Seasonal Rhapsody - Part I: Water
Seasonal Rhapsody - Part I: Water
Tales about the Cycle(s) of Life in the Rainforest --- [Estimated reading time: 30 min.]
Life in the Jungle. A surprisingly large number of people residing in temperate climate zones are under the illusion that “the simple life” in a “tropical paradise” is pleasant, easy and worry-free – which it undoubtedly is, most of the time – but there are downsides as well. You can harvest vegetables and fruit year-round, and it is never too cold, but that doesn’t mean it’s all fun and games. In this series, I invite you to explore the stuff you won’t see on Instagram: the real story of the simple life in the tropics, a glimpse behind the scenes – without filters, raw and uncut. Biting insects, skin rashes, swarms of mosquitoes, hungry leeches, sweltering heat or torrential downpours – there is no shortage of things that try their best to make your life hell. But, please, don’t get me wrong: this kind of life is still immensely rewarding and fulfilling, full of little luxuries and pleasant surprises, and, if you ask my wife and me, it is absolutely worth it – but it’s not for everyone, and definitely not for the faint-hearted. It does take a certain toughness to weather the unique challenges our Great Mother throws at us in this climate if we live within Her limits and under Her laws, but we won’t complain – otherwise life would be too easy, which in turn would pose its own dangers: problems of a more existential manner.
Most of the problems we encounter in our daily lives are rather basic, and pretty much the same challenges our ancestors have mastered for aeons. It is in many respects pretty close to the life we evolved to live over millions of years of evolution – the life we were made for.
I might have to add that while I often use the term “jungle” to describe our place, technically it’s a mix of a fruit orchard, a giant bamboo plantation and secondary forest. It will be a “real” jungle in a few decades – environmental conditions permitted. “Jungle” is an idea, a concept, not an adequate botanical description of the plant composition that makes up our habitat.
The timeless concept of the Four Elements will serve as a layout to guide us through a full year’s cycle of changing from one state to the next, each element representing one season: rainy season, cold season, early dry season, and late dry season.
Water, Wind, Fire and Earth.
Due to my rather chaotic writing/gardening schedule, I write down keywords and a few paragraphs here and there almost constantly, but have to wait for the right time to formulate them into a readable text – which usually happens during rainy season.
Furthermore, I rarely write anything about how our daily life looks like, but several readers have expressed interest in knowing more about how exactly we live. One standard I set myself for my writing is that it should be at least moderately informative, the reader should be able to take something important away from it and, in the best case, even learn something new or connect dots hitherto unpaired. When writing about our life I’m not sure I can live up to this expectation, since it is actually fairly simple. But I sincerely hope this series will at the very least be entertaining to some.
The first part of this series, Water, describes the period between August and October 2022, and the following installments will be direct sequels, describing the end of 2022 and the first half of 2023.
Part One: Water
I am sitting in my hammock, under the stilted wooden house towering over the vegetable beds around us, on a cool Sunday morning, a steaming hot cup of mulberry leaf tea on the bamboo table besides me, my laptop on my lap. The rain has turned from a light trickle into a steady downpour, hammering the roof above me like a dozen snare drums, heavy drops making the leaves around me dance. A large mosquito buzzes around my face and lands on my leg. I slowly move my hand into position, and – smack! – kill her with a swift blow. The baby cat that has been sleeping behind my laptop startles awake with a jolt. I roll down the sleeves of my shirt and reposition the tiny cat that competes with the laptop for the best place on my lap. He curls up again and starts purring, and I continue to write.
I often joke that rainy season is “the winter of the tropics”. And while there are some obvious parallels (mainly that you spend a lot of time sitting around drinking hot tea), there are arguments to be found that it can be both better and worse than winter. Personally, I think winter is at least ten times worse, tough, simply because you can’t be outside for too long. I have always hated being trapped in artificially-lit rooms with stagnant air, and the short days and lack of outdoor time was what bothered me the most about the dark, wet and cold German winters. Here, at least it’s still possible to wear a single layer of clothing in rainy season! I slap another mosquito that has landed on the back of my hand. “No mosquitoes” is definitely a strong argument in favor of winter over rainy season.
