Stacy McCloud with a mystical white blesbok. 2018, Namibia, Africa.
For five days, I conserved water and words.
For days, we sat with nothing approaching the watering hole.
As luck would have it, I have none.
On Thursday June 15, 2023, at 8 am, that’s the title I punched into my keyboard.
I am not a believer in luck. Within a year, I’d broken a dozen handheld mirrors. I chalked it up to occupational hazards of the esthetic industry.
I was once holding a handheld mirror for a client and tripped, flinging it across the room directly into a 36 by 24 mirror on the opposite wall, shattering both glasses into indistinguishable pieces. If fate was sealed, I now had nothing to lose.
I am not triskaidekaphobic. My favorite number has ALWAYS been 13. My jersey number was usually 13. Years ago, I was spotlighted by a sheriff on WCR 13, making out with my husband. I nearly got a tattoo in Lakewood at Lucky 13 tattoo until I realized I didn’t really want a tattoo.
If I believed in luck, the number 13 would be what I would have tattooed on my right bicep in place of what is mostly reserved for “mom.”
Still, I don’t test fate. Since last Thursday, my new stance on luck and superstitions leans towards caution. Carry your lucky rabbit’s foot, kiss your baseball bat before every at bat, don’t walk under a ladder, or never let a black cat cross your path.
Don’t open an umbrella indoors. Carry your bride over the threshold, but never, ever kiss her there.
Knock on wood when speaking the unspeakable, huck some salt over your shoulder, put the evil eye above the outside of your door, and hang a horseshoe facing upwards inside your door.
Don’t step on a crack, and while you’re out, if three bad things happen to you in one day, know you’re in trouble.
Being Christian, I questioned what I was about to do on June 15. Blasphemous in nature, questionable in reality, idolatry by belief, and downright rude by the laws of Emily Post.
That morning, my beautiful country home—just 15 minutes south of the high school I graduated from on 35th Avenue—was hitting the real estate market.
My home was at the end of the cul de sac where I’d raised my children. It’s full of beautiful memories of bonfires, sledding in the winters, star gazing, coyotes lulling me to sleep, birthdays, graduations, Christmases, and Easters.
I was informed of a trick for a quick home sale. Buy a plastic replica of St. Joseph, then bury the tiny saintly man upside down facing away from the property. As I am instructing my children on this task, thoughts flood my brain of how I’m abusing a patron saint, Catholic or not, in this downright disrespectful act.
I was surely condemning the three of us eternally.
So, bury the little 2-inch plastic stepfather of Jesus we did, and since there was no instruction for depth, we buried the replica of the man who raised Jesus DEEP. An indication of my damnation came with the last shovel of fresh soil sealing the Saint’s fate.
Thunder crashed, the skies opened, and the heavens started an immediate outpouring of tears.
After the ceremonious entombing of St. Joseph, Bor, my male Pitbull, unearthed the statue and returned him. Seemingly, even Bor knew the consequences of my actions. Divine intervention with the help of a canine saved three souls from damnation last Thursday.
All dogs do go to Heaven.
Luck is chance, happenstance, unintentional, completely accidental by nature. My existence is deliberate. Everything that has brought me failure and fortune had been premeditated. Nothing in my life has been arbitrary.
Decades into being the woman God is molding me into, I realize that even the smallest experience was intentional.
Stacy McCloud and Rambo, the famous African elephant. Photo/Stacy McCloud.
In 2018, I took my second trip to Africa, specifically to Namibia. I was possessed by the notion of taking a blue wildebeest.
I love the wildness and effortless disobedient nature of the species.
The sassy, wild, untamable species also happens to pair well with a good oaky cabernet, cooked medium rare, and served in soft lighting with good company and great conversation.
During the 3-hour truck ride from the Hosea Kutako airport to our camp, I watched a magnificent example of the species dart across the highway, and in attempt to jump the fence on the other side, he impaled himself in a demonstration of agility and grace. I’m confident he broke his own neck. A beautiful, reckless, wild, brainless species with a striped hue of bluish, all legs and mane accompanied by a skittish nature.
They are the rockstars of the African deserts—the flip of their manes rivals Mick Jagger’s and Tina Turner’s sweaty coif tosses mid-concert.
In the early African summer, I sat in a 5 x 5 elevated blind, humbly holding my bladder as there was no place to privately relieve myself away from the watchful eyes of Vilem, my Namibian professional hunter.
For five days, I conserved water and words. Fleetingly, Vilem and I spoke through the 100-degree by midday, breezeless day. Our perch was 15 feet in the air with a 360-degree view of no animals approaching. I showed him photos of the first and only animal I’d taken with a bow the previous year—my blesbok in Limpopo.
Vilem told me a tale of a white blesbok, the only one they’d seen for years on their ranch. He hadn’t seen it on video in months; he was afraid it had been poached.
For days, we sat with nothing approaching the watering hole. I would read in between, looking out the small window slits with my Maven binoculars. I shifted the numbness in my butt between the carpeted blind floor and the folding chair that had been melted by the past summer’s heat.
I sat sleeping sitting up in a corner and was jolted awake by Vilem shaking me. Wide-eyed, his finger pressed against his lips and quickly pointed to my bow, motioning me to gently get to my feet. Something was making its way to the watering hole 15 feet below us.
In one surprisingly graceful move, my Triax was drawn, and my arrow was aiming at what my eyes would soon see.
There he was. The mystical white blesbok at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
I took a deep breath and released my arrow knowing that the shot was a testament to patience, and perseverance.
This rare mutated species is not an apparition or a ghost but symbolic, a reminder that not everything is as it seems. He was a reminder that fortune favors the bold.
As luck would have it, my aim was true.
