It's Already Happening

Story and Photography by Greta Rybus // @gretarybus

The fishermen in the bustling fishing community Guet Ndar once dragged their boats for an hour across the sand before reaching the sea. Now the ocean laps at their front door and eats their homes in giant, crumbling gulps. Inland, in a little village called Takhembeut, the herders and farmers once relied on the rainy season’s punctuality, the timely arrival of just enough water to sustain crop and cattle.

The UN recognized Saint Louis, called Ndar by locals, as being the city most threatened by climate change in Africa. At the northernmost point of Senegal, Ndar hugs the Sahara and hovers on the edge of the Arabic and African worlds. The locals are knowledgeable about climate—being from the desert means paying close attention to the rains and to the seas. Even the younger workers have been in the fields or on the seas for many years, doing the work of their fathers or grandmothers who taught them to pay attention, notice change, and anticipate what comes next. 

The last few years have brought variables greater than anyone anticipated. Winds and waters have changed, causing coastal erosion along Senegal’s coast, made worse in Ndar by a botched canal project intended to slow the rising water. The rainy season is shorter and more erratic. The herders can no longer grow crops for their animals, and now shake seed pods from the trees to sustain their shrinking herds. The farmers grow just enough food for their families, and many have become the first in their lineage to supplement their work with odd jobs in the city. 

The Senegalese government is paying attention. They are building housing for the fishermen who are losing their homes to the sea. They are providing municipal water, enough to drink and bathe in, for the families who live inland. But this is not a problem caused by the Senegalese. It’s a problem larger than a people or a country. It is a problem caused by an anemic global response to climate change. It is caused by larger countries making policy and industrial decisions that impact global health. For those who rely directly on natural resources for survival, like the majority of Senegalese people, climate change will be a calamitous test and a catalyst for poverty worldwide.

“The waves of the sea were very strong, strong enough to cross over the protective wall and reach up to my house. My house was flooded. I changed the gate to the other side of the home, and put sand bags on the sea facing side.”

— Baye Sarr, fishing boat captain

“Coastal erosion is undoubtedly related to rising sea level. As a consequence of the relative rise in the temperature worldwide, the icecaps are melting, bringing about a rise in the ocean level. In low altitude areas, like Saint Louis, these phenomena cause an overflowing called marine flooding.”

— Abou Sy, climate change scientist and geographer

“Climate change is upsetting the balance of the seasons. However, even though some fishermen may feel reluctant to go out fishing when they notice that weather conditions are not suitable to catch a lot of fish, others go out anyway, since they don’t have another source of income. The seasons are no longer regular; the fishermen are experiencing this upside down weather day-in and day-out. Nowadays, they happen to go out under good weather conditions, but once they are in the middle of the ocean, strong winds and waves suddenly surround them, jeopardize their activities, and even put their lives in danger. In my opinion, climate change is to be blamed for this imbalance.”

— Boly Sarr, retired fishing captain

“Of course, I have seen homes falling into the ocean. We can cope with the climate conditions in this area because we were born and brought up here. We experienced all the changes that have happened over time. We cannot live outside the coastal area. If we relocate inland we won’t be able to adapt. We are just like fish in the water.”

— Ndiawar, community leader and retired fisherman

“Developed countries are the major greenhouse gases issuers and the main cause of climate change. In developing countries, people discuss climate change more and more because they are directly affected by its impact. The population is mainly made up of farmers, herders and fishermen, and they are most vulnerable to climate change. Climate change is increasing poverty. It is not the only cause of the poverty, but it is accelerating it. Unfortunately, we don’t have the choice but to adapt to a phenomenon we didn’t cause.”

— Abdou Sy, climate change scientist and geographer 

Super Bloom

Words by Ginger Boyd
@sleepyatfunerals

Photography by Tracy L Chandler
tracylchandler.com // @tracylchandler

The desert. You can probably imagine it pretty clearly—if not a specific desert, then just the idea of one. Dry, sandy, harsh, hot. Big sky. Tumbleweed. You can access the abstract idea immediately. A lone cactus, arms akimbo. That was my thought, anyway. Even though I’d never been to Death Valley, CA, I figured I knew what I’d find. The hottest and lowest point in North America, I get it. So when Tracy called me up inviting me on an impromptu road trip to Death Valley with Jenn and Hankey, I shrugged, “Why not?” They had heard about this thing called Super Bloom, where once a decade or so Death Valley becomes covered with wildflowers. My interest was piqued, but I wasn’t convinced. Covered with wildflowers? There would probably be a couple of daisies by the side of the road. Flowers or not, I’m always game for a road trip. So I freed up my weekend and we hit the road. As we drove, thick clouds began to roll in, and eventually, fat droplets pattered the windshield.

