#4: The Devil’s breath

Cat under a hot tin roof: Mouse is usually 3.5kg of split-the-atom charisma, but even she was floored by the heat.*

There’ve only been three times in the past year where I’ve thought I might have to throw in the towel on the Story Ark voyage.

Each time, because of fear.

Fear, brought on by heat.

Heat One: departure day

As if sailing away from everything safe and familiar wasn’t hard enough, departure day on 6 October 2024 was like heading directly into the Devil’s breath: half a day’s drive from Cape Town, its safe harbour disappearing beyond the distant curvature of the horizon. The van’s thermometer nearly broke its housing as we approached Clanwilliam, hitting 39°C.

Heat Two: foul vapours

Setting up camp two months later on the banks of the Gourtiz River in 38°C, followed by a week of wind storm that felt like it came straight from the belly of the beast: all acid reflux, bile, and foul vapours. I fled, with shattered tent poles and a mood approaching Chernobyl-level meltdown, and limped across the breadth of the country to find safe harbour in the Eastern Cape grasslands.

Heat Three: not-so-hot-day

Last Sunday, it happened again.

It wasn’t even that hot: 26°C, if the flaming red digits on the cab’s dashboard were anything to go by. But when I swung open the door of the — well, they called it a chalet but really it was just a Wendy house. In South Africa, a Wendy house isn’t the play house from the Peter Pan story. It’s what we call the permanent homes that aren’t quite informal shacks, but nothing as palatial as a bricks-n-mortar home. We also call them hokkies, as in a chicken coop.

I’d booked this chalet for a week-long research trip in south Durban, near where I hoped to spend time visiting families in the Dakota Beach informal settlement. The plan was to hear about life in Dakota and how they experience extreme events when they’re living in homes made from found materials like wooden boards or tin.

The people who’d agreed to meet have been part of a research effort that’s mapping how hot the inside of their homes are compared with outside conditions. Over the past summer, they’d had temperature-reading devices called i-buttons fitted a few centimetres beneath their roofs in order to record daily indoor temperatures. These homes are made of board, tin sheets, or, if they’re lucky, bricks and mortar.

Just before rolling into Durban — notorious not just for hot summers, but stiflingly humid ones — I’d scanned the first report coming out of their project collaboration with the local civil society organisation Project Empower.

One graph is a stop-you-in-your-tracks bit of data: temperature spikes inside the homes are easily 15°C hotter than the local Ballito weather station. Where the station registered 35°C outside, the i-buttons logged nearly 50°C inside the Dakota Beach homes.

Fifty degrees Celsius.

That’s enough to stop the strongest of hearts.

Hokkies, not play houses

My home for the week had looked quaintly rustic on the website. Given the price, I expected it to at least be habitable. And surely a proper structure with actual roof should be? I flung the windows wide, drew the thin curtains on the blazing-hot-side of the hokkie, and fired up the fan. But the sun’s energy, hitting the tin roof, seemed to be greater than the sum of the parts. The laws of thermodynamics inside Wendy house took care of the rest.

At first, the mood was one of bemusement.

Not great, but it’ll cool down soon, surely?

Four hours later, my heart was thundering like the great wildebeest migration, my head pounded like a funeral drum (channeling Roger Waters here), and my mood was blistering like I’d scalded my skin over an angry kettle. [Sometimes one has to break the rule about not mixing metaphors, sorry language nerds.]

There was no escape: outside = sun; inside = furnace. Lost the will to form complete sentences. Pen down. Dazed.

By lights-out, the bed was the epicentre of an unsafe universe that seemed desolate and inescapable.

Monday arrived with cooler air, but with a few light sprinkles of tears. We spent the morning moving from home to home, sitting on people’s neatly-made beds as they chatted about their lives in Dakota Beach, and spoke of the discomfort of a heatwave as if it’s a normal part of life.

By the time we wrapped up, my mood had become more throaty and thunderous.

Is this our collective future, I wondered? The life of the average person in an informal settlement, the ones that most of us turn away from because we don’t want to be confronted by this reality: is this what awaits all of us? The question is not so much that we’ll all end up in informal settlements — although climate migration is going to uproot many more of us than we currently realise, and we don’t know where we’ll land — but the heat, the heat, the inescapable blistering, brain-melting heat.

Hot as Hades

Part of the i-button work was for participants to record daily voice notes, giving a personal account of how they’d experienced conditions on any given day. Many described themselves as feeling tired, or were apologetic for being lazy on hot days, not realising that what they were describing is something far more serious: heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It can make us properly sick. It can even be lethal.

This is what’s tee-ed up for the next chapter of Story Ark. But behind the calculated storylines and edited photo essays is a turbulent week that’s left me on my knees.

