The Groot Marico in Early Spring

We came back to South Africa to find a winter tracery of branches wearing their dust overalls, all a-popping with spring underneath, the buds on some trees set to jostle the little beans, hanging like sentinels, off from their perches. There were sunsets the orange of gold so hot you could pour it, the incandescence shot through with hot pink, such that the sky was filled with all the colours of a glowing peach. Throughout the managed veld, green shoots ran through and under the black soot of spring burning, the bare ground visible beneath. Arrays of African grass ranged along the roadside edges, gang-pressed regiments straggly and most disorderly in their ranks.

We are back, home in South Africa after a year overseas in Arabia and just in time for our first wedding anniversary. We do indeed have something to celebrate at that, it's been a difficult first year of marriage and both we, and the marriage, have survived. There was the relocation, my dad’s death, our experience of a less than perfect expatriate work situation, relating to cash-flow problems on the employer's side, and then our relocation back home again, sooner than we had anticipated.

As my friend Enid’s father put it, sometimes life is about having your hand in a bucket of something unmentionable, and still grinning. So we stuck it out; Fem wrote many, many exams and formally resigned at the end of the year. When we first moved back we stayed with my aunt, since, of course, I had signed a year’s contract on the townhouse the previous December, hadn’t I, not expecting to be back so soon. Hence are immensely grateful, to this day, for their offer of sanctuary to us during an otherwise not easy time.  

In his letters, just published, Ted Hughes writes of the awful intimacy of marriage and says it’s a great monster but kills a lot of little snakes. There were a lot more little snakes than we had bargained for but at least the monster definitely thrived.

So here we are, heading out to the Groot Marico for a weekend to celebrate our first wedding anniversary on September 2nd and we figure we’ve got more to celebrate than most. As it is, it is probably just as well we take that gap, September 11th 2001 is just around the corner, little do we know it, and then, three days after we move back into the townhouse at the beginning of November (the tenants vacated the place a month early), and our goods are professionally unpacked, Fem gets an offer via his new company, to go back overseas, since the company to which he had been sub-contracted desired to utilise his skills again. But nothing is without its price. So for the third time in just over a year we make are obliged to make an international relocation, worry about storing our goods again, renting out the house … We have never doubted since the importance of seizing the moment whenever we can. But we hardly ever have moments these days to seize, since our children are better at seizing all given moments than we are. But such is the right of childhood.

We start our journey by driving through newly developed suburbs of Pretoria, where Tuscany ochres, warm and vibrant, predominate among the otherwise soulless architecture; houses like large-eyed skulls glare back at us. The close-packed series of skulls snarling at each other is succeeded by an array of houses from an older, more well-established suburb. These are smaller and painted peach or pink and actually have some kind of a garden, albeit small, surrounding them. I comment to Fem that Greek columns don’t make much of a statement when hemmed in by klinker brick surrounds. But then again, I add, this is Purple Pretoria, where even the jacarandas come out in uniform style. 

Now we wend our way through wealthier traditional Pretoriana. It is psycho-visually disturbing to an unusual degree, particularly since I am no longer habituated to its unusual colour statements; a year of neutrals all the colours of sand has set me up for a shock. I say to Fem that it’s not that the house colours are mismatched per se; they don’t use a red and a pink together, for instance. Rather, it’s the weird juxtaposition of hues that is so very peculiar. For a red and a pink of similar hue and intensity can in fact be gorgeous together, admittedly in small doses and probably not painted on the exterior of a house. 

But it is not usual (except in Pretoria, clearly) to paint houses in such varying degrees of brightness, placing light pastels adjacent to darker hues that are distinctly not even close to the pastel range. Hence you find disturbing conjunctions of a light pastel pink, with a deep, dark turquoise. A combination that screams discordance but which is nonetheless particularly popular is an extremely light pastel yellow paired with a brackish darkish green. The new Ster-Kinekor Lego-like centre exudes a wired, jangly, teenager-ish feel, painted as it is in hot peach-pinks and jacaranda blue. 

After a year of super-sized American cars, I am astonished by the appearance of little bubble cars, neon-blue, like space cars from the world of the Jefferson’s cartoons, dancing beside us. It’s even more strange that they actively avoid the space immediately next to our car. Saudi traffic crams into every available inch of the road, and even the unavailable ones. There, it is not unusual at a three-lane stop to have five massive GMC vehicles cramming the lanes and a sixth half-straddling the concrete barrier beside the traffic light. Which of course they largely ignore, to the extent that, recently, at four-way intersections only one set of traffic can go through at a time, since otherwise everyone turning into the lanes coming from opposite directions completely clogs them up. Voluntarily waiting your turn is not a known Saudi trait. 

