Sleeping with Lions

By Netta Pfeifer

The year is 1968, three years after Netta Pfeifer saw the movie Born Free, based on Joy Adamson’s award-winning book. Fascinated by what she perceived as a special kind of love that led Joy and George Adamson to return their pet lioness, Elsa, to a life in the wild, Netta wrote a fan letter to the Adamsons. The two-year correspondence with Joy that followed evolved into an invitation for Netta to visit Joy’s camp in Kenya’s Meru National Park where Joy was studying the cheetah, Pippa, and her cubs.

In Nairobi, Netta receives her first surprise from Joy, a list of errands to run and supplies to procure—a lot to ask of a stranger and guest in a foreign and confusing city.
It is also a portent of things to come in her roller-coaster relationship with the enigmatic Joy: author, painter, sculptor, concert pianist, and wildlife researcher.
Far from being a simple adventure in the African wilderness, Netta lives in a palm log hut, learns the ways of the wildlife all around her—from elephants to elands to eagle owls—cares for the camp in Joy’s absences, and spends a great deal of time at George Adamson’s camp with his many lions. As a month’s visit lengthens into six, Netta becomes Joy’s assistant, her typist, her editor, her occasional cook, her travel companion, and her chief listener.

All the while, Joy’s volatility, unpredictability, and lack of social skills reminds Netta of her own mother’s mental illness, and focuses her attention on why she’d traveled to Africa in the first place: her search for an answer to the question, What is love? As told in this memoir, little did she know that her answer lay in the vision she’d had when she was eight years old of a beautiful man who became her guardian angel, her inner voice.

Leaving Joy, Netta spends three months in Nairobi with the Adamsons’ veterinarian friends, the only European members in all of East Africa of an East Indian mystic philosophy. Through them, she heads to India where 1968 ends in an unexpected and beautiful way...
a way that changes her outlook—and her life—in a spiritual awakening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brighton Publishing LLC
• Release date: Mar 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781621832133

Netta Pfeifer

In her professional life, Netta Pfeifer has donned many and varied career hats, including: Office Assistant at Green Hills Theatre, an Equity summer stock company in Reading, Pennsylvania; Executive Secretary to two major motion picture talent agents in Hollywood, California; Assistant Manager of a resort on Oak Creek in Sedona, Arizona; Office Administrator for fine art galleries in Sedona; and Director of eSales for the Resonance Repatterning Institute.At MCA Artists, Ltd. in Hollywood, she was the only employee ever allowed to work part time while completing her BFA degree from UCLA. During that time she interviewed the Oscar-winning French actress, Simone Signoret, for the UCLA Daily Bruin newspaper, which she later wrote about in the UCLA Alumni magazine, one of many articles she’s written for publications like Southwest Art, Living Bird, Farm & Ranch Living, The Secretary, Spirit of Change, and The Repatterning Practitioners Association Journal. After returning from Africa, Netta spent two years as production secretary on an award-winning film called The African Elephant. In the company of luminaries like Sir David Attenborough and Elspeth Huxley, she was the only American to be interviewed at the BBC in London for a television documentary on Joy Adamson’s life that appeared on the A&E network.An Easterner by birth, Netta wears a very different hat these days. You might say it’s of the ten-gallon variety. She’s become a Westerner mostly because she’s lived in the grandeur and beauty of Arizona’s red rock country for far longer than anywhere else. “I am so glad that you found at last what you like, wide, open Arizona space and interesting work to do there,” Joy Adamson wrote to her. To that Netta would add how blessed she is to have a loving family as well as the support of a spiritual community, quite a few of whom she has known since the year she went to Kenya and lived Sleeping with Lions.

Book preview

Sleeping with Lions

A Spiritual Awakening

Netta Pfeifer

Brighton Publishing LLC

435 N. Harris Drive

Mesa, AZ 85203

www.BrightonPublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-62183-213-3

Copyright © 2013

eBook

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover Design: Tom Rodriguez

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Dedications

For Karol, Ian, Ada and Ian Alexander,

Ehren, Adrian, Evan and Emilie,

and my Guardian Angel

Acknowledgments

My journey to Africa and India spans the year of 1968. My journey from the day I began to write Sleeping with Lions has been a much longer one. For some time my inner voice had been nudging me to share my story with the world, but I ignored it with equal vigor. Then one day, while she picked and flushed and vacuumed, my dental hygienist, Laurie Scott, asked about my background. It wasn’t easy, but I must have answered her questions because, You have to write a book, she announced as she unhooked my bib. It was Laurie who finally made me put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard.