During the months between May and October, our garden transforms. It’s a different world, it looks and feels as different as can be when compared with dry season. It’s a largely positive transformation, an intensification of beauty, a sudden explosion of green in all shades, a time of both vigorous growth and rapid decay at the same time. It’s also the time of the year with the least amount of sunlight, thanks to the almost gapless reel of heavy, grey rain clouds that unwinds overhead. This can take a toll on one’s spirits – the lack of warming sunlight facilitates feelings of melancholy that can even be slightly depressing at times. At the height of rainy season, entire weeks might pass during which we don’t see the sun a single time – but when the clouds finally disperse, we rejoice, run out from under our house, rip off our shirts, spread our arms, and bathe in the warm rays, happily soaking in our home star’s energy, just like the plants around us.
Sometimes, during the wettest few weeks, walking can become more like ice-skating, or, since we live on a hillside, like skiing. It's usually towards the end of the rainy season, when the Earth is so full of water that she couldn't possibly hold any more. It just runs off, turning footpaths into mud-red miniature rapids that plunge down into the valley. During this time, the area around our house and the most-traveled paths transform into something reminiscent of a Motocross track (although I have occasionally compared it to trenches from World War One before), mud everywhere, slimy and slick, and if you’re not wearing boots, well, then you’ll have to wash your feet each time you come back from the garden. Everything is wet, and everything is muddy.
We are regularly cut off from the outside world during this time, since the runoff from the surrounding hills causes the river in the valley to swell up until it becomes impassable, inundating the access road to our garden. This gives us a rugged aura, two lone outcasts inhabiting the hinterlands, cut off from the rest of the world – although in reality we’re only a few kilometers away from the main road. It feels decidedly different, though.
Rain alone is not that bad, but when combined with strong gusts of westbound winds, waves of fine spray moisten the interior of half of our house. The house is pretty much open on two sides: we don’t have regular windows, just large, rectangular openings that almost take up the entire wall. Theoretically, they can be closed with heavy, loudly squeaking wooden shutters that have barely been moved in the last two decades, but it’s a lot of effort and usually the storms don’t even last that long. Sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night because the drift lands on the head end of our bed, sprinkling cool, wet powder onto our faces. Our “bed” consists of a one-inch-thick mattress under a mosquito net, right on the floor, cornered between two of the large windows, so that it almost feels like sleeping outside. On clear nights we can watch the moon and the stars before our eyes fall shut, but on nights like this it’s a different type of outdoor experience. Getting up and closing the shutters would mean exerting physical efforts that would surely rob you of an additional hour of sleep, at least – so we spend a few minutes in that psychedelic state between the dream world and the material one, where everything feels both distant and strangely amplified at the same time, and simply doze off again after some time. We often point out that other animals get wet as well, so why shouldn’t we humans?
As they say in Germany: “we’re not made from sugar!”
Encountering exceptionally heavy downpours can be downright frightening, but it’s also humbling, awe-inspiring, and often genuinely beautiful – a show of force by our Great Mother Nature – it will leave you with a feeling that’s difficult to put into words. A strongly felt respect, a reverence bordering on religious worship, a humility in the face of a power so awesome that it could sweep you away with all your belongings, should she decide to do so; primordial shock and awe. In spite of all our fancy technology and purpoted mastery of the world, a decent rain storm is able to knock us out of the proverbial sky in an instant and put us back in our place.
If you’ve ever experienced tropical rain, you know what I’m talking about. If not, let me try to visualize it for you: at the peak of rainy season there are usually several heavy downpours per day, although it might happen that it rains constantly for a few days (with periods of lighter and heavier rain), and it might also be that there is almost no rain for a few days. Usually, you hear the rain long before it arrives. It starts with a faint rushing noise, similar to radio static, that quickly grows in intensity until it is an all-embracing roar that drowns out all other noise. Birdsong suddenly abates, and even the ubiquitous chirping of the crickets breaks off as everyone scuttles to safety. By this time, you see the grey wall approaching – and it’s approaching fast. In an instant, you find yourself within a waterfall, loud enough to drown out every conversation, and if you’re not under a roof, you’re soaked within seconds. Visibility drops to a few meters, and the apocalyptic scenery is often exacerbated by sudden explosions of thunder, without warning, loud enough to make you jump with fright and tug in your head between your shoulders.