Driving to Death Valley has a bit of an unsettling feeling. Highway 14 cuts across the southernmost tip of the Sierra Nevada mountains and curves its way up to 4,000 feet without you ever really noticing. Then, without warning, the ground begins to drop beneath you and you seem to hurdle towards the valley, to 182 feet below sea level, in a matter of just a few miles. By the time we reached this unexpected roller coaster drop in the road, it was completely dark and the wind was howling. A few raindrops had turned into a proper storm, and even in our rugged adventure van, Tracy had to use all her might to keep the steering wheel straight. As we plunged into the valley, we passed smaller cars parked on the side of the road, unable to make it through the gushing water and huge rocks covering the roadway. The chatter had slowly died away, and the four of us just stared, eyes wide, trying to find the ground past where the road cut away. We seemed to dip lower and lower into blackness and, nearly blown away by the wind, we seriously considered turning back.

What kept us going was the seriousness of this damn van. I mean, if we can’t make it through this storm why did we take it in the first place? We would be fine, we assured each other, and figured now more than ever we’d have to see what the fuss was about with all these flowers.

We made it to our spot, went to bed early, and headed out before dawn the next morning. The rain had stopped, but the wind was so strong it was difficult to get out of the van. The heavy doors would slam shut right into you if you weren’t careful. When the sky began to gradually lighten, what we witnessed was unreal. The remnants of clouds from the previous night’s storm obscured the sunrise, leaving only streaks of purple, grey and blue to announce its arrival. The salt flats glowed blue and otherworldly. The sky, too big to really take in, was cut with two rainbows. We ran outward from the road into it—into this desert, out into this immense space—and allowed ourselves to be pelted by freezing, blow-you-over wind, hair whipping our faces. In that moment we realized we had no idea what this place was. This desert, this place so mythicized and so deeply ingrained our minds, was in fact further than anything we thought we knew about the world around us. Before we were even hungry for breakfast, the wind pushed the clouds across the sky and the sun was already quite high. It burned bright and golden on the flowers that erupted out of every corner and crevice of dry dust in that valley. The road glowed gold and everything was irrefutably alive.

According to the locals, the wildflowers in Death Valley bloom every year. But in order for these tiny, delicate beings to fight their way through the harshest landscape on Earth and not just survive, but take over the entire valley, something special has to happen. The rainfall in October and November has to be heavy and prolonged. More importantly, though, it’s the seeds. They’re out there, every year. Just waiting. Lying dormant until the conditions are just right. Then, they take their chance and they bloom … slowly at first, until the entire park has been painted with new colors. You might think you know the desert. Predictable, dry, barren, extreme. For all of Google. For all the books written about it. You have no fucking idea.

Thoughts on Mountains and Love

Story by Charlotte Austin

Photos by Rodrigo De Medeiros

The first thing I learned to love about the mountains was the sharpness of cold water on my tongue. I loved that cutting burn immediately—a painful gulp that felt like truth—and I knew that I could not live without something that was so honest inside my chest.

When I am guiding, every morning starts the same: I wake up, bundled in layers of down, and wriggle one arm free to reach for my Nalgene. Bracing the bottle between my knees, I crack the ice that has frozen the bottle shut, shake it hard to make the ice-slush drinkable, and put my mouth to the rim. The taste is glacier ice, chopped into chunks the day before with my battered axe and melted just to liquid over a wobbling white gas stove. I am careful to keep it from touching my teeth, instead sliding it straight to the back of my throat and feeling it burn down the inside of my chest and deep into my belly.

Then there is a shuffle while I find a headlamp, cram my legs into long underwear, and stuff my feet into boots that have frozen solid overnight. There is the slow unzip of the tent door, the careful setting of the bottle onto the snow, the flustered ejection of a girl onto the cold glacier.

When I uncurl my body to stand, it is into air that is colder than the water in my belly. The first thing I notice is that—no matter what time it is—the snow reflects enough light to read a newspaper. It is painfully beautiful: a cold gray-blue light on a harsh, angled landscape of glacier and starlight. I stand still and breathe, letting the cold sink deep into my skin. Sometimes I listen to the wind rustle the nylon of the tents nearby; sometimes there is silence. I stoop, lift my water bottle from the snow, and take another long sip of cold water.

