Behold my field
It’s now properly cold in the village on the periphery of Durban, well — as cold as it gets on the Eastern seaboard — which is to say that sunbathing on the local beaches is frowned upon if it’s before 9am or after 3pm. Surfing on the other hand commences pretty much as the first hazy rays of light appear on the horizon.
And it’s single digit Celsius mornings of heavy mist mingled in with burning coal and wood fires, seriously heavy emissions from ancient and aging trucks, busses, taxis and cars and in some parking lots, a not inconsiderable amount of smoke from cigarette smokers having an illegal puff.
If you stand still for a moment on the streets and close your eyes, you could imagine you were in an open cast mine in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. It’s a special thing to experience but probably much less so when it’s your daily walk to the taxi or bus rank on the first leg of your journey to work.
The dog walkers generally start around 5am and all but disappear before 7am when the school run traffic really gets going. A millipede of cars, plenty of bakkies, minibus taxis and a load of SUVs make up the regular traffic. To this mix add in the delivery trucks, ambulances and an occasional tractor and you get a sense of peak hour in the village. It’s a carbon dioxide spike of note. I look at the primary school children walking diligently to school in this smog and wonder again if this is the best civilization we can possibly create? It seems an oddly murderous civilisation.
The second shift of dog walkers appear after the 8am rush has died down and the streets have returned to some sort of calm after the buzzing crowds of an hour ago. These are the slower walkers out for a stroll as much as to catch up with other locals, get the latest news and grab a powershot immune booster or an almond milk latte. This crowd is generally the end of the dog-walkers for the day; except for the odd straggler who breaks the rules and takes the mutt out for a stroll at 2pm in the afternoon. Which is deeply perplexing to some locals who can’t abide by this reckless disregard for the generations of folkways.
Other things that perplex the locals and have them swinging their heads around and all the way back, slowly and with that open-mouthed stare that only generations of privilege can give you, are colourful pants. Take your morning stroll or jog in a pair of grey or black running longs and t-shirt and you’re just another mug on the streets. Swop out the grey sweatpants for a pair of bright blue and gold Ghanaian print pants and suddenly the locals want to know who has the temerity to walk around with loud pants. On a Monday morning, nogal.
The locals also have a thing about keeping their yards very clean. It’s imperative that your yard is always clean. Grass, shrubs, trees and pretty much any living plant must be removed and the yard paved over. At worst — and only because you lack the money to have the paving done — you will proceed to concrete over anything that is within the confines of the boundary of your property. ‘The trees make such a mess’ is a refrain I’ve heard a lot when remarking on how a wonderful piece of nature I recalled from my childhood visit had been reduced to a badly paved parking lot.
Having spent a fortune denuding the natural environment and obsessed with keeping their yards clean; the same locals see no irony in dumping the garbage from the strenuous cleaning of their yards, in the public park across the street. None whatsoever.
If this was Twitter, that would be the ‘behold my field, it is bare’ tweet. But their field of f**ks would not be bare, because they had just dumped the packaging from the new TV and the 300 rolls of TP in the field.
Other things that perplex the locals is COVID-19 and the grim regulations about washing hands, sanitising, wearing a mask, keeping a two-metre physical distance from other people and generally not gathering in crowds. Over the weekend, a neighbour passed out at home and ended up in hospital — it was an angina and after tests and a pharmacy full of medications and stern injunctions, he was sent back home to recuperate as it was in the doctors words a ‘safer option.’
And the most natural thing when a member of your close clan suddenly reminds all of us of the fragility of life, it is to go over to their house and visit. In numbers and almost immediately after each other giving scant attention to the generally accepted protocols for preventing the spread of the Corona virus. It’s also critically important to talk about all the COVID-19 safety protocols in great detail while practicing none of them. Again, the locals see no irony in any of this.
This village is no place for the faint hearted nor anyone with even a marginal level of sanity. It feels surreal to witness this happening as the wave of the pandemic reaches into the little fort of blissful isolation I had built around me. In the past week, a former colleagues mum passed on, two of my friends reported deaths in their friendship circles and on Monday I added a close family member to the list of those promoted to the next level of the game.
My gut feel is that we’re just getting started with the pandemic in the holy land and for someone who took a long time to trust in and practice listening to my gut feel, I feel cheated. I want this gut feel for the good stuff only — like the face breaking smile from the human I bump into at the local grocery store — not for the heavy stuff.
For that, I want my gut feel to be completely off. Please.
