Circling the Sun

Many thanks to Chris P. for  a wonderfully delicious and relaxing evening at her beautiful home overlooking the wide Columbia River. We started the evening off with a toast to adventure, and were reminded that a few of our regulars were off on adventures of their own.  Conversation about the book touched on aspects of  the unusual and daring life of the main character, Beryl Markham, the challenges she faced in the circumstances of her upbringing, and the surprising liberal lifestyles of the English colonialists in Kenya.  As the joke  went, "Are you married or do you live in Kenya?" Several of us had read or watched a film of other accounts of either Beryl or Karen Blixen.

We had mixed feelings about Beryl's love interests, especially with a man who was the lover of her good friend, but considering the culture of free love that existed in that society, and her lack of strong family ethics, hers was a natural response to a strong attraction to a man with a sense of freedom and adventure to which she aspired.

We all loved the descriptions of Africa. " This close to the equator, we had almost no twilight. Day turned to night in minutes, but they were lovely ones. Around us the yellow grasses stretched and moved like the sea sometimes dipping into antbear burrows and pig holes, or lifting towards  the knuckled spires of termite mounds, but never truly ceasing.  There was a powerful illusion that the bush didn't end - that we could ride for years like this, carried by the grasses and the sense of distance, on and on for ever. "

We will need to to discuss over email the plan for our next meeting.