tree planting in africa

I used to call this story warm rain and sand. I worked on it for a long time. It didn't really go anywhere. Practice makes perfect I guess.

Tree Planting in Africa

Adam Lorrey was a doodler, a dreamer, a lonely, dull boy who spent most of his time in smoke-filled rooms though he didn’t smoke and found the habit distasteful. Sometimes heavy, sometimes not, his frame always seemed fit though his pallor betrayed sickliness symptomatic of his fickle mood; he was born cursed with a healthy amount of restlessness. His home was comfortable his relations were casual. The world he knew was built on green hills under well-groomed trees. People spent their afternoons in parks watching pigeons shit on war heroes and trail-blazing pioneers memorialized in bronze, young lovers on blankets ate and talked idly. Adam Lorrey was never one for idle talk. Adam Lorrey could have been a fireman or an engineer, married himself a pretty girl and made a happy home. But, he wouldn’t. He was anxious and bored and would have to leave home soon for simple reasons hard to accept. He wasn’t like everyone else. He wanted a little bit more and he was going to Africa to get it.
The longest view in town was a few hundred feet to the nearest hill or house or pile of bricks that used to be a shoe factory. At night, the streetlights dulled the view of the sky and her stars. It was maddening. What did big look like? What did empty look like? What did dark look like? How could anyone be content not knowing these things?
There is a difference between people who have felt the ground wash away from underneath their feet and those who have not: people who know the earth is supple, moving and inconsistent; these are the ones who know the world is big and they are small. Adam wanted to be one of these people who knew. What better place to learn of supple earth than in a desert wasteland ten-thousand miles away?
What did he say when people asked? It didn’t matter what he told them. Truth was, he didn’t know. He would figure it out. He wanted to know what big looked like and that was reason enough. If only he had known at the time, he would have told them that he was leaving to learn how to plant trees in Africa.
Finally, the day came to leave; a wave of emotion came over him like nothing he had ever known. He knew he would be gone too long. He would change. They would change; the people he knew now would not be here when he got back. He cried like a baby at the airport. The wonderful ticket-woman brought him a bottle of water. Hugs were exchanged with family and friends. Then, off he went. He had a layover in Johannesburg. Another wonderful ticket-woman wouldn’t let him out of the airport for his own good. The only excitement to be had at the Johannesburg airport was window shopping juice coolers and trying to imagine the flavors of these strange, new African fruits. It was sincerely exciting, like dipping a toe into the cold pool of Africa.
From one airport to another, to a train station to a bus station, and then on to hitchhiking, he finally got to the little village that needed a schoolteacher. He hopped out of the back of a pick-up truck, gave his thanks to the driver and was left behind in a cloud of dust at the village square. It was alive with movement. Hunks of rusted metal held together by wire, sloppy welds and burnt cow dung pulled up to their respective stalls: snapping, coughing and growling for want of better days. Hundreds of strangers huddled together carrying sacks of clothes, food and children, madly vied for a spot on the next transport home. The ticket-masters were busy with their receipt books arguing with fools who would try to bargain a rate with them. Young boys crowded up against bus windows holding up sweets, soda and China-shop goods. They said nothing, glanced off to nowhere in particular and waited for any blessed coin that would come their way. Adam smiled. This was finally a new life. This change of scenery was blessed excitement: strange and new. This was how life was supposed to be lived! The people were everywhere. They put their hands upon each other as they spoke. They spoke, touched, made noise and lived! And the whole place was flat, you could see for miles: no green hills, no big houses, and no pigeon-shit statues, just palm trees, brush and the big, open unknown. Then it began to rain and everyone scattered towards shelter. It was time for Adam’s first lesson.
