Dem Bones

Every step in the Karoo could take you back 250 million years to the bony remains of an age when giant reptiles and amphibians roamed, foraged and fought in a primeval swamp. It was the time of the therapsids and flourishing reptile populations that existed millions of years before the dinosaurs, when the dry desert of the Karoo was a wet basin, and creatures like Dictodon, Bradysaurus, Lystrosaurus and Mesosaurus thrived amid the luxurious plant life of the humid forest. In paleontological terms, the Karoo has evolved into a permanent, frozen 50-million-year fossil record, stretching from 240 to 190 million years ago, before the likes of T-Rex, Velociraptors and Stegasaurus came along to irk the fundamentalists. To a fossil hunter, the Karoo is Mecca. Skeletons are unearthed daily in the sand, mud and clay.

The Karoo National Park makes it easy for for the amateur paleontologist, providing a Fossil Trail of some of the finds, a looping outdoor path hosting a meandering collection of bizarre, skeletal beasts under glass, kin to Moschops and Jonkeria and Dinocephalians. Bradysaurus, described as a large, slow-moving, herbivorous reptile, were the rhinos of the late Permian Period. Parelesaurus was a cross between a hippopotamus and a crocodile, two animals that now share rivers together in South Africa (and are among the deadliest creatures in the world). Into this harsh, savage environment, a new type of animal, the size of a rat, appeared in the Karoo, representing the first of the true mammals. Darwin’s Adam.

In the dusty red glare of the Karoo today, a lonely and desolate space, the bones are the bridge to the Lost World of reptilian dynasty. A world that endured for millions of years until some cataclysm wiped out everything and opened the door for the dinosaurs, who had their own run of eons and epochs before the cosmic dice turned craps. Their loss is our window. Before it closes, we at least have one advantage over the therapsids and dinosaurs – a chance to read the stones, the stars and museum display cases.

“Don’t be a fossil.” Those words are printed on an admission receipt, urging visitors back soon to Iziko Museum in Cape Town, where dioramas of reconstructed therapsids elaborate on the Karoo skeletons and Permian life. The advice is well-meant. But the earliest South Africans, those with leathery skins and dagger-like teeth living among vine-entangled trees the size of skyscrapers, didn’t follow it. Worlds come and go. Life evolves and disappears. The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone. These are the things we know.

The Stars

Life in the Great Karoo moves to the time of the stones and the stars. Surrounded by such companions of eternity, people discover that they slow down themselves. There is no wi-fi, no Facebook or Twitter to occupy every waking moment of our distracted days. There is just the land, bone-dry and textured in the slanting light of sunshine and shadow, and the immense sky above fading from blue to yellow to red to a black so deep it calls forth all of the silver in the heavens.

There are few sights as beautiful as the night sky in the southern hemisphere, with its exotic constellations and Magellanic clouds, unpolluted by manmade light. I had seen it before, most impressively in the Australian Outback. I wanted to see it again in a place where the stars were so dense and bright that they evoked the same sense of awe, wonder, mystery, inspiration and imagination that compelled the first storytellers to make sense of the world. The ancient Greeks connected the dots. The Aboriginal Australians saw patterns in the dark spaces between the stars. African tribes tended to tell stories about individual stars. But whether Vikings with their Norse fatalism or Vincent van Gogh with his mad genius, all who look up at a starry night see it in their own peculiar way.

To practice, I had visited the planetarium in Cape Town, where I sat in on “The Sky Tonight,” a lesson on the evening sky of the southern hemisphere. The Southern Cross (Crux), with its Pointers, was easy to spot every night, low in the southeast. It is the signature constellation in this half of the world, as comforting a presence to southerners as the Big Dipper is to northerners. Since there is no “South Star” above the South Pole to orient travelers in the hemisphere the way the North Star guides navigators in the north, the Southern Cross serves as celestial compass check as well. Both Australia and New Zealand feature it on their flags.

Just below it is Centaurus, “The Centaur,” another constellation almost exclusively seen in the southern hemisphere, but named after the Greek legend of the centaur who was the first to group the stars into constellations and who taught humankind how to read the sky.

In my experience of casual stargazing, while the stars in the northern hemisphere appear closer, those in the southern hemisphere are brighter and more colorful, and the striped white band of the Milky Way is more vibrant here. The naked eye or a cheap pair of binoculars are all that is needed to see such features as the Jewel Box Cluster within the Southern Cross, red supergiants among bright blue supergiants and other colorful stars that appear as glimmering precious stones. Omega Centauri, the second brightest globular cluster in either hemisphere, is also visible. Dark nebulae within the Milky Way are prominent, with Emu in the Sky, the best known Australian Aboriginal constellation, among them. The sky also shows the False Cross in Argo, the mythological ship comprising Vela (Sails), Carina Keel) and Puppis (Rear Deck). Orion, faithful constellation of winter in the North, is a summer constellation in the South, albeit an upside-down one if you’re observing it after changing hemispheres. And then there is Mensa, or Table Mountain, named in tribute to the mountain that cradles Cape Town, and the only official constellation named after a natural Earth landmark.

