Dan's Papers - June 13, 2008 -

As some of you know, I have written a memoir called In the Hamptons. It was bought by Random House and on May 6, just over a month ago, it made its debut. It has gotten what only can be called sensational reviews, is flying off the shelves and, on Sunday, will be excerpted in Newsday. They are reprinting an entire chapter of the book, and though I am not sure which one, I suspect it is either "Billy Joel" or "Frank Mundus."

Billy Joel you know. Frank Mundus is the famous Montauk shark fisherman who landed one-and-a-half-ton killer sharks and, way back when, was selected as the model for the role of the fishing boat captain in the movie Jaws.

Each chapter in the book is about a particular individual. The subtitle of the book is "Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities," and I have been going around the East End every Saturday morning reading these chapters in the locations they took place. Billy Joel's chapter, for example, will be read at the Coecles Harbor Boat Works on Shelter Island. You'll have to come to that on June 21 at 11 a.m. to find out what that's all about. Or, if you'd like to attend a reading sooner, come to BookHampton Southampton this Saturday at 5 p.m.

Besides Newsday, I've been on NPR (three times), ABC-TV and Channel 11. I have had a feature on the front page of The New York Times Long Island section, and was a pick of the month in National Geographic Traveler. Upcoming, I am scheduled to be on Channel 11, CNBC and NBC.

What I really want to talk about in this article, however, is how this book came to be written. The majority of it got written at night by lantern light during the month of April 2006 on safari in Africa.

Chris and I spent that entire month there. We were in South Africa at Kruger, Zambia at the Victoria Falls, and for three of the four weeks in Botswana, the African country with the greatest number of large animals on the continent. Indeed, it can be said that Botswana has the greatest number of animals free to roam around without hindrance in one place. About 10 years ago, the president of that nation decreed that all fences in the entire country had to come down. And so they were. Now the animals run free. And that means personal encounters - accompanied by armed guides, of course - with wild elephants, lions, cheetahs, hippos, rhinos and leopards.

What in the world does Botswana have to do with the Hamptons and a book I might write? Absolutely nothing. And so I have had to dig further to find the reason why this book was written there. I think it is emotional.

Anybody who tells you that they have gone on safari in Africa and were not scared, especially in the dark, is a liar. During the month we were there, we learned, because it was in the newspapers, that a doctor from Cincinnati had poked a crocodile in the eye with an oar while in the Zambia River, and he would be alive today if he had not done that. There was the case of an elephant that charged a man, his wife and child as they walked down the dusty street in Livingstone the day after we were there, and now they were hunting this elephant down to kill him. He must have been berserk to do what he did. Only the man survived. At every tent camp we stayed at - they have names like Kwara, Labala, Zambia, Chuma, Sussi, because you can't refer to them by the name of a town because they are not in any town - we were told not to go out after dark without a camp guide. And so, of course, we did not.

Except, of course, for me. I still wrote my articles for the newspaper even while in Africa. I was determined to do it in a place where there is no phone service, no electricity after dark (they turn off the generator), no cell phone service, no Internet, you travel from one camp to another only by small plane, and if in your tent there is an emergency, you have a knife and a very large bell to clang. The only connection to the outside world was a big tower with an antenna on the top from which the camp's satellite phone worked, at $2 a minute, and then only to the base camp.

What I brought with me was my laptop computer, a long cable and a second device that looked like another clamshell laptop, but which was actually a satellite dish that I had rented from an Arizona firm for $45 a month. I'd set that outside the tent at night, aim the dish toward a point 20 degrees almost due north, and hone in on a satellite there that was sitting stationary a few miles up over Egypt.

I actually succeeded with this. I'd charge my regular laptop during the day while we were out photographing giraffes, cheetahs, kudus and white rhinoceroses. We watched three lions stalk a herd of wildebeest. We watched a migration of zebras pass before our eyes for four hours. Then at night, by lantern light, I'd hook the laptop up by a computer cable to the dish on the tent deck. The dish needed a direct, unobstructed view of the satellite. I could not do it all indoors.

So on many nights of the week, I'd be inside looking at the range finder on the laptop, then I'd unzip the tent flap, go outside, zip up the tent flap, re-adjust the dish toward the satellite, and then go back inside the way I had come to see if I was on the mark or would have to go out again. Usually, I'd get it after five or six tries.

There were things hooting and roaring and snuffling out there. Occasionally you'd hear a scream from a monkey. And it was pitch dark.

After a few nights of this, I thought it was kind of fun. Except that the only days I needed to be in contact with the office in Bridgehampton were Monday, Tuesday and Friday. What about the other days?

Well, that's when I wrote most of the chapters for In the Hamptons. I wrote a chapter about George Plimpton and the Artist and Writers softball game there. I wrote a chapter about the house mover Bob Kennelly and when a house he was moving fell on him; he lived and was back at work a month later. I wrote about Jackson Pollock and about Willem de Kooning and how, for years, he kept on painting even after he fell into a severe and terminal dementia.

One afternoon, in the Kabala camp, the manager of the place, an Aussie, asked me to show him and the assistant manager how this worked. We were in the dining tent and I set it up on the table there with the wire to the dish on a railing outside.

After I was reading my email and showing him how I uploaded attachments, the two of them stared at it for the longest time.

"We need one of these here," the Aussie mumbled. He might have said this is the end of life as we know it.

The scariest of my editing sessions came at Kwara Camp. Our tent faced out onto a swampy pond where nine hippos wallowed. They spend all day there and occasionally you'd hear them snort or bellow. At night, according to our manager, they'd rumble slowly onto the shore and in the coolness of the night, find some place in the camp to all lie down and go to sleep together in a big pile. The manager said, "Just stay away from them, and you'll be fine."

That evening, our first night in Labala, I determined by looking at a small compass on the dish that north was directly over some low bushes that stood between us and the pond. There was a part of the tent deck on the side that had a clear shot at Egypt. So I'd put it there.

I think you know where this is going. After several false starts, I got the rig going and was typing away when I heard what, at first, I thought was a very large person sloshing through the swamp just beyond the bushes. I could hear one foot, then another foot, then another. Of course this had to be the hippos. After a while, all seven of the other hippos followed, and within five minutes they were settling not 10 feet from our tent. As soon as the last of them arrived, they began honking and grunting at one another in a soft, reassuring way. It was some kind of bedtime story. And it went on and on, and the noises spaced further and further apart until the breathing got more regular and, finally, they all fell asleep and it all stopped.