Living in the wild
I was born in southern central Africa, Rhodesia at the time, later it became Zimbabwe. For the most part, I was a city boy, but I explored the surrounding bushveld and lakes and rivers all the time, enjoying the wild animals I came across in my wandering, elephants, giraffes, zebras, Cape buffalo, lions! I took the sightings for granted, it was just what my world was, and would always be. Boy, was I wrong. After a 15 year civil war, Rhodesia changed to Zimbabwe, and my world came to an end. I emigrated to California, to a small town in the San Francisco Bay Area, beautiful, exciting, but by no means Africa.Nothing can compare with Africa. If you love it, it seeps into your soul, and never leaves. I would go visit a couple of times in the next 25 years, taking my American wife with me to show her the place I came from and talk about , and she loved it too. But we couldn’t live there, we were Americans, and our lives were in California. So when we had to escape the built up disaster of the citified Bay Area, we moved just 4 hours away to the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. And as it turned out, the closest place we could find to Africa but still in California. It was warm and temperate, not freezing cold like Alaska, or the northern states or Canada. The next best thing, and we were happy.
