Paths cross, and random people spend a day together in places like this. In the pre-dawn, everybody mustered by the coffee pot, and on the way to the safari truck I shook hands with the man next to me.
"I’m Bill, hi."
"Hello, I’m Reto."
"Sorry?"
“Reto. R – e – t – o,” he said, grimly enough to back me off.
Just freezing at first, until the sky pinked up and gave form to the landscape, and we all leaned in toward the center of the open truck and out of the wind. Reto sat with the driver, a Damara with the English name of Bernard. A mom and her two kids huddled in the seat behind them, Mirja and me next, and dad, a bluff and hale South African, claimed not to be freezing in the back, in his shorts, by himself.We stopped at a lookout before the sun presented itself and he dismissed the cold, “Aw, in ten minutes time it will be hot.”
There was a stop at a particularly daunting sand dune, and Bernard put out a light breakfast. I slipped away to take pictures and so I was last to the picnic table, a seat made white with bird droppings. Didn’t much want the cold cuts and yogurt but I took more than my share of coffee and I perched, next to Mirja, sort of half on and half off the bench, which put my back mostly to Reto, who hadn’t said a word all day.
We prattled about the South Africans’ home city of Durban.
“Oh, you’re going there? I was actually hijacked in the center.”
“You must go shopping at Gateway, biggest mall in the southern hemisphere….”
“The Queen stayed at the Royal Hotel – it was five star then, hardly four now, I’m afraid.”
And so on.
After enough of the happy talk I felt my back to Reto, down at the end, and I turned to ask him where he was from.
Zurich, living in Geneva. International trade lawyer.
Naturally thin, prematurely graying but a youthful looking kid in his 30’s. He’d lectured on international trade law in Windhoek and arranged a four day extension to here and then, later in that day, to Swakopmund, and he called it once in a lifetime.
Back in the dark over, hovering over the coffee pot, when he sort of grimaced as he spelled his name, R – E – T – O, then fell silent, we couldn’t make anything of him, but as we drew him out we saw he was quite shy and alone, but with a razor-sharp wit.
In the late morning, as we walked across a dune just barely not lethally hot, Mirja asked one of her perennials, “Do you have snakes?” Before Bernard could reply the South African kids lovingly described the sidewinder and Bernard helpfully mentioned the spitting cobra.
Not something you run into in Geneva, I ventured to Reto.Quick as a sidewinder he replied, “No, only the two-legged version.”
(Photo from EarthPhotos.com. See 100 more photos from Namibia are in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And read more stories From the Eventual Book.)
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