It started during the high pandemic winter of 2020. They were bored — with the apartment, with their jobs, their lives, each other. Nothing was happening, ever. Or when it did, it was bad — a fight over who didn’t take out the trash, an encounter with someone unmasked in the elevator or at the store, an anxious-making phone call with the husband’s elderly parents (they’d talk about going to the grocery store, or how one of them had a fall and was bruised but didn’t need to go to the emergency room). The couple desperately needed an escape, and it was too cold to go outdoors for any length of time, and it felt as if they’d truly exhausted all of their subscriptions (they’d long ago cut the cord) by watching everything on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Starz, Amazon, AppleTV+, Disney+, and yes, even Showtime.
Then one day the husband was watching YouTube late at night, switching between the Yule Log and ASMR videos (did they work on him? Didn’t they? Now seemed like the time to figure it out…) when a new suggestion appeared: NamibiaCam. What could it be? Obviously YouTube wouldn’t suggest it if it didn’t know it was something he’d like (that was a joke, although maybe not a super funny one given how teens got radicalized into white supremacy thanks to the suggestion algorithms), so he clicked.
The next day, after he wore down her resistance (“YouTube? Really?” “With a lot of kids it’s all they watch.” “That says more about the failures of our culture than anything else…”), he showed it to the wife. She, too, was mesmerized. The Namibia livestream turned out to be a 24-hour camera on a waterhole in the Namib Desert, with an infrared feature for nighttime. It showed a large, overflowing puddle in the foreground of a wide-angle view that expanded in every direction into a flat, tan expanse, spotted with distant scrub. But the attraction was the ever-changing cast of desert wildlife that came to the waterhole for a drink. There were oryxes, known as gemsbok in Afrikaans according to Wikipedia, with dramatically-patched black and white faces and outlandishly long, straight-sticking horns. They were striking to look at, until you started seeing them every day and realized that they were the most common denizens of the area and therefore ho-hum, like deer and rabbits would be if you lived upstate. Then there were gnus/wildebeest, very funny-looking, hairy and wrinkly creatures (“Just like you, ha ha!”) that were much less common and therefore exciting when they would arrive, in herds, taking over for a day or two, during which the oryxes generally stayed away. Next in commonality were the jackals, cute and canine, they often came alone, day and night, when the oryxes weren’t around. Plus spotted and hunch-backed hyenas, more daring and bad-mannered (they always peed in the water, ew); delicate-looking antelope called springbok; black and grey and wobbly ostriches, who were just hilarious when they got flustered or ran; zebras, whose stripes made them so stunning to look at, especially at night, that it was hard to believe they were real; and the warthogs, who often showed up as a family to roll in the mud, making loud, unmistakably piggy noises. And the occasional fox, rabbit, or owl at night, and every once in a while, GIRAFFES! What freakish marvels they were, immense dappled bodies and relatively petite heads stacked on those endless and spindly stiff necks and legs: when they wanted to drink, they had to spread those front appendages wide to get their heads down to the water, then jump back up to standing. And when they came close to the camera, they lost their heads!
Soon after the couple started watching they discovered the chat feature. It had its own denizens, with handles in various languages, including funny ones like “kuna burger” and “JaffaCat,” chatting away about the animals or the weather on-camera in real time, asking questions (often the same ones, since people joined and left constantly), or just saying hello and goodbye — they spent an inordinate of time doing that, or reacting to others’ greetings or goodbyes, or reacting to the reactions, and it all ended up so out of order that it was often hard to follow who was talking about what to who, they didn’t know how the kids did it (though often it turned out they were not kids, one day she saw two people exchanging information about how they were both “well-traveled grandmothers.” It was basically just people with time on their hands, which, during a pandemic, could be anyone). The best part was that the moderators posted time stamps of what they had seen, mostly wildlife, but some got really granular, listing shooting stars or headlights in the distance that the couple couldn’t imagine anyone cared about — but still, the dedication was impressive. The husband felt like it was cheating if the animals weren’t spotted live, but the wife would scroll back in the feed in the mornings, as she warmed her face over her coffee, to find out what she’d missed: a confusion of wildebeest (could you believe that sensational animal group name?), or maybe a bat, something she could never have identified on her own because it came by so quick — in fact, maybe it was a waste of time to look for it.