Tobey, who passed away several years ago, and Rob Milne, shared an Africa-to-India experience similar to mine, including mutual friends Drs. Sue and Toni Harthoorn. The Milnes graciously read and critiqued my very first chapters and made invaluable suggestions based on Tobey’s expertise as a Certified Social Worker and Rob’s as a now-retired member of the National Parks Service. My friend, Joye Lytel, insisted that my working title had to go. It’s just too blah, she said. You need something with more punch. Unaware of my Chapter 7 or its title, Joye couldn’t have suggested anything more appropriate than Sleeping with Lions: A Spiritual Awakening.

Writing Sleeping with Lions would have been impossible without the letters I sent to family and friends at home, who saved them and then gave them back to me on my return to California. For that, more thanks than I can possibly express go to my sister Karol, George Chasin, Arthur L. Park, Jr., Eileen O’Brien, Bob Gray, and Silvia Benson.

What would I have done without my favorite cheerleader, Dee Rudd, with her magic mojo, and her attagirls whenever my manuscript received a positive response from anybody? She picked me up after countless rejections and made me see the wisdom of making vital changes as Sleeping with Lions lurched through its many incarnations.

Kathie McGuire at Brighton Publishing realized immediately what I was saying with Sleeping with Lions. She got its real spiritual message. For that, and for all the advice she’s given me, and her wondrous ability to explain publishing to a novice, I will be forever grateful.

Thanks to Kenya with its unforgettable people and animals; and to India with its very special place in the foothills of the Himalayas, two paradoxical lands that conspired to change my life and become forever entwined in my heart.

Chapter One

Bankers in Switzerland, a Pharmacist in Rome, Fate

Lesson number five, to have faith, is complete. (Emma Thompson in the final scee of the film Nanny McPhee Returns)

With warmth and sunshine awaiting me in Africa, there I was in a hotel in Pontresina, Switzerland, in the middle of a raging blizzard. To while away the hours of snowfall that made skiing impossible, I stretched out on the bed in my all-white room and tried to remember how and why I had ended up there. Was it the crush I’d had on a Swiss ski instructor I’d met in Sun Valley, Idaho, the previous year? The free stopover offered by SAS? Or had I convinced myself that a week of skiing in Switzerland would let me chill out and stop feeling guilty about leaving my sister with our mentally ill mother while I was gone?

Alone, unsure of what lay ahead for me so far to the south, feeling homesick and sorry for myself, I watched horse-drawn sleighs make U-turns around the hotel’s entryway under the bay window in my room. After ten years in Southern California, I was once again experiencing the whiteness of winter, my favorite time of year when I was growing up in Pennsylvania.

Toward the end of the week in Pontresina, my inner voice started nudging me—urging me to leave Switzerland earlier than the following Monday, January 15th. Moving my scheduled departure back one day to Sunday seemed to make about as much sense as my having come there in the first place, but over the years I had learned never to ignore my inner voice.

I was eight years old and living in Mt. Penn, Pennsylvania, when that inner voice became such a huge part of my life. Standing in line to jump rope in the recess yard at St. Catherine of Siena school, I looked over to where a chain link fence separated the school from some neighbors’ backyards. I saw what looked like a tall, strikingly beautiful older man standing against that fence. He had a round, jolly face and a long, white beard. Dressed in white from head to toe, he wore what looked like a towel on his head. An aura of gentleness, kindness, compassion, and, yes, love radiated from him. As though drawn by a magnet, I wanted to get closer to him. I left the jump rope line, but by the time I had taken a step or two toward him, he was gone.

In my excitement, and certain that others had seen him too, I told one of the nuns. She responded coldly, Oh, child, what a vivid imagination you have! That is when I knew my Guardian Angel—I called him that because we had been studying guardian angels in catechism class—was mine alone. From that moment on I knew I was loved in a very special way. My mother’s paranoid schizophrenia had meant a childhood filled with excruciating loneliness, and little if anything of what I thought of as love. With my Guardian Angel in my life, I knew I had only to remember him whenever I needed help. From then on, I listened to him as my inner voice.