South African tribes had their own constellation stories. The bright stars of the Pointers and the Southern Cross were giraffes, while the Pleiades were known as “the digging stars.” When they appeared in the sky, it was time to begin hoeing the ground. To the Namaquas, the Pleiades were daughters of the sky god. When husband (Aldebaran) shot his arrow (Orion’s sword) at three zebras (Orion’s belt) and missed, he didn’t return home because he had killed no game but he wouldn’t retrieve his sword because of the fierce lion (Betelgeuse), which sat watching the zebras. So he sits alone for eternity, cold, hungry and thirsty, frozen by shame and fear. To the Tswana, the stars of Orion’s sword were three dogs, chasing the three pigs of Orion’s belt, representing the natural phenomenon of warthogs having litters (usually of three) when Orion is prominent in the sky.

Another South African legend suggests that an impetuous young girl at the beginning of time tossed red and white roasted roots and their ashes out of a fire into the freezing sky, where the roots became stars and the ashes formed the Milky Way. To the Sotho and Tswana, the Milky Way is Molalatladl, “the place where lightning rests.” It also keeps the sky from collapsing and shows the movement of time.

The Karanga thought stars were the eyes of the dead, watching the living. The Tswana believed they were the spirits of those who were unwilling to be born, or else the souls of those dead for so long that they no longer serve as ancestor spirits.

In the Great Karoo, each day turns slowly dark and the birds go suddenly silent. The sky becomes thick with stars, and the world and the mind go quiet. A land of giant shadows settles into stillness, while above, ancient light works its magic, shimmering with the wonder of it all.

Rock of Ages

A recent discovery in Blombos Cave, along the southern coast of the Western Cape, revealed the world’s oldest artist tool kit, a way of making ochre, used in the first artworks created by humankind. We skirted the cave on our journeys, but I had hoped to see some rock art in the Karoo, home to thousands of enigmatic scenes and menageries engraved on stone by San hunter-gatherers, the Bushmen who comprised the world’s first artistic movement. I began at the start of my trip by exploring the extensive collection at the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, compelled by the images of eland and extinct quagga, ostrich and and dancing, flying birdlike people mingling with elephants. Like my hopes for seeing a dung beetle at Addo, my wish went unfulfilled beyond the museum visit. We detoured to Nelspoort, where a legacy of rock art and stone bells has been unearthed, but a woman at the local post office told us the man we needed to see was the principal of the town’s school. We decided to move on, given that the school day still had a number of hours in it, and we still needed to make our way to Beaufort West and the Karoo National Park. So those ancient galleries, strewn among countless miles of forgotten farming lands and hunting grounds, showcasing stone sketches of giraffe, kudu, white lion, warthog, impala, dancing sticks and bird people, would have to wait for another visit.

There are more than 15,000 rock art sites in South Africa, and there was always the chance that we might stumble onto one, but the harsh glare of the prevailing sunlight washed out the cracked and colored clay beds and rock fields in the Great Karoo, making it impossible to see anything but endlessly jagged shapes and textures. The last time I had seen rock art in the wild, in Kakadu, near Darwin in Australia, I suffered through long bus rides and a sustained fever to reach a wilderness of Aboriginal rock paintings. Given the oppressive heat and my feverish state, the images, chalked in ancient stone, seemed to pop off the rocks and fly around me in three dimensions. It felt as if I was living in Chatwin’s dream journals.

Back in Cape Town, I returned to the museum to explore more of what I had missed among the stones. Eland, the largest of the antelope, were a powerful symbol, represented often. In Bushman art, they are rendered in a polychromatic style with multiple colors fading into one another, a characteristic that is unique to the Bushmen, not found in any other prehistoric society. The eland was believed to be the most powerful animal of all, and its potency was harnessed by shamans to enter the spirit world to perform rituals of healing, protection or calling the rain. When Bushmen talk of the eland while on a hunt they use the word for “dance” – the trance or medicine dance being the most important ritual in Bushman society.

The rocks tell stories in pictures. Mud was the womb in the beginning. Creatures like the warthog, wildebeest and elephant were made with black mud, while the eland was created out of red mud and the giraffe out of white mud. Zebra was the first animal to be branded at the start of the world, and their stripes indicate supernatural power and beauty. Bees are the messengers of God, equally comfortable in the heavens of flight and the depths of the underground world. Ostriches introduced the ritual of dancing to the Bushmen, especially courtship dances. Some lore suggests that only the ostrich and the moon can regenerate themselves. Others believe that an ostrich claimed the title of king of all animals during the First Order of Existence, merely by tricking the lion into believing that it had teeth. In trance, on spiritual journeys, lions can be a malevolent force, but baboons will be friendly. And so on.

