2 August 2013
Friday
Pingtung
The hot season has given way to the wet. We await the first serious typhoon though
there is none in the forecast at the moment.
So far this year we’ve been brushed by the edges of a couple that
crashed through Mindanao but that only meant rain and some wind for us, nothing
serious.
Each day the mountains are visible for a bit of time in the
morning when the air is clear. As the
heat builds and the ineluctable Taiwanese coastal sea fog covers the lower
lands where Pingtung sits, clouds build up across the peaks and then smother
the lower slopes, turning dark with rain as the day progresses into
evening. Sometimes the rains roll out
into the river plain where we sit and then the temperatures drop from the
stifling. The falling water somehow
seems to suck the humidity from the air and then the night is cooler and
pleasant and I sit on the roof terrace, training the fan on my bare legs to
keep the mosquitoes off. I drink a beer
or a whiskey or even rum with ice and water.
I smoke some cigarettes; at times I angle the television so that I can
watch it through the sliding door (which I leave open) and I follow an American
or, in its absence, a Taiwanese baseball game.
Somehow the juxtaposition of heat and humidity and the lazier pace of
the game are right.
But today, like yesterday, is overcast and there is a
continuous, spitting rain, seemingly light but persistent enough that, out in
it, you are wet within moments. But the
option is to put on a rain coat, even one of those flimsy yellow plastic jobs
that every scooter driver carries for times like these, and that is not
conceivable for the humidity is high, somehow wetter, and just walking up the steps
from the kitchen to my den leaves me perspiring.
I turn on the air-conditioner and a fan, not because the
temperature is so high but to remove some of the moisture which films up the
screen of my iPad and leaves the back of my neck sweaty and uncomfortable.
Outside, behind the house, there is a field, a valuable one
for its unbuilt emptiness in the center of the town. An unrepentant green now, the field has nurtured
low trees and bushes that have mushroomed in the hot-warm and wet air; this
verdure pops back seemingly within weeks of the occasional haircuts it is given
by the municipal authorities. Even now,
in the rain, I can see the yellow butterflies that are so numerous, many hiding
under the plants’ top layer, still darting from leaf to leaf and bush to bush
on a mission who purpose baffles me.
Deeper below where water stands, I know that there are breeding
mosquitoes and, as well as typhoon, we are now entering the break-bone fever
season. Mosquitoes laid their eggs down
there as long as a year ago. With the
coming of the rains, the eggs hatch. Last
night I was bit, twice. The itching and
swelling did not last and I live under the illusion, which I will not research
to destroy, that the creatures that bit me are more relative to a midge than the
larger, Aedes Aegypti, an African export that has spread across the world. I fear them more than wild dogs, spiders or
mice; they are killers.
When Alex was younger and we lived in Manila, in a beautiful
suburb, gated, built around green spaces, a wonderful golf course and with
gentle hills, I fought a one man battle against the pests in our back yard,
spraying continuously in my campaign to protect my baby girl from the
predations of that awful beast, Aedes Aegypti.
In the event, I probably put her more at risk from the chemical side
effects of whatever insecticide I was spraying but my intentions were
noble. Alex never got dengue or Japanese
encephalitis or any other mosquito vector disease. Now she lives in Canada where the creatures
are large enough to mate with cars and leave welts where they bite but that’s
it, they don’t kill you.
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