[at-l] Adventurous Woman

[janl2@mindspring.com (Jan Leitschuh)]

A snippet from a remarkable book I am reading, "West With the Night" by
Beryl Markam. 

Beryl was the subject of the PBS documentary World Without Walls". Ha! I'll
say. A real "out-of-the-box" thinker.

She was born in England in 1902, and was taken by her father to East Africa
in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with the native Murani children. 

After apprenticing as a trainer and breeder of race horses, she learned to
fly and ran her own one-plane freelance aviation service shuttling
passengers, medicine, supplies and mail to lonely African outposts (roads,
literally, sucked). 

In 1936, she became the first solo flier, man or woman, to travel east to
west across the Atlantic ocean, leaving from England and crash-landing in
Nova Scotia some 21 hours layer...

An adventurous woman ahead of her time. With deep insight, as well.

The snippet, the snippet - OK, her thoughts on "civilization," arrogance,
boredom, projection and, most of all, the need to reconnect deeply with wild
places:

"Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a
photographer's paradise; a hunter's Valhalla; an escapist's Utopia. It is
the last vestige of a dead world, or the cradle of a shiny new one. It is
what you will, and it withstands all interpretations.

"Competitors in conquest have overlooked the vital soul of Africa herself,
from which emanates the true resistance to conquest. The soul is not dead,
but silent, the wisdom not lacking, but of such simplicity as to be counted
as non-existent in the tinker's mind of modern civilization... 

What upstart race, sprung from some recent, callow century to arm itself
with steel and boastfulnes, can match in purity the blood of a single Masai
Murani whose heritage may have stemmed not far from Eden?
 It is not the weed that is corrupt; roots of the weed first sucked life
from the genesis of the earth and hold the essence of it still. ALWAYS, the
weed returns; the cultivated plant retreats before it...

Racial purity, TRUE aristocracy, devolve not from edict, nor from rote, but
from the preservation of kinship with the elemental forces and purposes of
life whose understanding is not farther beyond the mind of the native
shepherd than beyond the cultured fumblings of a mortar-board
intelligence...

>From the time I arrived in British East Africa at age four and went through
the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later
training race horses, still later scouting...by aeroplane, for elephant, I
remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being
alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a
year.
Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic."

Marvelous, dry stuff! What a gal! Thanks, Alex ATRunner, for the loan of the
book.




-- 
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    Jan Leitschuh Sporthorses Ltd.

http://www.mindspring.com/~janl2

E-mail:  mailto:janl2@mindspring.com

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