Chasing Lightning with Chris Wallace
The author traces the footsteps of Peter Beard through the Serengeti for his new book “Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard”.
Peter Beard was a provocateur. Both in his personal life and as a photographer behind some of the most striking images of women and wildlife (and sometimes the two intertwined) of the last half-century, Peter was always pushing, pushing, pushing; looking for lines that those before him might not have passed, lines perhaps that one ought not to pass, entering into world of transgression (against women, wildlife, and whatever else), all in the hopes of… what? Finding something new? Something thrilling? Something never before captured on film?
That might be dressing it up a bit more romantically than it was, actually. (This was after all a guy who after being turned away at the door of a downtown Manhattan hotspot in his late fifties jumped a velvet rope to make a mad dash to the bottle service booths, only to get battered and broken by the doormen for his trouble). In the time that I came to know Peter, over the last five of six years of his life and then in researching and writing his biography for the next two or three, I have thought a lot about the lines of propriety and even common sense that Peter approached, broached, and regularly thumbed his nose at. Not without consequence, of course, and not just from New York nightlife heavies; in his years of flouting the conventions of etiquette in the bush, around animals, whether while making images or just out wandering, Peter was not entirely unscathed. In the late 80s, for example, he was implicated (and read the riot act by a court for his actions) in the goring and critical injury of a fellow outdoorsman, an event that cost Peter at least one of his oldest friends in Africa. And then of course he too had his own very personal encounter with an enraged adolescent elephant mother that, taking umbrage at Peter’s proximity to her newborn, chased him down, smashed his pelvis, gored him, and caused enough damage both internally and otherwise that, after a feverish dash from the Masai Mara to Nairobi — while Peter joked that “my screwing days are over” — when he was admitted to the hospital, Peter had no pulse.
And still he looked to provoke, to prod, to probe. Maybe successfully, you could say, because, even after his passing, this part of Peter’s personality profile rankled me. Maybe because this all is so foreign to me, being as I am a neurotic shut in, an only child who daren’t make a peep lest it rankle a hair on anyone’s head because I couldn’t deal with the shame, or maybe because books and movies are a little oversimplistic about provocateurs — surely they are just attention seekers, needing to stir up anything, even antipathy so as to be noticed — this facet of Peter’s life and resume, if you will, made me a bit restless, made me curious. And so, I got up out of my shut-in couch in my shut-in room and followed in Peter’s footsteps, literally, to Africa. Twice.
The first time, for research, I went to Kenya to walk the field in the Mara where Peter had his fateful encounter with the elephant, to retrace what was ultimately his last safari. And immediately I felt a sense of… familiarity I couldn’t quite understand. I seemed to know the landscape, before having ever arrived — of course I have, throughout my life, seen it across media, in Disney movies and in dreams probably, but still that didn’t quite explain it. “It is because you are at home here,” Calvin Cottar said. “We all are. This is the place we became human.”
Calvin owns and operates the luxury safari outfit (and their 1920’s-style camp at the edge of the Mara, near the Tanzanian border) Cottar’s Kenya, which was first established by his grandfather more than 100 years ago. It was Calvin’s father, one of Peter’s first friends and sometime employer in Africa who cut him off after Peter’s behavior in the field had gotten a fellow guide hurt in 1988. From that point on, the family had no contact with Peter, until in 1996, after Calvin’s father’s passed and Peter called up, asking to come visit, to go out on safari. Calvin graciously welcomed him in the Mara, took him out personally, and so was with him, right beside him on the day he was struck by the elephant.
Rocking along in the back of an open Land Rover as we made our way out to the field where it happened, I kept thinking about the chimes of familiarity, inevitability. I asked Calvin a bit more about the feeling of almost recognizing the landscape here. “Genetic memory is something we acknowledge in other species — butterflies that migrate miles and miles,” he said. “Why should we be any different?”
This landscape, right here, this immediate neighborhood, Calvin went on to say, is where mankind took its radical leap forward, where we became homo sapiens for the very first time. And then we up and skidaddled, vacating the Rift Valley to walk our way into every nook and cranny of the world, elsewhere, all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, cultivating land, progressing as a species, warring, begetting, developing. Except here. The highlands here remained unpopulated for millennia, until a couple hundred thousand years ago when Nilotic peoples began to make forays down from what is now Egypt. Which makes the region incredibly unique, of course. It is both our birthplace and the last place we settled. We evolved to be the way that we are with these smells, this particular place tuned into all of our instincts and behavior, predilections and fears and desires. But it is the last place we came to live. Which means of course that it has had the least exposure to our rapacity, has suffered the shortest term under our reign of constant destruction and consumption. And, importantly: in the Rift Valley, like almost no other place on the planet, we can see very clearly all of our stages of evolution living side by side.