The soft, warm rain Adam had known all his life never came to this place. In the desert, water came down in cold shards to tear the place down. The ground broke apart in fits of erosion. Salt from the parent rock below seeped up into the topsoil to poison it. It sounded like machine-gun fire when the rain beat upon the rooftops of metal shacks. It stung the backs of children and animals as they ran screaming, laughing and baying. Then it would leave and the next few moments brought the hottest desert sun. The song of cicadas quickly replaced the waning babble of raindrops; this was the song of burnt land, flesh and bone. Domestic animals roamed free, their gaze dull and dumb: too stupid to hurt. Cows and goats scavenged for any piece of life they could digest. They left nothing behind but shit, poison weeds and dust. The unbroken fields of sand became one fluid glass sheet covering the wasteland. Reflected sunlight became liquid lightning that scorched retina and stilled the heart.
The loon loved it. Adam Lorrey had found a place like nothing he had ever known. He was eager to know every bit of everything all at once. He wanted to know what the people did and how they did it and why and where and how often and how to join in.
That first year was busy with many long treks on foot and by bicycle. He would visit and sit with anyone who would have him. He drank beer, gave smiles and asked many questions. He was good and trusted easily. The people were afraid for him. He enjoyed life too much and seemed to have no worries and in this way, he was childlike. Contrasting his old life against this one in the desert, he gained insight that aged him prematurely, thoroughly confused him and enlivened him like so many young foreigners who had come before him. He was a boy gaining old man’s eyes.
That first afternoon was spent at a liquor shack café no bigger than an oversized outhouse. The native men sat and drank beer and homebrew and so did Adam. That first hour was spent sitting in a respectful, comfortable silence watching the sky brew with storm and the trucks rip water and dirt from the road. Adam got to talking with one old man. The old man was gnarled and worn: not only his clothes and skin, his being was the truest form of these words; his endurance to the elements was testament to a nobility earned, the highest kind. Adam greeted the man then talked idly out of respect and finally he asked if there were trees to climb and if the children climbed for fun as he had done when he was young. The old man simply pointed off into the distance and said yes. Adam was dumbfounded.
“What trees? Where?” he said.
The man pointed again into the same direction and said, “Yes, there.”
For all he could do, Adam Lorrey could not see any trees fit for climbing remotely near where the man had pointed. The old man’s English wasn’t strong and all they had between them was a limited common vocabulary of bastardized English and native Bantu phrases, hand gestures and pictures in the sand; it was fun for both of them. When Adam had run out of ideas on how to express himself, he looked closely at the old man hoping, looking for insight. He noticed two scars underneath each eye and he asked him about them. They were “O-sha”: marks left behind by an old African tradition. They are scars: a pair of two, sometimes three or four or one, roughly one centimeter high, one centimeter apart. Blood from the cheeks is dropped into a baby’s eyes to improve his sight: spiritually as well as physically. Adam was so excited at finding his answer to this conundrum of the missing trees. Obviously, through this scarring ritual this old man possessed some spiritual insight that Adam lacked. However, before Adam could explore this absurdly easy answer any further the old man made an insightful observation of his own. He pointed off into the distance again and quite gently with one rough finger, bumped Adam in the nose to direct his gaze higher: farther into the horizon. The old man smiled knowing the poor lad, having grown up in a place so small and so full was simply not in the habit of looking beyond a few hundred feet in front of him. Adam smiled, finally noticing the trees a half a mile away, and offered the man a beer.
“Well, shit. I think someone will have to plant a few of those trees closer,” Adam said.
The old man laughed. He didn’t need any hand gestures or pictures in the sand. He knew exactly what the word “shit” meant. He had spent most of his life working for white men who had used it quite often. By the time the rain broke Adam knew where his new house and school were and that he had been talking to his headmaster all along. School would begin in a week or two depending on the weather and Adam was encouraged to come to town, sit and be known in the meantime.
Twilight fell as Adam closed in on the zinc roofed concrete block he would call home. A small fence kept animals out and let the wild things grow: green vines mostly, a beautiful contrast to the sun bleached shades of earth that surrounded the place. It was wonderful. There was nothing for him here. He look towards nothing and then looked behind himself: nothing. Nothing on either side of him. He was excited to go to nothing, feel it out, spread his arms out until his fingers stretched out as far from his body as they could, and still nothing. Nothing in the dark, free as could be. Nothing was his agenda. He had no idea about Africa, he was looking for home.