When rain approaches while we are gardening, we quickly judge how long it would take us to get back to the house – if we won’t make it in time anyway, we stoically accept our fate and continue working, water running down our faces and our spine, soaking first shirts, then pants, then slowly filling our boots. Once you’re wet, you’re wet, so you might as well continue for a bit. It can even be refreshing, especially if you’ve been working for a while. When it doesn’t rain, the humidity is dizzying – it’s still between 25 and 35 degrees Celsius during the day – since all the water that fell the day before is now evaporating, saturating the air until it becomes heavy and thick, rising up from the ground and wavering between the trees. In this climate, just turning the pages of your book while you sit in your hammock is enough to break a sweat.
The land we inhabit is unique in how much rainfall it receives per year, especially when compared with the next subdistrict. With well over 2,500 mm annually, we receive more than double the global average.1 Our place is located between two mountain ranges that act like a funnel, concentrating clouds moving inland from the Gulf of Thailand, so that most of the water is squeezed out of the clouds right above our valley. Both mountain ranges are covered in old-growth forest – they are both part of two separate Nature Reserves – which further aids the torrential downpours being unleashed onto us each year. The district just a few dozen kilometers north of us has considerably less precipitation, so much that it’s commercially not viable to cultivate Durian, the main crop of our province and an ecological crisis in the making, there – most orchards in Soi Dao are Longan monocultures, since they can cope with drought a lot better.
This year’s La Niña – the third in a row! – has meant that there was virtually no dry season. There wasn’t a single month in which it didn’t rain hard several times, which had both upsides and downsides. We didn’t have to water our vegetables much, a welcome change to the usual dry season routine – which seemed ironic, since we had just bought an electrical water pump this very same year (after using a muscle-powered pump for the previous two years), and now we barely even had to use it. Seed-saving – and drying basically anything – was extremely difficult, as were many other aspects of tending a garden that require the soil or the air to be relatively dry. We hadn’t finished digging over all of our vegetable beds before the rains arrived daily, and now the earth is too heavy and sticky to allow for efficient digging and mixing soil – we’ll have to wait until next dry season.
We are lucky to live on a hillside, so at least we don’t have to worry about flooding, but in the village of Karn’s parents in the Northeast of the country, some people already didn’t harvest any rice due to their fields being flooded for long enough to drown the rice plants.2 The Durian harvest this year was also less bountiful than last year’s, due to heavy rain just when the Durian flowers opened at the beginning of the year. The trees are confused; not only the Durian trees, but a whole host of other fruit trees as well. Flowering and fruiting cycles are off by up to three months – much more than the average year-on-year variability. Whereas the seasons used to be fairly regular affairs, this regularity has been upset by forces greater than what our minds (or the trees’ minds) can comprehend, and the prospect of this irregularity intensifying is frightening.
The climate is changing, and rainfall patterns are becoming more erratic. The thing we worry about most is that the next El Niño – La Niña’s antithesis – might mean a year without anything worthy of being called a rainy season. For us as gardeners, too much rain is always better than too little.
During the rainiest months, usually September and October, humidity constantly hovers above 90 percent, and especially during the night, but sometimes from late afternoon to early morning, we are quite literally in the clouds. Our garden is situated a mere 300 meters above sea level (we’re about 40 kilometers away from the sea), but rain clouds hang deep in the sky during the monsoon.
The high humidity here necessitates a minimalist material culture, since literally nothing can be kept safe from the elements. Tools rust from the humidity alone, even if they are stored under the house. Keeping photos is impossible, since the humidity dissolves the ink and makes stacks of photos stick together – something we learned the hard way with a few pictures of our families. All important documents have to be kept in two layers of plastic foil, safely stowed away in a briefcase until the rains abate.
Paper becomes damp and slack, so all books need to be stored in large plastic containers before the monsoon arrives, but they still develop a moldy smell in time. Mold also appears on any clothes not neatly folded and kept inside the house – even if you leave them hanging under the roof for a week or two, round, white spots the size of a coin appear everywhere. Same with certain food ingredients, especially garlic, red onions and dry chili, all of which are notoriously difficult to store in rainy season (and happen to be the main items we still buy at the market). All perishable dry plant parts – seeds, dried leaves for making tea, cinnamon sticks, cannabis buds, etc. – need to be stored in tightly-sealed canning jars, which we periodically put out into the sunlight, so that any humidity that might have entered the jar when we opened it collects at the top of the jar and can be wiped away.
