Author: Cheryl Merrill

Cheryl Merrill’s essays have been published in Fourth Genre, Pilgrimage, Brevity, Seems, South Loop Review, Ghoti, Alaska Quarterly Review, Adventum and Isotope. “Singing Like Yma Sumac” was selected for the Best of Brevity 2005 and Creative Nonfiction #27. It was also included in the anthology Short Takes: Model Essays for Composition, 10th Edition. Another essay, “Trunk,” was chosen for Special Mention in Pushcart 2008. She is currently working on a book about elephants: Larger than Life: Living in the Shadows of Elephants.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

The Most Useful Appendage Ever Evolved

Posted on November 16, 2013November 17, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Since I have a huge cold and can’t think, I’m re-blogging this post from early in 2012.

An excerpt from my book-in-progress:

Morula plucks a branch from one of her favorite snacks, a bush-willow. She holds the stem in her teeth, wraps her trunk from right to left around the branch, and sheers off leaves, top-to-bottom with a single swipe. She drops the branch and transfers the leaves from the curl of her trunk into her mouth.

Morula is right-trunked, as I am right-handed, preferring to grab and wrap from the right. Thembi is also right-trunked, but Jabu’s a lefty.

One of the ways to determine an elephant’s dominant tendencies is to inspect the underside of its trunk for green stains on either the right side or the left. But before you do this, make sure you know the elephant and, more importantly, the elephant knows you.

Morula peels and discards branch after branch. Shredded bushes mark her path. She pauses next to a candle-pod acacia, easily recognizable by its upright seedpods. It reminds me of a giant leafy candelabrum, holding a hundred or more candles in ruffled tiers. Sharp curved thorns protect each pod. Morula strips the acacia of a branch, then puts it in her mouth and eats it, thorns, pods and all.

She sidles close to Doug and curls her trunk against her forehead.

“Those round bumps on her forehead might be an old skin infection,” Doug tells me, “but we really don’t know.”

: Morula waves hello

A light breeze feathers the hair in her ears as she stands slightly sideways and nods the tipof her trunk in a tiny Hello. . . Ribbed muscles cross the underside of her trunk. Bristles stick out like the legs of a giant centipede.

There is no other living creature on this planet that has a trunk. If elephants were already extinct, which brave paleontologist would go out on a limb and reconstruct the trunk just from evidence of bony nostrils high on the skull? Who could imagine a nose dangling close to the ground where scents abound? A nose with the ability to pick up a single straw, rip a tree out by its roots, bench-press 600 pounds and untie your shoelaces without you ever noticing?

“Stand here,” Doug commands me.

I obey, my back to an elephant lineup.

With a little guidance from Doug, Thembi gently places the tip of her trunk on top of my head. It feels like a big beanbag up there, but one that’s warm, wiggly, drooling and breathing.

As Thembi rubs nose slime into my hair, Doug places Jabu’s trunk tip on my right shoulder and then Morula’s on my left.

Jabu has trouble keeping his trunk balanced on such a narrow ledge. He constantly fidgets and pokes my cheek with his bristles. Morula’s trunk drapes over my shoulder like a slack hose with a dripping nozzle. Her runny nose continuously drains to clear out inhaled dust – the common condition of all elephant trunks.

When I look down and to the left, I have a close-up view of the two “fingers” on her trunk. Her top finger is more pointed than the one on the bottom. The shape of it reminds me of a hooded cobra. But perhaps that’s because I think of Morula’s trunk as thinner and “snakier” than Jabu’s spectacular snout.

Which is getting heavier by the moment. With the peripheral vision in my right eye, I see two nostrils dotted with grains of moist sand, nostrils more flesh-colored than gray. Each opening is nearly as wide as the “O” of my mouth.

All three trunk tips, I can attest, are not just sheer weights. They sniff, snorf, squirm, wiggle, inhale and exhale. They create an atmosphere of elephant breath around my head.

Doug lowers my camera and pronounces, “Allll-right.”

