Sahara Sands March 19
Yuh cyar see we, We cyar see you,
‘Cuz de air es t’icker den callaloo,
Dey no visibility,
I got Africa on me,
De Sahara Sands!
apologies to Kes
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the sands of the Sahara Desert were on a West African beach. In the warm shallow Paleozoic sea, single-cell algae called diatoms proliferated and left behind their unique signature—tiny round silica shells, which under microscope resemble glass cathedrals and spaceships. Embedded in these intricate structures are the atomic remains of ancient DNA, the most essential of which is Phosphorous.
Hot easterly winds carry this desert sand across the Atlantic, atop an inverted layer of cooler air. Most of the matter ends up in the Pacific, although high pressure systems in Central and South America can force the air down. During the dry season, the Amazon Basin receives 50-million pounds of Phosphates per year from falling dust, making it the most fecund environment on earth. As the jungle rainforest is continually cleared, phosphorous leaches from the diatomaceous earth and becomes the fertilizer for blooming sargassum, the seaweed scourge of Caribbean beaches, in the strangest of elemental cycles—algae to dust to algae.
When the dry season settles over Trinidad, the air thickens with Old World particulates. Some days are clearer than others, but locals say it has been getting worse in recent years. “We have lost our seasons,“ says Sumintra, my cleaning lady, as she wonders whether to send her asthmatic son to school this week. I remind her that most days the air is healthy, certainly better than the other cities I have lived in, but her perspective is necessarily limited, given that Petit Valley is as hazy as a burning California forest.
Maracas Beach is full of bathers on Saint Patrick’s Day. While the Irishmen of Padna toast Mr. Jameson with punchy moonshine and bush rum, God’s other chosen ones frolic in lively surf under a yellow sky. Bikinis and burkas co-mingle among the green waves, while kids of a thousand colors build castles, score goals, and flirt shamelessly. A young coconut-water vender wrestles his business tricycle out of quicksand in the encroaching tide. The salt air smells of Shark-n-Bake and spicy Channa. Corbeaux, the black-shrouded vultures, soar in the murky thermals, waiting for good news. Above the refracted horizon, the sun becomes mars approaching, while the Sahara sands fall, like manna from heaven, on all of Africa’s children.