Finally we are past suburbia and head out along the arterial roads, accompanied by urbanization’s vanguard. Electricity pylons, like thick-legged men trying to pull themselves out of the ground with little dwarf arms, advance across the land and alongside the road. Smaller pylons with cross-patch faces and even smaller arms yet intersect in the distance and then they all branch off in other, unknown directions. You can hear them grumbling in their regiments, like a Roman army of would-be deserters, not knowing the point of all this marching off every which way. 

Wherever we drive, we always see someone walking somewhere, no matter how-so-many miles the road stretches out both behind and before. In outlandish places, miles from any apparent habitation, we pass people, some dressed in their Sunday best and others in their everyday non-best. 

The molasses of lucerne is borne on the wind, rich and pungent and murmuring of cows. 

A sign say, “Nietgedacht” – unimagined. And unimaginable.

Bleak the landscape, as only Africa can be. Dry yellow leaves hang on black branches, rattling in the wind driving down from the mountains. A few spring trees in early blossom dab some signs of colour into place. We pass a drive-way flanked by huge trees towering into the sky, and at the very end of it, espy a small Victorian-era house both framed and dwarfed thereby. 

Heading towards sunset, the sky appears spray-painted a pink above grey, such that you can’t pin precisely where one ends and the other begins. There is a lightening of all colours towards the top, almost as if there were a hole above, a yellow-blue with the light shining underneath. 

I am struck, suddenly, by the concept of a garage. It does seem especially silly for a car to have a room of its own when so many people inhabit only shacks, at best. But then again, I reflect, a car does look naked, like a snail without a shell, when placed out on its own in the front yard. Though it’s probably only because we always see them thus clad that makes housing a car appear natural. 

Now we come across a series of holiday homes, all done up in klinker brick, many with thatched-roofed lapas, almost as big again as the house, consuming what little yard they had. Here we pass a string of syringa trees, like a statement a propos of nothing, a non sequitur if ever I saw one. I become extremely irritated by a Coke truck trailing along plastic, some all twirled up at the end. We are stuck behind it and, like Toad, I desire the endless vista of the road stretching out before me. 

"Ons gaan bosveld toe”, Fem says to me, pointing out candelabra bushes, green, grey and brown against the blackened earth. In the distance, little green roofs are sprinkled on a chocolate dark hillside. Rocks, using each other for support, climb the sharp hills, cumbered by candelabra. 

We pass palatial gates encompassing a dirt track beside some orange trees behind a barbed wire fence. No element is unusual; it’s just the combination that is bizarre. 

Here is a town, completed by the requisite triangular-shaped church of orange klinker-brick, grey slate roof and white trimmings. I would be surprised if I did not see this church here. When I drove seventeen thousand kilometres across the length and breadth of South Africa for the GIS database transformation project, in every mid-size town I drove through - and I drove through many, since I usually took back-roads for reasons both necessary and unnecessary - there stood this very church. There may have been some differences between them all, but they were of the kind that merely emphasized the commonality they all had, any changes made to differentiate them from one another as ultimately futile as an identical twin putting on a different coloured shirt. 

I always wondered, were all these churches the product of just one entrepreneurial architect, a Johnny Appleseed of his day, who travelled the country and made his fortune from selling the same grand church plan over and over and over again? Or did the NG Kerk, in a proclamation of its burgeoning powers in a country newly flush with gold money, ordain that this very church and no other was to be built everywhere and accordingly set up a distribution system to ensure they popped up all over the terrain? 

But whenever I see this church I think I know something about the town, the era, the zeitgeist that produced it, its inhabitants and the world they inhabited, at least then if not now. But I could be deluding myself. We are in Rustenburg after all. 

Rustenburg is full of big-shouldered women with pale fleshy arms, thick necks and dour expressions driving large trucks while smoking cigarettes clad in grey shirts and sporting short hair. It’s a mining town, so is imbued with a certain brashness in its attitudes, its cars and its people. Even the grills on their new model cars form little mouths of disapproval. We are glad to leave it behind us particularly since we have to negotiate multiple road works. Carefully, Fem threads our way past road signs weighted down by big sacks filled with stones on each prong - each sign like an elf with a plank covering his privates. 

Finally we know we are on the last long stretch. Here are fields of rocks learning to look itinerant. And here’s a bird in long flight, clumsily flapping and about to land; the hypnotic effect of the long grass slanting in the sun beneath its lidded eyes means that it can flap only in a desultory fashion and I watch as it almost stumbles, half in sleep, while getting its gear ready to land in the half-light. 

