RN7, Madagascar
Summer, 2015
It takes twelve hours to travel the 400 kilometers from Fianar to Antananarivo on the RN7. The road is a single-laned affair that supports traffic running in both directions as well ox carts, bicycles and foot traffic.
The road slowly saunters and winds its way up from the coast to Antananarivo with poorly done makeup and dangerous shoulders like a drunk stumbling into a small town bar on a Saturday night.
Traveling by bush taxi is both unnecessarily painful and surprisingly beautiful. The seats are too small and the vehicles are compulsorily stuffed to the gills with people, sacks of rice, dried fish and luggage.
Towns, faces, landscapes and animals drift past like a silent film projected on a white sheet in the summer twilight. Light pours out of the sky, bounces off the red dirt, and reflects the emotions of strangers as they move about their lives. The brilliant colors and stories of Madagascar are never more vivid than when they are viewed from the window of a crowded taxi-brousse.
I see things long enough to share emotions and thoughts with them before they disappear. I fall into a sort of reverie as I stare out of the window and over these twenty hours:
I worried with a man as he poured oil into his engine.
I willed a small ball made of plastic bags closer and closer to a target.
I quickly wrapped the string around a homemade top.
I sang and laughed with three children as they pounded rice with heavy five-foot poles in a giant mortar.
I held a child under a cloth with his father.
I trusted an old bicycle chain not to break as I climbed a steep hill with an old French horn in my backpack.
I raced down a hill on a ramshackle cart with my little brother and my dad.
I ate a small patch of hay from the cart that I pulled across the red moonscape.
I flew low and swift across a group of tombs with my flock of brilliantly white, egrets.
I froze myself in time with giant granite elephants and settled in for eternity. I stuck my hand up and out, hoping for someone to stop.
I wrapped myself and shouldered my shovel and walked proudly home.
As the sun set I saw a glimpse of myself looking back from the other side of a dusty window.