Today, my discussion went online so I got to sleep ij a but more. Then, I completed a lot of work and attended my physics office hours online. Professor Rhombes got a real fresh cut. After this, I had a couple meetings with some upperclassmen, which was really refreshing. I also cut my nails today while the sun was shining on my face through my window. It made me feel magical.

The homie Alan went on Zoom to meet some people before playing some League. Then, he finished his homework. I am glad that he has been able to relax lately.

The homie Gabi went to her BL lab where she completed some titrations. Then she completed some emails. It was a very chill, ”okay” day for her.

Scorched Earth (pt. 1)

All around the earth is burnt.

We coast along at speeds that would be deemed worthy of psychological evaluation in any developed country, swerving around taxi caravans, nervously gripping the decaying faux-leather of our generic well-worn sedan.

Looking out through our grime-encrusted, permanently fog-stained windows, we are enclosed in an envelope composed solely of horizon and heavens. Black, ash-scattered terrain stretches out in all directions under a sky crying gentle pink. In a single minute, there may be no signs of human habitation visible. In the next, you might see a couple of clay huts straddling the edge of some marbled, corroding cliff, naked without the protection of deep roots that have long decomposed after what had to be an eye-watering, windswept blaze. Lone palms stand like sentinels over bare patches of earth, their bark having withstood several inevitable infernos. Each time the mind wanders on these surroundings, a sharp jolt from a raised steppe in the road returns the body back to the cramped space of the vehicle. As our drivers jabber on in Malagasy, we are left wondering if we are the subject of the conversation - a curse that has been bestowed on all those who haven’t taken the time to learn a foreign tongue. The combination of all these factors makes your head swim a little, to say the least.

Madagascar’s fiery, umber canyons and noxiously red dirt have given the place a nickname - “The Red Continent”- that must certainly be a recent one. Since the 1960’s up until year 2000, 90% of Madagascar’s forest cover was systematically destroyed through a mixture of controlled fires, uncontrolled fires, lumber demand, and jewel mines. In the past ten years, 75% of the remaining 10% of said forest has been similarly destroyed. In a country where 75% of all species are completely indigenous - lemurs, for instance, are found only on the island continent and nowhere else on Earth - this serves as a demonstrable example of blatant greed-fueled environmental destruction.

I find myself fantasizing, on occasion, of driving down a very different road - one where the forest cover stretches dense and primeval around our shabby vehicle - where the limbs of great Baobabs are the only things capable of breaking through a dense layer of moist biomass that houses branches clung onto by wide-eyed mammals long-since extinct. Somewhere in my psyche are aerial views of a quivering green tidal wave that washes away decades of dust and ash and roots that shoot through the soil like cloud-to-ground lightning in a towering cumulonimbus cloud. Hovering above this arboreal sea, I see no indication of complex life - yet I know that somewhere under the canopy, it must be stirring. A newborn is slowly exiting a burden free slumber, dismayed upon awakening to find that inescapable realities of heat and swarming mosquito are indeed inescapable and letting out a wailing that is distinctly mammalian in nature. The aye-aye - a species of lemur famous for its hideously bug-eyed, bony form - taps the thick bark of a rich ebony and listens for the persistent wriggle of a thick, juicy grub. On some distant, moon-soaked stretch of pristine coastline, a colossal leatherback turtle expels egg after egg into a substrate of soft black sand still holds heat from the day’s blaring sun.

Always, I am jolted from such visions when the suspension-less wheels glide over some rut in the hard dirt road. These fits of romanticized yearning for periods of time that no living human has experienced for hundreds of years are becoming increasingly common on my travels. Alternating between appreciating the natural beauty available and letting the mind wander to a place where everything is natural beauty is getting easier and easier.

Our next destination is Ankarafantsika National Park, 330 thousands acres of dry tropical forest scarred by alligator-filled lakes, lazy stretches of savannah broken by sheer cliff’d orange chasms. We had planned on arriving at the park the previous night following an unsurprisingly arduous 14-hour taxi brousse ride soundtracked through top-10 pop efforts of far-away countries throughout the entire duration, nonstop E.D.M beats and Chainsmokers-esque beat breakdowns failing to coalesce with the tin-roof riddled countryside in cause of the driver’s insistence that without this hell of synths he’d fall asleep at the wheel. Our narcoleptic friend tells us he’d highly recommend sleeping overnight at the nearest port town, Mahajanga, owing to previous incidents spurred on by similarly clueless tourists being in places far too remote far too late at night.

Thusly, the next morning, we wander from hotel to street corner to hotel in search of a guide willing to taxi us to the park for a relatively low price - relatively low being the American equivalent of dirt cheap, cheapskate high prices the equivalent of good bargains - and finally come into contact with our two current road warriors through the help of a friendly local who’d been taking english classes in hopes of a future trip to the United Kingdom. After one and a half hours of driving and eight hours of attempted sleep in a tent that seemingly opted for the use of mosquitos as insulation, we can now spend some time exploring our oasis.

Our guide is a towering, shambling man whose deep, calming voice whose commentary serves as light background noise during each trek. He relates to us his name and history in slow, measured syllables (“My name… is Si-mon) and sings a steady stream of wishes of distant travel and latin names of various flora and fauna. Twenty minutes into our first trek, he pauses next to a thin tree whose bark was is peeling in thin white sheets. “We call this the white people tree”, he says laughing. The reasons for that are fairly self-explanatory - the surface of the trunk bares a slight resemblance to all of our backs. Simon’s, I imagine, looks more like the taut skin of a great Baobab.

He leads us with an easy confidence through what is to us a veritable maze of paths, all in different stages of upkeep and grooming. As we continue on through the thicker parts of the forest, I feel as if I’m being digested in the stomach of some great beast. An intoxicating odor of what most be hundreds of years of decaying organic matter is almost nostril-stingingly storng, each footfall sinking a few inches into the earthy blanket. Similarly to much United States forestland, the trees are deciduous, meaning that they shed and grow back their leaves during periods of dryness and wetness. The lushness around is such that if you take time to be still you can hear leaves falling and pattering on the forest floor like drops of rain, and observe them leaving their branches without the aid of wind or disturbance of any kind. The stillness is at once intensely calming and slightly unsettling, as if it is only there to serve as premonition to some deafeningly loud divine trumpet call.