The Foreigner and the Gecko

To travel, meet new people, spread the corporate word, have my photo taken with geocachers and eat as many insects as possible!

This little fella inspired me to find a nice story associated with geckos, and I happened upon this little gem, The Foreigner and the Gecko. I'm including the story here just in case the website it resides on ever disappears.

The Foreigner and the Gecko

A True Story by Obi Okorougo

While I lived in Kenya I had a pet gecko that I named Gideon. Gideon was a Lima bean green thing with quick feet and a bobbing head – not unlike the lizard from the Geiko commercials but sans the cheesy, western European accent.

I chose the name Gideon because it started with a “G”, and so did the word gecko. I wanted to name him Obi, but then I would be inclined to call him “O.G.”, and he was definitely more saint than he was gangster. You see, Gideon lived in the 1-inch gap between the headboard on my bed and the patterned curtain blanketing the wall behind it. There was a foot-long chasm from the top of the headboard to the bottom of the wall light, and this is where Gideon would work his miracles.

The first week of anybody’s trip to Africa is subject to a heavy adjustment period. The itchiest of these involves dealing with the 10,000 things looking to make quick meals of your red blood cells. This was especially tough for me, as I would often lay child-like on my stomach, with legs kicking in the air, reading Hemingway or Schopenhauer by the artificial light on the bedroom wall. Likening this to the NASCAR man with the checkered flag waving the drivers home would not be too much of a stretch.

I would regularly “feed” Gideon by leaving the wall light on even when I wasn’t in the room. Spiders and their blood-sucking, winged associates would often congregate in the warm radius of the light’s rays, planning their mischievous expeditions to my bed sheets, no doubt. I didn’t have the heart to kill them myself, for I was a foreigner trespassing on their land, and to off any one of them would be nothing short of a territorial assassination.

One night as I lay on my back reading Emerson’s essay on Heroism, I distracted myself by counting how many eight-legged enemies lay waiting for me to sleep. Five, I thought to myself. Five eight-legged enemies. My eyes wandered back to the page. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character… With nothing to alert me but my own curiosity, I looked back to the wall. Four! Only four eight-legged enemies left. Where did the other go? As if on cue, Gideon rose Jaws-like from the shadows of the headboard to snatch another brown spider in his mouth. It was an unfortunate thing for those insects, the moment that I realized Gideon’s taste for the crunchy beasts; the wall light was nary off from that moment forward. I assumed the role of both producer and spectator of many gladiator battles in the arena that the chasm soon became. 

To call Gideon my pet was to use the word liberally. He neither belonged to me nor did he live in a cage. At times, I would let my imagination wander as I attempted to piece together the origin of my new protector and pet/friend. It was too easy to assume that he came from Nature and likely wandered into the room through the open crack in the window. No, Gideon was probably sent away by his father as the last hope of a dying planet, not unlike what Marlon Brando did for Superman in the late 1970s.

It’s a funny thing what a little imagination and lack of distraction can do for a man. I began to weave epic tales of courage and heroism around my little bodyguard. Envisioning his family, his dreams, his vices, and his after-hours recreation – my mind personified a warrior’s soul trapped in a lizard’s body. This constant envisaging created a sort of cinematic character development for Gideon, and each battle in the arena thus became much more dramatic, regardless of the modest actual risk to his Life.

. . .

It was a gorgeous summer day in January when I left Kenya. I contemplated putting Gideon in a cage and bringing him along with me to the States, but I couldn’t do it. I decided to leave him for the next man with a big heart in need of protection. After all, Gideon belonged to Nature - and I was just a traveler in a foreign land.