I Think That I Shall Never See

Peter assures me that he will write a comprehensive summary of the last two weeks, including (and pretty much limited to) our adventures in Joburg and Botswana (a.k.a. "real Africa"). What I want to share with you personally - confident as I am that my associate will actually sit down and write a full and complete report - is that the trees here in Africa, and specifically in Botswana, are awesome. And I mean awesome not in the way that people like myself so often and so carelessly use the word, but awesome in the sense that I am in awe of them.

Whereas trees in Canada generally have pencil-like or perhaps wishbone-shaped trunks, and on the whole look something like cotton candy or feather-dusters or bristle-brushes, trees in Botswana have trunks something like lightning, or grasping claws, and with leaves they look more like an ink drop in water or a freeze-frame moment in a hundred-year organic explosion, life-green billowing, blasting out against the sky. Branches twist and split off at hard angles, as if the whole frame were made of some malleable metal and had been bashed about by an idle boy.

Living, these trees mingle majesty with a sinewy, pulsing energy, like electricity in bloom. If you made Ents of these trees they would not be grandfatherly singers and shepherds. They would be hunters, sweat-slick and battle-scarred, crouched low and taut in readiness, and fire in their eyes.

The dead trees are darker, rawer. Leafless and stripped of their bristling branches they stand iron-still in a solemn scream, an ancient monument to the beauty of barrenness and death. As if some great beast had gnawed the flesh from a mountain and spit out the bones.

That's my best shot at poetry. (Not poetry in form, I know, but in spirit.) If you don't think much of it, that's fine. But you should see these trees!