Windhoek to Walvis Bay

Pulp the plant and plant it new, that’s what termites do. We learned that from books 
one devoured while the other was driving. From the conferences convened inside the 
car. We’d come down from the highlands. Come out of acacia trees and into acacia 
bushes. We taught ourselves to gauge the age of a termite mound by the age of the acacia 
beside it. We founded a college, which grew into a university, for we had space and time. 
I watched one colonial town fade from the rearview and then nothing until another 
white-washed town wavered in our windows, its petrol station in view a long while. I 
grew restless with little to do but stitch and re-stich my notions. We had assumed we 
would hop in the car and arrive there shortly. We hadn’t adjusted our perspective yet. We 
wouldn’t adjust our perspective for hundreds of years. I spied with my little eyes: several 
journeys of giraffe, a congress of baboons, a pride of ostrich (baby ostrich, mama ostrich, 
ostrich— gray and white and black of feather, gray and white and black of feather, gray 
and white and black of feather—of an uncertain age), kudu—brown and beige of pelt and 
antler, brown and beige of pelt and antler—and signs warning kudu jump into the road. 
Nearly indistinguishable from the bush, all this life lived on before us. We sighted oryx 
with black noses to draw heat off their brains, an implausibility of wildebeest, a band of 
mongoose, and several confusions of guinea fowl fowling the road. At first, we felt as close 
to God as Adam, and as headlong, naming every beast and bird and bush with plastic 
specificity. I didn’t know an eland from a hartebeest, but the naming made them. We felt 
satisfied until we noticed how far we were past our star’s highest hour. We had descended 
from bushes to succulents. Driven from succulents to little but lichen scattered close to 
the stony ground. This reminds me of Lubbock, of the scratchy plains outside of Lubbock, one of 
us noted, though the other was napping by then, head toppled like our top-heavy globe. 
This reminds me of the moon. It was not long before the gloaming of the first day in the 
furthest reaches of our dreams, when what we were seeing couldn’t be compared to what 
we had seen. Rising in the distance
could have been anything. Could have been fortresses. 
Could have been oceans. Could have been elephants. Could have been dunes. We were 
caught somewhere between the compact center of the earth and the earth’s exaggerated 
edges. Trucks drove toward us with long fishing poles lodged in their front fenders. 
Trucks drove toward us looking like catfish on their way to a cove that was bound to 
disappoint. I thought I was close to understanding where we really were, but that ceased 
to be the point a long time ago. One of us passed a strip of dry, salty meat through our 
own lips. One of us passed a strip of dry, salty meat to the dog. We climbed out of the 
car inside a grayness and put up our tent in the wind. The sun set before we got the fire 
started. There were no stars to speak of, only fog and clouds and a long night sky, jackals 
packed and cackling in the distance, the road ahead of us still.