Searching for stoke

I haven’t posted anything for a long time. Things change. I have less hair and greyer stubble. From where I write, I look due east over rooftops and then the sprawl of twinkling city lights to the distant line of mountains, etched hard and clear by the dawn. They are the mountains in which we used to live. For twenty-five years. Until the unrelenting tide of change swept that all away, with the force and violence of which it is perfectly capable.

But this is not about that. It is not about big stories. For it is often not the big stories that are important, but the little ones.

I awake, on my fifty-third birthday, in the most beautiful place on earth. The first of the pure white sandbanks are already exposed, with the tide still running out. The wind is from the north-west, the winter wind that brings rain and cold. But today it is soft and gentle, yet chilly. The dawn is silver-grey and unremarkable. None of the showy, warm tones of a typically African sunrise. Simpler. Cleaner. So that you have to look more intently to see the perfection.

Only the wind

This is a story about Hendrik Mathys and how I came to meet him. Like all stories it relies on the unfolding of events in a particular sequence. Like all stories, it requires all of the events in that sequence to happen. None can be left out, neither the ones we might think of as good or lucky, nor the ones we might think of as bad or unlucky. They are all integral to the story, and to its particular end.

If the events, those two days, had unfolded differently, if any one of them had taken a different trajectory, I may never have met him. Would he have been worse off? Would I have been worse off? One cannot really say.

Homecoming

It is a good story, worth writing down, I think, even after all these years. And maybe it has taken all these years for me to discover the voice with which I want to tell it. I am thinking of the story because I am driving the road along which it draws to an end, twenty six years ago. It was a road then, that lead home, but no longer does, a road that I have travelled thousands of times throughout my life, but then was travelling for the first time in two years. I was returning home. I was twenty two years old. Twenty two seemed older, then.

Happy New Year

Is it the here and now that matters? Is it what we bring back? Is it both? If it's what we bring back, then it's this: two skulls from leopard kills – one a klipspringer, one a dassie; a rough, hand-carved piece of donkey cart from along the hundred year old road; half a rusted horse shoe; a luminous, moon-like, pebble; a hexagonal quartz crystal; a pressed disa. Also photographs and memories, a tired body, a re-kindled desire to spend more time in places of beauty, and an inspiration to save mockingbirds.

Sandra and I are much more strategic about the ending of this year's family trip into the mountains, than we are about the beginning. By the end we are more in tune.

Resolutions from paradise

The beginning of each new year offers a natural, little pause in which it is common to think about the coming year. We can make resolutions. We can set intentions. We can re-consider how we want to live, what we want to hope for, what we want to strive for.

Sometimes more significant events come along that break the everyday unfolding of daily routines, to bring clarity and a changed perspective. A near-death experience is said to be one such event. If that is so, then going beyond near-death, and all the way to paradise, like we did at the beginning of this year, must surely offer an amazing opportunity for renewing how we want to live into the rest of our lives.

A tribute to Mike

On the 17^th of January my uncle, Mike Mamacos, died. He was in his late eighties and had lived out the last 10 or more years of his life as something of a hermit in his beautiful, simple dwelling, deep in the Du Toits Kloof mountains, that has no electricity or communication connections with the outside world. Although a loner, he was also a quiet but welcoming host to visitors. In his day, Mike was one of the best rock climbers in the world. At a memorial gathering held at the mountain club I paid tribute to this unusual man. Composing what I wanted to say was a valuable, meaning-making process of realising and appreciating what his influence means for me:

Things that went growl in the night

A kind-of sequel to a previous post: Things that go growl in the night
 

There is something satisfactory in returning to a wild place that you know well, a place beyond your everyday life, yet that is familiar because it holds a piece of your own history. If you are drawn back to such places, for whatever reasons, you may find that the combination of their wildness, their beauty and their familiarity invites you both backwards and forwards into your life in a mix that is compelling.

Yellowwood is such a place for me, a place that is within the geographical proximity of my everyday experience and yet far beyond it. Today the higher ground, everything above the foot slopes, is hidden in a cloud that has been stripped away from the plains over which I drove this morning, but still shrouds these mountains.

Witness to an eclipse

This article was written for the September issue of SA Mountain Magazine.

The Cederberg has the best climbing in the world. I don't know this because I've compared climbing destinations around the world. I know it because I've climbed in the Cederberg. That is enough. It is hard to imagine having a better friend than your best friend. Climbers are not objective route quality measuring devices. We are human and part of what I love about climbing is that it engages so much of my humanity. However beautiful the rock and the moves on a route, our experience of climbing it is about much more than just that.

On the day my father died

I am driving towards the small city of Port Elizabeth in the winter darkness. The eastern horizon, dead ahead, gradually defines itself in increasingly lighter tones of orange, outlined between the dark earth and sky. There are raindrops on the windscreen. The new glasses I am wearing define the world around me more sharply. Everything is slightly more beautiful.

This is what I am thinking: The actual world beyond the windscreen pays scant attention to the models we use to understand it, whether they are models that attempt to attribute value ratings to agricultural land, or religious models that attempt to understand the mystery of human existence. I think we believe too much in the models. But of course if we don't, we set ourselves adrift in a spinning world. And that can be uncomfortable.

