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Meiringspoort Reveries 2 — scanning time and space in the back of a 1964 Cortina GT

Approaching Meiringspoort from Prince Albert and Klaarstroom. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

13 Sep 2024

Waves crash on indifferent rocks. Paint peels on forgotten farmhouses flashing by on the long road. On the edge of the desert, a little boy lies with only the hot wind for eternal company. In kitchens of houses once lived in, remnants of food eaten in times forgotten moulder on dusty shelves.

The Karoo Dreamer has been a searcher all his life ever since he stepped away from the schoolyard bullies; an eternal eye scanning the cynical terrain for proof of life, inevitably concluding that the more of everything there is, the tinier his mere existence seems to be.

In the impervious veld and mute mountains and on the wild vacant beach he feels even smaller and less significant. On the beach he sees not frolicking humans but their footprints soon dispersed by water, like lives birthed and soon over, hardly more significant than tiny molluscs sucked into granules of quicksand. Try not to blink, for if you blink, when your eye is open again the footprint will be forever gone. As if it had never been there. Was he ever?

Between Steinkopf and Springbok, in the back seat of the Ford Cortina GT, the off-white one with a flash of red edged in chrome, his little eyes bore into purple-clad mountains with baked orange rockfaces. It is 1964 and he is 9. It is the July school holidays and for three weeks there will be no taunting on the playground and the fatigue of having to hear the same dreary insults from kids who would grow up to retain no memory of their cruelty. Kids who were turning the object of their spite into the writer he would become, so that the now old man looks back and is thankful for it. Their darts became his determination.

The bullied child learns empathy and with each taunt and every arrow his empathy deepens, so that when he is an adult he is told by strangers that he has a way with words. But a way with words is not merely a facility for putting one word after another and hoping for the best. The deeper your pain, the more you are putting thoughts down, carried by words. It is the meaning within the assembled words, the way they have flowed from you, that resonates with the reader.

Often he has scant idea of where it is leading. Only when he gets to the end and suddenly he knows, this is when to stop, does he realise that the job is done, the piece is written.

But not yet. Let’s put the boy back in the red leather back seat of the Cortina GT, and see what he sees. But the keener sense in the quiet kid staring out of the back window as the road behind the car is swallowed by time is not his sight, but the taste of last night’s braai. It had been a Sunday, and the man down the road, as sometimes happened on a Sunday, had arrived at the front door with a big bag of four giant lobsters he’d plucked from the Atlantic rocks that morning.

A Ford Cortina GT from the mid-Sixties: my dad’s was white with a red flash; this one is red, flashed with white. (Photo: Pedro Pereira on Pixabay)

Cyril Jackman, the diminutive and distant father, had dispatched them out of sight (thank you Dad), basted them with lemon butter, and later on put them on the coals. No garlic for the Yorkshireman, nawbody wants ter eat that rubbish. But boy could the grumpy old bugger cook. Charred first, flesh side to the heat, until little spots of black appeared on the whitening surface, then turned for the meat under the shell side to cook through. It has remained one of the boy’s favourite meals for decades since.

What happens when that road disappears behind the car as the overtaking Studebaker whooshes past wondering why the strange boy is staring like that? Where does it go? Does it lead to memories of other boys in the backs of other cars that drove that way last week and last year and on and on into periods long gone but which have been captured in remnants left behind? In tin Coca-Cola cans rusting in the veld, thrown from half-wound-down windows by careless boys. Other kids who’ve eaten other meals in other houses in other towns, and everywhere in the veld and on the mountain sides and on the dreary edges of towns there are reminders of them. And where are the rusting remains of the Studebaker now, and whatever happened to dad’s Cortina after the liquidators took it in 1971?

The flaking paint on the wall of a dilapidated house holds the boy’s gaze for four minutes before it disappears from view after it turns from a big house to a speck and then gone, as though it was never there. Generations seemed captured in its peeling paint, he thought, coat upon coat revealing one, two, three, four, five colours, sunbaked paint representing five tranches of other people’s lives. They must have painted it green when they first moved in after they were wed, replaced by ochre when it was due for a repaint when the kids were heading for their adolescence. The sky blue came when the kids were on the verge of leaving home for a life in the city. In the eighteen years that followed they must have scrounged the money to afford that coat of cream and ultimately the final whitewash, now fading as fast as their declining lives. Then, a generation of dilapidation as a once-lively house stands barren while seasons of dust collect and forlorn memories float from room to vacant room.

And within, in its unkempt kitchen, a dusty cereal bowl lies upturned on the grimy floor, a 1962 Jungle Oats tin lies on a shelf, and if you creep up to the window outside and peer in, the cracks in the window panes seem to be doing you a favour by not allowing you to see the human activity there once was in that room, spoon clinking against bowl, water sloshing in the sink, porridge bubbling on the stove.