Hunting in rainy season always requires some extra work as well, since you have to wipe down your rifle with gun oil every single time you take it out of the case to keep the barrel from rusting, even when it doesn’t get wet – most of the time, I don’t even bother taking it out. Aim a rifle for even a few seconds, and you’ll immediately feel the Aedes mosquitoes that have been following you around biting your hands and face, so it’s difficult to keep a steady aim. This time of the year, trapping small game is much easier than shooting it: all you have to do is force yourself to check the traps every morning, no matter how heavy the rain. Each time you set a trap, you make a commitment to the animal that might end up in it, and it becomes your duty to reduce suffering as much as possible (traps are checked twice daily, before dusk and right after dawn – most rodents are crepuscular or nocturnal, and any animal that is not killed immediately doesn’t have to suffer too long), and make sure nothing goes to waste (a dead animal caught in a trap will start decaying fast in this weather).
Two species of insects are especially ubiquitous during the rainiest months: ants and termites. Termites invade our house in legions of thousands, looking for softened paper and cloth to eat. Endless lines of them relentlessly march up the poles of our house, often unnoticed until someone lifts a cardboard box or a stack of clothes, and start pillaging. We respond by lighting small fires around the pole that’s being invaded and pouring hot water down the holes from which they emerge. This soon escalates into an all-out war with daily battles, in which different strategies and tactics are tested and applied by both sides, and – as in all wars – there is no real winner, only losers (although the fortress is, despite frequent breaches, as of yet still standing).
Same goes for ants: we have to build ant-safe storage places for our rice pot and any bowls containing leftovers, otherwise the ants would start carrying food away and replacing it with little granules of sand and dirt. Ants can’t swim, so those anti-ant-fortifications consist of a large bowl filled with water that has a smaller bowl placed upside down in its middle on which the rice pot towers, creating a kind of moat surrounding the fort, I mean, the food. There are occasions, usually once or twice a year, right before an especially long period of heavy rainfall, on which the ants invade our house, usually at night. It's a fairly small species of ants, about two millimeters long, colloquially called มดคัน (the "itchy ant") in Thai, that tries to escape the rising waters while at the same time foraging for food. You wake up in the middle of the night, with ants all over your body and tangled up in your hair, viciously biting what they mistook for a perfect area to turn into an ant highway. There are easily thousands of them, and until you’ve squished every one of them an hour has passed.
A sleepless night here and there is something you can’t avoid when living like we do – whether there’s an invading ant army to be fought, a male cat to be chased away, a python to be killed before it eats any more chicken, or an elephant noisily munching his way through the garden – noise-free bedrooms are a “luxury” of civilization’s encapsulated houses, walled off from the rest of the world. Our house is basically open, so we overhear whatever happens in the garden.
But you’ll definitely sleep like a stone the next night.
I execute another mosquito that’s been whirring around my head. In rainy season, we kill what easily feels like a hundred mosquitoes each day, but their numbers never seem to dwindle. Here, we have four different kinds of mosquitoes: the dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti with her zebra stripe pattern – small and rather annoying, but not that itchy. Dengue is more of a problem in denser settlements with plenty of stagnant water and a larger host population, but Aedes herself is ubiquitous. The much larger black ones that we call ยุงไดโนเสาร์, “dinosaur mosquito,” are the most common, and the ones whose bite immediately hurts the most. Then there are the thin Anopheles mosquitoes, known for transmitting Malaria, whose bite is the itchiest of all, sometimes lasting for ten minutes or more. Another kind is the medium-sized brown Culex mosquito, a vector for Japanese encephalitis, which is rarer and doesn’t bother us that much.
They rarely fly straight, but in irregular spirals that make them look like they’re slightly inebriated, and which also makes it difficult to determine their flight path. No doubt a clever tactic to avoid getting smacked to death or snatched by a bird or bat – but thanks to the daily training sessions, we often manage to squeeze them in mid-air with a single hand. Add that to the list of quaint skills you acquire as a tropical subsistence farmer.
