#2: Into the flames

If Story Ark’s departure day had been written as a screen play, it could have been penned by Dante himself.

A Dante who is as bitter now as he was back in the 1300s when his vendetta against the political rivals who sent him into exile inspired him to create all nine lava-levels of hell, immortalised in the Divine Comedy, into which he could cast his foes for eternal suffering.

As far as writing gigs go, he did a pretty good job back then, going on to become possibly the most famous travel-writer-slash-poet this side of unholy Christendom.

Story Ark set sail eight months ago, on 6 October 2024, and it was a shocker of a day.

There were no dock-side ticker-tape parades. There were no streamers, no bottles of bubbly exploding extravagantly over the hull as we hoisted anchor mid-morning on that Sunday, and sailed away from the safe harbour after nearly three decades of living the high-life in Cape Town, South Africa.

There was a quavering farewell with friends, tears in a cavernous lounge of a former-home, the dead-bolting of a kitchen door that was no longer mine to open, and an uncertainty unlike anything I’ve known in the many years I’ve travelled far from home to find ‘the story’. I've done many trips over the years, some with companions, usually solo, but I’ve always had a home to come back to.

Now, home was wherever the van’s engine idled. At the time, this was liberating and terrifying in equal measure. It still is.

Cooked

The day started at 4am, two hours ahead of the alarm, and involved the final packing of the van which dragged on well beyond departure time. When we finally pulled out of Cape Town, we stuck to the best harbour protocols: slow as you can, this is a wake-free zone.

It was only when we hit the high seas of the N7 motorway that something on the dash began to flash a warning. Not to say that the engine was over heating.

Something far more horrid was on the stew. Outside, the ambient temperature hit 29°C, then 31,5°C, then 34°C, 36°C, 37.5°C… by the time we rolled into the outskirts of Clanwilliam, I thought the dial would break. It was 39°C outside.

39°C.

Earth’s average temperature has climbed by 1.5°C since the first fossil-fuelled industrial machines fired up three centuries ago. Doesn’t sound like much, right? But if this average temperature were a child, they’d be spiking the kind of fever that’d have us rushing to the nearest emergency room.

A 1.5°C average temperature begins to look like the kind of anomaly that hit the Western Cape with a fever on that October spring day.

In that brain-melting bewilderment, I drew on the wisdom of comrade-in-arms ma-gogo Margie. When I’d laid bare my anxieties ahead of departure, about going off on this insane venture, she said pithily:

‘Go. It’s not going to get any cooler.’

She wasn’t wrong.

Day one of Story Ark was supposed to be easy, a trial run for longer, harder, harsher exposure to the elements, to solitude, to the rigours of investigative research in the most off-grid conditions.

I didn’t anticipate what was to come on that maiden voyage, of how it’d feel to aim for the distant curvature of an unknown horizon, back turned to all the security I’d known.

There was a moment of getting lost — the first of many, it would later transpire — in a phone dead-zone in the Cedarberg mountains because I was so tired that I missed a few important off-ramps and right-turns.

There was a temperature spike that even the best medieval scribe would have struggled to conjure with his noxious quill.

There was a distraught cat who began to wail like she was mourning the dead, and there was nothing that I — the one inflicting this torment on her — could do about it.

Our first stop was a camp site in the Biedouw Valley in the Cedarberg, about four hours’ drive north-east of Cape Town. We should have arrived by mid-afternoon. Alas, the sun was bloating on the horizon but no less foul-tempered when the van tiptoed down the sandstone-y road and onto the cropped lawns next to a river which, if nearby rock paintings are to be believed, show that foragers were bedding down here a good two or three thousand years ago. It was good to join the club.

At reception, I hoofed away some overly zealous house dogs, and made an executive decision. Bugger the tent idea. After such a hellish day, we were taking a chalet.

Little Mouse, the chief navigator and plucky comic relief, was unrecognisable on the first night. She wouldn’t leave my side, sticking to my heel and yelling with nerve-jangling ferocity whenever I took a step anywhere. In spite of her irrepressible spirit, even she needed reassurance that the world wasn’t coming undone. I couldn’t give her any assurances at the time. I still can’t.

What the hell had I done?

What the hell have I done?

The only thing one can, really, given the circumstances.

The voice messages dispatched from my phone the next morning were a morse code of snot-en-trane.

But there was no going back. I’d sold my home to pay off the debt following a few years of collapse in the journalism sector. I’d cobbled together a crazy scheme to salvage my career, even as the climate seemed to be unravelling unstoppably.

If the Titanic’s going down, I told myself, I’m still going to put myself to good use, even if it’s just rearranging the deck chairs and telling everyone there’s no point in panicking.

The idea: untether from the cost and hassle of a home and office. Become an itinerant reporter, moving from place to place in search of the tales that will show how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime. Hammer out the stories from a tent, Hemingway style. File copy from wherever there’s cellphone signal.

It seemed so romantic, so easy, from the safe side of departure day, from the secure side before you sign away your home with an offer-to-purchase agreement.

True as (non-) fiction

Humans are meaning-making animals. We tell stories about how we see the world as a way of making sense of the uncertainty and suffering. Viktor Frankl nailed it down in his book Man’s Search For Meaning.

Yes, journalism has collapsed. I’m not the only reporter to have lost chunks of their livelihood recently, and that’s before AI elbows us away from the keyboard. Yes, the climate is unravelling far faster than scientific models foretold.

