Feral Cats II (what did you expect?)

In the past four years, I have been certain of my death on two occasions. The second involves being lost for five hours in the dark in a Ugandan jungle while following chimpanzees. I’ve repressed most of that memory. The first I can elaborate on: One afternoon in Kruger National Park in South Africa, I walked around a bend on a dirt path. Protruding from savanna brush were the gray legs and trunk of a bull elephant. Yes, he was the size of a building. Yes, he moved to the center of the road, yes, he faced me and yes, he trumpeted. He charged, sound and pain left the universe, and I found myself behind the fence of the research camp. I had run, with my three companions, and the elephant had veered off. I can tell you now (maybe) how it feels before you die. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes. Instead, you think of no one and nothing except the ground, your feet and where you can move them.

It is at times like graduation, not the end of my life but the end of part of it, that memories flash through my mind. I arrived at Duke knowing I wanted to write for the paper, but not that I wanted to study primates. I wrote my first Chronicle story about a lemur. I started working with lemurs a few weeks later and could no longer cover them objectively. I became health and science editor and pitched lemur stories to staff writers. I grew a soft spot for blue-eyed lemurs and blue-eyed writers.

Friendships are the best part of a newsroom, of course. In 301 Flowers mine have started with perfume (always smell good, copy editors—this may be the only time someone will lean for so long over your shoulder), drugs (though not in the way you think), a feral cat feature pitch and a Pekingese with an unfortunate underbite and breathing problem.

I left this paper to study abroad my junior year. It is an abandonment we have never quite overcome. In many ways, I returned as an ashamed parent, detached from storylines, from sources and from my former coworkers. They had remained, devoted and sacrificing, and I had taken a trip to a place across an ocean and seen magnificent things. I have never regretted this. I feel guilt at that admission.

Senior year, I took on an editor position again, but the distance remained. Freshmen in the office, you don’t realize that you’ll feel invisible as a senior too. You return to your old desk and find you don’t know anyone around you. You smile and speak softly. I went from arriving in an unfamiliar space at 17, to feeling unfamiliar in it at 21. Towerview put me back in touch with stories, with talented writers, with the people I missed who hadn’t graduated yet. And, at the end, it introduced me to a younger generation of promising writers.

As an editor-in-chief of the magazine I could decide which stories went to print, but some of my best work remains unfinished and forgotten:

1. My unedited Flipcam footage of the 2010 men’s basketball team meeting President Obama in the Rose Garden. It’s earthquake-like—I had to convince the sports editor at the time to take me on the assignment that summer. You would have said you could hold a Flipcam steady in order to go to the White House too.

(Of course, I wound up having to help cover the men’s lacrosse national championship, which we won, in Baltimore before returning to Durham. I’d never watched lacrosse before, but I live-tweeted the game from @chroniclesports in the press box, thinking I would have become a sports writer if I had known about the snacks. I’ve never told you this, Andy, but I mixed up the names of the goalies in those first tweets of my life. I didn’t realize until after the first half.)

Rachna Reddy is a Trinity senior. She is the co-editor of Towerview and the former health and science editor of The Chronicle. She thanks the editors who ensured that “feral squirrels” never made it to print and the young writers who may try to write it yet.