I checked out of the tourist shack after one night. Once Monday’s work was done Mouse and I drifted around Durban in our little plumber’s van looking for somewhere to stay but my brain felt moribund. I couldn’t seem to trouble-shoot my mood or the predicament of having nowhere to drop anchor that night.

By mid-afternoon, I turned the good ship Story Ark inland, and made my way back to the bricks-n-mortar home we’d been squatting at for much of August.

I’ve been lucky. Through all these heat episodes we’ve had an escape hatch. The people I’m about to write about don’t.

Nothing quite like walking in another person’s shoes to build some empathy, even if it’s just for a few short steps.

Stay chill, and chilled.

Leonie

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

*Mouse was in the care of loving cat-sitters at the Project Empower offices while I did the field work on Monday, and was safe from the heat.

#3: Plastic poisoning: the new passive smoking

Image: screen grab from Clicks website.

We’re only just beginning to realise how serious long-term exposure to microscopic plastic particles is likely to be for our health. While plastic-polluting corporations lobby for business-as-usual, none of us is safe from the indestructible toxic sludge that’s been building in our air, water, and food for the past 70 years — not even those doing the polluting.

What’s a lethal dose of plastics poisoning?

We don’t know yet, but one day we will.

Consider Marie Curie. She gave herself a lethal dose of radiation after carrying in her lab coat the very elements whose discovery bagged her a Nobel for physics and chemistry. Science didn’t know yet that radioactive materials can curdle our genes, and possibly dispatch us with a nasty little tumour.

Mull on that while we stand in the checkout queue at Clicks, because otherwise the wait will be as dull as unbuttered toast.

‘Do as I say, not as I do’ — the gospel according to Clicks just about every big corporate

My Liverpudlian mum calls these places ‘mals’, as in the ciggie brand Pall Mall, or ‘mal-ware’. Us Saffers call them ‘malls’, as in maul, haul, appal.

Both seem fitting for this point of planetary inflection. A UN-directed effort to put a global treaty in place to cut plastic pollution just failed epically. Most countries wanted a strong agreement that’d turn off the tap on pollution by cutting virgin plastic production and ban many of the poisonous chemicals they carry in their lab-baked DNA. But a few greedy petro-states made sure this didn't happen. So now the polluters keep profiting, while you and I have to keep mopping up the mess while also getting exposed to potentially lethal doses of plastics poisoning.

What these polluters don’t seem to realise, though, is that none of us is safe from this novel form of pollution. We’re all soaking up the indestructible toxic sludge that’s been building in our air, food and water for the past 70 years. If we don’t want to passive-smoke, we can walk away from the smokers’ corner. We can’t escape microscopic plastics.

This recent moment at the Clicks checkout shows what we’re up against, here and around the world.   

The dull-as-unbuttered-toast queue

It’s a Sunday afternoon. My mum and I are en route to a family braai, and we’ve handbrake-turned into the nearest shopping centre to pick up a chips-n-choccie something to add to the spread.

This lands me in the queue in Clicks in a mall that’s so generic, it could be in Cape Town, Cairo, or modern-day Carthage. These temples to consumerism are designed this way: stun punters with a disorienting interior; keep us lost in space and time; dazzle us with sparkly things. *Insert ‘jackpot winnings’ sound effect.*

Up on the wall, above our heads, is a plus-sized poster with stylish font in muted beige, cream, and ivory: “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.”

Yet all around us, at every point on the compass, is row upon row upon row upon row of single-use plastic. All manner of content — cosmetics, sugary treats, chips, trinkets, more cosmetics — most of which is packaged in a material that’s indestructible, but will be used only once.

The contents won’t last long, but the packaging will. It’ll either end up getting fossilised in a municipal landfill. [Our tax money will pay for the city’s waste system to take responsibility for this going-nowhere material.]

Or, it’ll become pollution in the environment, where it’ll get milled down into particles so tiny that these can now even get through the body’s most sophisticated defence: the blood-brain barrier. [We will pick up the tab for this pollution too, whether we’re paying a private medical scheme to treat the health complications from long-term exposure to plastic in the environment and having it clogged in our bodies; or whether our taxes are paying for treatment through the public health sector.]

See who’s not paying for the cost of the pollution clean-up or your and my treatment for plastic poisoning?

Two for the price of one a tumour

The checkout fellow breaks into a full-throated grin when he rings up my chips-n-choccie combo.

‘If you buy these… ‘ he points at the two items, ‘you get…’

… a free single-use plastic bottle!

What he actually says is that I can get a free cool drink as part of the promotion. What he doesn’t know he’s saying is that the promotion means I get a free single-use plastic bottle that happens to contain whatever sugary drink takes my fancy.