The ghostly memory of the kettle’s whistle seems to spin in the hot dry wind.

And you wonder where everybody went. What meaning these lives had. You probe the very meaning of existence, theirs, yours, ours. You go to places where every mind goes, some fleetingly, others – the deep thinkers – urgently, endlessly and often hopelessly.

And you wonder, in your late night reveries under the infinite night sky, whether your brother can somehow hear you in the ether, his small whisper in the breeze, even while still lying in his 6-year-old’s little grave on the edge of town. A speck of memory forgotten and unknown by everybody in the world except his little brother, now an old man. And whether that occasional chat you have with him, trying to know him, hoping for answers to eternal hopes and fears, might ever be heard. What if thoughts waft and float on the wind to be discerned by other ears, like prayers of the bereaved aching to be heard.

How lonely it must be in the slight grave on the edge of the desert with only the hot wind for company. Hear me, Phillip.

View towards Cradock from Olive Schreiner’s tomb at the top of Buffelskop in the Swaershoek, Eastern Cape. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The nascent Karoo Dreamer in the back of the Cortina GT has always believed the science of his eyes more than equations and mysteries dredged out of impenetrable books written by people who know too many words but don’t know how best to use them. He learnt long ago that the more big words you throw at people, the less you are able to have them understand what you’re telling them. The words are piled up to form a cairn in which the hope of and desire for understanding are entombed. The cairn is over there, in the lee of that conical koppie, and while one half of his mind is scrambling to understand how nature could make a koppie so precise, so madly symmetrical, so that even a pyramid looks dishevelled by comparison, another part of him is contemplating that cairn, a wart in the skirts of a mountain that formed itself, because don’t mountains do that?

When the kid in the back of the car grew up and was made to go to the army he and his Highlander mates had to build a cairn one day, on a slow march, each carrying a brown stone, one by one, until the cairn was six feet high and he wondered why they had to do it. It had been built for no other reason than to say these men had been there at that time, on that Sunday morning. Somewhere in Lohatla in the Northern Cape the cairn still stands today, a stone encasement of the presence there long ago of men who now are old or dead.

That camp had been called Operation Thunder Chariot, but the rations dispatched were far less than the battalion needed for those three months, so that the sparse rations were rationed doubly and triply, a thousand men got skinnier and skinnier, and returned home to their families barely recognisable. They quickly renamed it Operation Hunger Chariot, and even today those still surviving remember the day the drought was broken, when the regimental sergeant-major returned from the veld with a cow on the back of a Unimog and we gorged on glorious braaied steaks that night. He had “accidentally” run it over, he said, trying to suppress his private delight. RSMs must always look stern and mightily pissed off, even when they’re having fun. It is a requirement of the uniform.

The taste of that slab of steak that was lifted into his varkpan that sun-soft evening is still remembered by the older man, his memory savouring its char and tender bite. When you’ve been without for some time, what before would have been taken for granted seems suddenly heaven sent, seasoned by the Gods, cooked by the anointed.

Standing before his braai in the Karoo today, that steak seems to have been consumed only nights ago, and the ones he is about to throw on to the grid while those flames are still alive and licking can only hope to match the glory of a piece of meat once eaten by a young man forced to do military service that he despised, yet who ironically retains happy memories of unexpected moments. His mind goes to the desert grave again, to the boy who didn’t grow up to taste the world of food his kid brother has been blessed to know. But a slight smile toys with his lips at the thought that at least his elder brother did not have to go to the army.

Like the mysteries held by mountains and in the rolling of the waves that crash against the wild western coast, there is beauty in everything, even in Langenhoven’s ewige gebergtes and the fearful sea.

Approaching Meiringspoort from Prince Albert and Klaarstroom. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The Karoo Dreamer sees more than rock in a mountain and more than water in the wild sea. Like the flickering flames of a fire in the pry of a Karoo night, staring at the lonely, infinite ocean and the mysterious folds and crags of ancient mountains take the mind far away from the body. The dreamer might drive into the veld, alone, climb out of the car and turn the lights off. Lie on his back on the hard ground, and look up to the heavens. Make a loop with a finger, put it to his eye and see only that minuscule dot of distant space, knowing that within that smallness is a world of galaxy upon galaxy. And he is smaller than ever; even the towering mountains of Meiringspoort seem to disappear. The blue car that was parked in Meiringspoort is insignificant, its human contents out of sight.

The eternal cynic in him is frowning, quiet now, under his Big Karoo Sky. Is there meaning in the crashing wave, reason in the wind; are there memories in the somnolent rocks, and what if the hopes and dreams are heard, really heard? And that feeling, that strangest of senses, that somebody may be standing near you; the peculiar sensation of human company where there is none.

Suddenly he doesn’t feel quite so alone. Good night, Phillip. DM

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