L'Arbre du Ténéré

I once thought travelling in the desert must be amazing. I thought it would be so cool if I could cross the desert myself. When I was a kid, I watched Babar, a children's show about a royal family of elephants. I'm not sure that they lived in a desert, probably more like a jungle, but back then I thought they were always beside each other anyways. They're both hot places after all. At any rate, in one episode I saw one of them walking the desert with a canteen. At first I thought it was a purse, but when I realized it was filled with water, I thought it was so cool. So cool that I wanted one too. My mom had, years before when I was pretty much a baby, bought me a canteen. It was covered with red canvas and had a picture of Snoopy on it. I remember when I had been old enough to go to school for the first time I didn't want to take it to school, but now I thought it was just great. I started using it to play desert with my friends. We would pretend that our bikes were camels, we would bike real slow on them, and every few hundred meters we'd get really thirsty and have to drink out of my canteen.

My friend, Cameron, he loved the game too because neither of us knew anyone else who had a canteen and thought it made the game that much more real. We played lots of games together, usually with no toys except for our imagination. There was a tiny forest near our houses. It probably isn't fair to call it a forest, it was more like a small growth of trees, maybe 20 of them, bracketed on one side by people's back yard fences, and on the other side by a tall fence separating our neighbourhood from the train tracks. We would play in that forest all the time, trying to climb the weeping willow, and laughing wildly as we'd tumble off the branches.

He always wanted to play fighting games. Like cops and robbers, but he'd always be the cop, and he'd always have to wrestle you when he caught you. It wasn't enough to just get tagged, he needed to fight you to the ground. I didn't like those kinds of games. I liked the kinds where we were all on the same side, and the bad guys were all imaginary. That's why we almost always played Ninja Turtles. I was always Donatello, and he'd be Raphael. Armed with broomsticks and hand rakes, we'd take on invisible foot soldiers and aliens.

We would always chase animals and pretend they were monsters too. Pigeons and squirrels mostly. We would chase them down, but we would never catch them. They were always too fast. But then, one late August evening, Cameron decided he wanted to be Leonardo. I remember the clouds were an odd shade of purple and red, but it was no where near sunset time. It was like the skies were embarrassed. But maybe that's my own memory tingeing the past. He brought out a hockey stick, and it started off like any other day, except we had found a squirrel standing in the middle of the street. We chased it around the corner, and had it backed up to a brick wall. It tried to climb up the wall, but kept losing it's footing. And that's when he struck. Cameron brought the hockey stick high up over his head, and down on the squirrel. I don't remember how it looked. I only remember feeling sick. At first I thought it was an accident, but he brought up the stick again, and down on the squirrel's head. And again. It came apart quickly and the whole area looks like a balloon filled with blood and guts and fur had exploded against the brick wall. I told him he should stop, but he said it was a monster, and we had to kill it. He even stepped back and handed me the stick, and asked if I wanted to take a hit too. I ran into my house, washed the blood on my hands, and hid in my room.

I don't remember much else about those days. I do remember that we went to different schools. He went to a catholic school somewhere away from me. I remember thinking that the first day of school would be horrible without him. He was my best friend and I wouldn't know anyone else. He was the friend who always fought the bad guys so I wouldn't have to.

But I learned to fight my own monsters, in my own way. And he, he just learned how to fight himself.

There is a tree in the Sahara. Called the L'Arbre du Ténéré, it is the most isolated tree on the planet, the only one for 400 km around itself. It used to live amongst a couple other trees, but they had all died out, and it lived on its own for decades. And it was destroyed by a drunk driver. A man, driving a car, managed to miss 800 km of open empty desert, and hit the only tree in basically everywhere. How absolutely ridiculous is that? They have since uprooted the dead remains of the tree, and now it stays in the Niger National Museum.

Sometimes, on days like today, when the clouds look like they did on that August afternoon, I wish I could go back to the last day of L'Arbre du Ténéré as it sat there alone in the Sahara. And I wish I could sit under it's shade, and drink from my red Snoopy canteen. And look up and watch the purple embarrassed clouds pass by. As we await for the end of the universe.