”Ezra,” John Guare said to me, standing there in the hallway of the New York Public Library, pumping my hand warmly, ”Ezra Cleveland. How delightful.” Not ”delightful” to meet me necessarily-more like
”delightful” that my name, or so he thought, was Ezra.
I was there, in New York, last October, along with Russ Vandenbroucke from Evanston`s Northlight Theatre and six other playwrights and artistic directors, to accept an award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. And John Guare, a Tony Award-winning playwright perhaps best known as the author of ”The House of Blue Leaves,” was one of the other writers. They photographed us all together, and afterwards, I mustered up the courage to go up to Guare and introduce myself.
”Hi-I`m Rick Cleveland,” I said. ”I`m one of the other writers, and I, um, just wanted to introduce myself and tell you that you`re one of my heroes and probably one of the reasons why I`m in this room, probably one of the reasons why I even try and write plays.”
I said all this in a nervous gusher, and he smiled at me sweetly but somehow thought he heard me say my name was ”Ezra.” For a moment I thought about not correcting him. And for half a second I thought maybe I should take it as a sign and just change my name to Ezra. But then I did correct him.
”No, no . . . Rick,” I said, pointing at my name tag, ”my name is Rick.” He was still shaking my hand, still smiling at me.
”Oh,” he said, ”Well, I`m pleased to meet you, Rick.”
And with that we walked into the luncheon being held in our honor. But for some reason I got the idea that maybe he was just a little disappointed that my name wasn`t Ezra.
Russ and I sat at a table with Hume Cronyn, Roger Stevens (founder of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kennedy Center), and Jean Kennedy Smith (the mother of you-know-who). During his speech, Cronyn referred to new plays and playwrights as ”endangered species.” I thought about ”The Rhino`s Policeman,” the new play for which Northlight and I had won the award. I thought about all the time I spent doing research, about the trip I made to Africa and about the last three years I spent working on the play, trying desperately to hack my way through the ”new play development” jungle and beat the script into producible shape. It was hard to believe that it had gone this long and come this far.
In May 1988 the Goodman Theatre commissioned me to write a play. Goodman artistic director Bob Falls was familiar with my work with American Blues Theatre and Victory Gardens Theater, and thought it was time to give me a shot at writing for a bigger venue. A few weeks later, still in search of an idea, I happened on to one of those wildlife documentaries on the Discovery Channel. This one was about rhino and elephant poaching and focused on an anti-poaching patrol in Zimbabwe. A group of armed game scouts went into the deep bush of a national park to look for poachers-Zambians armed with automatic weapons who would cross the Zambezi River into Zimbabwe to illegally hunt for black rhino and elephant.
The black market trade in rhino horn (which is worth a fortune in North Yemen, where it is carved into elaborate, ornamental dagger handles, and in China, where it is ground up and used for heart medicine) had forced the black rhino to the brink of extinction, and the illegal trade in ivory was decimating Africa`s once-thriving elephant population.
The documentary showed these game scouts hunting down poachers in a last- ditch effort to protect the big game. In Zimbabwe and a lot of other African countries, wildlife conservation is being fought like a war: Men are killing other men to save animals. By the end of the program, I had found the idea for my play.
I`ve always considered myself something of an armchair conservationist, and now here was my chance to get out and write about something besides life in a Midwestern steel town. Once I convinced the people at the Goodman that this was to be a play about a group of men on an anti-poaching patrol and not about rhinos or elephants, they said OK. Shortly after that they started calling me ”Rhino Rick.”
Someone once said-and this is sage advice for any young writer-”write what you know.” And what did I know about elephants or poachers or Africa for that matter? Not much. A love of wildlife documentaries, Hemingway and old Johnny Weissmuller ”Tarzan” movies hardly made me an expert on anything African. Someone else-it might even have been John Guare-said ”know what you write.” So for six months I read everything about Africa that I could get my hands on.
But I knew that what I really needed to do, if I was to learn anything firsthand, was to go to Africa and see what was going on over there for myself. So in April 1989, after making contact with the Save the Rhino Trust, a conservation project in Zambia`s Luangwa Valley, I got inoculated for every Third World disease imaginable. Then, armed with some airfare and an assignment letter from Outside Magazine, a duffel bag full of clothes from Banana Republic and most of my life`s savings converted into traveler`s checks, I got on a plane headed for the Heart of Darkness. Africa. The Dark Continent.
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April 5: A few hours after arriving in Lusaka, I`m speeding along a pitted, dirt road, in the back of a Land Rover, hanging onto the rollbar for dear life. John, the driver, toots his horn at the locals, mostly women, walking along, carrying stacks of wood on their heads. They jump out of our way just in time, and we barrel past them.
