Laikipia, Kenya

Twenty years ago, we pitched a tent in the wilderness which became the farm where we live now. We were starting from scratch. At twilight we saw a low, silver mist descend into the trees, making halos around the distant giraffe and elephant, and settling into the grass. The constellations came out, the moon in its phases, with meteorite showers. There were no electric lights, nor any sounds outside camp apart from wild creatures.

In our early days, drought made the land bare and silent. Dust devils coiled across the plains. One night, we woke to hear an army beating spears against shields. The breeze brought the first scent of rain, which lifts your soul. The smell of wet dust, blood of the gods splashing onto dry rocks. Hope! Delight! Then came a swift battering of big drops, then continuous noise and curtains of water, Claire and I lying awake in bed on either side of our two little children, Eve and Rider. I felt great confidence about our lives ahead.

For our first year, we cooked on an open campfire and our shower was a bucket hung in the branches

At first light after the rain, we looked out at mists, lifting like breath from a knife blade over rocky escarpments, mimosa branches and tawny pastures. There were crickets, frogs and hundreds of birds. Dew dripped from cobwebs in the early sunlight and we walked in pastures soaking our legs, with larks in the blue above and the savannah stretching away, unbounded by barbed wire.

The ranch was all open country, with no fences between here and Ethiopia. Wild animals roamed freely and out on the high plains we saw zebras, oryx and gazelles. A bull giraffe was a dinosaur with oxpeckers all over his back. A herd of eland ran with their heads up and dewlaps swinging. A buck impala snorted. All around were flowers and toadstools and insects. The insects attracted snakes by day and geckos by night. Rodents cantered harum-scarum across our tent roof and peed on our mosquito net. The black cotton plains around us became an impassable bog, with no vehicles moving. We were stranded, hemmed in by weather, cut off like castaways.

For our first year, we cooked on an open campfire and our shower was a bucket hung in the branches of a thorn tree. We washed our faces and clothes in the same bucket. At night we lit candles or hurricane lanterns. The loo was a long drop latrine, with the thunder box commanding a splendid view across the valley. I was happy here, gazing over the treetops or reading about bison hunts in Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. Sitting on our haunches near the open fire, Claire and I talked about books, plays and movies. We had left the city world behind and this remote place invigorated our minds to think and talk about ideas. Every day we read aloud to each other and we felt we were in an Arcadia full of books.

Our tent was big enough for our double bed and a cot where the children slept end to end. Every evening we told them stories or read to them by hurricane lamplight. At night Claire and I lay awake together, under the mosquito net listening to hyena whoops, desert lizards sounding like little electric motors, bats and nightjars, lion roars that hit the solar plexus and made our neck hairs stand up, the braying of zebras as they were hunted down. Nature was here all around us.

Today the farmstead has stone houses, solar power, water tanks, generators, a three-acre dam, chickens, fences, TVs, a piano, gardens and an orchard, a swimming pool and avenues of trees. There are herds of cattle and sheep and goats. We’ve had hundreds of adventures here, livestock raids and Christmas parties and some lonely stretches under this sky. People have worked here for so long that now their children are working here. Meanwhile, our children have become adults and gone to university while three dogs have grown old, conceding territory to three mischievous cats. From over the horizon at night we see the glow of electricity and hear distant trucks rumbling south. Claire and I are both nearly 60 and together we created this farm from what seemed like nothing, a wild corner. It always felt like we were working towards a perfect world, when we could relax and say that the farm was complete and we could finally rest. Instead, we found the work never ends and there are always adventures ahead. But when we had just a tent in the bush, life seemed simple and I miss it.