The weights disappear. For a few steps I am oddly light, as if walking on the surface of the moon.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Zoos

A Pedestrian Afternoon

Posted on November 10, 2013November 14, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Plump, babbling, feather-brained guinea fowl run ahead of us in silly mobs. Perched atop impossibly skinny blue necks, their noggins look professionally shrunk by headhunters. The morning air is hot, dusty, and soft as windblown sheets.

A faint sizzle above my head makes me look up. A pointed dart in the shape of a cross moves steadily across the pale blue sky, spawns a cloud of ice behind itself for a hundred miles or more. Its contrail broadens from a sharp point into a wide cottony smudge. One of the astronauts reported from space that contrails could be seen over all parts of the world, often radiating from major airports like the spokes on a wheel.

Morula and I mosey along at the rear of the herd, one foot in front of the other, each footstep connected to the next one.

I place my boot inside Morula’s huge footprint. The brand name of my boots is imprinted within the outline of my soles; a clever advertisement made with each step. My boots make deeper impressions than Morula’s feet because each one of my steps applies more pressure per square inch. All my weight transfers to my feet, my two small points of contact with the earth. Morula’s weight spreads over four large footpads the size of a medium pizza pan.

One week ago, looking down from a jet that took me across Tanzania, I was surprised to see crater after crater, giant ancient footprints, leading to Kilma-ngaro, the Maasai words for “hill of water.” At 19,340 feet, Kilimanjaro is the highest peak in Africa and one of its oldest volcanic cones, providing water to the rivers of the Masa Mara.

Some of the cratered footprints leading to Kilimanjaro were shaped like the sharp tracks of zebras. Others were so worn down they were completely covered with vegetation, visible only from the air. The sequence of volcanic craters looked as if Kilimanjaro itself had marched up the eastern fault line of the Great Rift Valley, which is sort of what volcanoes do, given millions of years to do it.

From the air, I could see webs of roads and trails near the ancient craters – some leading up to their rims, some circling around them. Many of these paths are generations old, harmonious with the landscape, paths that flow around obstacles and toward places of safety and browse. Compacted by many feet, they are safe passages across treacherous quagmires that could swallow you and me. Some of them make so much sense to the feet that they can be followed in the dark. In Kenya, the old highway from Nairobi to Nakuru was once an ancient elephant route, zigzagging down to the Rift Valley floor.

Earlier in the afternoon, the elephants stopped to browse. I took a photograph of Morula resting against an eroded termite mound and noticed the bottoms of her feet were as cracked as dried mud puddles. They mirrored the ground upon which she walks.

Morula has four toes on her front feet and three on her hind feet. They grow at a rate that might be expected from an animal that walks twenty to thirty miles a day. In captivity, an elephant’s nails must be constantly trimmed, often on a daily basis; otherwise they become infected and ingrown.

Incarcerated elephants also have problems with the pads on their feet. Without wide-ranging activity the pads thicken and grow hard and must frequently be pared down. Otherwise their feet begin to resemble shoes with worn heels. The displacement of their gait will cause joint problems later on.

Tramping along in Morula’s wake, I’m beginning to get the hang of all this walking and browsing – less sweating, less reliance on my water bottle. I’m beginning to wish I could do this every day of my life.

There’s a lot of languid movement packed into the word: “browse.” Days and weeks and years of walking. Walking and stopping. Walking and stopping. Walking in one elephant’s lifetime the equivalent of 5 times around the circumference of the earth.

Morula’s round print, side-by-side with my boot print, tell a story of companionship, of human and elephant as equals. Our direction is not purposeful or hurried or even random. We take this path day after day, a normal occurrence. It’s a way of life.

Imagine that. A way of life.

Elephants, Nonfiction, Zoos

Extreme Happiness

Posted on November 3, 2013November 4, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

In the spring of 1996, right before my first trip to Africa, I participated in a “behind-the-scenes” tour at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. During the tour, we were allowed into the close contact area of the elephant barn, an area separated from the zoo’s three elephants by strong metal bars. One by one, they were brought forward by their handler, and we fed them carrots from a 50-pound bag.