The raggedy-edged fields above which the bird hangs assume geometric symmetries from the air. 

It’s been a grey, smouldering day. And the land darkens as the light behind the drapery of sky grows more luminous just before it begins to fade. 

Journey’s end and day’s end coincide, as they sometimes should.  

Santa and Egbert are waiting for us in the Marico. Santa, like a shy Shetland that might head-butt you in panicked affection, darts forward, in spurts, looking at you with deep concern from underneath her hedgehog fringe of hair above big glasses. Then she gives you a quick, shy hug and retreats a small distance away, listening to you so intently you think she may be talking. You are surprised to discover that it’s actually you who is talking. Fem is also listening, but his is a quieter kind of listening, almost a form of repose. 

Egbert has been waiting to make a fresh pot of coffee. He asks about our journey and I talk of how memory comes pouring back as we travel the roads. I have been struck by a number of crosses that suddenly seem to have sprouted up across the land at places where accidents have happened and people have died. I wonder aloud how you can erase the bad from your memory banks when you go back to a scene. Egbert replies that perhaps memory as a web is geographically bound, so it’s not so much the you that remembers as the place that remembers you. 

Our weekend is spent at River Still. Aloes like sentinels are placed along the winding track. They are in flower. So too are the arum lilies, angel trumpets with long cool throats set amongst the pellucid green-grey river’s banks. 

On our anniversary day we climb to the top of the hill, to see River Still in the valley below. Most of the trees are still bare, palpably demonstrating Egbert’s statement that, “In winter the trees show a new vocabulary to the sky.”

On the north-facing slope, going down, a number of dainty wild plums have burst with flower. Sylvia always feels that the trees of the bushveld are very brave; they flower in spring in the anticipation of rain. 

Aloes tower into the sky, immensely tall, double-crowned, first with green spiky leaves, while above these a second, slender candelabrum of exotic yellow flowers spikes outwards towards the sky. Aloes, I find, are an acquired taste; as a child I found them emblematic of all that was profoundly weird about South Africa. Their glowing colours stared out from too many coffee-table book covers of my youth, celebrating South Africa, land of beauty and splendour while ignoring the poverty and other social ills. I always thought then, “Couldn’t they find something better, more original, at least more beautiful, for their cover?” But now, were I ever to produce a beautiful book on South Africa’s landscapes, I’d probably put an aloe on the cover. 

The cows have felled a few fine aloe specimens; you can see where they have rubbed their hides up against them, luxuriating in getting just that particular itch scratched. I try to push one over, but it proves too much for me. Fem, I think, must think I am faintly ridiculous, or maybe it’s just me thinking that, he has a slow smile on his face anyway, but I blame the cows. They made knocking down a 30 foot aloe look like it was a push-over. 

On our way down, we hear the alarm cries of baboons, in deep-throated gutturals, a ‘yahoo’ said with an Afrikaans accent. Striding back from having accosted the baboons, so we think, two men crest the hill having had a lovely time, though they never saw or even heard the baboons they had so alarmed. 

We have lovely companionate evenings by the glow of the fire, sharing food and laughter with Egbert and Santa, Jacques and Gerda, and asking of the Marico that it remember us both well and fondly. Talk flows like the river below, easy and natural. 

On our way back, we take the longer route, the one more travelled by ourselves. I find I prefer the landscape of grass and vistas laid out to the left and the right, not one hemmed in by rocks and valleys and roads bored through hills. I am a child on whom the rolling savannah-clad hills of Natal, gently undulating into the distances, maternal and green and serene, have left an indelible impression, after all. 

On my left I see a portrait of colour: orange gravel, yellow grass, grey trees, with the sun illuminating the green of new growth in amongst the black. 

Another portrait: yellow wheat-like grasses with touches of light, lime-yellow green abound, and give contrast to the tall turpentine grasses towering above, and which appear to be rusting at the head. 

There is the young green of the trees in spring. Haphazard untidy clumps of old growth litter the willow trees lining the streams below. Stately, whimsical pendulums, winter’s seeds, stir in the breeze. 

The trees are festooned with plastic bags like a litter artist gone wild. A pale blue sky washes towards white. Leaves show their silver undersides to the wind, clinging upside-down to pencil-thin trunks. 

A pall falls upon the land. We hope it portends rain. Hairy-trunked trees lift themselves to the sky, craving benediction.

We are home.