All animals were once people, according to Bushman belief, until a locust branded them differently. As such, every species, from the worm and the locust to the elephant and the eland, deserve ritualistic respect as part of the family of Earth. The Bushmen knew intuitively what we are still learning, as scientists try to figure out why dung beetles orient themselves to the Milky Way and how certain lemurs can ingest natural toxins that would kill a human in an instant and how mussels adhere to wet rocks and vibrate to warn the rest of the community whenever a predator approaches. Hunting may be necessary for survival, but indiscriminate killing, wanton destruction and vanity poaching is a sin against Nature. In our zeal to prove that we are the most destructive creature on Earth, we are eliminating species before they can teach us what we may need to know to survive our own ignorance. The lesson, repeated a thousandfold, cries out from the stones. We ignore the dancing eland at our own peril.

Lost in Translation

One of the pleasures of Cape Town is listening to its daily polyglot soundtrack of voices, everything from English to Afrikaans to isiXhosa to any number of other official South African tongues to the traveler’s languages of Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Swahili. It is a Babel of babble, a lively and animated chorus of conversations from the markets to the cafes. Elsewhere in the country, English is understood, isiXhosa is often spoken in the townships and African communities and Afrikaans hangs on in the cities and suburbs, no longer the dominant language, but still spoken and heard in traditional towns such as Graaff-Reinet, where we pulled in for the night after Addo. I am hopeless in speaking, reading or understanding it, which is as much a product of my English-centric American upbringing as my inability make the phlegmish sound required for many of their words. (It is the same with the Xhosa clicks.) But there are words in Afrikaans that have appealed to my reader’s eye, so I spent part of the trip perusing a “woordeboek” (dictionary) to get my bearings and found it to be as much of a cultural adventure as visiting wild parks, museums, giant telescopes and art galleries.

Some Afrikaans words, like “trek” and “aardvark,” have entered the English lexicon, but most remain unique to this little corner of the world, making every encounter a unique discovery.

My frequent journeys to Kloof Street were physical metaphors of the Afrikaans-English hybrid that South Africa became. “Kloof” means cliff in Afrikaans. The street, which rises above the City Bowl to the lower part of Table Mountain, used to be called Kloof Straat. For some reason, the city kept Kloof instead of changing to Cliff but got rid of Straat in favor of Street.

Some Afrikaans words are in common use here – “Pap” for a kind of porridge, for example, “dagga” for weed, “dankie” for thanks, “lekker” for sweet or great, or “bakkie” for a pick-up truck, and – on signs if not often spoken – “winkel” for shop, “apteek” for pharmacist or chemist shop and “klip” for stone.

The language of language itself would be recognizable to any English speaker. Noun is “naamwoord” (nameword), which serves its function perfectly. A verb is a “werkwoord.” While to be anonymous is to be “naamloos” (nameless). (One of my favorite finds was learning that “sterre” is both the word for a little star and an asterisk.)

Some words just sound wonderfully right in a Lewis Carroll kind of way. “Naaldprikking” is a word used for acupuncture. “Uitlander” (outlander) is one term for alien. “Onhandig” (one-handed?) means awkward. “Pluimbal” (plume ball?) is the term for badminton. A bargain is a “winskoop.” A billy goat is a “bokram” (buck ram). Blasphemy is the evocative “godslastering.” Coronation is “kroning” (crowning). Death is “dood.” Dusk is conjured by the enchanting word “skemering.” Frog is a “padda” (and a mushroom is a “paddastoel”). Gloom is “somberheid.” A hammock is a “hangmat.” A hangover is “babbelas.” A manuscript is a “handscrif.” A massacre is a “bloedbad” (bloodbath). A miracle is a “wonderwerk.” A mustache is a “snorbaard.” The sounds-like-what-it-is word of onomatopoeia is the equally musical “klanknabootsing.” Smog is the ominous sounding “rookmis.” Squirrel is the mischievous “eekhorinkie.”  A trampoline is a “wipmat.” A vendetta is a “bloedwraak.” An artificial eye is a “glasoog.”

The lovely word “dwaal,” meaning to err, wander or roam, finds its way into other words, such as “dwaalgees” (wandering spirit) and “dwaalspoor” (false track) and “dwaallig” (will-o-the-wisp). To the purposeful Afrikaners, there is a dangerous connotation to “dwaal.” Anything “dwaal” would threaten the “trek.” But the word suits me. In any meaningful journey, getting lost, following false tracks and keeping the company of wandering spirits separates the traveler from the tourist. Explorers can’t help themselves. They have to dwaal. “Dwaal” is where the stories live.

