Littering the burnt mountainsides of Nyika, stand countless piles of sliced tree. In the 1970’s or maybe the 60’s a huge pine forest was planted in Nyika National Park. The pines, though not native to Malawi, have reached unbelievable heights and create this surreal piece of forest. As I am always telling anyone who happens to be in this forest with me, it reminds me of some sort of forbidden enchanted forest. A forest featured prominently in a dark fairy tale where the curious, adventurous, heroine is warned against ever going in, but of course she does and is trapped between tree souls at the very tops of their branches, never able to get down or move from her lookout. Since the pines are not natural to Malawi, people have permission to cut them down, and now outside the forest all of these pine trees are being cut for planks that are sold all over Malawi. My friend assists with a bee-keeping group and he needed to venture to this mountainside to buy planks for his hives. I agreed to go along and ended up snagging some free planks for a bridge I am working on outside my village.
Nyika is different from the many parts of Malawi that I have visited. Since it’s way up in the mountains it’s actually cold. Sweatshirt and blanket cold, which is jarring. It’s also almost completely quiet. Though if you are staying at the Chelinda Camp, you can hear the electric whir and crunching of the saws that cut through the fallen pines.
A lot of the time I fight it when people make comments about my ‘hippie-ness’ or ‘tree-hugging’ sensibilities. I didn’t grow up in the time of hippies, and what exactly did hippies do anyway? Ok, so some of my choices may bare a likeness to a certain way of life, but can’t we go with ‘radical revolutionary’ instead? It’s only a million times sexier.
Anyways, seeing all these trees being cut and put into giant piles in a context where most of the country is becoming completely deforested, I did in fact have a huge impulse to cling to a tree, native or not and not let go, to hug it in other words…and I don’t think I would have cared if someone called me ‘tree-hugger.’ Yeah, I’m hugging this tree because I hug what I love. I am hugging this tree because it is part of a preservation that is preserving me, so **ck off! You’re cutting it down, for what? For homes, shops, bridges? These trees make our home. They make our air breathable, so we can breath within our homes, they suck up water creating less stagnant pools for malaria ridden mosquitoes to breed in, they fertilize the soil for crops, they limit noise pollution, create shade, help with flooding, provide home for animals, in general act as a crucial part of our eco-system that has been consistently ignored and degraded and is still all we got. So yeah I am going to cling to this tree, because everyone should be clinging to these trees. I am not giving up the self-title of ‘radical revolutionary,’ but when I started tagging major cities in the ole’ US of A, I may make tribute to the tree-hugging part of me, or make it my tag, my sign off, because what better sign off than that of tree?