As Calvin was talking we came to a stop about 20 yards from a lone elephant — seemingly alone, that is. “You see,” he said, “she is happy to turn her back if she is outside of the flight path.” The range of an arrow or spear, he means. How far a human projected missile of the Pleistocene could fly and so injure them.
Over millennia we evolved together, human and the megafauna here, to the point that they recognize our range of danger. To the point that, if they are confronted at any range beyond the flight reach of human propelled projectiles, an elephant, a lion, a leopard will happily just turn tail and jog off, happy to be away from bothersome men. But! If we should surprise her — an elephant on its own, even a lion, somewhere close enough that our ancestors might’ve been able to throw a spear at one of their ancestors — “they have no choice but to charge.” Instinct has wired it into their programming that if they find themselves that close to that grave of a threat — this biped hunter with killer intent — they must attack it first.
“Which is why there are so few megafauna elsewhere. They hadn’t evolved alongside us,” and they didn’t know our tricks, weren’t appropriately suspicious of we wily humans. “And, apart from some deep jungle- and high mountain-dwellers,” Calvin said, thinking perhaps of Bengal tigers, and Snow Leopards — that we couldn’t as easily approach as, say, a woolly mammoth on an open sheet of ice — we simply walked up to all the megafauna all over the world, animals that hadn’t grown up with homo sapiens and so did not have the gene-deep instinct to avoid us, and we simply stuck them with whatever sharp bits we had on hand. “Poked them,” Calvin says. Poked them over and over and over until they were gone, gone sooner than they could evolve an instinctive response to run from us when we came any nearer than the flight range of a chucked spear or bow-sprung arrow.
And when we did return to the Rift, the megafauna there were still plentiful enough that we haven’t yet had time to stomp them all into extinction. Or not quite yet anyway.
Which leads me to another of my city slicker pet theses: that safari occupies such an elevated place in our imaginings, as travelers, tourists these days, not because it is in any way returning to the motherland which of course it is, but because it suggests to us the kind of adventure that calls upon all of our faculties, and thus makes us the most human. The (perceived) danger, the thrill, the confrontation, interaction, communion or combat with these ancient animals from way back in our evolution: just the idea of it triggers something primal for us, makes us feel like we are complete again, doing what we were made to do, doing it in real life as opposed to simulating it in a gym or on a playing field. This is real human be-ing, I suggest to Calvin, and why safari is such an alluring adventure.
“Well, that and Out of Africa,” Calvin said.
Not that Peter was here for that. Or not exactly — though it was Blixen’s book that created much of the fantasy-scape he was to inhabit over the course of his many decades in Kenya (where he purchased a plot of land adjacent to Blixen’s former Karen estate). In every way, Peter was trying to have an experience as close to some idea he had of authentic man as he could manage. “He’d be happy camping under a sheet between those two trees,” Calvin told me. “So long as he had regular visitors,” he added. “He needed a lot of social activity.”
The second time I set about tracking Peter, it was well after I’d finished the book. But still, the restlessness remained — or, maybe it was that I’d grown curious to see if I could catch a little of the same magic Peter had in his earliest wildlife photography (alas). Through the Four Seasons team in the Serengeti, I was able to arrange a safari accompanied by an acclaimed wildlife photographer — thinking, I guess, that if I did as Peter did, where he did it, I might get a better sense of how he did it. If not exactly why.
Not five minutes after landing at the Serengeti airstrip, and deplaning into open-canopy Land Cruiser, we came upon a pair of lions in the early frenzy of a mating marathon. And moments later came upon another pride. And then another. Good fortune that would have seemed unbelievable to me on previous safaris, was almost commonplace, expected. Which may have had a kind of calming effect on me. Providing a false sense of confidence, if not accomplishment. Like, no big deal, this wildlife thing, when lions and cheetahs and leopards walk right into frame and pose for you to get your settings and focus just so.
Of course, those perfectly arranged photos weren’t what Peter had been after. They would have bored him silly. He wanted something electrifying, something dangerous perhaps, effecting, certainly. And I knew damn well what he would have done to create the moment if it weren’t just happening. He would have leapt out of the truck to cross over the threshold into the flight range — that is where he hoped to live and to find the pictures that most interested him. He lived to dance into the danger zone (where, obviously, I was unwilling to follow him).