‘I prefer water.’

‘No problem!’ his smile doesn’t miss a beat. I can get a bottle of water if I prefer.

Here’s the economics behind this kind of offer: the big players higher up the value chain — the manufacturers, producers, and retailers — aren’t just making profit on the content of the bottle, they’re making money on the bottle itself. Double the incentive to move stock.

Clicks’s promotion is at odds with what it’s asking of its consumers. That we be good citizens — reduce, re-use, recycle — while pushing us to do the exact opposite: consume, consume, consume.

I asked the Clicks Group for comment: in the context of the plastic treaty failing earlier this month, what is the group’s policy on single-use plastics? And how does the retail chain’s August promotion square with its messaging around getting the consumer to take responsibility for the plastic waste resulting from what it stocks on its shelves?

Click’s senior management said they were not available for comment.

This mundane queuing moment is a perfect wrap-up to the four-part investigation, Piles of sh*t, which ran in the Daily Maverick recently.

The series starts with a hyper-local story, looking at single-use plastic nappies and the impact on people and cattle health in communal grasslands in the Eastern Cape. But it broadens to look at the global system that’s allowing this kind of self-destructive pollution to continue. The series draws attention to the most powerful players in the system — governments and corporations — and makes the case for a whole-of-society response to throttle the pollution.

Most urgently, it points out that corporations have a legal and moral responsibility to help realise our constitutional right to a healthy, safe environment. They must be part of turning off the tap of pollution, instead of continuing to profit from a system that asks the rest of us to mop up the spill and treat our plastic-poisoned bodies once the ‘spill’ has happened.

The final article left me winded: microplastics are now so everywhere that they’re even blowing in over some of southern Africa’s most rugged and remote high-altitude water catchments, and that plastic poisoning is going to be as real as the effects of other kinds of toxic exposure.

Who gives a damn?

What was striking during the research for the series was how disengaged the corporates were. I canvased several big nappy manufacturers, and the retailers who fill their shelves with this noxious form of single-use plastic, to find out what their policy is on single-use plastics and how this squares with the products they fill their shelves with (hint, not a re-usable nappy in sight!).

Most either didn’t respond to my emails and phone calls. Some deftly sidestepped them. Others sent through responses that were so thin and curated as to say nothing at all but look sparkly, like glitter.

This is why their communications consultants call themselves ‘reputation managers’ — they don’t even pretend to be honest information brokers. [History buff moment: back before it was called ‘public relations’, spin-doctoring for brand management was known more bluntly as ‘propaganda’. You can understand why the PR sector renamed and re-branded.]

These corporates are happy to spend a king’s ransom on wooing us as consumers with lavish, seductive marketing campaigns. But when they have the more serious responsibility to engage with us as fellow citizens through the important democratic pillar that is accountability-driven journalism, they’re very quiet. Either they’re deliberately ghosting the query in the hope that they can kill the story, or they simply don’t give a damn.

Do the people running these corporations and their hired media handlers not understand that plastics pollution is out of control, and we’ll soon be facing a new public health crisis: plastics poisoning? Do they realise they’re no safer than the rest of us? We’re all soaking up this toxic sludge together.

In solidarity,

Leonie

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

#2: Into the flames

Story Ark’s departure day was like a screenplay from one of Dante’s lava-levels of hell.

We 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 safe 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. The final packing of the van dragged on well beyond departure time, taking so much longer than anticipated. 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, and it wasn’t the engine 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, four hours’ drive north of Cape Town, 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 extreme heat event 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 living out of a tent from time to time, 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, with my back turned to all the security I’d known.

In that first day, there was also a moment of getting lost in a phone dead-zone in the Cederberg mountains because I was muddled by tiredness, heat, and probably a bit of oh-my-f*ck-what-have-I-done. So I missed a few important off-ramps and right-turns, and boom, next thing I’m in the middle of a directional dead-zone with a distraught cat who was wailing like she was mourning the dead, and there was nothing that I could do to ease her suffering.

When we finally dropped anchor at our first stop, a camp site in the Biedouw Valley in the Cederberg, it should have been mid-afternoon. Alas, the sun was bloating on the horizon but no less foul-tempered. 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.

The cat called 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. I still can’t.

What the hell had I done?

What the hell have I done?

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.

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 as a way to make sense of the world amidst all its 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. You’ll read about them here, in the Captain’s Log.

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 a once-in-a-lifetime 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 make even the most salted seafarers question the wisdom of this voyage.

Thank you for sailing with us into these uncertain waters.

The Captain’s Log will that document the journey as it unfolds over the months and years since departure day.

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.