We are not terribly afraid of the diseases they might transmit: in the five years we now live here, we didn’t have a fever even once.3 The land offers a solution for every challenge it confronts you with, and a common herb we eat every day – Holy Basil, sometimes called Tulsi – acts as a prophylaxis, preventing dengue. Whenever we feel a bit under the weather, we eat a few leaves of the King of Bitters,4 a highly effective febrifuge and potent tonic. We usually feel better by noon.
We cook on a small, portable woodstove that looks like a metal bucket, and in addition to the three fires we build daily for boiling water and cooking food, we make smaller fires during the day and throw plenty of green plant matter on top in an effort to deter mosquitoes. If there is one thing they really hate it’s smoke – another piece of evidence for my theory that there is a simple solution to every problem you encounter when living in the jungle. Even regular fires produce copious amounts of smoke: heavy, white clouds that waver slowly through the garden, since all firewood we gather is still a bit wet. We never store firewood for longer than a week or two – there is no shortage of dead branches in the jungle – since termites replace it with little structures and tunnels of red clay and wood borers transform any softwood that lays around for too long into fine dust. The wheel of life spins rapidly in the tropics, especially during rainy season, when things decay as fast as the vegetation grows rampant.
Apart from the ubiquitous mosquitoes, there are land leeches in the bioregion we inhabit: nasty little beasts, who climb up your legs and inside your clothes, where they attach themselves above a vein and start sucking blood. Luckily, they are not a vector for any diseases or parasites, and their bite is relatively painless – most of the time you won’t even feel that they bite you. The annoying thing is that the wound, once they let go, continues to bleed for up to an hour. They inject a compound that keeps your blood from clogging, so it flows freely. Our clothes, hammocks and even our bed sheets are regularly speckled with blood stains. There is no practical way to ward them off, although some villagers recommend rubbing tobacco-infused water onto your boots and legs (which seems like a waste of tobacco).5 But if you don’t let them into your boots, they bite your waist. If you tug your shirt in, they come for your neck. And if your neck is covered, they go straight for the face - which is why we usually don’t even bother.
There are people who just can’t stand them. We’ve had visitors screaming hysterically once they discovered that a leech has been clinging on to their leg for a while, and if you’ve ever seen a close-up of a leech’s mouth, I’m sure you’ll have some sympathy for this reaction. Yet we’ve grown accustomed to them, and they don’t even bother us that much anymore. Leeches, together with centipedes and the small, brown scorpions, are the only kinds of animal that we kill on sight – they are nowhere close to being endangered (or even threatened), and they will relentlessly pursue us (and the cats) until they’ve drunk their fill. The Penan, a hunter-gatherer culture native to Borneo, have plenty of land leeches in parts of the rainforest they inhabit, and during a day’s walk to move camp, a member of the tribe counted over two hundred leeches attempting to attach themselves to his legs. Compared with that, we are pretty lucky! As recounted in the diaries of Bruno Manser (who lived with the Penan for six years), leeches are pretty much the only creature they kill without hesitating for even a second. The Penan are an animistic culture, whose members even apologize to sago palm trees for cutting them down (sago starch obtained from the trunk is one of their staple foods) – yet nobody shows any compassion for leeches. We sympathize - with the Penan, not the leeches.
Last year we discovered that our chickens eat (at least some) leeches, which undoubtedly helps to reduce their overall numbers, but there’s still tons of them. We get bitten almost every day, often by more than one. Sometimes I think that they are like little forest guardians, deterring anyone who ventures too deep into territory they’re not familiar with and don’t belong, and sometimes I wonder whether they – together with the mosquitoes – extract a kind of “blood tax” from us, for all the harm and damage we do to other living beings while gardening. This blood-for-blood trade is not an uncontroversial thought (if history holds any lesson, this kind of thought easily escalates into widespread practices of blood sacrifice), but I think it’s ultimately a price that’s more than fair.
All this might sound rather horrifying, I agree, and it is definitely not for the faint-hearted. We encourage any potential visitors to come in dry season and we don’t accept any volunteers during rainy season, because it can easily be that we would just sit around under our house for a week or two – not exactly the kind of experience we want to provide our guests with.
