Simon Donner: The Man Who Fell Through My Window

After traveling to Madagascar for a conservation project, climatologist Simon Donner misses his ride to the field site, and must find his way there on his own. 

Simon Donner is a Professor of Climatology in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He teaches and conducts interdisciplinary research at the interface of climate science, marine science, and public policy. His current areas of research include climate change and coral reefs; ocean warming and El Nino; climate change adaptation in small island developing states; public engagement on climate change. Simon is also the director of UBC’s NSERC-supported “Ocean Leaders” program and is affiliated with UBC’s Institute of Oceans and Fisheries, Liu Institute for Global Issues, and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. His efforts at public engagement on climate change have been recognized with an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship, a Google Science Communication Fellowship and the UBC President’s Award for Public Education through the Media.

This story originally aired on July 20, 2018 in an episode titled “Surprises: Stories about the unexpected”.

Story Transcript

It’s 2:00 a.m.  I’m in Madagascar.  It is the middle of the wet season.  The air is completely still and it’s hot.  That type of sticky tropical heat where you don’t want anything to touch your skin. 

So I’m lying on top of the sheets, I would levitate above them if I could, and I’m completely naked.  Listen, no one said science is pretty.  And I just desperately want to get to sleep. 

And then a man falls out the window above me and lands on top of me on the bed. 

The trip had not been going well.  I'd come to Madagascar to visit a coral reef field program.  It was a project being run by a conservation group.  At the time, my research was more on the computer modeling side.  I was studying how climate change was affecting the world’s coral reefs.  I started doing field work, but I felt that I needed to learn more about how to run a project like the one these people had.  They were nice enough to say I could come as a visiting scientist for six weeks or a couple of months. 

So I pack myself off there, traveled around Madagascar, but they warned me one thing.  I might be coming a little bit off schedule and I might miss their transport.  The city nearby was only 150 kilometers away so I thought, what’s the big deal?  I’m sure I can get there. 

I did miss the transport.  So I was able to find out with some help that there was a fishing company, a French company that drove trucks up and down the coast picking up squid from all the villages.  I managed to get a lift from the fishing company.  Again, they warned me it’s wet season and humid.  It might be a little bit slow.  The roads aren’t that good during the wet season. 

But it’s only 150 kilometers.  How long could it possibly take?  I mean, it was the coast.  It’s as flat as a board.  There's no mountains to cross.  So I was like, you know, maybe a few hours or something. 

So I was waiting.  When the man landed on me, there was some confusion.  He was French, a French expat, of which there are many in the coastal towns of Madagascar.  He was drunk and, as I said, he was quite confused.  We exchanged some words.  The words were spoken in a variety of different languages and I can’t really recount any of them here.  That’s for the best. 

But we came to a mutual understanding that he had entered the wrong room and he had also entered the room the wrong way.  So he was nice enough to leave out the door and I tried to get back to sleep. 

A day later, and I mean a day in the scientific sense, it was exactly 24 hours later, I climbed out of that same bed, unglued myself from the sheets basically, and walked off to go and pick up the truck.  I was a bit suspicious as to why I had to meet it at 2:00 a.m. but that’s what they told me. 

So we loaded on some bags, 50 kilogram bags of rice.  They made sure the fish coolers in the back were all secure.  I got on, there were a few other passengers, and off we went. 

It was a bumpy ride.  It was not good for somebody with a lower-back problem but I was surviving.  It was kind of an interesting adventure.  We forded some rivers, we passed on this road.  There was part sand, part rock.  It was kind of exciting.  We got stuck in the mud.  By hour three, that got a little tiresome, but we kept going.  We were able to get back out. 

Then at some point getting around lunchtime I was told, “Oh, the truck stops in the next village.  That’s as far as it goes.”  And we were only maybe like a third of the way.  But they said, “Don’t worry.  There's another truck.  You can just get on the next one.”

And there was another truck.  The driver was nice enough to say I could sit next to him.  I was like, okay.  I'll sit on the seat next to him.  Not the passenger seat.  That was like an actual seat.  Next to the driver, between the driver and the passenger seat.  Well, it wasn’t really a seat.  There was no back and there was no base really either, actually.  There was no pad.  It was really just the metal frame, like the outer frame of the truck.  So that was really the only thing between me and the engine block. 

It was hot.  I moved side to side probably once every two minutes to just avoid scalding my butt, basically.  Definitely it was not good sitting on a metal seat for my lower back, although the heat probably helped a little bit.  It was therapeutic. 

So we travelled on.  We stopped in some villages.  We unloaded rice.  We loaded squid.  Got back off.  And the day kept going on and it started to get dark and it didn’t seem like we were anywhere near where I was going yet.  And it became clear that when it got dark we weren’t going any further. 

So we stopped in another village and they said, “We have to spend the night here.  This truck, this is as far as it goes.  But don’t worry.  There will be another one.  You can take it in the morning.” 

And everyone is very generous and hospitable.  They let me stay in somebody’s hut on the beach and they fed us dinner, they fed us breakfast.  And I was all excited about the next truck. 

And I would ask around, “Le camion, is it here?”  It turned out no truck.  In fact, nobody had seen the third truck in days, which is something you think they might have mentioned earlier. 

So I was stuck.  I wandered off to the beach and started thinking about whether it would be possible to buy one of the local fishermen’s canoes and I could paddle it up shore.  Whether that would be culturally appropriate to even ask? 

And someone came up to me and said, “Oh, you're going to the Andavadoaka.  We can drive you almost all the way there.” 

I said, “Okay.  Great.”  And he had a boat and he was a lovely guy.  His name was Dominic.  It sounded great. 

He says, “We’re just getting ready to leave.” 

