Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 S E C O N D M O O N 06who matters. And Nick, was a do-er. Apart from the map reading andshopping, he loved to be helpful. The pad of self-inflating foam that wassupposed to be a soft centimetre between me and the planet at night regularlydeflated to leave me dumped on a rock. I accepted it with gloomyresignation, but Nick was going to fix it. Into the drainage ditch he wentto ascertain the location of the leak and circle the spot with indeliblemarker. The next town had a bicycle repair shop, and he spent half anhour or so explaining, pointing out, and getting a patch stuck on. It didn’twork. The next day he would try again in another drainage ditch, stoppingin another town. But there was always another hole, or the patchcame off. And on and on: this is samsara.N I C KFor the first few days we were walking across a land that must have beenforestuntilrecently.Theroadwewereonlookedverynew,anditcrossed,in a straight line, the rolling and slightly higher ground. There were fewervillages, bigger fields, and square remnants of woodland. It was typicalof much of the Terai land that runs along the base of the Himalayanfoothills. Here the silt deposited by the rivers coming out of the mountainsis banked up, and the water table can be much farther down. On thishigher ground the soils are poorer, and they suffer from drought formuch of the year. This is why until this century and the introduction ofmechanical pumps there were still great tracts of forest lapping the baseof the Himalayas. They would have been dominated by the sal tree, thebig straight trees with few low branches that make good timber and wereonce the most common species in northern India. The Terai sal forestshave mostly gone from India and are going from Nepal. Lumbini wouldhave been in such a forest both at the time of the Buddha and when it wasrediscovered last century. The forest has since gone, cleared first by logging,which in Nepal’s case was usually illegal, with the logs going intoIndia, and then cultivation by people migrating north from India.6 6