Addo Afternoon

We arrived at the national park in Addo at noon, during the hottest hour of the hottest day of our trip – typically not the best time for game-viewing, since most creatures would be looking for shade and resting. The camp had no vacancies, so we were limited to whatever we could see that afternoon. Addo began as an elephant park to protect the last remaining African elephants in the region. It is the only place in the world that hosts the Big 7 (including the Big 5 of lion, leopard, black rhino, buffalo and elephant, along with the oceanic southern right whale and great white shark in the marine section). The park extends over five unique habitats from Darlington Lake to the Zuurberg mountains through the dense valley bushveld of Sundays River Valley and lush indigenous forests of the green Woody Cape, hugging the largest coastal dune fields of the Southern Hemisphere, to Bird & St. Croix Islands in the Indian Ocean. All of that was well and good. But I wasn’t desperate to see elephant, which I have observed before at Kruger. What drew me to Addo was the dung.

Elephant dung, which is in abundance in the park, is the life source of the endangered flightless dung beetle, one of the most fascinating creatures on Earth. Signs at Addo read: “Caution: Dung Beetles Have Right Of Way.” The insects have been the subject of recent news and glowing profiles in such magazines as The New Yorker. Dung beetles feed on scat, but rather than eating their meals on site, they shape it into a ball and roll it away to dine in privacy. Scientists in Sweden have discovered that they use the Milky Way to get their bearings, navigating along straight paths even on clear, moonless nights, using the starry sky for orientation. Experiments with dung beetles in a South African planetarium showed that the insects even perform a ritualistic orientation dance on their dung ball before following the line of the Milky Way, but when scientists removed the galaxy from the overhead star pattern, they became lost and confused.

Given the copious amount of dung we saw in the road, mostly elephant and buffalo, it was a promising afternoon for a dung beetle sighting. But the driving was difficult, since running over dung with your tires is prohibited on the chance that a beetle might be working somewhere inside it. The trip we took amounted to three hours of dirt roads, looking for game while slaloming continually around elephant droppings. From the Southern Gate entrance we worked our way to a waterhole, figuring that might be our best chance to see wildlife. The decision paid off. There were two elephant standing in a pond, using their trunks to spray themselves with water (and occasionally splashing warthogs sneaking up for a drink). On the rise to our right, small herds of red hartebeest and Burchells zebra gathered, slowly wending their way through the foliage to the water. We watched the antics between old and young warthogs and the stubborn elephants until other cars showed up, passing through a range of biomes while stopping at various lookouts and watering holes, spotting plenty of zebra and buck and ostrich. Somewhere near the Domkrag Dam we saw a large herd of elephants moving through the landscape. Some had stopped to drink, sharing the pond with secretary birds, blue cranes and more warthogs. A baby elephant, mother close to its side, was prodded to move whenever it lingered too long by a gentle tap from the mother’s trunk.

The day’s quest was an anticlimax, as we traveled past more than 2,000 piles of dung but no beetles in action. We scrambled for lodging outside the park, landing at the Elephant House, where we had our own cottage. A little skink-like lizard spent the evening on top of my laptop as I typed, seemingly as fascinated in my activity as I was in its courageous curiosity. The next morning, our breakfast was served outside a nearby building that contained two giant blackboards. One was filled with inspirational quotes from Nelson Mandela. On the other was chalked the parable of “The Rich Industrialist and the Poor Fisherman,” a lesson for all lives spent contemplating the ways of skinks and dung beetles instead of hedge funds and daily fluctuations in the stock market.

I’m paraphrasing, but the gist goes:  A rich industrialist on vacation at an island paradise saw a fisherman resting in the middle of the afternoon. “There’s plenty of light left,” the businessman said. “Why aren’t you out catching fish?” “I’ve caught enough for the day,” the fisherman answered. The rich man explained that if he worked here he’d fish until he had enough money to buy a new and bigger boat, which would help him make even more money. “And then,” the fisherman asked. “Then you could buy a second boat or even a fleet of boats and have people working for you and make even more money,” the industrialist said. “And then,” the fisherman asked. “Then you could relax here like me,” the businessman said. The fisherman replied: “But I’m relaxing already.”

Shell Life

A day after chasing invisible elephants, we kept going East until the light ran out. Shortly after a disorienting drive in the dark looking for lodging in Humansdorp, we found our way to Jeffreys Bay, where several friendly locals helped us find a place for the night. Sandkasteel (Afrikaans for “Sandcastle”) is aptly named, a large self-catering accommodation with a back door propped in the sand, opening to views of the ocean, with a long corridor connecting to rooms inside rooms, like a series of Chinese boxes. Our place required seven keys for seven locks, including three skeleton keys and one circular alarm key, evidence of the prevailing circumstance of homes and guest houses, especially in places that were once predominantly Afrikaner towns. Gated entrances, security guards, locks, alarms, CCTV cameras and razor wire are as much a part of a suburban middle-to-upper class dwelling here as welcome mats and mailboxes are in America. In the vast building, there was only one other vacationer, and so it felt as if we had the sea to ourselves that night. I went outside, watching the stars of the Southern Hemisphere dangle in dazzling repose, the Southern Cross seemingly close enough to climb. Suddenly a flock of glowing white wings flew beneath the stars. I would have thought them gulls, their wings illuminated by some trick of beachside lighting, except their uniform V-shape in flight didn’t remind me of any gulls I’d ever seen before. (Gulls, a chaotic, individualistic lot, never seem to follow orders the way, say, geese do.) But whatever they were, the wings and the stars and relentless ocean surf were worth the long miles of asphalt we had endured that day.

