Wild Things, pt. 1

It's easy to get a little panicky when you're walking amidst a pride of ravenous lions. That's exactly how I felt that day, surrounded by all those slobbering tongues, hanging gracelessly from mouths full of huge, whetted teeth. It took everything I had to affect a sense of composure. Yet, getting to see them up close like this — feeling their satiny coats brush up against me, beholding their royal manner, smelling their strangely familiar lion scent — well, was simply extraordinary.

You're not going to believe this, but that very morning I was in Portland, Oregon, heading to work on the westbound light rail. Damn car was with the mechanic again, this time for a bad oxygen sensor. I wasn't sure what an oxygen sensor was for, but the mechanic made one thing certain: it didn't come cheap. Whatever the hell it did, I couldn't renew the registration on my vehicle until I got it replaced.

I had a pitifully thin budget. If I got a new sensor for my car, I could forget about buying any more Christmas presents this year. My credit cards, with their abominably high interest rates, were already maxed-out. My savings account, depleted. This car repair was a matter of agony, and during that short ride on the light rail, it became my only preoccupation.

"Willow Creek, Southwest 185th Avenue," announced the rail operator over the public address. My stop, but I didn't hear it. I had become lost in worry, biting my nails nervously, looking out at the passing scene but not actually seeing any of it. In this trance I spent an extensive but uncertain amount of time. Before long, the clinic where I worked was far, far behind me.

The slight jolt of a track switch brought me back to attention. I glanced outside at the surroundings. Still no sign of the clinic, whose building's conspicuous 30-60-90-right-triangle shape made it nearly impossible to miss; just a large field of elephant grass, some whistling thornbush, a few candelabra trees, and two highly ordinary giraffe. I already wanted to be done with this day.

Wait a second. Giraffe? Where the hell was I?

"L'aviron, monsieur?" said a scruff voice in the aisle. I turned to notice a rail attendant looking down at me. He wore a long-billed khaki sun cap, a light camouflage shirt with visible splotches of sweat under the armpits, and opaque zinc oxide lotion on his nose. In each of his hands he held a large wooden oar.

"What did you say?" I replied.

"Rowing, sir?" He proffered one of the oars.

"Rowing?" I asked, confounded. "What stop are we coming to?"

"Benue River," he said. "Adamawa Plateau of Cameroon. Doors to the right."

"Cameroon? Wait a second. As in Cameroon, Africa?"

I took another look through the glass. No buildings, or roads, or even farms, just miles and miles of rolling grasslands peppered with yellow-flowering thorn trees. Alongside us, a narrow rivulet of water meandered toward the main river up ahead. In the water I could make out shadows of crocodiles and their scaly snouts poking above the surface; here and there, an elephant on the shore. I turned my attention to some movement in the distance: a pair of lions. They were taking down a white-bearded wildebeest, sinking teeth into its neck and dragging it bloody along the brier. Further ahead, more wildebeests, grazing in the tall grasses; and a zebra chasing off stallions.

I knew at this moment I must have been dreaming. People don't just magically transport to Africa on the Portland light rail. This French rail attendant, the oars, the untamed landscape, were all just fabrications of my sleep-deprived mind. The real me was still somewhere between Portland and Hillsboro, enjoying a nice snooze.

It was also at this moment I observed the attendant, as yet waiting for me to take the oar, making hurried glances at his digital watch. I suddenly remembered an old bit of trivia I learned as a kid, which claimed a digital watch in a dream is impossible to read. So as soon as the attendant brought his watch arm down I stole a peek:

Nine-fifty-seven a.m. and fourteen seconds. Fifteen. Sixteen. Okay, this wasn't working.

I looked around. I wished I had taken notice of the handful of other passengers when I first got on. These ones looked like Portlanders, but were they the same people? Where were they going? And why were they accepting oars from the rail attendants with such nonchalance? The attendant standing over me let off an impatient sigh.

"No thank you," I said. "I will be getting off here."

"Suit yourself," he said abruptly, and continued to the next row of seats.

I stood up and hurried to the doors, the force of the rapidly decelerating train tripping my step. Before I disembarked, I turned to the closest rider, a old wheelchair-bound man in an Oregon Ducks tracksuit. He too had an oar, which he held casually across his lap. He was too busy with his Sudoku puzzle to catch my stare.

"Excuse me," I interrupted.

"Wha?!" he answered with a start.

"Can you tell me where you are headed?"

"Who me? I'm just going for a tour of the savanna of course."

"Of course," I mumbled. I felt my disbelief swelling within me; I refused to believe this wasn't a dream. I was simply a passenger aboard a train of my own creation, traveling through a land of my own absurd thoughts. And if I didn't want to be egregiously late for work, I had to do whatever it would take to wake myself up. Whatever it would take.

The doors slid swiftly open, and I leaped out, like a dog from a kennel, into the shade of a gnarled candelabra tree. Turning around to watch the train depart, I finally understood what the rail attendant meant. The tracks actually ended up ahead, sloping into the river a few yards away. The river was maybe the width of an interstate freeway; the channel of water we had been following flowed into it here. Before us, the river slithered and descended between some volcanic crags toward a destination unknown to me. Behind us, from where we came, the tracks ran a straight line along the plateau for miles and disappeared into the horizon.

Meanwhile, amid a fanfare of whirring motors, the train was undergoing an incredible transformation. Emerging from the underside of the train were two separate boat hulls, similar to the body of a catamaran. The hulls, each about a third the diameter of the cabin itself, extended downwardly and outwardly toward the ground. After they contacted the ground they continued to lower, eventually pushing the train cabin up off of its grooved rail track. Thin panels running the length of the train on each side opened automatically, and then a few oars here and there started reaching out through them. The train was becoming a ferryboat.

In another few moments, the transformation terminated, and the motors switched off. "The doors are closing," I heard from inside the cabin; and with a brief flash of caution lights in each doorway, they did. Carefully, the new ferryboat slid forward on a smooth concrete ramp, powered by a final stretch of overhead electric lines, before disengaging from them and slipping quietly into the river. As soon as it was completely waterborne, a large air cushion between the hulls inflated rapidly.

There I was, standing alone on the shore, while the Portland light rail floated lazily away on the Benue River. I had just renounced what was probably my only link back to civilization. Watching the ferryboat dwindle toward the skyline, I tried to ignore the sudden and unexpected pang of doubt creeping into my mind. If this really was a dream, why had I started to worry about when the next train was due?

My attention turned to the river itself now, churning with a healthy population of crocodiles. "Just a dream," I reminded myself. But I knew there was only one way to find out.