But no, there were no wastes of time in Namibia! Namibia was all day long and endless, and what could be more important? Literally, at the time, nothing. It was so nice to have something new to talk about, a separate world to spend time in, that changed potentially every second. Something that they could call the person from the other room in excitement about — “Giraffe! Giraffe, hurry!” — so that they could share a moment together in a way that they really didn’t have access to much otherwise in those days. After a while, they just had it on permanently, except for when the new season of Stranger Things dropped, or during the election, or the attack on the capitol, or some other important TV/life event — for hadn’t those things become one in the same?
Finally, there was a vaccine, but they weren’t eligible for the first round (too young, no co-morbidities), and didn’t want to fight the crowds for the second. They were both doing fine working from home, they had Zoom calls with friends and family when they wanted them, and it wasn’t that they didn’t want to see the elderly parents, it was more that they wanted to be extra, extra cautious. So the couple waited until they could get the vaccine at their local Walgreens, and went together. The two of them cowered in a corner, in their masks, waiting for the pharmacist (he never had his nose covered, leading them to conclude that pharmacists were not real doctors), who eventually took them, one at a time, into a little room in the back and gave them their shots. Rather than having to wait through the 15-minute allergic reaction window in the waiting area, they convinced the pharmacist that they could go home and keep an eye on each other. They didn’t like being around all of those dubiously-masked people, no, but also it was also the longest time they had spent away from Namibia, other than during sleep, since they’d discovered it — a full hour and fifteen minutes, what with all the walking and waiting. She scanned back immediately and found that they had missed — oh my gosh! — A CHEETAH! They had never seen one of those at the watering hole, they’d only been able to find previously recorded footage of them, and now they had missed this one by just five minutes! The wife tried to comfort the husband by pointing out that scrolling back five minutes was really just like being there, but he was inconsolable. He flopped down on the couch and would not move, or barely even blink, for the next several hours, willing the cheetah to come back. It didn’t. Eventually he went back to work, but with Namibia there the entire time in a corner of his monitor, where he’d glance every few seconds, reducing his work output by…well, considerably. (“But who’s getting a ton of work done these days anyway? All the other associates have kids and they’re basically home-schooling them. Compared to that, I’m employee of the year.”) They eventually got the second shot — she had a hard time convincing him to make the appointment, but he finally agreed to go in the late afternoon, when it would already be dark in Namibia, and this time, thank God, they didn’t miss anything, not even an owl.
Then, a couple of weeks later, they got invited to a birthday party. It was outside, in the park, and they knew at this point that they were at full immunity, but they still decided not to go, agreeing that it still felt too soon, too raw. A week or two later, the parents wanted to have dinner, outside at a cafe close to their house, but the couple talked them out of it: the risks still seemed too great. After a few more weeks, though, when the news was coming in that the vaccine was working, that fewer and fewer people were getting sick, and the parents had already gone out to do several things with their friends (“Isn’t it funny how boomers are afraid of everything new and different unless it somehow leads to them to being able to play golf again?”), the couple finally agreed to have them over for dinner. The wife cooked and the husband’s parents enjoyed the meal, although she could see that they were distracted by Namibia, which the husband of course refused to turn off and kept darting his eyes back to when he thought nobody was watching him. But when a family of zebras emerged, one by one, from the surrounding night, of course the parents were overjoyed, and couldn’t wait to turn it on themselves back at home. (The couple spent quite a long time explaining to the parents how to find it on YouTube, but they had a feeling it still might never happen. But that was okay, they would forget about it, they always had PBS).