Jeffreys Bay is famed for two things: Surf and seashells. As a result, everyone is an expert on the tides here, and the beaches have become a pilgrimage for any serious surfer or conchologist. It earned its wave-riding reputation in the mid-Sixties with the release of the cult classic surf film, “Endless Summer.” And the backpackers’ hostels and beaches attract the kind of folks who are always on a quest of some sort, whether involving a wetsuit and a longboard or a plastic bag. The same swells and break that made the world-famous Tubes, attracting surfers looking for the perfect wave, also brings the shells out. J-bay, as it’s called, is the shell capital of South Africa, with more than 400 types identified as frequent visitors.

I woke at 7, hoping to walk out the back and start my own shell collection. It was a perfect morning, breezy and warm, with a golden glow surrounding the crescent beach. But I was already too late. Dozens of women carrying large plastic bags had already scoured the best shells from the last high tide. I went out among them, hunting through the remaining slim pickings. Some of the women were looking for shells to bring to market. Others were indulging in their favorite holiday hobby. Serious collectors, who were not likely to sell their finds, held smaller bags. I scraped up two-dozen or so varieties among the turbans and mottled venus, zigzag clams and platter shells, chitons and tellins, sea urchins and otter shells, and stored them in a bag for their long journey to the North Atlantic.

Seashells, in their infinite variety of shapes, textures, colors and sizes, represent the discarded remnants of the living. They are homes abandoned, relics of some previous existence, endlessly echoing the rhythms of the primordial ocean. Humans are attracted to them in part, I think, because we can’t make them. We can only discover them. It would be nice if we could leave a shell behind now and then as a testament to our former homes and past lives, old lovers and lost friends, priceless memories and significant moments. But we are no longer of the sea, and we have forgotten what it feels like to move with a natural grace between the tides. So we look for cowries to put on a shelf and keep us as close to the source of the mystery as we can stand.

The Last Elephant(s) of Knysna Forest

We spent a morning in the Knysna Forest chasing phantoms. It was a cursory visit, the kind one makes to Loch Ness looking for the Monster, but it left a lingering impression. On narrow, twisting dirt roads with hairpin turns and steep climbs and drops, views were obscured by the blinding sun, whose rays disappeared into the green shadow of a thick, impenetrable forest. Somewhere in here, a herd of elephants lives. No one knows how many. They represent all that remains from the vast Cape bush elephant that roamed southern Africa for generations. Wherever they are, however many there are, they are the only truly wild and free elephant population in South Africa (even those in a park as large as Kruger will eventually run into a fence). And they are almost never seen.

Forest workers, guards and timber truck drivers may spot them now and then but otherwise sightings have been so rare that for years many people believed the elephants were mere myth, ghosts of the forest, spirits playing tricks on the living. Then, for two decades, beginning with a sighting in the 1980s, it was thought that only one elephant remained in Knysna Forest. A female, aged somewhere between 30 and 50 years, she was believed to be the last elephant of a dwindling herd that once numbered about 600 more than a century ago. When settlers moved into the area, the elephants were poached for their ivory tusks. The poaching was brutal. Often their tusks were ripped out before they had died. When gold was discovered in the region, a mining community grew. Even though the seam tapped out quickly, people stayed and the remaining elephants were viewed as a threat. Most were shot by big game hunters. By 1920, only 10 elephants remained. They went into hiding in the forest and were almost never seen by the people who lived around them.

Even during a short journey like ours, along the 7 Passes Road to George, beyond Reenendal, through Homtini Pass, toward Kraaibos and Barrington, one can imagine a herd of elephants in the thick, claustrophobic denseness of the surrounding foliage, mingling in the thriving yellowwood, kalander and stinkwood, feasting on the fruits of the sacred forest and the appetizing fynbos leading to the sea.

The female first sighted in 1987 was thought to be the sole survivor, the matriarch without a mate who would go down in the annals of the Earth as the last of her kind. She would forever be a creature of mystery. One local scientist reported seeing her, having emerged from the forest to the edge of the sea, in communion with a blue whale that had surfaced near the shoreline. But in recent years there have been sightings by forest officials and residents of a small herd of mostly young males. And, more and more, people have encountered the dung and spoor that offer proof. The males are aggressive when discovered, attacking and trampling anyone they see. An old saw holds that elephants have long memories. The years of hiding – decades dedicated to the art of silence and stillness and camouflage, a century in isolation – have not diminished the loss and suffering caused by the most destructive animal on the planet. They remain ghosts to us. We remain demons to them.

