Every 22nd of April, World Water Day is celebrated. This year I observe it from an unlikely place: The Namib Desert.
The Namib is the oldest desert of the world. We know that some deserts have been man-made, by human deforestation and overgrazing of goats and sheep. This desert, luckily, is not man-made. When West Gondwana split from the original one-lump ur-continent Gondwana about 140 million years ago, conditions arose for the arid coastal strip that we call the Namib Desert. Then and now, warm moist winds from the north are cooled down by a cold ocean stream, the Benguela upwelling. The mixture results in cold air that can’t rise up high enough to make rain clouds, just fog. So it rarely if ever rains here, which creates this desert, many hundred of miles long, from Namibia to Angola. Those cool ocean fogs maintain the nearly invisible desert fauna and spare flora.
History aside, the most prominent feature of the Namib Desert are the wandering dunes, spectacular formations in constant movement, propelled by the winds. I marvel at the sharp edges, undulating forms, surprising patterns one finds and the colors of yellow and red sand, sometimes dusted with crimson or black – the beauty of this desert is indescribable. The desert reaches right to the edge of the ocean. One would think there should be a thin stripe of green between them, but there is only the stark contrast of endless yellow sand and endless turquoise ocean.
Plants and animals eke out a living in the Namib Desert. Welwitschia mirabilis is such a plant, ancient and immutable, nurtured by the ocean fogs that roll in most days. Hundreds of years old at times, perhaps even thousands, Welwitschia has two long leaves (usually ripped into several strands by the constant desert winds) and a middle trunk that grows incredibly slow. We saw a colony of plants of male and female plants spreading on the desert floor – it takes hundreds of years before you’d call the middle a real trunk that visibly reaches some height from the ground.
How can a country like Namibia exist? Due to a sweet water reservoir beneath this scorched coastal stripe. Namibians are very aware how fragile this ecosystem is, and fierce regulations who is allowed to drill a well and where are in place. Namibian agriculture consists mostly grazing cows and sheep. A famous meat product is a jerky made from springbok, a wild antelope. Due to lack of water, Namibia has nearly no plant agriculture – most fruit and vegetables are imported from South Africa by which Namibia was annexed until 1990, when it freed itself during a bloody rebellion. By chance, their Independence Day happened to be yesterday – March 21st.
And by another chance we arrived last week during some of the worst rains and thunderstorms the Namibian remember. We ended the first leg of our trip at a washed out bridge and had to make a huge detour. And for all that unusual rain, the Namib Desert, in places, showed us a fine, fuzzy green – a beautiful welcome. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
On a Rainy Summer Day: Read!
July 29, 2010
What are you doing if it is raining? Do you let it ruin your day/your summer/your life?
This is what I do (not to mention that not everyone is on vacation, of course):
Declutter. I take one corner in my house, and start. I plan to do only ten minutes, but if I get carried away and stick with it longer, so be it. Yesterday, although it was not raining, I started in my study. Because it needed it sorely– and heat can be just as forbidding for the outdoors as rain is.
Play the cello. Still badly. But since my recent summer camp, with 120 adorable kids (I was one of them), I extended my repertoire to jazz and swing. Really fun!
Read. And this is what I want to write about today: my summer reading list. One summer, in Maine, I read one Dickens novel after the other; another summer, I tackled Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. This year’s is without rhyme and reason – just what tickles my fancy:
• This summer, I want to read as many of Georges Simenon’s mysteries as I can get my hands on. Superintendent Maigret is the hero. So far, I have read about six. A joy to rediscover him.
• G.K Chesterton’s Complete Father Brown Stories. Finished already. These mysteries did not age quite as well as Commissaire Maigret’s but if you like an old-fashioned, Catholic sleuth – this is for you.
• David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story. If you grew up in the fifties, this one will touch you.
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. Won the Booker Prize. A engrossing novel about Henry VIII, Anna Boleyn and the whole mess they created. Beautifully densely written – not for breezing through.
• Howard Mittelmark, Sandra Newman, How NOT to Write a Novel. This is a re-read for me. Easy to read, and instructive.
• Christina Stead, by Hazel Rowley. If you read Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, you might want to learn more about the life of its Australian author.
• David Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500 to 1800. Is on my reading list because of the Chinese novel I am writing. Probably too scholarly for the average reader.
• David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Also a must-read for my Chinese project – but more fun.
• Another reread: Annemarie Colbin, Food and Healing. There are so many interesting details that once in a while I have to take it out again.
• Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. Very interesting, very philosophical. Kuriyama teaches at Harvard.
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. An intelligent delight – finished it already.
• Pierre Ebert Loti, An Iceland Fisherman. Warmly recommended by my friend Diana. This is an old book – from 1886. A different pace, a different voice than what we are used to now.
• Laurence Hill, Someone Knows My Name. A gripping tale about African slaves coming over the ocean to our shores, against their will.
• And an enjoyable little fluff: Yoga Mamas, by Katherine Silberger Stewart. Fluff - but taking yoga serious.
• And my old stand-by, perhaps the best story ever written in German: The Marquise of O, by Heinrich von Kleist.
I get my books either from the library or buy used – otherwise I could not sustain my reading addiction.
This is what I could do: Go for a swim in the rain. It’s exhilarating. Just make sure there is no danger of lightning. Every year, about one hundred people are killed in the US by lightning, mostly in the southeast. Worst state is Florida; Alaska is safe – you guessed it.
Or go deadheading the roses and dahlias in the rain. Might be adventurous too. Because, as I always say, Nature build me water-tight: No rain gets through my skin. Read More
Bad Weather
June 12, 2010
It’s raining outside, and not for the first time lately.
But don’t call this “bad weather”! Because we need the water. Perhaps not acutely here in the North-East, but worldwide, water shortage is growing – and will only get worse.
Here some water facts:
• About one billion people in the world are short of water, and suffer from consequences of poor sanitation and not enough drinking water.
• Mexico City is sinking because water for 20 Million people is pumped out under the city and cannot be refilled.
• Beijing’s aquifers are drying out because, with heavy industrialization, more wells have been drilled: Water levels are falling about a meter per year. Wells need to be deeper now: Up to a thousand feet. Rivers and lakes, especially in the North, are drying out.
• The same happens in Africa where, for instance, Lake Chad is getting to look like a puddle.
• Similar things happen here: California faces drought and water shortage. Texas wants to privatize water. For Colorado, future shortages are on the wall – due to population growth, global warming and extensive use of Colorado water by other states.
• Groundwater gets more polluted from agricultural and industrial run-off. Lee water is soaked up in forests and meadows because more and more land is covered with asphalt – the asphalt industry worldwide still grows by two percent every year.
• Bottled water is becoming a commodity – and you make firms rich (and yourself poor) if you buy bottled water. Water is your life right – it should not be peddled away.
For now only this: There is no bad weather – just healthy water. Unless we are talking hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, flash floods … Read More