Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World - Hardcover

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PROLOGUE

A REPORT CAME OVER THE RADIO IN SWAHILI: SOMEONE HAD SPOTTED A cheetah and her cubs.

"We'd have to drive fast to get there. Do you want to go?" my guide David Barisa asked, breathlessly. David was in his thirties, but he had a certain youthful panache given his shaven head, gold-plated sunglasses, and street-savvy nubuck boots. I couldn't tell if his excitement was over the predator sighting or the excuse to speed.

"Sure," I said.

We'd been watching the largest wildebeest herd I'd seen in the Serengeti, roughly 10,000 animals grazing and shuffling their feet in migration. Each year, some 1.3 million wildebeest move full circle through Kenya and Tanzania, following rains. They're joined by zebra and gazelle, as well as a cast of hungry characters that lurk in the fray. And the drama of all this-as it's taught in textbooks-was transpiring before me.

In the distance, thousands of additional wildebeest were clumped on the horizon, moving like silt-colored rivers. Breezes brought the sweet, nostalgic smell of hay. We bounded across rutted roads while David reeled off names of the animal groupings we'd seen over the past few days: clan of hyena, pack of wild dogs, pride of lions, herd of elephants.

"So, what do you call a group of cheetah?" I asked.

"They're usually alone," David said, grinding a gear. "But when I see them together, I just call them a family."

I had to ask because I'm not a scientist. No, I'm a part-time teacher and freelance writer, mother of a young child, wife of a carpenter. So what was I-grader of papers, changer of diapers-doing gallivanting around the Serengeti? Why had I left my husband and two-year-old son back home in the hills of southern Appalachia?

My answer might come across as insane, or-at the very least-overly dramatic.

But here's the truth: I was on an epic quest for wonder.

I'd been chasing phenomena around the world for more than a year when I arrived in the Serengeti, and I still had many miles to go. But my inspiration had been sparked even before I became a mother, when-three years before my son's birth-I visited the overwintering site of the monarch butterfly in central Mexico. Before I accepted the magazine assignment that took me there, I'd never even heard of the monarch migration, during which nearly the entire North American population comes to roost in a small swath of forest. But witnessing millions of butterflies swirling, dipping, and gliding over a single mountaintop gave me an actual glimpse of what I mean when I refer to myself as spiritual but not religious.

And-in difficult times-memories of that experience sustained me.

I don't know that I suffered clinical postpartum depression when my son was born, but I began to empathize with the horror stories the condition can lead to. Inspired by butterflies, I had long ago dreamed up a list of other natural phenomena I'd like to experience. But travel to far-flung lands? Once I had a baby, I considered myself lucky to make it to the grocery store before it was time for bed.

Still, I mused: Children have the capacity to marvel over simple things in nature-leaves, twigs, pebbles. Couldn't exploring just a few of earth's most dazzling natural phenomena-steeped as they are in science and mythology-make the world similarly new again, reawakening that sort of wonder within me? Drudgery, after all, has nothing to do with growing up if we do it right and-beyond tending to the acute physical needs of a child-little to do with what it means to be a good parent.

Right?

Back then, I didn't know that acting out my self-designed pilgrimage would put me in the path of modern-day shamans, reindeer herders, and astrophysicists. I had no idea there were lay people from all over the world, from all walks of life, already going to great lengths to undertake the sorts of phenomena chases I'd dreamed up. Some took odd jobs to stay unde