proximity to jungle animals — this was what we had wanted when we went on safari, wasn’t it? However,  outside our door on the deck that touched our unit seemed a little too close.

“Are you getting it?  Are you getting it?” I asked Hal, who was using his weapon of choice to tackle the elephant invasion — Iphone video.

As he filmed, something unpleasant occurred to me.   “Do you think they can see us?”  I said.  Frantically, I began Googling “eyesight of adult elephants”.    Did I really think they were going to spot me in my towel and charge,  marauders through our sliding glass door? Given that we were accompanied to our lodge every night by a guard with a gun?  Well, yes: I did think that.

Un-summoned, the elephants remained for about a half hour — sipping messily with their trunks at the plunge pool, where I had been swimming less than 24 hours before.  It seemed ironic.  The day before, we’d been searching for them for hours with a guide in a jeep.  If I had known getting the elephants to come was as simple as inviting them to my back deck for a swim, I never would have gotten up at five in the morning to search for them.  After this, we could try for the lions.

“The elephants in our plunge pool” is what our Facebook caption ultimately said. “Our” plunge pool? Really? What made it ours?  If anything, it was a pool we were borrowing, and it’s not clear from whom. The safari lodge? Or were we using something that really belonged to the jungle? Who should the elephants have asked permission to drink from our plunge pool? The lions?

I still remember how the tiniest elephant in the group tried to maneuver her extremely short trunk into the plunge pool and reach for some water.  “I feel like I should carry out some Poland Spring,” said Hal, who must have had a secret wish to be trampled.

Next, he’d be providing the fox that we sometimes see at home in the Quarry with lemonade.

Everyone around me talks about having a bucket list. Africa was on mine; specifically a safari. It’s easy to sit in a jeep in your khaki best and check off the boxes. I’ve seen the big five – elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions and giraffes; I’ve hiked – well, at least partially hiked — Table Mountain.   It’s the memory of that plunge pool drink fest that will stick with me — and a few weeks later my granddaughter’s wonderful two-year-old voice saying, “I want to see picture of effants.”

A day after we filmed the elephants, we heard that a bunch of fish had been electrocuted in a pond because of a lightning strike, and we saw the evidence from our safari jeep – hundreds of lifeless eels floating on top of the water. I remember that to comfort herself about the prospect of death, my niece used to go around talking about the circle of life. Sad as it was to witness, the eels’ untimely death seemed like the personification of that very idea. Wrong pond, wrong time; oh, well.

A year and three months later, I think mostly about the baby elephant, the one whose trunk couldn’t reach the pool water. I suspect I’ll never go back to Africa to ask the question about chlorination in the plunge pool water and the health of the elephants who drank it. But as I sit and look at the birds flying around the Quarry, I wish I were the kind of person who would lobby more for the well-being of the things I see every day, even if it meant I were to travel less.