At the bar one evening in Pontresina, without mentioning my inner voice, I pleaded my case about wanting to leave early to Mr. Hetz, the owner of the hotel. He drove me to the nearest travel agency, in St. Moritz, where the clerk took my tickets and passport and promised to let me know what they could do. On Friday, during a brief interlude of sun, I made the return trip to St. Moritz by bus. Happily, the travel agency had been able to reschedule my departure—a seemingly insignificant change with consequences I could not possibly have imagined on the bus ride back to the hotel through the sun-sparkled snow.

Not long after the train pulled out of the station early on Sunday morning, it started to snow again. Across the aisle from me sat an elderly gentleman who looked for all the world like Santa Claus, with a round face, rosy cheeks, and a long, white beard. He opened the briefcase in his lap and occupied himself with paperwork. Seconds after the first seating for lunch was announced, Santa Claus closed his case and rose to his feet. To my utter amazement, he bowed and very politely invited me to join him and his friends for lunch in the dining car. How could I possibly say no to Santa Claus?

Blowing his Santa Claus cover, he introduced himself as Herr Bakke, head of sales for SAS, the airline through which I had booked my around-the-world trip. As I followed him to the dining car, it dawned on me that of course Herr Bakke knew who I was. I was part of his job.

We were shown to a semi-circular banquette, where two other gentlemen already were seated. Seeing me, they slid out and stood to greet us. Herr Bakke’s companions, whose names I failed to record because I didn’t grasp their pronunciation, let alone their spelling, turned out to be the presidents of the national banks of Denmark and Sweden. All three were returning home from a board meeting of what was then the SAS consortium.

I felt as though we were in a five-star restaurant when lunch was served on bone china, with a linen tablecloth and napkins, sterling silver, and fine crystal.

Why are you going to Kenya? Herr Bakke asked.

"Two years ago I saw the movie Born Free, about Elsa the lioness, I responded enthusiastically. I sent a fan letter to George and Joy Adamson, who wrote the Born Free books. Joy responded, and we’ve been corresponding ever since."

Joy Adamson, she’s very famous even in Scandinavia, the Danish bank president said.

"That’s because all three of her books were international best-sellers, and the film based on Born Free was nominated for an Academy Award," I said.

"Born Free, Born Free, Born Free—that’s all my grandchildren could talk about, Herr Bakke said, and the other two men smiled. I must confess I didn’t pay much attention to what they were saying."

That was my cue to tell them that Born Free was about Elsa, one of three lion cubs orphaned when George Adamson, then a game warden in northern Kenya, was out on patrol in search of a man-eating lion and accidentally shot and killed their mother instead. George took the cubs home to his wife, Joy, who fell in love with the smallest, whom she called Elsa.

When Elsa and her sisters outgrew the Adamsons’ home, George and Joy were forced to make some hard decisions. Two of the cubs were sent to a zoo in Holland; Elsa’s fate would be quite different from her sisters’, because the Adamsons had chosen to do something that no one had ever attempted before. They chose to teach Elsa to be wild again and to regain her birthright as a wild lioness.

Watching the film, I was transfixed by what I perceived to be George and Joy’s relationship with Elsa. As I saw it, it was the Adamsons’ love for Elsa that inspired them to choose freedom and the life of a wild lioness for her, rather than consign her to a zoo, as they had done with her sisters. They had chosen to let her go. Therefore, like wild lionesses, I reasoned, Elsa’s birthright was freedom.

What, I wondered, was my birthright? Being a slave to the fear and terror engendered by my mother’s paranoid schizophrenia? Or could my birthright be freedom, too? But who would show me the love that would set me free?

From the film to here for you, how did that happen? the Swedish bank president wanted to know.

For a wonderful week of skiing, I joked, pointing to the increasingly white world outside the train’s windows and deciding not to mention my preoccupation with love and freedom. "I’m from Los Angeles, where I worked as executive secretary to one of the top motion picture talent agents in Hollywood. About six months after I saw Born Free, I visited a friend who was working on the Utah location of a film called Duel at Diablo. One of its stars happened to be Bill Travers, the actor who played George Adamson. After meeting him, I told Bill how much I had enjoyed the film. He gave me the Adamsons’ address in Kenya. That’s how I connected with Joy.

When she hinted at needing an assistant to help with her enormous work load, including Pippa the cheetah whom she has released back into the wild, I wrote to her asking if she would be open to a visit from me. In November she replied, saying, ‘BIG WELCOME! But NOT in Nov or Dec because that is the rainy season.’ So, here I am.

