Notes on the Lion King

I saw him in Africa chasing wild animals from an encampment on the edge of the Masai Mara with the aplomb of a man taking a slipper from a puppy.

Then I saw him in a kitchen in L.A., cringing suddenly from a growl in the vicinity of the sink, like a man in the presence of Satan himself.

The animals were 300-pound lions in whose territory we had inadvertently camped. The growl from the kitchen was a garbage disposal.

But to Patrick Pape, who has spent most of his 48 years in the Kenyan bush, wild lions were familiar, wild garbage disposals were not.

The noises of L.A. were generally unfamiliar, attacking him from all sides the minute he stepped off a plane and surrounding him for all of the 15 days he was here.

The lights of the city were after him too, blinding flashes of headlights, street lights and neon, brighter than anything he had ever seen.

There are no sounds in the bush except for an occasional roar or a bird call or the scoldings of orangutans. There are no lights in the bush except for campfires, lanterns and the amber glow of animal eyes in the darkness.

For the time he was here, Patrick Pape, trim and ruddy, was Crocodile Dundee on only the second trip in his life out of his native Kenya, and the world was full of surprises.

I began to see L.A. through the eyes of an enchanted visitor.

*

I met Pape, the son of British expatriates, during a trip to Kenya a few years ago. He owns his own camping safari, and his visit to L.A. was both a vacation and an effort to drum up business.

Pape’s camp is mobile and stays close to the animals of Africa, unlike the safaris that put you up in lodges and bus you on day trips to the game preserves. With Pape, you live in tents, and, while the accommodations are far from primitive, a lifetime in the bush has taught him where the animals are, and that’s where you go.

This was never clearer than the night a pride of 15 lions wandered through our encampment and Pape had to chase them off with his Land Rover.

“It was just a mum and her kittens,” he explained later in a slight British accent, while we searched the darkness apprehensively for signs of their return. We began calling him the Lion King after that, long before Disney made the name popular.

To Pape, the traffic of L.A. was a danger far greater than anything that prowled the nights of Kenya. There were times when he absolutely refused to cross a street because of the speed and abundance of cars whizzing by.

“If I am going to be killed,” he said firmly, “it will be by a lion or a cape buffalo, not by a Pontiac.”

Pape loved the beauty of our ocean and the “wildness” of the Santa Monica Mountains. Places in the mountains reminded him of Africa, and he couldn’t believe there were coyotes, deer and even pumas so close to a big city.

In the mountains, there was a little silence. In the mountains, there was a little darkness.

*

He was struck by the excesses of L.A., the row on row of stores in malls, the abundance of food in the markets, the amounts served at restaurants. And he was amused by what he considered the “posing” of the people: the jewelry, the flashy cars, the cellular phones, the clothes.

But while Pape laughed at those who always seemed to feel they were on stage, he was equally taken with their friendliness. Two beautiful women, in fact, invited him to party with them.

“It took me a while in the first encounter to realize she was a prostitute,” he said. “She asked me to come to her place for a little fun. When I figured out what she meant, I ran.”

The second encounter, less startling, found the naturally amiable Pape not going off with a hooker but buying her a cup of coffee. “She was a lovely person,” he said. “She had come here to be in the movies and when that didn’t pan out, she went to work. It was just a way of making money.”

There was only one disquieting moment for Pape in Los Angeles, and it involved a gun. Not the guns of gang members, but the gun of someone showing him around.

“We were in his car,” Pape recalled, “and he opened his glove compartment. There was a gun in it. He said he had one because other people had them. That scared me.”

He carries no guns in Africa, where wild animals prowl the bush. “I wouldn’t have one near me,” he says. He’s headed back there now. Back to the wildness and back to the tranquillity, away from guns, the roar of traffic and the menacing growl of garbage disposals.