I said, “Okay,” and I ran and grabbed my backpack, ran down to the beach and waited for about five hours.  And then we got in the boat and then we took off. 

It turned out to be a little bit of a milk run.  I think more accurately I would call it a squid run.  We stopped in a village.  It wasn’t clear why at first.  We got out and Dominic went up the beach and they had a little thing set up there with a scale.  He weighed a bunch of squid and then he gave the fishermen some money, and then all the guys in the boat loaded them to the coolers and we got back into the boat.  And then off we went again. 

So I learned that the reason Dominic was going up and down the coast, he was part of this massive global supply chain for squid.  They buy the squid from these fishermen in these tiny little villages, the Vezo people that do this fishing in the coast of Madagascar.  They buy the squid, transport in their little boat on ice, move onto the trucks, the trucks then move them to the port, from the port gets on a ship, goes on another ship and ends up in somebody’s dinner plate somewhere.  We were just at the very beginning of that supply chain. 

So we stop at another village.  At that point I’m like, well, I’m in Madagascar.  When in Madagascar I guess this is what you do, so I help load squid and everything.  We did this a number of times.  Time passed and basically we reached the last village of his stop pretty much right as it was getting dark.  We were going through blasting rain out on the ocean so actually it was at the point we were cold. 

We land on the beach and this is the end of the run.  This is the end of Dominic’s run and I’m not actually at the field site yet. 

So they tell me, “You can stay here.  Don’t worry.  Just you'll stay in the village tonight and tomorrow morning another boat can take you the last 15 kilometers or so.”  Dominic and the squid will go back the other way.  So it’s great. 

We walk over to a series of huts and Dominic and I walk to the one he normally stays in, that the village is nice enough to let him stay in.  He looks at the double bed in the village, it’s not really a bed, I would say.  It’s a double-mattress on the ground.  I’m sorry, in the hut.  And he looks at me and he just says, “Ca va?  Is this okay?” 

So of course it’s okay.  At this point I’m used to sleeping with strangers here so that’s fine.  So we settled into bed, smelling of squid of course. 

Got up in the morning.  People made us a very nice breakfast.  I asked around, “Is there a boat?  You think somebody could just give me a lift up the coast?” 

So I go in and, “No, no, no.  No boats.  It’s not possible.  The wind is going the wrong way.  You can’t do it at this time of the year.”  I surmised from that that there's also no engines that could push someone that way. 

So at that point I was starting to get a little bit desperate.  It had been two days and I was only trying to go 150 kilometers.  Somebody then said, “Well, if you wait until 11:00 a.m. you can take a Zebu.” 

Now, my French, and I’m ashamed as a Canadian to say this, is not that great.  I wasn’t exactly sure what they were saying but I was confident that ‘Zebu’ is not a word that I'd heard in French before.  What could it possibly be?  I kept hearing ‘Zebu’, ‘Zebu’, ‘Zebu’.  Wait.  Zebu like the cattle?  Which is like the word they use for cows. 

And that’s what he meant.  So I was like, “So I’m riding a cow?  What’s the plan here?” 

It turned out it was an ox cart and it was leaving at 11:00 a.m.  I don't know if that’s the schedule.  I didn’t look on the posting, but there's no app.  So I was like, “Well, this is what, you know, when in Madagascar…”

So at 11:00 a.m. I loaded onto the ox cart together with the ox cart driver’s son, a lovely local guy named Dolph, a whole pile of our bags.  The cart was only about 3’ by 5’.  It was tied in there, and a 15-horsepower boat engine. 

I don't know why the engine was there.  I really wanted to ask somebody, “Couldn’t we just be using it?”  But it didn’t seem appropriate at the time.  I was happy at least there was some sort of transportation.  So we go off in the ox cart, we cross at low tide and we’re back on the road.  It looks like I’m actually finally getting there. 

But an ox cart is not the most comfortable thing in the world.  We’re bouncing over these rocks on the road and it is just killing my back.  I can’t believe it.  I’m almost there and I feel like I can’t take it.  So I jump out of the ox cart and think I'll just walk.  It’s not going that fast anyways. 

Then of course it picks up speed.  So I start running beside it and I ended up running the last 10 to 12 kilometers of this trip holding on to an ox cart, just so they didn’t get away from me and everything.  I basically look like a Malagasy secret service agent protecting the ox cart. 

When we got there it took in total sixty hours.  That’s six-zero hours.  If you do the math and I’m a scientist and I had a lot of time to kill, so I did the math, it’s about two-and-a-half kilometers an hour, which is what I probably could have walked.  If you count the days I was waiting in the town just for the truck, I actually could have swam there. 

But it was a great trip.  What’s fascinating about it to me all these years later, this was over 10 years ago for me, as in now what I do at UBC, I've been doing field research for a number of years now.  I've done projects in a number of different countries in all sorts of different conditions and I've had to negotiate for boats, for trains, for planes.  I literally tried to stop a 737 from taking off once because it didn’t have our gear in it.  I've done all these things and I have photos of these, just all these great memories all around my office.  They're all in the office walls. 

And there's one photo that’s kind of out of place.  It’s not on the wall.  It’s right next to my desk and it’s of the truck.  The very first truck.  I like looking at that photo because the truth is I don't remember anything I learned from that field project that visit, and I was there for like six weeks I think.  But I remember this trip really well. 

And that’s the thing about science.  These days in science, there's so much obsession about the findings.  You need to get the publication out, you want to make sure it’s getting attention.  But science is about the process.  Science is about the journey to the findings.  It’s about how you got there.  It’s about the steps that you took. 

The truck always reminds me that.  It is about the journey.  It is about the journey and not the destination.  Thank you.