One of the elephants, Chai, was extremely interested in my sister’s leather coat, gently squeezing it at the shoulder, inhaling each square inch down to my sister’s elbow, as if asking, What animal is this? My brother-in-law, who is huge by human standards, was especially fascinating in his leather coat. Sniff. Squeeze. And who are you?

Trunk length from an elephant for the very first time, I was mesmerized by the meditative intelligence in her eyes.

Chai rumbled, the sound reverberating throughout the barn.

We hummed back at her, sang a low, wordless song, my brother-in-law’s voice especially deep and loud. She turned her head from side to side, as if trying to understand our oscillating meaning. Then the air around us condensed, washed over us in waves, pulsated just below our range of hearing. It was my first experience with infrasound, vibrations I could feel in my chest, vibrations my ears would never hear.

Chai slowly stretched out her trunk to accept a carrot from my sister, stuffed it into her cheeks and then slowly reached out for another. When her cheeks were as stuffed as a chipmunk’s, her handler said, “Okay, that’s enough,” and tapped her alternately above each knee with an ankus, an elephant hook. She backed up, swinging her head from side to side.

In 1980, when Chai was only a year old, she was separated from her mother and flown to Seattle by Thai Airways to commemorate the delivery of the first Boeing 747 to Thailand. She was only sixteen when I met her. Two years after our behind-the-scenes tour, Chai was shipped to Missouri to be bred to a bull named Onyx. By then several artificial insemination attempts had already failed to impregnate her.

After three days and 2,100 miles in a truck, she arrived at the Dickerson Park Zoo. On the third day after her arrival, the Dickerson Zoo’s staff beat her for two-and-a-half hours because she would not respond to their commands. (The zoo was later fined $5000.) Chai lost 1,000 pounds in the twelve months she was in Missouri.

Finally pregnant, she was trucked back to Seattle. Twenty-two months later, in 2000, she gave birth to a female calf. The naming contest for the new zoo resident gathered 16,000 entries. The Thai name selected, Hansa (pronounced HUN-suh), means “Extreme Happiness.” Once the calf was on view attendance at the zoo doubled and Chai proved to be a very capable mother.

photo by Benjamin Benschnieder, Seattle Times

But in June of 2007, Hansa died, infected with a new strain of elephant herpes – a highly communicable virus that had already claimed the lives of forty percent of young Asian calves in zoos. Hansa made a lot of money for Woodland Park, so Chai has been artificially inseminated again and again – a total of 112 times – resulting in just one other pregnancy and the miscarriage of that calf.

Day after day, Chai listens to hordes and choruses of unfamiliar human noises. She listens and moves slowly back and forth in her cage. Perhaps she mourns the loss of her Extreme Happiness. Perhaps after awhile it all blurs, like the background hum of an engine in flight.

Nature, Photography

If It Were Possible

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

If it were possible

To sleep standing up

To taste the many flavors of water

To tell each part of the day by its scent

To wear nothing but our own skins

To walk always barefoot in the grass

To watch the nightly migration of stars

To smell the stories brought by the wind

To be surrounded by family

To hear the symphony of their heartbeats

To trumpet to the skies and rumble to the ground

Could you then live the life you were given?

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel

Toenail Sun

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

An Excerpt from my Book:

Morula drowses, lying on her side, falling asleep in the sun. She catches the tip of her trunk in her mouth, as Doug rubs the bottom of her front foot. Her eyes droop and her mouth slackens with pleasure.

As Doug continues to rub, the tip of her trunk slips from her mouth. Her eyes nearly close. She drools a bit.

I kneel down next to her.

Morula’s legs are folded together, bent at the ankle and knee, the same way I fold my wrists and elbows together in sleep. She’s strangely voluptuous, even Rubenesque, with her rounded belly and nipple peaking out from underneath her right leg. Her ear drapes like a leather cloak over her shoulder. From this angle it’s easy to see how her right tusk pierces her upper lip.

