I want to go to there

The PR director for the International Crane Foundation is going to South Africa for 18 months to manage a wildlife reserve as a volunteer. She knows I've been there, and we were talking about where exactly she'd be. It felt strange - beautiful - spitting out old place names I haven't said in more than a year. "Oh, by the Drakensberg?" Those are the mountains that inspired Tolkien's Misty Mountains. "The Giant's Castle? Howick? Yes, I know the place." Lesotho is close by. I miss Lesotho with an odd ferocity for a place I only spent a few days in. I question my motives for loving it - if I didn't hate the words, I would probably unthinkingly call it "remote," "exotic," or even worse, "cute." But also, "very poor," but also, "little crime, little rape, overbrimming with trust," which meant that after 6 months in Cape Town, the contrast was both astounding and welcome. At the end of our talk, A says, "My door is open, if you're ever up that way and need a place to stay."

So the rest of today I've been daydreaming about finding someone who will pay me to go back and write about efforts to save the wattled cranes amid the government's efforts to redistribute land to people who were cheated of it during apartheid. Poverty of persons versus poverty of cranepersons. Someone with more credentials may already be writing that story, though. And I think I'd probably need more than a 2-week paid vacation (which I haven't even earned yet) to do it.

self promotion

What did I do on my vacation beside go to Florida, look at apartments, hang out at art fairs and vaudeville shows, wash my dishes and put my books in boxes and NOT make progress on the Triangle Shirtwaist poems? Write about going to Florida for Dane101. I get paid per page view, so if you're curious about what south Florida is like post-BP, following the link would be totally awesome and maybe in a few weeks I can buy a milkshake to celebrate.

Excerpt to tantalize: "It’s Independence Day and I’m seven miles off the coast of Key West, Florida, right on the cusp of the southernmost point in the contiguous United States. I’m having my first ever look at a shallow water coral reef through the clear glass of a snorkel mask. Two hours earlier my friends and I had stumbled, bleary-eyed, from a 95-degree tent at the KOA campground where we’d spent the night, in order to spend our holiday here, first snorkeling and then, after hours of sweaty wandering, watching fireworks from a beach filled with hundreds of people while rows of boats drifted just offshore, their lights bobbing like stars." Here's the link again.