Twitching

It was in Heidelberg when I first devoted myself to leisurely hours of twitching. The term, originating among the birdwatching community of Britain, technically refers to those who travel long distances to see a rare bird. In my case, as someone who is still struggling to distinguish the differences between our avian friends, it applies to a wannabe New England birder who flew on metal wings to a land that is closer to the South Pole than to Boston.

The Cape turtle doves woke me every morning in Cape Town and throughout the Western Cape, their “kuk kuroo, kuk kuroo” cries joined on occasion by the less melodic, more monotonous red-eyed dove and monkey-like laughing dove. Sometimes overhead I’d hear the raucous hadedas, ibises named for the noise they make, making the short journey from the Company’s Gardens, where they are abundant in the foliage. Errant gulls from the nearby sea swooping through for a cheap scavenger meal around Long Street would also call out now and then. Given my Rhode Island roots, it’s the one call that makes me feel at home anywhere in the world.

Another noisy bird, the Cape francolin, came in a pair as semi-permanent residents at our guest house on a cliff in Fish Hoek, where they walked down the steps several times a day to nibble house plants and ventured to the front of the building each morning to issue their wake-up calls, a series of sharp barks ending in a wicked, cackling laugh.

Egyptian geese had the run of Cape Town, along with pigeons in the Company’s Gardens that nibbled around your feet, flew to your table and took particular delight in sitting on branches overhead, using you for target practice. Cormorants plied the coast, while red-winged starlings seemed to be everywhere, curious and intelligent and unafraid to come within table distance.

On our journeys, ostrich were prevalent. The largest bird in the world, distinctive by its size, black (male) or dusky brown (female) feathers and long, Slinky necks, ostriches are commonly found on roadside farms but also in game parks and other wild places. They are capable of disemboweling a human in an instant with a swift kick, but somehow that didn’t stop us from seeking them out, turning into ostrich paparazzi at the beaches along Cape Point.

Long drives were accompanied by pied crows and white-necked ravens, both flashing white on their black bodies, scouring the barren earth for roadkill or other easy pickings. We also saw jackal buzzards and yellow-billed kites and other raptors that were difficult to identify, swooping over the desolate landscape.

Large, dinosaur-looking secretary birds were common at watering holes in the wild parks, along with white storks, cattle egrets and black-headed herons. The stars at Boulders Beach and elsewhere around Simonstown and the Cape Point coastline were the small African penguins (formerly known as jackass penguins because of their distinctive braying calls). We had a leisurely morning on the rocks and sand among them as they socialized, napped or found their own private Idahos in the maze of coves.

The most distinctive birds at Kirstenbosch are the helmeted Cape guinea fowl (my father’s favorite animal, as evidenced by his little collection of handcrafted guinea fowl roaming around his Rhode Island home). Their distinctive appearance (with red crested helmets and blue faces and large black eyes and spiky bits of feather and skin on top of a plump, speckled black body) and quirky, herky-jerky movement and behavior make them worth following around the garden (it’s as good a way as any to tour Kirstenbosch, which offers natural delights and surprises around every corner). We also saw Cape robin-chats, Cape white-eyes, African dusky flycatchers, Cape sugarbirds, Karoo prinias and Knysna warblers. But our biggest find was a Southern double-collared sunbird, a tiny singer on a branch, colored in bands of iridescent green, red and blue. It looked like a little warbling, vibrating gemstone.

The first bird I identified in Heidelberg, using my aunt’s South African bird book, was the Cape wagtail, a cheeky little gray bird that reminded me of the mockingbirds back home. It wandered around me on the ground while I studied the bird book at a picnic table, plucking up insects, wagging its tail while it walked, even stepping over my toes. Mustard-colored Cape canaries fed in droves at the birdbath, along with the odd Cape weaver and several Cape sparrows. Forgive me the partial spewing of my travel list, but this twitching is compulsive. I returned home to wake up with mourning doves and watch the osprey that had come back to the cove for the spring, and the birds of South Africa, now thousands of miles away, are just a distant memory. And yet the minutes and hours spent observing them, knowing we are looking at what survived when the dinosaurs succumbed to asteroid aftermath, understanding that somehow the species found a way to take wing and continue on for centuries in this mystery play we all take part in, fed the part of me that requires some sacred meditation everyday. Watching them be, spending their days and nights actively engaged, each in their own purposeful way, helps to erase some of the madness and chaos and divisiveness that our species brings to the world. And when our asteroid comes, or if we destroy each other beforehand, I wonder if some of us will have the dinosaur sense to grow wings and move on.