Other than that, their routine really didn’t change much. Their friends texted to make plans a lot at first — with a stream of exclamation points, because they were so excited to be able to go out again!!!! But after the husband and wife turned them down three, four, seven times, the invitations petered out. It wasn’t that they didn’t like going out, they did. At least, they liked the idea of going out. The memory of the fun things they’d done in the before times: trips to the Met, dinners at steakhouses with rude waiters who were part of the charm. But they had negative memories too. Take New Years Eve: seriously, when was the last time they’d really enjoyed it? They felt to compelled to do something because they didn’t want to be losers, but the night was always awash in overpriced dinners and lame house parties, inevitably drawing to a close with a forever wait on the subway platform, surrounded by throngs of the wasted, tripping and vomiting, because there were never any cabs. The worst one had been when they’d paid $200 each to go out to some big party in a cathedral with free booze and famous DJs, that had them freezing on line outside at midnight because the people working the door seemed to have no idea how to process the e-tickets, and then, once they got inside, more lines snaking to the only alcohol left, which turned out to be shots of Jager in tiny shitty plastic cups. And when the couple gave up and decided to leave, the coat check was a free-for-all, with stoned check people at a loss to match ticket and coat, and tanked partygoers finally overrunning them to grab and go with whatever they could get. They never got either of their own back (hers was Elie Tahari!), and had to huddle and shiver their way to and from the train to Brooklyn, puffing clouds of frustrated exhaustion into the black, crystalline, January night. So ugh, no, they did not miss that, and wasn’t so much of it like that? The concerts or musicals where your seats were way, way in the back and yet still cost $300 — realistically, how different was that than watching the broadcast of the show, other than that your couch was way more comfortable than those tiny, rigid seats, and you didn’t have to deal with the crowds, which were still definitely unsafe? Every interesting, minuscule restaurant (because weren’t all of the interesting ones minuscule?) had to cram you right up against someone else, they were always so loud that you couldn’t have a conversation without barking at each other, and the food, even if it was good, was always $30 for a hamburger.
And sure, they missed their friends, but they had to admit that, before the pandemic, they’d been feeling just…a bit…well…sick of all of them. Megan, the wife’s supposed best friend, just seemed to talk more and more about herself, and her boyfriend had to be on the spectrum, he spent most of their time together looking at his phone. Sammy, the husband’s college roommate, and his wife, Jess, had no life outside of their kids now, 2 and 4, so what, really, was there left to talk about? And whenever they went to Pat and Mark’s dinner parties, they never knew anything about the hot new restaurants and clubs that everyone else was talking about, so they’d just get plastered to hide how frankly boring they felt. And while the wife had always had social anxiety, the past year and a half had definitely worsened it. It was one thing to see people on Zoom, where nobody expected you to put on make-up or outfits and you could just make an excuse and leave whenever you felt like it. If you went out, you’d have to talk to people and make choices and figure out how much to tip, or if you went to someone’s house, you’d have to come up with say nice things about it. And even if, as the husband said, everyone was so predictable that you knew exactly what each person was going to say every time, that didn’t make it any less stressful, because you had to act like you didn’t. Had they really ever found any of that fun?
Whereas Namibia was different every time you sat down. Sure, you’d have boring days, when there would be one lone jackal wandering in and out for what seemed like forever, or just a bunch of crows. But then suddenly: a pride of ostriches! (“A pride? Like with lions?” “I know. Ostriches don’t seem like they’re too proud for anything.”) And no matter what happened, if there was a disturbance that caused the wildebeest to stampede, or even an attack, oryx on oryx, or the one time a giraffe kicked at and barely missed a hyena who wouldn’t give ground, things always returned to some sort of equilibrium. Even if there was an injured warthog, they might worry about it for a day or two, but eventually it would just disappear, to be replaced by other animals vying for a drink. Namibia was always unexpected, but it still always felt safe.
Until the day when they woke up to find the channel was gone. Just gone. Deleted.
“Can that happen?”
“Can’t anything happen? It’s the internet.”
“But did the camera break? Did the funding run out? I would have sent money — I should have sent money!”
Googling showed that the organization that had created the NamibiaCam had been taken over by another organization that had no interest in running and maintaining the hardware required to host the livestream. They wanted to use the money and manpower to focus on conservation. The husband stormed around the apartment, gesticulating, fists in the air, until he wore himself out and crashed on the couch, curled in a ball. The wife grabbed the Roku remote and frantically started scouring YouTube for other options. She was still searching when he fell asleep.
He awoke the next day, looked up at the television, and felt like he was…moving. The whole image was roaming through a snowy landscape of homes, fields, trees, tunnels, and snaking over train tracks throughout — it was a camera attached to the front of a train. The view was constantly changing, and looked so white, so crisp. Including the image quality, which had to be 4K.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she replied. She looked tired, but also somehow refreshed. “It’s Norway.”
They watched for several minutes more in contented silence, before the husband said, “We need to get a better TV.”
Amazing and very interesting An unusual topic
Very interesting. Too bad it was cancelled. Thanks for a good read