Farewell to Ernie

On Wednesday 3rd July a crowd of family and friends gathered to bid farewell to my dad, Ernie. We were at the Llandudno Lifesaving Club on the beach in Llandudno, where my dad had lived for more than 50 years. Ernie died on Friday 28 June, aged 80, after a gradual deterioration compounded by his spinal injury, from a mountain biking accident, and the subsequent 15 years he spent in a wheelchair. This is what I and others said at the gathering:

Workers Day

I walked home along the Jonkershoek Road after we spent the evening together. There were no cars on the road. It was beautiful and cold and crisp. My down jacket was puffed around me and my beanie pulled low, so the cold against my face and nose, was pleasing rather than a discomfort. I walked slowly and looked at the stars and thought. I was happy to be walking rather than driving. Like so much about my life, it felt like a privilege, the silence, the darkness, the space, the stars wide overhead. I mulled over what I had said about myself. I thought about what it meant. When we talked together, I struggled to think of anything, really, to say about my life. Yes, it is good. But you know that.

New year greetings

Rim of Africa: Day 9

Day 9 (21): Roelof's Dam to Vredelust Dam, Kouebokkeveldberge

If each of the 7 billion of us on this planet could possibly walk along the western edge of the high expanse of water that is Roelof's Dam, at dawn, and in silence, I think it would change the course of our evolution. Unfortunately most cannot, and of those who can, few will choose to. I am grateful that I am among those who can.

Photo: Galeo Saintz

Rim of Africa: Day 8

Day 8 (20*): Elandskloof to Roelof's Dam, Kouebokkeveldberge

photo: Ann Reilly

* The day number is that particular day's walk as it fits into the 26 day journey of the Rim of Africa from Pakhuis to Montagu. I was not there for every stage of this journey this season. After completing stages 1 and 3, I started again at the beginning to lead a second group through the 12 days of stages 1 and 2. So the number in brackets is the number of my own day on the trail this season out of a total of 24 days, and several hundred kilometers through the most beautiful mountains on earth.

At the very beginning of stage Two of the Rim of Africa, as we transition into the Kouebokkeveld Mountains, on a farm called Tuinskloof, there is a tree that is magical. To experience its magic you must do this:

Rim of Africa: Day 15

Photo: Galeo Saintz

Tomorrow I go back to the mountains, back to Pakhuisberg, back to begin another cycle in the journey, to lead a new group of walkers southwards on the Rim. I have not yet posted all my poems from the previous stages I walked. I have not found the time, here in the world, where time and I relate so differently. But before I go, I want to post the poem that is my favourite from the journey so far.

Day 15: Panorama to Ceres Dam, Agter Witzenberg

Rim of Africa: Day 5

Day 5: Welbedacht to Bokkveldskloof

Photo: Galeo Saintz

Not long after we've left camp, but long enough for the water basin to no longer freeze over again once your hands are washed, we pass the pool near Driehoek. It is not an easy pool to simply walk past, as we discovered last year. I will not be the one to suggest it this time, but I am very happy when Linda does. A day that starts with a swim in a pool like this, can only become one of the very best of days.

Over the river we gather to marvel at a dung beetle. It doesn't so much as pause in its industriousness, does not for a moment hesitate to question the value of its work. At Eikeboom, something in the soil at my feet catches my eye. It is a coin, worn and thin - a 1942 South African tikkie, with a protea on the front. I wonder at how long it has lain buried there. I wonder at what brought it to the surface for me to find.

All of this feeds into the poem that comes to me as we walk silently up the track into Tierkloof,

Rim of Africa: Day 2

Day 2: Pakhuis to Brugkraal

Photo: Adele Labuscagne

We are descending the pass with Heuningvlei in the valley below. It is warm. I can feel the salt on my skin from the uphill behind us. I have been thinking about time, out here on the trail, and about the feeling of moving into the wide open space around us. The track curves and runs south of some towering rocks that throw welcome shade across it. The little stream, that was dry in January, rushes below. I pause here and the group slowly gathers as each one arrives, stops, takes off their backpack, settles in, and stares outwards. The stream and the birds are part of the silence. All else is as still as the ancient cedars in the rocky koppies above us. My poem is ready:

Rim of Africa: starting the journey

October is Rim of Africa month for me. In October the Cape Fold Mountains are at their best. The daytime temperatures are not yet too hot, the night times no longer too cold, the water flows strongly in each stream and the fynbos is ablaze with its diversity of flower and scent.

Being a trail leader on the Rim of Africa mountain passage is, every year, an extraordinary experience for me and an amazing privilege.

For my Father on his 80th birthday

Ernie didn't want gifts. He doesn't need things. But as his son, I wanted to give him something. I wanted to give him something that is worthy of this milestone, and worthy of this man. And it couldn't be green bananas. What I decided on were words. And so I have written one of my pieces for my dad, for this day. That is my gift to you, Ernie:

Tide & Time

I am old enough, now, to remember things that no longer exist in my world, or that have been irrevocably changed: silver metal ticky boxes (as my mother used to call them) with concertina doors, and heavy, black telephones inside that actually required you to turn a dial; military conscription; my mother herself. All of these were once a part of my life.