How you get up there?
So I leave tomorrow and I can’t get this David Wilcox song out of my head that seems to fit perfectly. Every time I get a little freaked out about this trip, the song “Johnny’s Camaro” seems to nudge me a little closer to the plane and the adventure that lies ahead.
“Man, I’ve got to tell you about the adventure she had in Africa.
I think I should start with the silver bracelet,
I think that’s where it all turns around.
She hadn’t been on the trip long and one of the guides sort of
took her under his wing.
‘Cause she was sort of startled easy,
she was a little nervous about being out there.
The first time she got sunburned through her hat
she realized she was a long way from being home.
She had just left the group for a little while one day,
she had just went to take a pee,
she said “I’ll be right back,” but she didn’t come back for awhile.
And this guide, this African man went to look for her.
“Laura! Laura?”
He found her standing on the lowest branch of a fairly tall tree,
way off the ground.”
“How you get up there?”
Well she had jumped.
“Why?”
Well there was a hyena, and they had told her about hyenas.
They have jaws that can crush bone.
She wasn’t in a really confident position anyway,
and she just ran, and there was the branch.
She jumped – one hand slipped, one hand held.
She was not coming down.
“He’s gone.”
So now she trusted him, and she swings back down
and both arms straight, hanging from that branch,
her feet are four feet off the ground.
Man, she didn’t know she could jump that high.
Ah, but she does now.
It was changes like that that made him give her that silver bracelet.
It was the one that he’d always wear kind of between his elbow
and his shoulder, kind of wrapped tight around his arm.
It was a beautiful silver bracelet, and he bent it down to fit around
her muscle there and she smiled.
So much so that it startled him.
So much so that on the last day of that trip, when they were getting
back on the bus to go to the small airport to go to the big airport
to go across the ocean to go back to… you know,
when they were getting back on the bus and she leaned out the window
for that last little cheesecake snapshot
and as he looked through the camera, he had to slowly take the camera
down, and turn his head to the side a little bit, look a little bit
sad and say
“How you get up there?”
She was dreaming over the ocean
Dreaming of being home again
Dreaming over the ocean
Of what would never be the same.”
