I’d Be Lion If I Said It Wasn’t Terrifying, Part 1

My sister’s flirtatious nature almost got me killed in Tanzania.

To appreciate this, you’ll need some background.

First, all of the women in my family (save me) are natural vamps. Let’s say our family name is Beekman. (Close.) My mother and her sisters all have the Beekman Butt, and to go with it, the Beekman Walk, which involves walking on one’s tiptoes and shaking it like a Polaroid picture with every footfall.  It doesn’t sound cute, but it is. None of those women have ever been single. EVER. I can’t tell you how many of mom’s visits to DC have involved me pointedly telling men that she is MARRIED and MY MOTHER so please STOP THAT.

My sister doesn’t have the Butt, but she was born with the Walk. You’ll want to maintain clear distance when strolling alongside her, lest you wind up with hip-inflicted bruises on your own butt. Does she want some fries with that shake, you might ask? She claims she has no idea what you’re talking about, all wide blue eyes. But denying awareness of the Walk does not diminish its power, as we will see.

The Walk transcends cultural barriers and language, and that might sound like a positive thing, but  it’s actually more of a diplomatic disaster.  Besides the Walk and a mass of curly hair that she also swings with abandon, my sister is very friendly and loathe to offend.  Because we have swallowed the baggage of American imperialism wholesale, when we travel to foreign countries, we bend over backwards not to be the Ugly Americans.  We study tipping and greeting customs religiously. We suss out the prevailing modesty norms for beach destinations. We carry local currency at all times, and strive to bargain just the right amount so as to neither give offense nor rip off anyone who lives without running water. In country, we try to distance ourselves from everyone who has ever worn a fanny pack. We eat where the locals eat, and we consume the ice, stomachs be damned. I–and please note that I have veered into the first-person singular here–try to learn as much of the language as possible.

And this is where the trouble lies.

In Costa Rica, it was our river guide. Juan had a wide smile, a bristly mustache, a knack for spotting rare birds in dense foliage, and a wife who lived somewhere other than the wetland turtle sanctuary we were visiting. For three days, we met Juan every morning at dawn at the dock, climbed into his boat, and explored miles of watery byways. A troop of capuchin monkeys 40 strong crossed over our heads one morning, swinging branch to branch and chattering importantly among themselves. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, and everyone in the boat was transfixed…but Juan was much more interested in mi hermana.

Sister understands more Spanish than most people, the legacy of years of restaurant work and a Latino ex-boyfriend, but she is not fluent. She masks this fact by nodding a lot and throwing her head back when she laughs. After the monkeys passed over us, I caught her eye so that we could share a tender sister moment, marveling together at such a singular experience.  Without moving her lips, she said “I think Juan just asked if he could come stay with me at the hotel in Puerto Viejo.”  She grinned stiffly, raising her eyebrows animatedly so he’d think we were talking about something else. “And I think I accidentally said yes.”

It took me a bit of fancy footwork to get us out of that one. I waited until we were on dry land, because while the caiman were small, they were plentiful, and there were snakes in the trees.

On Zanzibar, we went snorkeling in a wooden dhow. The Indian Ocean is an insanely clear aquamarine there, and you can see more than 20 feet down to the sandy bottom. Our guide, Henry, was about 24. I saw my sister involuntarily toss her hair at him on the ride out to the reef and vowed to keep an eye on things, but when the boat dropped us in open water, miles from land, without any wetsuits, life jackets, or flotation devices of any kind and then inexplicably MOTORED OUT OF SIGHT, I kind of lost the thread of what was happening with Sister and Henry.  I was concentrating hard on not thinking about a) sharks; and b) the fact that I am not actually a very good swimmer.

Henry was all white teeth and antics, diving down to the bottom and bringing up tiny, brilliant blue octopi and pieces of the reef to show us, in flagrant violation of every rule I ever learned at Girl Scout Camp about taking only photos and leaving only memories. He swam around my sister like, well, a fish, all but nibbling at her legs (the ones attached to the Butt) as she giggled and I dog-paddled, praying that the boat would come back before I wore myself out and trying to forget everything I ever saw on the Discovery Channel.

By the time the dhow returned from dropping scuba divers on the other side of the reef (THANK BABY JESUS), I had a vicious, blistering sunburn and Sister had accidentally accepted a date. Because she didn’t actually want to go on a date with Henry, and because we were in a foreign country where we knew absolutely no one and where people are still (albeit infrequently) kidnapped and held for ransom, my sunburn and I were pressed into chaperon duty.

You’ve never seen me, internet, but I am a pale, blue-eyed Irish person. My people were bred for the bog. The sunburn I got from bobbing around in the ocean so close to the equator would have made you weep to see it. Additionally, I had gotten a tiny cut on my cuticle earlier in the week that had become so infected that I could feel my own pulse in my grotesquely swollen fingertip. It was green. I had a fever. Did I want to walk 2 miles down the beach to town in the white-hot, blinding African sun? No, I did not. I wasn’t even sure I could. But my sister summed up my lack of options succinctly when she said, “Well, I’m going. I don’t know what you’re going to tell mom if I never come back. Besides, maybe you can finally eat some ugali!”

I never did get to eat ugali, but I did get to see Maasai warriors in red kanga playing pool. That was pretty cool.  (Though now that I think of it, they could easily have been a fever-induced hallucination.)  And, in fairness, we lived.  Henry was perfectly nice; he still calls my sister every few months in the middle of the night, shouts her name a few times, and hangs up.

But Paul and my near death in the jaws of the Serengeti lions were a whole different story…