But despite all this, rainy season has its own unique beauty and appeal. While the rain is at times too much even for the trees (their roots can’t breathe if the soil is constantly waterlogged), they do grow almost constantly, and the level of plant growth is simply astonishing. Each time we visit a part of the garden where we haven’t been in a few days, a surprise waits for us: Another new flower! Look how much taller it is! New growth, again?! The size of those leaves!
Nature never ceases to amaze those who know what to look for.
My mother always says that if she would live in the tropics, she’d miss the seasons – especially the bright colors of the forest in fall. But rainy season is colorful as well, although more subtly so. Not only old leaves, but the new growth of many tree species in the tropics is brightly colored as well, in tones ranging from dark orange, burgundy, stop-sign red, and yellow, all the way to violet, soft rose, bright pink and dark purple, and even navy blue. There is not a distinct season in which all trees leaf out simultaneously, so each time a tree produces new leaves it looks like freeze-frame fireworks in front of a dark green background.
Moreover, we have our own ways of dealing with the unique challenges of rainy season. Because food spoils easily, we live from hand to mouth, eating whatever we happen to stumble over during our daily walks through the garden, and garnishing it with whatever dangles in our faces. Food is literally everywhere, so there’s no need to store or preserve much. To avoid textile mold, for the most part we simply wear two or three working outfits in constant rotation: one on our body, one dry, and one in the process of drying – and another set of dry, clean clothes for the evening. We wash our working clothes almost daily, since at least there is no shortage of water during this time, and any faint whiff of sweat will attract clouds of mosquitoes. Tools need to be maintained, sharpened and oiled even if not in use, other clothes need to be dried during the few sunny intervals, folded, and stored in big plastic boxes. Every evening we have to hang up our hammocks, collect current books and the like in the middle of the table (the only place where the spray doesn’t reach during a heavy shower), and secure any leftovers from ants, so that we don’t wake up to a bad surprise – which has happened often enough in the past.
Over the years, we’ve lost two large trees, some of our favorite shirts, a few dozen notebook pages, a recurve bow, a mortar made from sugar palm wood, at least one entire book, a woven bamboo hat, two bamboo baskets and a sticky rice container, and countless bowls of delicious leftovers to rain, humidity and concomitants (like ants, termites and fungi).
In terms of subsistence mode, during the rainy season we are the closest to being actual hunter-gatherers: everything grows, without us exerting but the slightest effort, and there’s more Bamboo shoots, Bananas, Mangosteen, Jackfruit and Cempedak than we can eat – which means the chickens get fed plenty of fresh fruit during rainy season, Nature’s way to compensate them for being wet most of the time. Our chickens sleep in the tree tops, no matter how hard the rain or how strong the wind, impressive little dinosaur-descendants they are: the hut we built for them is only used as a shelter during the day. We keep a semi-wild breed called Ayam Kampong, hardy and strong birds quite similar in many respects to their wild ancestors, the jungle fowl. They are good fliers and, once mature, seemingly never sick. At our last project in the South of Thailand we kept the fat, fluffy chicken I knew from my grandparents’ coop back in Germany, and each year some of them died from humidity-related or mosquito-borne diseases.
Not our chicken though. They’ve evolved in this climate for millions of years, and the heaviest downpours are but a minor inconvenience for them. Needless to say, they are excellent role models when it comes to dealing with adverse weather. “Just sit it out,” they reassure each other when they flock together under their house, puffed up and tucked in, “ever since the beginning of time, sunshine has followed rain. Just a few more months, weeks, days…”
Since food is always abundant and preparing a meal requires little but taking a leisurely stroll through the garden in the breaks between showers, we have plenty of time for other things. We read more books than during any other season, and I have plenty of time to spend on things like this little essay here. On mornings where it doesn’t rain, we are woken up by a whole orchestra of birds greeting the sun, before dispersing to noisily go about their daily business before the rain arrives. Since you don’t hear much else when it rains, the birdsong seems even more beautiful than usual.
Other special features of rainy season that we enjoy much are the spooky atmosphere when we’re in the clouds, the regular blooms of wild orchids, magically timed to happen simultaneously all over the valley (and probably beyond), the crystal-clear view of the mountains (as opposed to fire season), and the breathtaking sunsets we are awarded with on the few occasions where the conditions are just right.
