It’s decades ago now it seems since I entered into the utterly captivating novel “White Bone” by Barbara Gowdy. Throughout my life I have felt a respectful connection towards African elephants, a species that both frightens me with their power and their strength, yet intrigues me with their loyalties, their ancestral ties and their family bonds.
Of all the hundreds of books I have devoured, two remain lodged in my soul. The mental image of thousands of orange butterflies soaring up through the trees as if the trees were on fire will stay with me forever thanks to the wordsmith Barbara Kingsolver in “Flight Behaviour”.
The second is “White Bone”. From the first page, I leapt into a journey following the lives of African elephants. Set in the backdrop of the majestic and perilous African savanna, I could immerse myself into the complex world of a herd of elephants, each with its own personality, desires, and struggles as they navigated the harsh realities of survival and explored with them deeper themes of memory, identity, and the bonds that tie this extraordinary group together. The elephants’ journey is a profound and emotional one, as they search for a refuge known as the “White Bone.” Driving home tonight as rain lashed against the windscreen after an evening with my family, and with my father safe at the White Bone, my head is full of my own memories and our own bonds.
I never put that book down. I realise now that books are where I used to escape to and fall into stories, letting my imagination leap and twist in its own interpretations of an author’s word. I miss that as I stumble from the written word to the spoken one on podcasts, and TV dramas.
The story of crippled Mud and her calf searching the desert to find her tribe, slipped from my grasp and fell into bath water I had let cool as my toes started to crinkle. Whether true or not I had heard that our fingers and toes crinkling are a genetic throwback from living in water to enable us to grasp slippery rocks as we clamber out. I like that thought. It has a fleeting glimpse of mermaids about it.
The book was sodden and I let it drip on the bathroom’s antiquated storage heater; a huge beast of a machine filled with bricks that held the heat and slowly released it to warm the house from the second I left for the office to the second I returned, before becoming cool to the touch just when I needed it.
For days each page slowly expanded and puffed out to create its own set of quills, its spine cracked and withered, but still the haunting front image of an elephant’s eye cast down in its thought, remained firm.