#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.