Sometimes, after the sun has already sunken behind the mountains, something really strange happens: optimal levels of humidity, we hypothesize, lead to a phenomenon in which clouds are being lit up brightly from below, sunlight is reflected back to us from behind the horizon by water vapor suspended in the air, and colors – especially green – are so intense that it feels a bit like the onset of a psychedelic experience, when everything starts getting really intense, and pleasantly weird.
A truly magical experience that makes you stop dead in your tracks and simply stand there, looking around in awe.
The sun now stands high enough in the sky for me to start sweating, and as I wipe away beads of sweat from my face, I hear the faint rumbling of an approaching thunderstorm – time to get active. There are fewer mosquitoes now – it is getting really hot! – and the chicken are starting to encroach on our vegetable beds on their daily round of foraging freely through the garden. Once they come closer to the house, this is the unmistakable signal for us that they’d like to have a handful of rice now, so they can comfortably take their afternoon nap with a full stomach once the rains arrive.
As I’ve said in the beginning of this essay, rainy season is like a different world. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes annoying, sometimes frightening, sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes painful, sometimes pleasant, sometimes merciless, sometimes generous.
It’s an annual challenge, and every year we lose a few plants (mostly due to the staggering variety of fungi – some of which can kill mature trees in a matter of days – who proliferate during the wet months), seeds (due to the humidity it’s almost impossible to store them in a dry place), clothes and other utensils.
But we come out of rainy season tougher each year, knowing we’ve mastered another challenge and have grown more intimate with the land in the process. The scorching sun, and in fact the entire dry season with its unique challenges, becomes vastly more bearable after months of rain. It’s something to look forward to in the darkest months, and just when you feel like you’re fed up with all that damn rain all the damn time, the showers become more infrequent and less intense, and finally stop.
Being able to tolerate and accept those rather unpleasant conditions instills some kind of – inexplicably pleasant! – stoic indifference, and sometimes, I have to admit, when I’m somewhere in the garden, completely soaked, mud streaks on my face and forearms, water squishing and sloshing in my boots with every step, I feel a smug sense of superiority when I think about city people: faces scrunched up and umbrellas clutched firmly, tip-toeing around puddles in their expensive sneakers, and hasting from their cars into nearby doorways, head tucked in between their shoulders and briefcase over their heads, trying to avoid the rain for their entire lives, to never get wet.
“They should try it sometimes,” I think to myself with a smile, “just to see how good it can actually feel.”
Every other living being gets soaked from time to time – so why shouldn’t we?
Enjoyed this article? Click here to read Part II: Wind!
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Exact numbers are difficult to find, and we are too lazy and undisciplined to measure precipitation ourselves. The next province to the East, Trat, receives up to 4,500 mm per year.
Whereas most rice varieties are well adapted to having their roots submerged, they will still die if the entire plant is under water for more than a few days while they’re still young.
I had a fever twice during the five years I lived in the South – both times perhaps dengue – but I didn’t even bother to visit the doctor. The second time was pretty severe: the fever lasted for a week during which I didn’t eat anything and drank only herbal teas Karn prepared for me, but once the fever broke, I recovered quickly. Karn hasn’t been sick once in the seven years we live together.
Andrographis paniculata, called ฟ้าทะลายโจร (lit. “heaven strikes the thief”) in Thai. This wondrous herb was found to be an effective treatment for Covid-19 in clinical trials by several Thai universities, but Western countries – in their disdain for herbal medicine that can’t be monetized – prevented its sale and denied its effectivity. I can’t overemphasize the importance and effectiveness of this humble plant. Together with Siam Weed (for injuries) and Turmeric (for insect bites and skin rashes) it’s one of the three herbs we use most frequently.
Our neighbors barely encounter any leeches, because they spray enough herbicides and insecticides to deter them.
I love this. I’ve waited, what? like 2 years for you to write this sort of essay. My patience has finally been rewarded and I really look forward to reading your other ones.
I love rainy season but I think ours is a bit less rainy then yours. The thunderstorms are the worst part by far. Lightning strikes within a kilometer are pretty common and it absolutely scares the shit out of all of us. We bought protective earmuffs for the girls, it’s so frightening they’d spend an hour under a blanket.
Thank you David and Karn! ❤️❤️❤️