Just in Time The Collapse of Sequence in a Moment of Peril   I never expected my last night in Africa to be like this. I had had all day to drive to Johannesburg in order to catch an early flight the next day out of Jan Smuts Airport; the trip should have taken only six or seven hours, but I got greedy and couldn’t pass up the chance to take in Kruger National Park, a place I’d been hearing about ever since I arrived in Swaziland a year and a half before. “You’ve got to see the real Africa, man,” I was told again and again by white South Africans, who never tired of crowing about the scenic splendors of “their” country. This was the mid-1980s, the height of the apartheid crackdown, and I just couldn’t put trips to South Africa very high on my agenda.      But Swaziland is one of those little you-can’t-get-there-from-here places, and to leave Africa I’d have to fly out of Jo’burg anyway, and somehow I had a little South African rent-a-car that I could dump off at the airport, so here was my chance to “see the real Africa” without having to make the politically incorrect decision to go to South Africa; no, I would just be passing through, and that would be all right.      So I spent a wonderful, exhausting day in Kruger, due north of Swaziland, driving slowly through open bushveldt teeming with giraffes, zebras, wildebeest, elephants, kudus, impala — indeed, the real Africa. What I really wanted to see were lions, the national symbol of Swaziland but now hunted to extinction there. Kruger was said to be the best lion country in all of Africa, and I slowed down even more, peering into the bush, knowing it was my last chance . . . but all I saw were the amazing vortices of circling carrion birds that mark a recent kill — no lions.      The sun set, and I realized that I was still many hours away from Johannesburg. I set out on a fine modern highway that, in the blackness of a moonless night, seemed to stretch dead straight, dead flat from nowhere to nowhere across the Transvaal. The exits were few and they just led to little dorps, farming hamlets, where there would be no hotels or gas stations. Gradually the hours caught up with me and I was desperate for sleep. I decided that anyplace would do; I would just park the car safely away from the motorway and catch a nap. Finally I came to an exit that became an under-construction dirt road as it wound under the motorway and came to a set of railroad tracks. There was a crossing sign with flashing red lights. I looked both ways, saw nothing, and proceeded.      After all those hours of driving through featureless darkness, my mind was a fogbank of road weariness and sleep deprivation. Suddenly, though, time collapsed into itself, and I became aware of many things at once: the car had passed onto a second set of tracks that had been obscured by a pile of dirt; my ears were filled with an enormous trombone-like sound; my eyes were flooded with a blinding light; I was jabbing my foot into the gas pedal; the car was shuddering in the backwash of a speeding freight train; I had just barely survived, by an inch or two, my closest brush with death.     © Michael Fleming Temecula, California December, 1998   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page