Quiver trees — also known as kokerboom — thrive in the southern Namibian desert.
They eat rocks and drink sand, take many years to grow, and as they expand their girth their bark splits and reveals a smooth underlayer in different shades of rock and sand. I like to think that if they were snakes they would shed their tight old bark. But no: they just allow it to crack open and stay, maybe forever. The bark is hard and smooth but the innards are surprisingly spongy and serve as reservoirs of many gallons of water sucked in by the trees during rainy seasons. This pliable softness made it easy for the Bushmen of the Kalahari to hollow out the trees’ branches and use these tubular containers as quivers for their deadly arrows.
And here is what happens when John and I look up at quiver trees: we get dazzled. This is because no other trees we know flaunt such exquisite split bark lines along their bodies, the lines which twist, bend and disappear around the next turn. And when we photograph them in a sweet open shade of dusk they also shimmer and cover our lenses with a film of a waxy dust so thin you would never believe how hard it is to get it off. We know all this, because some weeks ago we spent a whole evening out in the desert with three of them, until the evening became night. And then we had quiver dreams, too, as if unwilling to part with their beauty.
That was some time ago, but it sent us looking for more. And now we are on a quiver tree farm, reputed to preserve the densest quiver grove in all of Namibia, and coupled with some desert acreage covered by large boulders and called, as such places usually are, a playground. Of giants, I think, or some such.
There are signs here sternly detailing “forbidden” behavior, and clean toilets and a spacious campground, and even a restaurant and a pet warthog and a couple of cheetahs. The cheetahs get fed at 4pm, sharp. Yes, this is a commercial enterprise, and we are not to forget there are certain charges. We understand the owners of this land want to present it to visiting tourists but also prevent any potential problems which often follow the opening of one’s hospitable doors. And since we fell in love with quiver trees, we hope we can put up with what any commercial venture can be expected to inject into our tree experience.
We take a look at the giant boulders which are brown and unremarkable, and quickly move on to the trees. There are some walking trails here, and a good number of quiver trees of all sizes, bolstered by more brown boulders. We walk and walk. We look and look. And try, and try again. Then, as the evening darkens, we meet somewhere on the slope and silently shake our heads. No, it did not happen. No pictures. No enchantment. No music lifting our spirits. A flat void.
Later we try to dissect the reasons. We quote the signs suggesting prosecution by the owner of the grove: perhaps our minds became too tight and worried because of these naked threats? We also come up with the wrong age of the trees: are they too old and already outlived their most beautiful stages? I even remember a noisy tourist who seemed to be everywhere at once, talking incessantly to her two silent male companions: maybe her loud voice prevented me from concentrating and really seeing what I came to see? We string all these and other reasons into an impossibly convoluted web of excuses. But it all sounds lame and untrue.
“Listen,” I say to John, “I think I may have a picture I like. At one point, I put my head inside the canopy of a really old tree, and met a rock hyrax who came up from the other side. We almost bumped our noses, and it was totally unexpected for both of us.” We find the frame and look at it together. The hyrax, bright eyed and alert, is — after all — considered the closest living relative of an elephant, and even if we are not sure if this information is reliable it is nice to think you can meet it up the tree when all else is lost.
We look again at my little picture and suddenly understand what we are missing here. We miss the enchantment which comes with solitude and not knowing what will happen next. We miss the sense that we must trust some forces outside ourselves which can make things happen unexpectedly at any time. Yes, there is the grove and the trees and the trails to walk around them. But it is all too set, too ready to be appreciated and photographed to be magnificent and dazzling. It is predictable and finite, and we cannot make it intimate and our own. And except for the little hyrax there are no surprises, the very essence of what we need. He saves the show a bit, but just enough to see that such well appointed offerings are alien to us and as many times removed from our joy as he is from his distant elephant cousins.
©Yva Momatiuk