The next day found Adam at another café, which consisted of a lawn chair an old woman had brought him and the concrete shack where beer, home brew tonic and sweets were kept. He spent most of the day staring off into the distance as far as he could, amazed with what powerful organs his eyes were. He read a bit and allowed himself to be gawked at. He appreciated the fact he was an oddity here, he even enjoyed it. He would spend every blessed moment in the wasteland looking at everything far and near, watching, learning and asking. This is how he learned to plant trees.
The first few weeks of school were concerned with housekeeping. Teachers had to be called back from their farms, schedules had to be made and the grounds had to be serviced. The school had no fence, the property was bare and open to all roaming livestock and bored children. Once again, the saplings would have to be planted, watered and protected.
Boys were put to work in pairs. It was a shame to see their new uniforms stained with the work of tree planting. They took turns with a shovel, as one tired the other took over. The digging never stopped until it was done. Usually, holes were so deep that a digging boy would need a hand up to escape his work. Soil was weak from erratic cycles of flooding and harsh evaporation. It was soured by salt from the parent rock below. Shovels brought up clumps that crumbled. The girls crushed rusted cans and spread them evenly along the sapling-bed floor; this gave the young tree much-needed nutrients. The boys left the new dirt a hand’s width below ground level to pool water at the sapling. The soil was a mixture of five parts topsoil for every one part dried cow dung. The younger boys, the ones not big enough to pick up a shovel collected palm fronds for fencing, they pressed them into the earth to make a shield against the burning sun and tearing rain. This also hid the young, green things from the wandering animals and idle children that would pluck at this new obtrusion and peel it away from their barren ken. This was the school’s fight with the earth, the roaming livestock and the children themselves, their fight to tame the sand and keep it alive. This was subsistence, this was work to sustain life and just barely hang on, this was the struggle of men and women to shape the land they stood on. To stay or to go, contentment versus ambition—subsistence living is staying, being content. The mistake most of us make is to confuse all forms of life with movement.
It seemed all but futility, planting and re-planting trees every year except for the four massive eucalyptus trees that rose far above the school. They stood in a row, outstretched branches barely touching as they stood at attention. They must have been at least twenty-five years old and were visible from a mile away. Adam wondered how four such wonderful trees could have grown under such difficult conditions. The survival was explained by one simple fact: they stood at attention at the headmaster’s door and no one dare go near.
Adam was trained as a math teacher. Those first few weeks at school offered no such opportunities. Everyone was busy with duties of housekeeping, duties of politeness: greeting old colleagues, running errands for superiors. Adam felt lost. He watched and listened; he was amazed. He had landed himself on a different planet, one of loose, flat, sandy earth and a bare, thin, strong people made from it. No solid ground here. No hard green earth. This place was sand instead. Sand moved the people. The movements made the people.
There was a small boy following Adam one morning. He pointed at Adam’s feet as he walked and covered his mouth in a fit of feigned laughter. He mocked Adam, dragged his feet along the ground, pound them into the earth with such force to send grains spurting over his head. Adam was perturbed though thankful for the insight; he really did slam his feet into the ground as he walked. He spent the rest of the day watching every student and every teacher make their way from room to room and about the school yard. Most everyone had a light step and made the loveliest curve into the sand with the ball of the foot.
