The elephant paragraph

I need to post something so that I don't feel so distant from you all, but it is totally unrelated to me, besides the fact that it's from the book I'm reading. Yeah, I am still reading A Primate's Memoir. I know, it's been like a month since I've started it, but I'm savoring it. It really is that good. Anyway, I was reading today and I remembered this one passage that instantly become one of my most favorite things I've ever read. So, I wanted to share it with you all, whether you know what the book is about or not. Here we go:

"Elephants at night in camp are quiet a spectacle, enough to speed up anyone's heart. You wake up in a panic--chaos around the tent, crackling, a tree has fallen just missing the tent, someone is eating a bush just by the door, the tent lines have been torn loose. You peer out the window, and the tree trunk that wasn't there when you went to sleep lifts up and comes down--an elephant leg! Now for certain you'll be crushed to death by some oaf elephant dropping a tree on you. And each time, as you lie there in absolute terror waiting for your end at the feet of the elephants, there is this bizarre counter-current of feeling, this amazement you feel at hearing... their stomach sounds. The elephants make monstrous amounts of noise with their stomachs. It's the most perfect sound on earth: low bass rumbles like the core of the earth, like you're a child again and you have the most perfect ancient white-bearded enormous loving grandpa who, just because he loves you, is going to lift you in his gnarled hands and put you in his lap and put your ear to his belly and just for you he's going to belch loudly and so slow and deep that it will last and make you tingle happily until the next ice age comes, that's what it sounds like, you're lying there in you tent prepared for death and you're surrounded by this wonderful lulling aura of stomach noise that makes you want to curl up and sleep like a puppy, but you can't because there are fucking elephants outside that are going to kill you, and invariably, you suddenly find yourself having to go outside the tent and take a crap. Once I really had to at such a time. Even I had become crazed with the rice and mackerel and had been taken to lunch at the lodge by tourists I had pulled out of the mud. I made up answers to their questions about animal behavior and mostly ate like a pig, finishing it all with mountains of hideous lugubrious tasteless pudding that the British adore and have left as their most lasting legacy to Kenyan hoteliers. Chicken gumbo, meat loaf a la Kikuyu, curries, Spam loaf with pineapple slices, all topped with brown thickened murk pudding with crystallized sugar doodads and filigrees on top. I was up all night with the runs and regretted nothing until the elephants came. During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round."

So, if that doesn't make you want to read Robert Sapolsky's book, I don't know what will. I have about 70 pages left and I'm doing my best to appreciate them all.

I hope all is well with everyone else. I don't have much to report, just doing my puffin business thing and taking in as much of Maine as possible. I should have some new pictures soon. Much love to all.