Forest Fantasy (The House That Chunkie Built)

A red lourie feather. A strip of lichen-covered bark. The husk of a protea flower base, seed indentations spiralling out in Fibonacci whorls.  A starfish skeleton. A broken pansy shell. These are the coastal forest keepsakes gathered on my desk, reminders of a place where I long to be.

Forests coloured my early imagination. Stories of houses in the woods, of winding paths and breadcrumb trails. Of things hidden in the shadows, lurking possibilities. Lurking dangers too – wolves and witches and grandmamas, or imps who would grant desperate wishes in return for some future payment you really should know better than to pledge. 

There was no real forest where I grew up, in New York City. But when I discovered one, years later, just a few hours' drive from my Cape Town home, I set my heart on it. I dreamed of having a piece of it. Of course you never can really possess that cycle of humus and musk and atmosphere. I just wanted to safeguard it, and be allowed to be safe there, myself.

Twenty years ago an opportunity came up for me to do just that. A plot for sale in a forest eco-development coincided with a windfall (well, I'd earned it).  I bought a small slice of indigenous forest - the sloping canopy made a three dimensional triangle as deep as it was wide. Pioneering keurbooms marked the forest edge, giving way to candlewoods and yellowwoods, stinkwood and ironwood, bokkenhout and assegai trees.

We camped there over December, my husband and I, mapping the terrain and the trees – none would be harmed in the making of our dwelling, not if we could help it. We slept in the back of the bakkie and I got stung by a forest scorpion. (With his big black pincers, he was more fierce-looking than poisonous.)

I wanted to build a Zen retreat, clean-lined and light on the land. I pictured a tower, book-lined inside, so you could browse as you spiralled up to the writing eyrie at the very top, from where you would look out over the treetops to the Outeniqua mountains. It was the perfect place to retire and write, one day.

But life had other plans. We realised we made better buddies than spouses, and divided our assets with an amiableness that startled our friends. It made much more sense for him to move to the forest – he needed out of the rat race, my career was peaking. And so he moved there, and I stayed on in the city.

But first I made a solo trip to the plot, set up a tent and spent some time thinking things through.

One misty morning I sat with a cup of camp tea gazing down the slope to where the fog settled thickest. I could barely make out the tree trunks through the haze, but thought I saw something move. A twig cracked. A shape morphed out of the mist. Then another. A band of baboons was moving quietly left to right, passing across the bottom of 'my' plot, using some hidden, private track. I knew then that it wasn't really mine.

My ex-husband-and-forever-friend made a life there. He honed his skills as a natural builder, using offcuts from other sites to create a tree house like no other. I visited every year, first on my own, then with my small son, and watched the bush kitchen-and-sleeping platform expand into a series of wood-and-glass rooms on three levels, linked by walkways through trees. I bathed my boy in a plastic basin on a deck in the canopy and watched the fireflies blink on. At night I peed over the edge of the balcony because the compost toilet out back was just too far. (After a few years of hinting, he graciously put a toilet in the house itself.)  

Travellers always feel welcome. There is an owl eyrie at the very top; if you climb the ladder you can sleep there, and wake up to the view I'd once imagined, and the sound of the loeries: kow-kow-kow.

You can walk through that forest for days without seeing another human soul. You can fill your pockets with feathers and seeds, with moss and old man's beard. You can bring them back home to remind you of a place that turned out better than anything you'd imagined.

 (This article originally appeared in Visi Magazine January 2016 issue.)

long-distance haiku

I cut my finger the day you left
the bleeding has stopped
but still I keep the plaster on

When a Lit Fest Turns Into Taxidermy Hell

It was such a find. We made a latish booking for the Franschhoek Literary Festival. With only a month to go, most of the guesthouses were taken. But we found a self-catering cottage on a wine farm. Yes please!

The pictures showed a cute thatched structure high up on a mountain, with amazing views of valley over autumnal vineyards. Breakfast was included. Bonus!

So we booked it, and when we arrived on the day the cottage was everything it said it was. Large open-plan under a roof of crazy beams and thatch. En suite with comforts like a kettle and heater.

Nothing to prepare us for the horror to come.

The cottage was separate from the main building, which called itself a lodge. (Big hint there.) There were zebra and springbok on the surrounding fields, wildebeest and a few larger buck too. (Another clue that passed us by.) Some farmers have horses, I thought, others like their livestock a bit wilder.