There are giraffes off to the side of the road, chewing leaves off a tree. Joern Fortun, the Norwegian logistics officer for the Luangwa Integrated Research and Development Project (LIRDP) is standing next to me in the back of the truck, gritting his teeth. ”Have you been to Africa before?” he shouts at me. ”Nope,” I answer as my hat flies off. John stops the truck, and I jump off to get it, scattering a family of baboons, who scamper away shrieking.
That`s when it hits me: This is the Luangwa Valley. This is Africa. I`m here.
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April 6: At breakfast, Joern says that Stephen, his cook and housekeeper, will be glad to do any laundry and ironing I might have. Joern tells me about the ”banana worm,” a small insect that lays its eggs in wet clothes. If they don`t iron their clothes, the eggs will hatch and burrow into the skin. That`s why, he tells me, they even press their shorts.
There are bugs-very small worms-in my supper tonight, which is a local dish called nshima, lumps of mushlike maize or cornmeal. Since there are no alternatives, and I am out of Fig Newtons, I do the best I can to push them off to the side and eat around them. John Kapanda, Joern`s driver, is impressed because I manage to eat four lumps.
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April 7: A gang of small children follows me up the road at a distance. Every time I stop and turn around, they shout, ”How are you? How are you?”
”Fine,” I answer. ”How are you?”
”Fine,” they say. ”How are you?”
This goes on for some time, until I catch on and hand out a few coins, and they run away laughing. Some of the older children are dressed in crisp charcoal-gray school uniforms, although where the school is, I have no idea. Most of the smaller children are dressed in rags. One little girl is wearing a dress made from a potato sack. For the most part, they are rail thin except for their bellies, and they smile openly at me while flies hover around their faces.
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April 8: The first thing that hits me is the smell. It is sickly, overpowering and makes my eyes water. I am in the South Park with John and Kazuo Saigawa, a Japanese wildlife biologist, looking for elephant carcasses. Four of the five we find are riddled with bullet holes-confirmed poachers`
kills.
Most of the carcasses are near the road, so we don`t have far to walk. Kazuo carries a shotgun and a small metal crate full of instruments.
The first thing we find is the oldest-part of a skull with a leathery covering of flesh. It was just sitting there in the shade, under some trees. A few flies buzz. Kazuo cuts a small sample of tissue, puts it in a plastic bag and we move on.
The next two are more intact. Scattered bones, chunks of hard, dried flesh, more flies. Here is something that looks like a face and part of an ear. Kazuo puts on rubber gloves and pulls out a scalpel the size of a big carving knife. He cuts off a hunk of flesh from the ear, a sound like sawing through old cardboard. He puts the tissue sample in another plastic bag. Later he`ll send them off to a lab to have them checked for anthrax, a disease that in recent years has become a serious problem among the elephant and hippo populations in the valley.
The ”freshest” of the carcasses is barely a week old, and vultures still circle over it. The carcass is huge, grotesquely bloated and wet. Flies swarm in a cloud. An empty eye socket stares at me blankly, still oozing liquid, like tears. Kazuo covers his mouth with a hankerchief and goes to work.
John hangs back from this one, with a look of disgust on his face. A few days before, he tells me, one of the lodges had taken groups out to view a pride of lions as they fed on the fresh corpse of this elephant. Later, when the lions had their fill, the vultures came to feed, and then the crocodiles came up from the river, to eat the vultures. Nothing goes to waste out here;
everything is eaten by something. People sat in the Land Rovers wearing brightly colored souvenir T-shirts and bush hats, he says, snapping photos of this food chain in action with a sort of detached fascination.
Later that day, John drives me out onto the savanna, into the middle of a large herd of ”tuskers.” There must be close to 100 of them. Grazing, sleeping, playing, so big they seem to move in slow motion. A young cow starts making her way toward us, slowly, walking sideways as if she`s curious. She pulls up a few tufts of grass, shakes her head and chews. She comes a few steps closer and cocks her head to get a better look at us. She sticks her face close enough for me to smell her breath. Her eyes are deep and clear as she stands there watching me, chewing the long grass. I start to laugh, quietly, afraid to move. She stands there for a few more minutes and then, bored, she lumbers away.
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April 9: I interview Norman Carr, one of the last of the old-time colonialists and the man who pioneered the walking safari. We sit out on his porch overlooking a lake-sized ox-bow lagoon and talk about the heavy poaching in the valley. ”We still have a chance with the elephants,” he says.
He tells me about his so-far futile attempts to keep the monkeys out of his vegetable garden. Lately, he`s been trying to trap them, and when he catches one, he`ll tie it up to the fence. Pretty soon all the other monkeys come around, frantic and screaming-obviously irritated. After a few hours he`ll release the captive monkey, and they`ll stay out of the garden for a few days. But he says they always come back. Now he`s thinking about catching another one, shaving it, and painting it blue. ”We`ll see what they make of that,” he says.