Adam watched the dirt for hours upon hours. He watched the boys dig for more trees. He watched the girls dance. Footprints drew pictures of the whole village. Soon he knew people by the track they made, what shoe, how deep, how large. He finally realized how precarious life on earth was; everything came from it and everything went to it, a living thing itself. This happened every day and no one knew it was happening to them, every day the sand of the wasteland gave its lessons on uncertainty and arbitrary pain. Where the foot asked for support the sand gave way to nothing. Where the sun shone the sand burned and there was no escape. The earth and sand taught that everything slips away to nothing. With nothing to stand upon, a certain self-reliance was bred into the human form. With each step, the sand made the people. With a soft step, dependence on the formless earth lessened. With a small stomach, hunger, hunger from the bare fruit of this place, came calling but a few times. With a light heart, anger was forgotten. The sand made this. The wasteland carved its people upon on the grindstone, made their form acute and efficient.
With such efficient grace, slight boys accomplished Herculean feats. Formless and slight, the tracks across the sand reminded Adam of water. A man like Adam, a man from solid dirt, dirt piled up in hills held together by green grass had no appreciation, no fear of what he stood on. He trusted the earth, it kept all he knew from falling down: unmovable, comfortable and solid. His foot needed the ground to be solid; it knew to press against the earth in solid fits of thrust. This made his calf and ankle thick, his form obtuse. Where a man from solid ground had trust, a boy of the sand had wary respect bred from fear; his form fit a more efficient functioning, one of harsher conditions. Sand has little substance; its inhabitants are not held fast to the earth. What they built their lives upon is not unmovable, comfortable or solid. A boy of the sand spends his life running away from it, when the sun shines the sand burns and it is time to move. There were no lovely afternoons in pigeon shit parks in the wasteland.
In the wasteland of dulled hues of brown, anything that is green and grows is amazing. A tree is not simply a tree; it is an incendiary fit of color and life that excites neurons dried up from disuse. Leaves have veins: channels that draw water from the air and earth the wasteland would otherwise not know. Day by day, these precious green things grow, precarious and delicate at first, later they grow by pure unstoppable, unexplainable magic. Adam was in awe, he dare not touch them. He knew if he ever saw grass again, he would hesitate to walk across it for fear of soiling it. He watched these green things grow, marveled at how shiny and clean the sprout of a new leaf looked and he knew if he ever dare defile that sprout to feel it would rot at his cancerous touch. Yet still, Adam dug holes and planted and made his place as green as could be. The children flocked to him. They dug with him. They ran around screaming pure joy of green things and shade. Every holiday that Adam left the place in the children’s care they would tear it all down in utter fits of joy. Upon his return, he’d smile, shrug and begin to cut back the broken overgrowth.
Another foreigner, a teacher, asked, “Why do you let them do that Adam? That would drive me insane, if I had worked so hard and seen it all torn down.” Adam responded, “It’s simpler here. People need help and I can help them. Trees need planting so I plant them. Children need to laugh so I let them laugh here, at me and my strange foreign ways. Let them wreak havoc and enjoy it. They’ll be back to help me dig more holes and we’ll enjoy that, too.”
There are verbs of actions and verbs of being to describe everything we know as life. Movement and ambition, subsistence and contentment—all fragile. This called life flutters, flies, and disappears into the mist of a starlit night, it is not planted into the hills, it has no foundation set in rock, it slips and slithers and dances across the way, it does not break, it is simply broken as the stream foams over the stone; it cannot be held, or hemmed in by land or feats of man, it simply is.
Adam planted trees, bushes and vines. He learned to touch these precious things. He learned to put them in just the right way of sunlight, water and food. He saw water move through stem and leaf, collect in drops of dew and vanish into the air again. His home was a flare of green in the wasteland. He taught children mathematics, they taught him to dig, work, breathe and see: old man’s things. He learned what big was and how it was to be small. And then he left. He slipped away from his wasteland just as he’d arrived: no celebrations, no fanfare, a few small goodbyes and he was gone.
There is a saying about Africa and in particular, the wasteland that Adam Lorrey called home, “It is a land God made in anger, when one comes here, they cry and when one leaves, they cry.” Adam Lorrey learned about tree planting in Africa and then he went home and along the way, the wonderful ticket-women dulled his tears with as many bottles of water as they could find.