What the owner of this lodge liked best, it soon became clear, was to serve his wildlife stuffed.

We took the short road to breakfast the next morning, and walked into a hall of death.

The lion greeted us just inside the door. His teeth were bared, his eyes blazed yellow. They were marbles. His hide was soft and tawny, the 'body' beneath it was hard. I know because I reached out and stroked him. My hand burned with the memory of it all though the meal.

We had entered a macabre mausoleum to one man's blood lust. There were eight heads in the dining room. I counted them, waiting for my poached eggs. 

They were mounted high up on the walls, their throats huge and soft and vulnerable. 

These were the most majestic of buck: eland, impala, kudu. There were European stags, Asian rams the antlers of American elk. There was a buffalo. No continent had been spared, it seems. 

There was a large artistic impression of a leopard. Kitty corner to it on the next wall was a photograph of a hunter with a gun, foot on the limp body of a leopard lying along a branch. (How many people had it taken to lift the spotted cat onto the log, and pose him there? He looked like he was in a rest from which he might spring up, grab that hunter by the ankle, drag that inane triumphant smile right off his face...) 

I wondered aloud whether the picture was of the same animal that the man shot. It was, the M'aitre d' assured me. 'That's him over there.' 

He pointed to the entrance hall. And there the leopard was, above an arched doorway, standing this time, on a different branch, posed to look threatening. I hadn't even noticed him when I walked in, drawn as I'd been to the lion's intense, dead yellow eyes.

There were some moose horns in that passage too. In this case they hadn't bothered with the rest of the head. The place was a tribute to taxonomy. (One of the heads still had the tag dangling from it.) But these trophies had not been bought. They were, the Maitre d' told me, all animals that the owner of the lodge had personally killed, himself. He had built this lodge, in fact, to house his considerable collection.

 

Sticking my knife into the little squares of butter, spreading marmalade on toast. I could tell David was feeling squeamish too. Across the hall from the dining room was a cosy lounge; a fire burned bright in the grate, which was straddled by two enormous elephant tusks. 

We had to rush to make our first FLF session of the day, so made a hasty escape. The quease didn't leave me.

The previous afternoon we'd caught to a discussion on animal rights that included rhino horn trade and trophy hunting. One of the speakers was GarethPatterson, the 'Lion Man', who took George Adams's lions to safety from Tanzania to Botswana. 

"Trophy hunters are serial killers," he said, after demonstrating the ugh-ugh-ugh that he used to communicate with the lions he lived with for so long. 

(He wasn't quite as articulate arguing against sustained harvesting of rhino horn to preserve the very few rhinos we have left, which was John Hanks' suggestion.)

The next morning, our last, we knew what to expect, and it was even more grisly than we remembered. I counted 28 heads in all, not including the free-standing antlers. 

There were two more rooms we hadn't looked at. A passage along the back with ducks and geese in a frieze up the wall, a 3D parody of the ceramic ones people of a certain age and social class have on their walls. These, of course, had once really flown.

There was a second lounge, with glass doors opening on to the view. In its back corner, facing this vista of vineyards and tame wildlife (oxymoron that?), was a giraffe. 

Well, part of a giraffe - the ceilings weren't high enough for all of it, so they just cut him off below the neck. After all, that's the only extraordinary part, isn't it? This part that's greater than the sum of its whole?

There was a foot of some sort in front of Mr Giraffe, with a bit of leg attached. I don't know whether it was his or some other creature's. There was an ashtray or a flat candle on top of it. I really couldn't bear to look any closer, or any more.

But as I turned to escape the room I saw the piece de resistance. In even more excruciating bad taste than the hoof ashtray was the zebra-head-on-a-plinth. The stand was made of hardwood (probably rare). The shape of Africa was cut out of it, the hollow space filled with yet more zebra skin. This whole continent is mine for the taking, the conqueror seemed to be saying.

I have a thing for horses (live ones), so it hurt to see this his wild equid face, made comical as his neck was posed to show off a stripe in the shape of a necktie.

I don't why it is that this wealthy man gets his kicks claiming the life force of these creatures as his own. I don't know why he is not deeply ashamed to display this need publically. I suppose there are people who feel powerful, in the presence of these corpses. As if they'd had a hand in bringing them here, in claiming them. Which, in a way, I suppose they did. 

