I promised you open ocean glow

I had a good weekend and a particularly special Sunday. We went hiking in the Suikerbosrand, and it was beautiful, in an unconventional way. There had very recently been a series of controlled burns, so half the reserve was charred to ash, the other half dry as a bone. It was a strange sensation, to be either walking through so much nature so close to death, everything dry like an enormous natural tinderbox, or the other half already ravaged by fire, nothing but ash. It was like we were walking on that edge of death, where the only thing separating the last vestiges of winter life and their tenuous hold on life from absolute nothingness was a single flame.

And yet, in all the death, a sensation, an idea, just a hint that life struggles on. Not even the first signs of regrowth (it's still too cold for that), but the (almost seditious) idea that life continues, subdued but unabated. The odd gazelle. Sounds of small animals in the sparse undergrowth. The intensely beautiful colour palettes of the shrubs, if you look closely enough. A lizard here or there. An entire herd of skittish zebra.

I positively reveled in the entire experience, if only because hiking is so much damned fun. I suspect I was the only one who really enjoyed it, but I was positively bounding from rock to rock, and pretty much running down the hills through the charred remains of plants, kicking up an enormous cloud of ash behind me and grinning like a madman as I did so. I was sorely tempted on numerous occasions to just break out into a run down a path to see what was on the other side of a group of boulders. I wanted to climb everything, see over the top of every rocky outcrop, explore everywhere. While the people I went with were fun and good company, the expectation was for something less intense, so we did very little running, very little climbing, very little exploring. I'd love to go back, by myself if need be, find the highest hill and climb it. I wanted to take it all in and run until I felt fire in my lungs and sweat in my eyes and feel the pounding of my heart in my hands. I may just.

This is why we get fit. This is why we get strong. It's so we can enjoy these experiences.

On the way back, we saw a controlled burn on a nearby expanse of veld. The plume of smoke it created, tinted pink by the afternoon sun was really quite something to behold. It left me smiling, although the bath I had afterwards, washing the accumulated, caked filth of a day spent in the dirt was probably the highlight of the day.

I spend the next couple of weeks at home, alone. I somehow feel like the timing is fortuitous. I need time to myself. It's been a very sociable couple of months for me, and I need to just disconnect and recharge.