Walking over water

It was not the picture that I had held in my imagination. Perhaps overly influenced by photos of Dean Potter solo high-lining above Yosemite, the picture I held had me looking cool, thrillingly poised, yet in control and making delicately deliberate progress across the line to the other side. Orange cliffs behind me, black water below.

I'd been slacklining only about three months. From the moment I was first introduced to it, in a Banff festival film, I knew I wanted to step onto the line to feel the taught and delicate balancing sway of the tape under my bare feet, and to experience that beautiful coming together in movement, of body and mind.

Easter 2010

Easter is a time when life and death are in close proximity, where Good Friday and Easter Sunday are separated by only a single day. Phoebe asked us why Good Friday is called good. “Surely”, she said, “the day that Jesus died was a bad one”.

I had heard of Bobby Woods’s death on Table Mountain, but it wasn’t close to me, just a newspaper article about a climber I had met once, long ago. Until I spoke to Adam.

Giving Voice to Walking

On the 19^th of March 2010 my friend Galeo and I did a presentation at the wonderful but too brief institution that was the annual Freewheeling Festival, held at Stanford Valley. Our idea was to share, through words and images, the inspiration and importance of the simple act of walking. Among other things we read alternate pieces of our own writings, that had been inspired by walking. Between us on a screen ran a continual set of images from our various walks, mostly of mountains. Black and white, fading into each other. We called the presentation, Giving Voice to Walking.

These were the pieces I read:

It was just a walk. A short walk. And yet something perhaps about the low angle of the sun’s light from behind the clouds, and the response it invoked in the landscape, and in the scrubby vegetation at my feet,

Why won’t Mr Retail let us swim in his pool?

We take two books with us this year, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. A Sand County nearly doesn’t make it. When you’re hiking with kids there’s a lot to carry and only essentials make the final cut. But as I deliberate the last items to pack, I open the book arbitrarily and read this passage

Rat...tat...tat...tat...tat

October 2008, spring unfurling in the depths of the Jonkershoek Valley:

Bill is an olive thrush, a robust little, no-nonsense bird with a yellow beak that scuffles loudly in the dry leaves around our house looking for worms. He irritates the hell out of me.

Land, life, walls & wine

'It is the ferment of love that completes the wine' - Rumi

The first thing I notice about Appelsdrift are the holes. The second thing is the wall. But it is the holes, long lines of them, curving across the undulating landscape, that bring me here.

Into unknown depths

Vision Quest, February 2002, Fish Hoek. During the initial days of this amazing process, all the participants are given a task, by Judy and Valerie, that is to be completed in the days before going to the mountain. Mine is to swim out to the buoy that bobs around in the sea in front of their house, quite a good distance from the beach and off the cat walk. I planned it for the Saturday morning, the day before our departure to the mountains. The idea to swim at sunrise was my own. And my plan was to sit in stillness on the beach, waiting to enter the water in the moment that the sun broke above the horizon - a kind of soundtrack in light to a heroic moment in my journey. An imagined blue sea on a warm and windless February morning. The aim of the task from Judy and Valerie’s side was to feel the support of the water, and the fact that one could flow through it, supported by it.

At this stage there was very little public awareness of the danger of sharks in Fish Hoek.