Pula (the Setswana word for rain, as well as the name of the currency)
I have been trying to do my laundry but I'm being assaulted by sunny thundershowers – the huge drops falling like diamonds into the bright tropical sunshine.
The rainy season is marvellous. It's an epic drama played out on a stage so huge and level that I can't see my own ant-like spot in it... Thunder and lightning rip across the Kalahari, and climbing the water tower behind my neighbours' house allows me to see an incredible distance across the plain to the crackling storms on the horizon. Rain falls in fits and starts, the wind whipping my windows closed and blowing my hapless laundry off the line. And the landscape greens. I saw this happen in Kenya, but we moved on soon after the rainy season commenced, and I wasn't able to observe it the way I am now – seeing the colour bleed back into the land.
When I arrived, the drive from D'Kar to Gantsi was a parched otherworldly expanse of silvery acacias, dry yellow grasses, the white rubble of exposed rock, and red lateritic soil – but even the red was flattened to beige, leached of its colour by the harsh desert sun. Now, driving the same road is just as extreme, but in an utterly different way. The scene is picture-perfect, like an extra-saturated image of idyllic pastoralism, the dream of the American West, perhaps – endless straight road, no other cars, and on either side, a bright new green that somehow speaks to you of growth, renewal, sustenance, possibility. There are vivid accents of red soil and yellow grasses; and the sky is everywhere, the clouds a virginal white but shadowed with dramatic grey blues and pregnant with rain. If you look to the horizon, you can see how the muted prussian blues blend into a thin band of falling rain, the drifting blur of water sieved from the heavens and settling onto the land. As evening falls, if you have a bit of elevation, you might see the snap and fire of lightning tearing through the clouds – you might see the shadows of birds as they ride the rising wind and shelter in the bushes.
Everything is growing. One of the trees in my backyard has burst out its plumage of tiny green leaves, and in its new shade the patchy grass has begun to emerge. There are flowers – the brilliant magenta cactus flowers and the most delicate, alien white blossoms that grow on single stems straight from the ground, like oddly-folded lilies. The tiny yellow flowers of one of the acacia species. I've gotten into the habit of running some mornings – I run down the gravel road, turn into the bush and run along a dirt track until I am tired, and then walk the rest of the way back, weaving my way in between bushes that were not green two weeks ago, watching the clear morning sun cast its shadows on the bone-coloured stones, the unevenly-greening bush. There is one acacia that seems to have some kind of relationship with a large, fleshy epiphyte*, and the separation of the plants is bizarrely obvious now; the epiphyte has greened up quickly and the acacia remains barren. The skeletal thorn trees harbour their verdant companions like strange hats, half-hidden by the frizz of thorny twigs.
The days are cooler. The wind and the clouds and the rain – ah. It's beautiful. Not that the sun, the extreme dryness and the perfect clearness of the sky weren't beautiful (I miss the unrelenting clarity of the stars), but this is easier to love.
I'm making progress on plans for my work next year – but I won't write about it until things are more hammered-out.
*I'm sure I'm missing something here – I don't think it can be a true epiphyte, or how could it green up so quickly, when its host tree is not? So maybe the 'epiphyte' has some roots in the soil? I'll have to examine it more closely. Anyhow, it looks like a cluster of fleshy green vines that sits in the upper branches of particular acacias.
The rainy season is marvellous. It's an epic drama played out on a stage so huge and level that I can't see my own ant-like spot in it... Thunder and lightning rip across the Kalahari, and climbing the water tower behind my neighbours' house allows me to see an incredible distance across the plain to the crackling storms on the horizon. Rain falls in fits and starts, the wind whipping my windows closed and blowing my hapless laundry off the line. And the landscape greens. I saw this happen in Kenya, but we moved on soon after the rainy season commenced, and I wasn't able to observe it the way I am now – seeing the colour bleed back into the land.
When I arrived, the drive from D'Kar to Gantsi was a parched otherworldly expanse of silvery acacias, dry yellow grasses, the white rubble of exposed rock, and red lateritic soil – but even the red was flattened to beige, leached of its colour by the harsh desert sun. Now, driving the same road is just as extreme, but in an utterly different way. The scene is picture-perfect, like an extra-saturated image of idyllic pastoralism, the dream of the American West, perhaps – endless straight road, no other cars, and on either side, a bright new green that somehow speaks to you of growth, renewal, sustenance, possibility. There are vivid accents of red soil and yellow grasses; and the sky is everywhere, the clouds a virginal white but shadowed with dramatic grey blues and pregnant with rain. If you look to the horizon, you can see how the muted prussian blues blend into a thin band of falling rain, the drifting blur of water sieved from the heavens and settling onto the land. As evening falls, if you have a bit of elevation, you might see the snap and fire of lightning tearing through the clouds – you might see the shadows of birds as they ride the rising wind and shelter in the bushes.
Everything is growing. One of the trees in my backyard has burst out its plumage of tiny green leaves, and in its new shade the patchy grass has begun to emerge. There are flowers – the brilliant magenta cactus flowers and the most delicate, alien white blossoms that grow on single stems straight from the ground, like oddly-folded lilies. The tiny yellow flowers of one of the acacia species. I've gotten into the habit of running some mornings – I run down the gravel road, turn into the bush and run along a dirt track until I am tired, and then walk the rest of the way back, weaving my way in between bushes that were not green two weeks ago, watching the clear morning sun cast its shadows on the bone-coloured stones, the unevenly-greening bush. There is one acacia that seems to have some kind of relationship with a large, fleshy epiphyte*, and the separation of the plants is bizarrely obvious now; the epiphyte has greened up quickly and the acacia remains barren. The skeletal thorn trees harbour their verdant companions like strange hats, half-hidden by the frizz of thorny twigs.
The days are cooler. The wind and the clouds and the rain – ah. It's beautiful. Not that the sun, the extreme dryness and the perfect clearness of the sky weren't beautiful (I miss the unrelenting clarity of the stars), but this is easier to love.
I'm making progress on plans for my work next year – but I won't write about it until things are more hammered-out.
*I'm sure I'm missing something here – I don't think it can be a true epiphyte, or how could it green up so quickly, when its host tree is not? So maybe the 'epiphyte' has some roots in the soil? I'll have to examine it more closely. Anyhow, it looks like a cluster of fleshy green vines that sits in the upper branches of particular acacias.
posted by Jenn at
8:14 AM
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