We have to cancel this day’s ride due to a sandstorm. We had a school in the morning, and in the afternoon, it all turned beige. Cinematic and sprawling, painful in the eyes, it makes the horses and us edgy. There is no way to keep the dust away. We all retreat to our tents, but it blows almost as much inside as outside—in every crevice, every bend, every wrinkle of us and our things. Visibility is nill. Two of my tent’s bamboo perimeter poles snap. A journey to the buffeted and rocking latrine carts is a wild and unpleasant adventure. After a long early afternoon, the wind dies down, but the insane Zephyrs are replaced by fat droplets of rain that soon saturate and overrun the ground, making lakes. Jagged zippers of lightning open the sky. Thunder and lighting fill the atmosphere in every direction as it seems the storm slowly drifts over us then comes back for more. The dust that was on everything is transformed to silty mud…also on everything. Many of us had chosen this clear morning to do laundry and now all our clothes are mud-colored military fatigues.
The canvas tents, made to withstand sun more than anything else, drip and leak. All of our luggage and bedding is wet—soaked through. The smell of wet canvas is everywhere from the tents and saddlebags. Nothing is mildewy, but soaked enough to revive the lost smells of the past. It is a long, hard day and night and the rain ebbs and flows from steady to torrential, but never really stops.
A somewhat large, green-brown puddle has formed directly in front of my tent. The sound of the rain battering the drenched canvas has momentarily slowed so I go out to sit and stare. I sit under the too-narrow overlay that forms a sort of entrance way to the tent—about six feet of canvas pulled out to cover the approach, sadly it’s only two feet wide but is enough to keep the giant lingering drops from making a direct hit. I right the molded plastic chair that has blown over with no thought to the fact that it is soaked and crusted with muddy sand…so am I, so I sit. You can only get so wet and so sand-crusted and I am pretty much saturated with both. I try to see where the oversized, industrious ants I had watched before have gone, their lair was directly in the path to my front door, but the puddle has obliterated any sign of them. My mind wanders to home and the breeze rippling the surface of the Mianus River as my commuter train crosses over every day. That olive-colored water is the same shade as my puddle here—it is my moat now. I worry for the ants—isn’t that funny? I tend to love all animals, but draw the line at ants and mosquitoes…at least at home. I’ll drop everything to usher a spider outside…but now I’m worried about the ants. Did they escape the deluge and move to higher ground or were they trapped beneath the surface in a watery grave? Their lifespan is short, surely they’d never expected flooding water from the sky. The villagers who have spent their entire, considerably longer, lives here never expected it. There has been a drought in this area for five years–no rain—until now. Even when there was rain, years ago, it was never in late February. Do they blame us? Thank us? We begin to wonder whether the locals think these strangers on horseback whose arrival coincided with the drought-busting precipitation have brought them auspicious good luck, or a curse. We are told that this is actually worse than monsoon season, because the monsoon dumps for an hour or two then moves on.
I’m surprised the desert isn’t more absorbent. The puddles stand—I would have thought they’d be soaked up right away. At some point someone told me the water table is 600 feet deep, so it is no wonder the rare well is revered like a temple, especially when you realize you never see any equipment like trucks or bulldozers or drills—nothing more techno than a camel pulling a water tank cart. Our crew had to pick up the entire tents of Curtis & Charlene as well as the kitchen—both had been staked in low territory and flooded several inches of water. It was like watching carneys hoist a circus tent with much “Hup-Ho”ing as each man grabbed and lifted a tie line and the group shuffled, en masse, to a somewhat higher hump in the ground. Those two tents are now prime real estate, all of 6-10 inches higher than the rest of us that begin to wonder if flood waters will come for us as well. It will be days before we catch a break.
The lightning is like glowing, lit nerves in some vast network, or bright, jagged scars where it seems the sun tears through the darkness only briefly before the black heals itself again, making itself whole. I love sleeping to the sound of a storm.
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