But in following Peter’s footsteps at least this far, across three continents, and in talking to his friends and intimates, wondering aloud with them about Peter’s continual flouting of the boundary between safety and its opposite — his flouting of all boundaries — I came to doubt that we have the proper language to describe his behavior. We fall into trite isms, only, and seem to wave away the workings of whatever machinery propelled him into the pathways of lions and elephants — collapse in our imaginings this behavior into a lump, equating it with his need for attention and for beautiful romantic company. At times we describe him as liking danger, and so explain away his courting it whenever he could. Maybe we say that he thrived on adrenaline, as his friend Mick Jagger must, but without the same sort of stage to provide it for him. We can agree that he was compelled to bite his thumb at forms of control, even his own feelings of safety that relied on them. But the need, the continual compulsion to cross that line… even Peter couldn’t properly describe it, whether it was about going a step further than anyone else had the will to do, in order to provoke a better photograph, or to hit a greater payload of his favorite adrenaline rush, or indeed to feel that real, final boundary, the boundary between life and death, and to thrum it just as he had every other line in his life, the better to hear its music.
One possibility — and before I begin to sound too terribly puritanical in reading the runes of Peter’s life, I should say, it is the reading that I, and all of his intimates on whom I tried it favor — is that Peter’s constant crossing of the line, like his constant chasing of skirts, was simply something to do. Something to which he had become habituated, sure, and which suited his temperaments, his aesthetic interests, his era and his metabolism, but merely one possible response to the cold indifference of the universe, as good as any other. See, I would suggest that Peter behaved the way he did, around elephants and supermodels, both, as a response to and a desperate rebellion against his own overwhelming fatalism. In his heartbreak over the destruction of the natural world — and, thus, along with it, all other worlds there might be — Peter resigned himself to a belief, to the truth that there is nothing to be done to save us, that all is doomed and nothing really even matters.
“I have no idea what the point is,” he said. “And I think we are, as [Francis] Bacon suggested… living a meaningless existence from birth to death. No one knows the answer… We don’t know what consciousness is. We don’t know what reality is. We don’t know what time is. We are just ants on an ant hill.”
Lost in a void, in nature. And, as he would’ve said, there is no morality that matters in nature. The cruel, the corrupt and the accidentally lucky win, momentarily, until all is rendered unto rot and ruin forever. Nothing man-made will last, all save the desecration we have wrought. And, finding the world he saw to be as close to paradise as can be hoped for destroyed by our own hand, and knowingly, with only short-term comfort and miniscule capitalist gains to be had at the cost of everything, of Eden, Peter gave up all hope that he had. He understood that God was dead, you might say, so he figured, we might as well party. Might as well enjoy the world that remains, find beauty which he regularly said was the only thing left that mattered in the cosmos. And so he did. He fucked and flailed like someone desperate to soothe himself, and someone who is desperately crying out, for attention, perhaps, in pain, maybe, in disappointment, probably. But he carried on, as he had to do, because that’s just the way we are programmed.
That is our instinct, just as the butterflies are given their instinct to migrate, we are compelled to survive, to go on. And that makes me wonder what else we might carry, behavior wise, impulse or motivation wise, that could be considered instinctive. To what extent do we still carry programming from our ancestors? And what instructions or talents have they handed down to us?
In a digression on human evolution in his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin records meeting the South African paleontologist Elizabeth Vrba who mentioned to him, he wrote, that “antelopes are stimulated to migrate by lightning. ‘So,’ I said, ‘are Kalahari Bushman,’” Chatwin wrote. “’They also “follow” the lightning. For where the lightning has been, there will be water, greenery, and game.’” And I cannot think of a better way to describe Peter’s energies, in his work, with wildlife, indeed, even around people with whom he was always trying to create electricity if not thunderstorms: running toward the dramatic, the dangerous, the electrifying. Maybe there was some evolutionary strand in Peter’s DNA that led him as it did the wildebeest and antelope and human hunters, to run toward the lightning.
Now when the scraggly filaments flash in the falling light, over Manhattan, Montauk, or the Rift valley, I look up and picture him out there, running in their pursuit. I imagine he’ll get the shot.
This article was featured in our Issue Four. Chris Wallace’s new biography of Peter Beard “Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard” is available for purchase now.