Do you know anything about lions or cheetahs? the Danish bank president asked incredulously.

Not a thing, I replied. I’ve seen them in zoos and circuses. We’ve always had pets at home like cats and dogs, and for some reason I seem to know what they’re thinking. But, no, I can’t even imagine what Joy’s camp in Kenya will be like.

Amazing! the Swedish bank president exclaimed. You’re traveling all this way alone to visit a continent you’ve never seen?

And a famous person she’s never met, Herr Bakke pointed out. Always the salesman and grinning broadly, he added, But at least she chose SAS!

While herding the rest of us away from the table, Herr Bakke suggested I join them for smoking and aperitifs in the private compartment of another of their board members. He turned out to be Herr Karl Nielsen, president of Swissair—tall, handsome, thin, and elegantly dressed.

From Born Free, lions, and cheetahs, our conversation turned to what was happening to the U.S. dollar. Inflation in the States, I said, seemed to be headed nowhere but up. In fact, three days hence, in his State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson would call for a ten percent income tax surcharge to reduce a budget deficit estimated at $20 billion for 1968, and to curb the rampant inflation. Although at the time I had no way of knowing that, I assured my august companions that, by the end of the year, I felt certain the dollar would be devalued.

In response, and in shock, three of the men pulled banknotes out of their pockets or wallets. Herr Bakke signed a Norwegian ten kroner note; the president of the bank of Denmark signed a Danish ten kroner note; and both Herr Nielsen and the president of the Bank of Sweden signed a Swedish ten kroner note. Handing the precious keepsakes to me, the men made me promise that, if the dollar was not devalued, I must return the bills to them.

Two months later, on March 14th, 1968, the Federal Reserve Board raised the lending rate to five percent, the highest since 1929. At the same time, a hunting party hosted by John M. King and his wife, Carylyn, of Denver, Colorado, was camped in the reserve that bordered Meru Park, where I was staying with Joy. The King party’s white hunter, Fred Seed, had located a cheetah cub; aware of Joy’s research, he thought she might like to know about it. She was thrilled, of course. As a result of this contact, Joy and I were invited to the Kings’ camp for dinner.

Aside from its being my one and only encounter with a full-fledged, five-star, tented safari camp—replete with excellent cuisine and a plethora of liveried servants—what I remember most about that evening was the Americans’ total disbelief that, when they arrived in Kenya, they couldn’t get any money. All exchange transactions in their suddenly worthless and unacceptable U.S. dollars had been temporarily suspended. Listening to those extremely wealthy tourists bemoaning the scramble they’d experienced just trying to find enough shillingis to pay the cab driver who took them from the airport into Nairobi, all I could think of were my wonderful friends on the Zurich-bound train. Somehow, with big smiles on their faces, I knew those bankers were thinking of me.

Today, as I write this, I’m looking at their three autographed kroner notes in a frame on my desk.

On the train, our attention was suddenly riveted on the world outside our windows. What had been a light snow when we got underway that morning had gradually escalated into another blizzard. By the time we finally pulled into the train station in Zurich, we were five hours behind schedule. Zurich had come to a standstill. Trains, planes, buses—nothing was moving, and there was nowhere to stay. The platform had been turned into a wall-to-wall sea of people, most of whom would end up calling it home, at least for that night. In the crush of humanity, I lost contact with my new friends.

I was being pushed out the door at one end of the coach when I heard Herr Nielsen calling to me from the other end, Go to the SAS counter. Using my hand luggage as a battering ram and wondering whether or not I would be joining the marooned throngs I was bumping into and stepping over, I followed his instructions. My progress was slow, but eventually I staggered up to the counter at the front of the terminal. At the mention of my name, the clerk summoned an attractive young woman named Eva in an SAS uniform. My luggage, she said in perfect English, was already in the car; would I please be good enough to follow her there, too?

In the car, Eva told me how lucky I was that they’d been able to find a room for me in a small hotel. She also said she would give me vouchers for dinner there that night and breakfast in the morning. When she left me at the hotel, she told me she’d be back again at six o’clock the next morning to take me to the airport for my flight to Rome. SAS, she assured me, had changed my tickets; all I had to worry about was getting a good night’s sleep.

I crashed into bed in my warm, cozy little room upstairs under the eaves. Before saying a fervent prayer of thanks to my Guardian Angel, it dawned on me that none of the names of my four companions on the train had entered Eva’s and my conversation. How else, I mused, could I feel like a