This is how I first learned to love the mountains.

When I see a man who works in the mountains look at his body in the mirror, it reminds me of the way a driver would look at a race car. I loved one once—a man—who would run his hands over every inch of his own body: his battered feet, his sinewed thighs, his flat abdomen, the coiled muscles of his ass. He squinted at the wrinkles in the skin, the scabs on the tips of his pinky toes, the tendons around his knees that were visible in his thighs. It was part of his morning routine: He’d lay on the floor of the shower, letting water scald his body, then walk, still dripping, to the mirror to assess his naked reflection. He knew every cell, every blood vessel, every hair. At any given time, he could tell me his heart rate and blood oxygen levels just by closing his eyes. His profession was climbing the world’s most dangerous mountains, and he needed to know exactly what he could and what he could not do.

His self care was precise. Inputs and outputs were carefully assessed: grams of protein, hours of sleep, the color of his urine. He stretched every night, opening his hips and breathing deeply. When he touched his own body, it was with reverence. But when we were out in town—which was rare—he never looked at his reflection in a window. He was undeniably a striking physical specimen, which he knew in an absent-minded, objective way. But he didn’t need to admire his appearance—only to know intimately the machine that was his body.

When I started guiding, I did not treat my own body with that kind of care. I’ve been climbing mountains for years now, but I still don’t know if it’s possible for a woman to love her own body in that matter-of-fact way.

People who don’t climb ask what it’s like to find yourself on a mountain. They imagine a spiritual place, some ethereal journey bookmarked with prayer flags and picturesque Sherpa children and lean, wind-hardened people gazing into the distance wearing name-brand parkas. You don’t find yourself on a mountain, I tell them. Mountains are beautiful and harsh and wild, yes, but mountains are also both more and less than most people imagine them to be.

When you reach a summit, you only find the things that you have carried with you. To get to the top of a mountain, you will bleed and sweat and cry, maybe mark each switchback with a small puddle of vomit in the snow. You’ll lose things along the way, dropping them down a slope or choosing to leave them behind. But when you get to the top, you’ll reach into your backpack and you will know that there are things that you have carried with you through the night. And you will love deeply the things that have survived that journey.

Once, at the ripe end of a September, I took a friend to a town at the base of a mountain. He was a city man, visiting to take photos of strong young men. After a day of shooting, we sat on picnic benches with pizza and cheap beer and talked about a calendar that is produced every year.

The calendar features twelve glossy panoramas, each month a different photo in high-contrast black and white. The man who produces the calendar every year goes to some of the world’s best climbing destinations: Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Red Rocks. He shoots young women climbing, nude skin against rock. The juxtaposition of strong bodies against hard stone is beautiful, and every year the calendar sells out.

Word on the street is that he tried to make a male version, but nobody bought it. Apparently men’s bodies are different. The photographer and I talked about that for a long time as we sat in the sun that day. “You have to be willing to love a body to shoot it well,” he said. “Your lens needs to fall across the skin like light.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. 

At the end of a guiding season, there is a process. First I sleep: My body is wrecked, broken down. I am calorie-deficient muscle with a sunglasses tan, and I want nothing more than to watch Modern Family and eat fruit that has never been dehydrated. That stage lasts for a week, more or less, depending how long I was in the field.

The next stage varies. Sometimes I want to spend time with my family, hear my father’s stories of adventure and feel my mother’s delicate skin against my sandpaper hands. Sometimes I want to create, and I’ll spend weeks writing and then deleting words as I try to describe the smell of cold air. Other times I want to travel, responsible only for myself.

The final stage is an inevitability: rage. I rage against my home, my partner, my family, my art. I rage against the city lights, and the way they encroach on the perimeter of the sky at dawn. I toss and turn until I rip off my blankets, stumble blindly out of my home, and gulp the cold night air in desperation. I know, then, that it’s time to go back to the mountains. I miss the brutal truth, the purity of my love for those places. I stand on a street corner, out of breath, and look for snow-capped glimpses of freedom on the skyline between the city lights.

---

For a long time, I loved the men of the mountains. They are simple and elegant, clean in the lines of their bodies and in their motivations in life. The way they know how to love is hard and rough and unthinking, and they keep their lives simple so that they can bend, unobstructed, at the altar of their chosen truth. They sleep in their rusty hatchback cars, eating rice and beans that they call Mexican food, and cut their own hair.