But how we survive these disquieting times, indeed how I survive as a newly-minted roving reporter, depends on the meaning we find in things. This isn’t about being a pollyanna. There’s room for reality. But where possible it helps to push back against the darkest reading of circumstances, if we can.

Am I a broke, homeless, middle-aged woman living out of a van?

No. Not for a second.

I’m a woman of such privilege that I can choose to be a childless cat lady, who has so much agency over her life, her body, her savings, that she can travel the country looking for climate stories, and do work that feels important, meaningful and life-giving.

Because of this privilege, I have a duty to use this for the greater good. To tell the stories of those who can’t do it themselves.

That sounds self aggrandising. But if I didn’t convince myself that there was a greater good in the dis-ease of that first tumultuous day, I wouldn’t have had enough ballast in the hold to keep going. I wouldn’t be able to keep tending the sails as future storms rolled through. And there were plenty to come.

Story Ark is an adventure, for sure. But even the best adventures come with sunburn, seasickness, and a hankering for stable ground under one’s feet from time to time.

This diary entry should have been written on Monday 7 October 2024 as I kicked back in a hammock, throwing myself delightedly into the embrace of day two of the epic adventure.

Alas, it seems I needed a few months to wrest the quill from Dante’s cold dead hands so I could find a way to tell a story where the author is allowed to be honest but doesn’t sound too forlorn.

There've been many glorious days since this first one. But the first one was enough to turn even the most salted seafarers green at the gills.

Thank you for sailing with us into these uncertain waters.

What will follow from this Captain’s Log entry, will be many more that document the journey as it has unfolded over the eight months that came after departure day. There will be more of Mouse’s plucky comic relief in these yarns, and less of the captain’s overwrought heliographs.

Until then, and in solidarity,

Leonie

Itinerant reporter, captain of the good ship Story Ark, and travel companion to the irrepressible cat called Mouse.

#1: Six months in, slow as can be

I used to think that a writer’s retreat was for divas, or wannabes with more money than sense.

Until I tried one.

Time. The privilege of time for slow, deep thinking. And silence. Our brains need these to advance an idea and craft a story, in the way that a parched throat needs water. Story Ark is like one long writer’s retreat.

It’s also a return to slow journalism.

I recently heard this called ‘artisanal’ journalism. Much like the idea of the writer’s retreat, this phrasing sounds a bit like overly-precious craft beer or hand-rolled facial hair that’s b’n sculpted with the tallow of a moss-fed yak from somewhere in the melting tundra, or what-what.

Slow journalism is really just a return to real journalism — cue: Paul Salopek’s extraordinary Out of Eden mega-walk. [Unashamed name-drop: Salopek and I shared the same National Geographic magazine editor, Oliver Payne.]

Slow journalism is how we should be doing the craft — taking time to dig deep, think hard, and do a fuller sweep of sources and experts. It’s the antidote to churnalism, where profit-driven commodified ‘produce’ has replaced news’s real function. Journalism should be a load bearing wall of a healthy democracy, where the job is to inform the public discourse, stoke active citizenry, and hold the powerful to account in the interests of the common good.

Slow journalism should also allow us to step away from our desks and get our boots back on the ground, out there in the communities where democratic participation unfolds in real time.

Story Ark is a pursuit of this old-school approach to the craft, albeit in a somewhat quirky form.

Cue disembodied narrator’s voice: Story Ark is a year-long journalist project where our intrepid writer is living out of a van and travelling under the guidance of chief navigator, the cat called Mouse. The mission is to find the invisible stories that show how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime.

Chapter 1 Dust Bowl is a wrap

We’ve been on the road for six months. The time and freedom have allowed such deep immersive research that I’ve only covered two geographies — the Namaqualand desert, and the grasslands of the Eastern Cape Highlands, Lesotho and the Free State. I’ve only now wrapped up Chapter 1 Dust Bowl, which includes eight stories from those first epic months.

What started out as a vague plan for a year-long project is fast growing into a three-year mission. If I hope to visit a wide range of ecosystems and places, and sink into the cultures and local economies embedded in them, the mission will need much more time on the road.

I’m about to disappear into a hermitage of sorts so that I can write the first stories for Chapter 2 Golden Threads and Chapter 3 Oil Spill.

Pimp my ride

As of this week, the good ship Story Ark will no longer sail incognito. The van will soon have some funky decal announcing our mission to the world. The virtual Story Ark is also getting a bit of a spit-’n’-polish: full social media clean up, and a website overhaul. Watch this space!

(Mis)adventures on the high seas

The (mis)adventures from the first six months on the road include, but are not limited to: one necrotic spider bite, two dune-drownings for the van, three slow punctures, and four sutures in a hand after a tumble off a medieval-style spiked fence the day before Christmas Eve. It’s b’n wild.

One final lesson from the road: If the spare tyre for your plumber’s van is stowed underneath the car, have some strapping lads move it into the van itself. You don’t want to discover that you’re not strong enough to brute-force the nuts loose with an ill-fitting tyre iron while lying on your back, in a frock, on the side of a secluded Lesotho road as the left rear wheel sighs quietly and deflates like it has a touch of the vapours and needs smelling salts.

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Thank you for joining us on this Odyssean voyage.

Fondly, from afar,

Leonie Joubert

Itinerant science writer-slash-journalist, and captain of the good ship Story Ark.