The Old Stories

After leaving Cape Town, we drove to Heidelberg for an overnight stay with my Aunt Dof and Uncle Nick, who have retired there. It was the first time I had seen them in South Africa in 18 years and, so, it was a time to indulge in hours of the old stories, those instant scrapbook memories that bring laughs and tears at every family reunion, along with reflections and revelations that emerge with the passing of time.

My relatives managed to sell the big house they once lived in but kept the yard, garage and sheds behind it and converted them into a beautifully designed dwelling built for leisurely days, with meandering gardens and a porch facing a bird bath and the street beyond, an outside picnic area and a guest bed-and-bath separate from the main house. The small living room, dining area, porch and picnic table are all suited for lingering conversation, and the hours passed in anecdotes and favorite stories retold. Nick and Dof, in their time, have lived all over South Africa and held dozens of jobs. Nick, a former national champion bodybuilder, worked in four mines – mica, iron, asbestos and gold – eventually left mining to get a degree and become a preacher. But it wasn’t long before he abandoned the ministry to go back to the mines, declaring that he found less hypocrisy in the community of people blowing up rocks underground than in the church. Over the years, he also helped build a dam, owned stores, constructed a boat that he and Dof later sailed to Mozambique and elsewhere, started chess clubs and, with Dof, even operated a fish-and-chips store and a hot dog cart at various points. Once, in desperate need of money, he painted landscapes on canvases and convinced a local shop owner to hang them. Twenty-one of 22 sold. The other hangs in his house. It was the only time he ever painted.

Some of the time, between the summer breezes, the darting dragonflies and fluttering butterflies and the sound of chimes, we spoke of family now gone, friends long lost. Other times we rehashed our own lives, travels and adventures. We spoke about the differences and similarities between our countries. We talked about American and British television personalities – like Oprah, Dr. Phil and Simon Cowell, who are all extremely popular in South Africa. And we talked about race. Nick and Dof are among the least prejudiced relatives I have in South Africa. They have always lived in mixed communities, worked with diverse groups of people and consider each person on his or her own merit, regardless of race or religion. “It’s not the color, it’s the character,” Nick said. “In some ways, South Africa is dealing with race more openly and honestly than America ever has,” I interjected. “Growing up, I was never taught about Rhode Island’s role in the slave trade. And there are a lot of people, even now in America, who cling to absurd ideas about being part of a pure race. There is no pure race. And why would anybody want there to be? It’s like breeding dogs. Keep insisting that everyone only marry and mingle within their own little communities and all you end up with is a bunch of crazy people.”

All conversations in South Africa eventually circle back to the country’s history and some discussions of today’s problems. But sometimes you can find out more about a place in the stories that are personal rather than political. Nick talked about how, once, while supervising the construction of a dam, someone’s bicycle was stolen. His assistant, a man named Samson, insisted that they visit the local witch doctor. “He was a tiny little man with a big belly and he had all these wives, all these children of different sizes running around,” Nick said. “We gave him a beer and a brandy and asked him to locate our bicycle.” Nick said the witch doctor went into a kind of trance then announced that the bicycle was lying in a dry river bed. Nick asked where that might be. The witch doctor said that information would cost extra. Nick said he would gladly pay him extra if he took them to the bicycle. “That will be extra,” the witch doctor insisted. “I am willing to pay you extra,” Nick replied. “Take me to the dry riverbed with the bicycle in it.” The impasse was never resolved.

Dad and Nick also recalled a time when my aunt and uncle were living near Wynberg in a home over a shop. On the roof, Nick had a makeshift bird shelter, housing about 30 canaries. In the middle of a rainy night, someone crashed into a post on the corner of the building. The impact collapsed the shelter and released the birds, sending Dad and Nick outside in the pitch dark and pouring rain, grabbing at the air, clutching at stunned canaries.

Stories came in waves. A previous renter of the house they now live in had a leg amputated but kept a car and tried to drive by using a broomstick to push down on the gas and brake. He died tragically, if somewhat predictably, in a head-on collision some time later.

Dof pulled out a map of South Africa, with lines charting all of the routes she has driven in recent years with my sister, during her frequent visits from England. “It really is such a beautiful country,” she said. “You forget.”

We heard about a local fellow, known as See What I Mean Man, for his habit of punctuating every sentence with the phrase, “See What I Mean.” He borrowed money from them and never saw them again. Nick and Dof said it was worth it not to have to hear the catch phrase anymore.

We talked about chess, a game that Nick loves. He has given hundreds of sets away to aspiring players, and as I left, he handed one to me.

“Chess is the game of life,” he said. “If you make a mistake, it’s not because your opponent is better than you. It’s because you made a mistake.”

