That Holiday Set Piece Y'all Ask For Every Year

[dr_pretentious]

At holiday parties, friends ask for the impala song, and someone who's new to the crowd will say, "What impala song?" and then I have to do the little explanation. In case of laryngitis, here it is:

Several years ago, Dan and I spent most of a December in South Africa. I was giving a paper at a conference, and we figured, when were we ever going to be in South Africa again? Most of the last week of our trip, we were in Kruger National Park, which belongs mostly to its animals. There are roads that link up the sparsely spaced little human-safe encampments, but outside those electric fences, you Must Stay In Your Car, or if you get eaten by lions it's your own damn fault.

A December Solstice in South Africa is pretty disorienting for a denizen of the Northern Hemisphere. Summer's getting seriously hot, the days are long...and all the cities' streets have snow-evocative holiday decorations. The bed and breakfast where we stayed in the Swadini Valley had a seven-foot-tall cactus in its courtyard for a Christmas tree. Radio stations play familiar Christmas melodies in Afrikaans and Zulu. Happy Yule!

All those hours of driving across the savannah looking for charismatic megafauna made us a little car-crazy, so we came up with our own Kruger National Park carols:

Rhino, rhino, rhino
We've looked for you all day
Rhino, rhino, rhino
Please come out and play!

The most abundant creatures in Kruger are the impalas, whose adaptation to being herbivores sharing a landscape with cheetahs, tigers, lions, and leopards is to reproduce to the point of absurdity. Impalas are everywhere, like walking antlered MacDonaldses. If they had a call, it would be, "Would you like fries with me?" Mile after mile, easily amused as we are, we sang:

See them grazing all before us
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
More and more come out of the forest
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
Quite prolific little breeders
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
So the lions can be feeders
Impala-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Comments

[annathepiper]

Ha! Excellent. :)

[temporus.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the Mozabmique border patrol. You don't want to get them mad. They eat you up.

Never made it out to KNP, but if I ever get back to South Africa, it's something I'd love to do.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

You and The Man are such nutcases, in such good ways!

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

I LOVE these! Thank you for posting them. I will practice and teach them to my honeys, Michael and Trent.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

Isn't it great when the things you start to amuse yourselves take on a life on their own and amuse multitudes?