Good trips take us out of the worlds we know; the best trips throw us headfirst into new worlds, tangible, grimy ones that are not made for us, but take us in and show us their beauty.
Succumbing to itchy feet, taking advantage of an ambiguous floating holiday policy, and guided mainly by a vague tip heard in Mauritania that was all the more intriguing for its lack of clarity, we jammed ourselves into a sept-place bound for The Gambia. Three additional modes of transport later, fortified by the raw sea-taste of oysters stripped fresh off mangrove roots, we found ourselves on an island deep in the Sine-Saloum Delta of southern Senegal. Dakar and Delhi and DC felt like drifting figments of imagination with no connection to our lives.
We fell asleep that night under mosquito nets, with the warm, humid darkness of the Senegalese summer pressing down on us. Five minutes or five hours later, we woke up to the darkness illuminated by flashing lightning, thunder booming and rumbling and cracking, the purple-black clouds lashing rain down on the mangroves. The air was cool and there was a strong smell of earth. The windows of our thatch hut had blown open, and the rain was misting us through the nets. Half-awake, we surrendered to the storm and all it seemed to mean.
When we get lucky, we experience amid the wild overwhelming complexity of life a moment that seems to contain a multitude of other moments within it. A moment that seems to concentrate a whole era, a whole state of being, down to a single point. These peaks are not common, and too often we fail to recognize them as they happen. There was a moment in that hut, in that storm, where the thunder broke right above our heads and forced the breath out of us. That moment seemed to symbolize all that this hot Senegalese summer has meant, with its sand, and its sweat, and its love.
Five minutes passed, and the storm was gone. But it left a rare crispness in the air, and the strong feeling that we are luckier than we can ever imagine to have lived through this summer in Senegal.