I don't understand it. I wish I had never seen it. But now that I have, I had to share it. 

The cottage was lovely, the service was excellent, the staff were gracious. But I never, ever, want to go back there again.

Thank you D Bush for additional pix

After the Fire

“It was always such a relief when fire season was over. 
        We hold our breath during the hot dry summer, with its relentless southeaster gales, waiting for the inevitable blazes.
        Fynbos needs fire to regenerate, but before the city crept up around the base of the mountains, those fires had natural causes. These days, too many of them are set by bored, pyromaniac hooligans. Or by mindless tourists tossing cigarettes out of rental-car windows. These days, there are too many fires for the fynbos to recuperate; too little time between blazes for the plants to regenerate, mature and reseed. Burned too young, they edge ever closer to extinction.”

That's a quote from my forthcoming novel, The Seed Thief, which will be published by Umuzi in August 2015. 

This week, those words felt prescient.

 

 

        I took these pictures with a heavy heart. But this last was the most hopefull pic of all. Because these are seeds. Lying in fluffy piles on the sand, waiting. Soft rains are coming. (Soft, please, soft...) 
        Already, a week after I took these pictures, there are green shoots on the mountain moonscape. Watsonia bulbs that will bind the soil. The leucadendrons will follow. 

          We're watching.

Shakira in the Year of the Horse

Dog's Breakfast

In the beginning, there was the word. For me, it started with this dictionary.

(Actaully it probably started with Dr Suesse, but that's a digression that threatens to lurch into rhyming verse.)

So this dictionary, a handsome Oxford volume which I would like to be able to show you in its former, entire, glory, today literally and not proverbially, became the dog's breakfast.

insult - the thing you add to injury...

The Gospel acording to Bruce

Pheonix, Arizona, July, 1978. Bruce Springsteen addresses his audience of 10 000 plus in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum (as told by Rolling Stone reporter Dave Marsh):

'It began with a description of his family, house and home, and his perennial battles with his father. 

"Finally," he says, "my father said to me, 'Bruce, it's time to get serious with your life. This guitar thing is okay as a hobby, but you need something to fall back on. You should be a lawyer' –– which I coulda used later on in my career. He says. 'Lawyers, they run the world.' But I didn't think they did--and I still don't.

"My mother, she's more sensitive. She thinks I should be an author and write books. But I wanted to play guitar. So my mother, she's very Italian, she says. 'This is a big thing, you should go see the priest.' So I went to the rectory and knocked on the door. 'Hi, Father Ray, I'm Mr. Springsteen's son. I got this problem. My father thinks I should be a lawyer, and my mother, she wants me to be an author. But I got this guitar.'

"Father Ray says. 'This is too big a deal for me. You gotta talk to God,' who I didn't know too well at the time. 'Tell him about the lawyer and the author,' he says, 'but don't say nothin' about that guitar'.


"Well, I didn't know how to find God, so I went to Clarence's house. He says, 'No sweat. He's just outside of town.' So we drive outside of town, way out on this little dark road.

"I said, 'Clarence, are you sure you know where we're goin'?' He said, 'Sure, I just took a guy out there the other day.' So we come to this little house out in the woods. There's music blasting out and a little hole in the door. I say, 'Clarence sent me,' and they let me in. And there's God behind the drums. On the bass drum, it says: G-O-D. So I said, 'God. I got this problem. My father wants me to be a lawyer and my mother wants me to be an author. But they just don't understand –– I got this guitar.'

 

"God says, 'What they don't understand is that there was supposed to be an Eleventh Commandment. Actually, it's Moses' fault. He was so scared after ten, he said this is enough, and went back down the mountain. You shoulda seen it--great show, the burning bush, thunder, lightning. You see, what those guys didn't understand was that there was an Eleventh Commandment. And all it said was: Let It Rock!'" '

An extract from Rolling Stone magazine's Bruce Springsteen Raises Cain: A true believer witnesses mass conversions, rock & roll vandalism, a rocket upside the head and a visit with God by Dave Marsh (August 24, 1978) 

See the full story http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bruce-springsteen-raises-cain-19780824

youtube video from a later concert that same year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMLIig1lR1g#t=357