People often mistake an elephant’s ankle joint for a knee, since it seems far away from the foot, but the locations of her ankle, knee and shoulder are clear from the way her legs are bent.

Except for their gray color, Morula’s toenails look pretty much the same as mine do, only bigger and thicker. Human and elephant nails are made of tough, insoluble keratin, a semi-transparent protein that is the major component of hair, hooves, horns and quills.

Morula’s toenails grow at a rate that might be expected from an animal that walks twenty or thirty miles a day. They are also highly polished from walking through sand. In captivity, an elephant’s nails must be constantly trimmed, often on a daily basis; otherwise they become infected and ingrown. And without the opportunity to walk long distances, the pads on the feet of incarcerated elephants thicken and grow hard, and must be frequently pared down. If they’re not, the displacement of their gait will cause joint problems later on.

I take a photograph of the sun mirrored on Morula’s highly polished nail.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Photography, Travel, Writing

Windows of the Soul

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Like us, like all mammals, an elephant’s eye has one large lens, its aperture always open, except for a blink, or in sleep. Like us, like all mammals, Jabu’s round iris controls the amount of light that enters his pupil. Like us, the lens of his eye focuses light images on his retinas, where they are converted into chemical and electrical impulses, and conveyed along the optic nerve directly into his brain.

The iris is the only muscle of our bodies not colored a shade of red. It contains pigment instead. The density of that pigment colors our eyes from brown to blue, mostly shades of brown for elephants, although a blue-eyed calf was photographed this year in South Africa.

Iris is the Greek word for rainbow. When light refracts through countless prisms of rain, it produces that arched scatter of reds, greens, blues and violets that we call rainbows. But what we see is only half the story. Rainbows are perfect circles cut in two by the horizon. It’s only possible to see a complete circular rainbow if you are in an aircraft and the sun is high enough behind you. A round rainbow is named a “glory.” A halo for the earth.

How did the Greeks know rainbows are round?

Hurtling towards earth at 186,282 miles per second, light from the sun is carried by subatomic particles called photons, which vibrate up and down in perpendicular motion to the direction of the advancing light waves, passing along their energy to the retinas of our eyes. Photons are both the medium and the message, carrying waves like water carries waves, invisible surf lapping against the islands of my eyes. The cells in my eyes, in Jabu’s eyes, are precisely one photon wide.

I blink, he blinks, photon by photon we gaze into each other’s souls.

Nature, Nonfiction, Photography

The Light from Saxophones

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Three tsessebees saunter up to their bellies in strong vertical spikes of custard-colored grass. Their shoulder humps, sea-horse faces and gleaming russet coats rise and fall, rise and fall, from left to right, like a musical score on parchment.

The light in this photograph belongs to lingering saxophones. Long, rich, golden notes catch and roll on the backs of impalas, snag in the teeth of lions and smolder in the burnt umber eyes of eagles. The grasses, the trees, the tsessebees, all are coated in honey as the sun bends at the waist and pours out the last light of day in a long slow moan, a sweet trickle down the throat of night.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

Deja Vu

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

It’s an ancient feeling, this memory of a moment I’ve never had before, this exact smell of scuffed dust, this slant of light, the slightly spicy taste of sand, the warm brush of sunrays across my cheeks, the squint my eyes adopt as if they’ve always looked into the African sun. It’s the way my bones melt, the acceptance in my mind and nerves that tells me not to run when a monster materializes from a clump of brush and moves to an arm’s length, breathing so quietly I wonder if it’s sleepwalking, I wonder if I’m sleepwalking, because everything that is happening, this monster, this place, my fog of serenity, must be made from dreams.

The monster moves closer.

A familiar monster. One with a shape. One with a name.

His eye, a huge topaz oval, stares down at me. He’s motionless, concentrating. I can’t even hear him breathing.

