Clare Sandy writes "Is even the rest of Madagascar aware of its Western half? "
THE WILD WEST
THE WILD WEST: cyclone season in the (wet) dry forest, by Clare Sandy, 3/2000. A dear friend recently wrote me, after a long hiatus, <> I sometimes wonder if it is me who has fallen off the face of the Earth, especially when the BBC, which I listen to compulsively to feel informed, announces that <> failing to mention that there is a very large island in the way.
And it occurs to me, is even the rest of Madagascar aware of its Western half? The major flooding, cholera panic, and associated funeral processions that gripped Morondava area in January have more or less subsided. We were lucky to escape the worst of the more recent storms. Still, we got an astonishing amount of rain in an area that?s already had an unusual amount of water this year, and the rivers crossing my road at random intervals reappeared and are still flowing now with water from upland.
The so-called route national makes the bad road to Mantasoa look great. It is so rutted that often only huge-wheeled rigs can make it through, rutting it deeper with their heavy loads of salt, crabs, and people bouncing around the back of their tsy minday pasazy-labeled truck-beds. My last trip into town had all this plus a sack of live tenrecs suspended from the ceiling that swung and thumped, squeaking, against the side of the truck with every lurch. There was also a pair of men dressed only in underwear riding on top of the cab who were sent ahead to wade waist-deep into the worst mud-puddles and directed to stand in various parts to show the best route through.
Whenever I arrive in Morondava after getting down to rice with kabaros and rice, and the dregs of last season?s Newsweek, I?m ravenous for news from friends, and the world that exists between BBC coverage and the daily village melodrama. To say nothing of fresh French bread. Somehow, though, I always feel a certain letdown after devouring the mail, as if I?m surprised and disappointed that the world has been going on without me, and, more often than not, not following the scripts I?d imagined for it (how presumptuous of it!).
Then as I walk up the road this evening, Baobabs back-lit by brilliant pink and blue streaks and billow of clouds, water gurgling through reeds and ferns, under and alongside the road, I look over the sunset scene like a prehistoric swamp. I would not be half-surprised to see a pterodactyl swooping by or a giant crocodile blinking an eye at me from the mud, and I do not wonder that this corner of the world doesn?t figure into the public?s mind?s eye.