Notes on a Rambling Road

The road began on Bree Street in Cape Town and continued through the clogged City Bowl past the outlying shanty town of Khayelitsha – where scraps of billboards and metal are propped up in the sand to serve as lodging, many of them equipped with satellite dishes – and eventually to the N2 and back roads and highways beyond. We made overnight stops in Heidelberg, Knysna, Jeffreys Bay, Addo, Graaff-Reinet, Karoo National Park, Prince Albert and (after a long day of driving to Sutherland and the largest space telescope in the Southern Hemisphere), to Robertson and back to Heidelberg, where I dropped off my father and headed back to Cape Town International to pick up a friend from Rhode Island. The rest of the journey included two nights in Fish Hoek and drives to Cape Point, the whale road to Hermanus, the shark port of Gansbaii, the wine country of Franschhoek and back to Cape Town, where I ended the trip at a backpacker’s hostel next door to my sister’s flat at Victoria Court, Long Street.

 

On the roads (not just in the game parks) we saw wildlife. Vervet monkeys scampering along stretches of the Eastern Cape. Crows with white bands around their necks sitting in pairs on power lines. Baboons, occasionally solo, but once in a mass troop of 70 or more, in the middle of a major highway. The mothers grabbed babies by their limbs and tossed them over the shoulder to the bank as cars flew through at 120 kilometers an hour. We saw plenty of antelope, including springbok, steenbok and various other kinds of bok that we had trouble identifying given our distance and our speed. There were many ostrich roaming about and predator birds – hawks and falcons – soaring overhead. Giant tortoises lumbered across some of these same highways and occasionally we’d see roadkill – usually hare – and hope it wasn’t the endangered Riverine Rabbit, a rare resident of the Karoo.

 

On the highways, usually just outside the towns, scores of Africans would hold out their hands, hitchhiking, sometimes flashing 10 Rand or 20 Rand as an enticement. We’d see them everyday, sometimes in remote areas, at all times of day, and wonder where they came from, where they were going and how long they had waited. But we didn’t offer anyone a ride. There had been too many incidents reported in the paper of attacks on travelers and so the thought of having strangers in the back seat was unsettling. (At one point I spoke to three straight people who mentioned that a relative of theirs had been murdered while out on a drive in recent years.) President Zuma, speaking about the nation, publicly criticized those who say South Africa is a violent country. But the headlines show he is wrong. (Not that gun-crazed America deserves the moral high ground on this point.) Some of the journalists are taking him to task for his stance. One, on the radio, compared Zuma’s words to former President Mbeki’s denial of AIDS and unemployment as problems in South Africa, saying that the country is still suffering the consequences from such ignorance, defiance and lack of leadership.

 

In the suburbs and even on the highways, we saw hawkers selling anything they could, from baskets of fruit to pink flamingos, sunglasses to CDs. They stood in the middle of the road as traffic whizzed by, holding up their wares, hoping to snag a sale. I never saw anyone stop (except a police car once, to chase away one of a hundred men hawking grapes on the N1), or roll down the window at a traffic light.

 

The church was the centerpiece of every Afrikaner town. All main roads led to it.  In Ashton, we saw hundreds of African women and men, mostly dressed what appeared to be blue hospital scrubs, walking en masse. Known as Blourokkies (Blue Dresses), they are part of South Africa’s largest Pentecostal church. Faith, in its multiple forms, including the active mosque life of Cape Town’s Moslem population, remains a significant strand of South Africa’s daily life, and a Puritanical strain persists. Even on television, vulgarity and violence was as common as you’ll find in America, but anytime a character mentioned “God” (outside of prayer or in a reverential way), the deity reference was dubbed out.

 

Once, along the N1, we saw a sign:

Number of Accident-Free Days: 0

Record: 11

 

Shortly afterward, we were in gridlock with hundreds of trucks and cars, scattered on all sides of a highway. Some of the drivers got out and created a new route for small cars. We took it, at times driving at a 45-degree angle along a bank of clay and scrub. Eventually we made our way to the scene of an accident. A truck, loaded with lumber planks, had overturned and was blocking the road from one side to the other. People grabbed planks and began building an improvised, temporary road, allowing cards to drop into a trench and climb to another bank. We joined the queue. Every time a car passed over the planks, dislodging them, someone adjusted the makeshift road for the next driver. We barreled along on a high bank, overlooking the spill and passing most of the stuck cars, many of which would be there all day. In all, we lost 18 minutes.

 

The appeal of the South African road is in the landscape, a panorama of natural colors and delights, mountain and sky, mist and ocean, cloud and sun, seemingly endless in its beauty and variety. We drove dusty, rock-strewn roads with dangerous, hairpin curves, hanging over the edge of long drops, and flat, smooth asphalt (the envy of any Rhode Islander forced to endure years and miles of potholes). We climbed and dropped through several magnificent passes, gaping at the scenery while focusing on the road. At many points, the drive became a kind of trance, with the looming landscapes of the dry Karoo, the alien topography of Sutherland, the mystical Swarteberg, the enchanted Hex River Valley, the ghostly Hottentots all calling out their ancient road magic, spellbinding everything that moves between them.