Bog Myrtle & Peat

At the end of a long day at the fences, we’d sit together in the sand or on the lowered back door of the bakkie. Sometimes we’d take guns from the back seats and shoot sand-grouse for the braai, but more often we were distracted by drink and laughter in the sunset. Twenty years have passed since I left South Africa, and the memory of those evenings is buried under a weight of more recent change. But when I lift the lid and climb back into that time, I’m rewarded by the sudden smell of thorn sap and the endless burr of calling doves; by the gin-clear recollection of specific jokes shared between Utt and Frikkie and Stef.

I also recall that on certain stretches of the fence we built in the flatlands near Ons Hoop, we’d sometimes see a dark, confusing shape which would rise up above the veldt like a firework. Flying to a height of forty feet, it would suddenly freeze and turn over upon itself like a bundle of rags – then it would fall vertically back down beneath the horizon again as if it had been tossed like a gymnast from a sheet. The first time I saw this happen, I asked for an explanation. It must have been early in my stay, because when the answer was offered in Afrikaans, I couldn’t make sense of it. I did better as time went on (maar ek es nou sonder oefening), but I don’t remember the Boer name for the bird which performed this strange ritual, and I wasn’t able to pursue the thread anyway. Having no idea what should astonish me in a landscape so endlessly filled with astonishment, I only asked to discover if it was “normal”.

Twenty years later, I realise that I had been watching “a suicide bird”; a korhaan. On a sudden spur of nostalgic curiosity, I searched for “Bird which flies up and falls down South Africa” and the internet showed me pictures of a brown, medium-sized bustard which stands on three floors – a head reached by a staircase from heavy wings, then two parallel elevators down to the feet. The “act of suicide” is part of a display which can go on for hours at a time; each flight and failure is a strategic attempt to mark and delineate a territory. And it’s suddenly perverse to realise that I have learnt more about these birds in half an hour’s research than I did from three long months in their company. 

Some kids make plans for the future. Far in advance of anything which resembles change in their lives, they have it all mapped out with care and diligence: university choices, career paths and even the blocked-out shape of the person they’ll marry. They might even have chosen names for their children when they are still children themselves, but none of these plans ever survive contact with reality. They’re largely forgotten, although sometimes the memory will resurface to make them laugh or curse the simplicity of childhood. But for the rest of us, life comes in a random spatter of influence and distraction. Things just happen, and we occasionally look up and think on the weird and circuitous routes we took to arrive where we are. And it’s easy to say that if only we had known that this is what we wanted, we could have pushed straight for it and saved ourselves a wealth of confusion and heartache. But there’s no more sense in forecasting what’s to come than dwelling on all that you missed.

I could get hung up on the idea that those korhaans were beckoning in the dusk, and that I simply ignored them – but it wouldn’t be true. Because my memories of those months on the veldt are simply hung elsewhere, and if I had gone to look for the birds, I would have missed the chance to learn of Utt’s anxiety about women, or the trick Frikkie pulled with a dead baboon. And how deeply I was struck by the childish, wondering way in which powerful Stef du Plessis used my descriptions to imagine what Scotland must be like, exclaiming Sjoe! to a place from the very opposite of his own outrageous normality. Even then, I wished that I had taken photographs with me to prove the fact that my home was a stone-built house, and how sometimes the rain would pause above my father’s fields to reveal a thousand geese descending.