Those men are hard to live with, I eventually realized. They love hard and simply, but they expect their women to be waiting when they come home.
 It took me most of my twenties to realize that the thing that attracted me most to those men—their single-minded pursuit of what made them feel whole—was something I wanted to find in myself, not in a partner. Loving that in someone else, I learned, got me close enough to reach out and touch it. But the feel of self-worth deep and cold in my belly was something I needed to earn. I had to carry it with me, no matter the cost.

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Sometimes, as we push up a route in the dark in the mountains, a struggling client will ask me a simple question: Why does anyone choose this pain? It’s all imaginary, he will say; summits are arbitrary, and the suffering is too much. I could live my life without this experience. They turn to look in my eyes, blinding me with their headlamp, searching for an answer to their question: Why? I hand them some water, tell them to drink. “I don’t know your truth,” I say, forcing them to breathe. “You may not find yourself here.” Most clients leave it at that, slumping down to put their hands on their knees and pant in the thin alpine air. But some press me, asking why it’s worth it, how I handle the pain and the cold and the ever-raw confrontation with the part of myself that is dark and unblinking and true. And sometimes, every once in a long while, I tell them the truth: I could not live without this fight. 

It's Best To Go

by Christian Coxen

@christiancoxen // christiancoxen.com

Six o’clock has rolled around, the temp has dropped, and my Bic pen feels like it’s dragging a lead ball as the ink has thickened. I dip it in the fire momentarily and it flows like a river once again. It is no longer 60° and sunny, but probably in the 30s and starry with a horizon haze. I took a nap earlier, observing the tide moving out every time I woke. Still no throbbing lines, tide on the move … still nothing connecting, tide drains further. Eventually, it neared sunset and I decided I’d gather some firewood and wait for the morning low. The surf is always better in the morning—this goes for damn near anywhere.

I made a lentil soup for dinner. Or rather, dumped it from its box and plunged it into my stove. It really tasted like shit at first, but between the slices of pepper jack cheese and its aftertaste of a roasted garlic game changer, I decided it wasn’t half bad and scraped my pot clean with the help of a Surrito tortilla that I cooked on a log. 

It’s pretty peaceful out here. What a different perspective—camping alone. All day I’ve been very much in my own head with no conflict, compromises, distractions, or anything else that comes along with camping, (or traveling for that matter) with another being. The road is smooth, unadulterated, and silent. Time seems to expand and contract, and I notice every minute of it.

I drank coconut porters and standard IPAs next to a one-man-sized fire beneath the January full moon. Buzzing with hops and contentedness, it became apparent that I had become damn good at camping and enjoying the little things. The night sky sang as the fire crackled, the sea was building, and I could feel it in the sand as the sets met the bars.    

In the morning, I swung awake from my hammock and looked down the line into the sandbar as the building swell shook the stack. There was ice on my board. The night brought me deep chills that carried through the day. 

Paddling out after a cup of coffee, the hands and toes never gained feeling beyond the all-inclusive winter ache. There was a lot of water moving in all directions, but I managed to find a rip that I rode out toward the nearly-imaginary peak. There were three identifiable swells through the mix-matched madness. The direction needed for my peak to connect, without walling clear to Alaska and closing out all hope, was so few and far between that by the time one came around I had been taken from the zone and relocated elsewhere. I decided to give up on the picky little swatch of sand creating these one-in-every-fifteen-minute behemoths, dredge left and paddle a hundred yards or so down-beach to my old standby. 

Throughout several hours of getting pitched on double overhead backwash-laced faces and two-turn closeouts, I managed to scrape up a handful of memorable rocketing adrenaline-driven lines along with some ear popping, to depth-driven throttling hold-downs. By the time I said enough is enough, noodle armed and half as buoyant, the water had risen along with the wind and there really wasn’t much of anything to paddle for anyway. The weekend’s mission had all in all been fulfilled—in fact, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. 

I got out of my suit, snacked, and took a nap swaying in the hammock for a few hours—using the last of my time to relax, tune it down to zero for a minute before I’m back to work for the week. A feeling of worldly connectedness and satisfaction accompanied me as I made my way off cloud nine and back to my rig for the drive home. 

As I sat down I thought to myself … it’s always best to go.