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Nature as Witness | Folly Magazine

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It is a warm day in January 2020, and we are standing on a steep slope, just inside the lower edge of a tropical rain forest in Manoa Valley, on the island of Oahu in Hawai’i. The ground is slick under foot, and an ooze of red mud is rising around each of our boots as we move slowly into the thicket of bright green palms, every one boasting glossy folded fans, more than eight feet in diameter. They have strange shredded clumps and looping stands of brown fibrous hair, full of insects. Gently, we push our way deeper into a glade of orange flowering ginger plants and then through the wetly cupped beaks of red heliconias that spill nectar on our skin with a deep spicy scent. A hundred thousand droplets of sun sparkle brightly in the half-dark as downpour after downpour surges across this valley. January is the wet season and further up the mountain above us, 23 inches can land in only 24 hrs. It is important to keep moving, as depths of mud seem uncertain, and it would be all too easy to

Nature as Witness | Folly Magazine FOLLY Nature as Witness Sarah Simblet | Non-fiction (excerpt) --> It is a warm day in January 2020, and we are standing on a steep slope, just inside the lower edge of a tropical rain forest in Manoa Valley, on the island of Oahu in Hawai’i. The ground is slick under foot, and an ooze of red mud is rising around each of our boots as we move slowly into the thicket of bright green palms, every one boasting glossy folded fans, more than eight feet in diameter. They have strange shredded clumps and looping stands of brown fibrous hair, full of insects. Gently, w

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