Like us, like all mammals, an elephant’s eye has one large lens, its aperture always open, except for a blink, or in sleep. Like us, like all mammals, Jabu’s round iris controls the amount of light that enters his pupil. And like us, the lens of his eye focuses light images on his retinas, where they convert into chemical and electrical impulses and whisk along the optic nerve directly to his brain.

What would it be like to think without words and recognize shapes without names?

Both of us, human and elephant, witness only a small portion of what is out there to be seen. Francolins, mambas, tsessebees, zebras and lions – everything that crawls, swims or walks – witness the world in ways I cannot even imagine.

Even in the womb the eye of a fetus moves through its amniotic dreams. Does it dream about the glories of a life to come?

“Hello,” I whisper.

The light from his eye just now reaches mine.

Elephants, Extinction, Nature

Mammoth Tree

Posted on August 25, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

“Look,” my friend says, “it’s an elephant.” I turn around. We’re walking along a path above the tide pools at Salt Creek, on the Straits of Juan de Fuca. It’s a cold, foggy morning, summer slipping into fall. She points to a western red cedar on a curve of the path. “I see an elephant,” she says.

She’s right. But where she sees a generic elephant I see a mammoth, a young Columbian mammoth, with a shaggy curl of moss on its domed forehead and layered fur all the way down its trunk. Its small ear flaps forward and a rounded burl eye stares sightlessly out over the straits. His trunk (by now I’ve already decided his gender) reaches down into salal and young firs, as if he is browsing while standing on the edge of a cliff where land meets sea.

I reach out and touch this frozen young giant – about seven feet tall to the top of his dome. He’ll be ten feet tall when fully grown. Of course he’s impassive, wooden to my touch, but the swirl of his bark/fur makes him seem as if he just stopped as we rounded his corner, hoping to blend in before deciding on our intent.

I retrace my steps to the other side of the tree and discover that my gender assignment is completely wrong. On the exact opposite side of the mammoth’s head is its unmistakably female rear end, two legs solidly planted on the ground, a hanging vulva in between them. Even though shaggy fur covers her rump, anus and legs, her triangular shaped vulva can clearly be seen. Male elephants have internal scrotum and their small hanging folds are tucked up and under. This mammoth is definitely female.

The western red cedar grows straight and tall from the middle of her back. I assume she grew around a nurse log, forming her shape during a hundred years or more. Cedars like this one will grow to 180 feet and live for a thousand years. Mammoths disappeared ten thousand years ago. But I wonder if giants remember giants and try to resurrect them however they can.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel

Pilgrimage

Posted on August 14, 2013August 15, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

(After a trip to Africa in 1999):

I’m nearly asleep, lying across several seats at Heathrow, dreaming of elephants, my body suspended at its origin eight time zones away. It’s neither night nor day in my dreams. I see fluorescent lights through the lids of my eyes, hear polite announcements for flights, smell the faint barnyard dust of Africa, sense a great presence looming towards me.

Step by step she comes closer. She is confident, unafraid. She looks me directly in the eye. Her eyelashes are long and straight, her deep brown eyes are dark, dark pools.

She stops less than five feet away, just beyond the reach of an outstretched arm, should I be foolish enough to do so. She is wild, in charge. I am on her terms and she knows it. She knows that people sit motionless on smelly, noisy, moveable rocks. She knows the small sneezing sounds of the devices they carry in their hands and point at her.

She stares into my eyes, then shakes her head sideways in a movement that would say “no” in my language. Her ears flap once, twice, and great clouds of dust rise from them. She raises her head, looks down the top of her long trunk. It’s an imperious, don’t-mess-with-me look, but that again is my language, not hers. A rumble like a promise for distant rain fills my ears. Then she sidesteps, turns and vanishes without another sound into a thicket of brush, her great presence subtracted, a void of air where she stood.

I am on a pilgrimage to that place. I am waiting for my flight, asleep at Heathrow. I am nearly, virtually there, in my dreams.

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