Okuhepa: How Green Was My Desert

As my new boss drove us out of the central Namibian savannah and into my new desert home last June, he talked a bit about the landscape. While much of Namibia enjoys a rainy season in the summer (late November or early December through March-ish; Andy writes eloquently about it), the Namib Desert doesn't go in for that sort of thing much. However, Lysias assured me if it did rain, the desert would turn brilliant green! I've heard and read about the wildflowers that bloom in the southwestern American desert after rainfall, and have yearned to see that. So I crossed my fingers.

And it rained several times in the first few weeks I was here. And the desert did nothing. Over time, I have come to understand that 'rain' doesn't mean the twenty-minute sprinkles of last winter. 'Rain' means something like what happened in mid-April, when we got hours of steady, serious rain one Wednesday afternoon. So I went hopefully into the desert with my camera, and found sand. Lots of sand, the usual scrubby bushes, maybe a couple of small white or yellow flowers. Every other scrap of flora was some shade of brown, including the brownish-green of the most ambitious bushes.

Well! On the sixth and seventh of June -- we got rain. We got slamming, torrential, amazing bucketloads of rain pouring down on us from late on Monday, when there was hail, too, until Tuesday afternoon, with frequent intermissions and resumptions. It was astonishing. People were saying, "not for ten years," "not in twenty years," "never in my lifetime." Along the coast they had slashing great streaks of lightning, and closed roads as the water pooled up, waiting for the sand to find room for it.

The junior library roof leaked quite a bit; many homes did, too. Why not?
The sand's going to get in with the east wind no matter what, and rain is not
an issue - until today.

A fairly brief clearing in the morning. This kid had probably never waded
through a puddle not made by a carwash before in his life. And maybe never again.

The powerful east wind of winter is usually a late-night and morning
phenomenon, but it kept up through early afternoon on The Rainy Day.

And the water hung around for hours -- in some places, days -- too.

So, that's rain, right? That's really rain. The water stayed pooled in a few places, in the desert, for a week or more. So a few days after the storm I went out with the camera, and found... sand. Scrub. A couple of flowers and a few new patches of green stuff that reminds me of star of Bethlehem. Nothing, though, proportionate to the excitement of that rainstorm.

Okay, greener than usual, but... (The evening light is lousy
for capturing the green tones, but there are a few in there; there really are.)

A month after the rain, camera-less, I started to notice... tiny, thick-leaved green things. Brighter color and more leaves on the bushes along the river tracks. And in a few places, grass! Like what they have in the savannah for game and cattle! Grass! A few days later, I took out the camera for real. Recently I've been telling people I'm going to get myself one very small cow, and start a farm.

Grass, sparkling and waving, like this is a prairie or something.
It makes my heart sing; it really does.

The green follows the curve of a shallow indentation, presumably once
a 'river', which is what they call the dry channels here that funnel water
through the savannahs every two or three or four years. Or twenty.