Mountain & Sea
It’s finally a clear day. The horizon stretches into a haze of muddling fog and smog in the distance. The sky has that band of delicate pink running through the blue above and the milky greys below. It seems you can see to the end of humanity itself from up here. The pretty bits of the university town are hidden away in a valley behind a quaint little cottage. The foreground is a mix of security estates and the neighbouring informal settlement sprawled over one end of the valley. On clear nights when there’s electricity this settlement might be mistaken for the sparkling gems of a distant universe. In the cool light of the morning, its spatial harshness is plain to see and I’ve noticed people tend to quickly look beyond it to the curve of the bay and the ring of mountains in the far distance. Over the other way lies a cool green valley, shaded by mountains and planted with vines. Lightly settled in neat little clusters and filled with large tracts of indigenous fynbos and pristine forest, it is also home to the local leopard. It’s a valley of corners and every one of them has been settled, being tended to produce something useful to human life and seen from high up is an aesthetic delight. Bucolic even and as locals might say; vrek koud too.
But it is winter here in the Southern hemisphere and in this part of the holy land, the season is typically wet and cold. The threat of rain hangs in the air, the winds can change direction quickly and you could find yourself caught in a rainstorm with gusting winds. Which is not all that bad if you’re sitting by a fire in a little cottage tucked away high up in the mountains. High up enough to be lost in the clouds on rainy days. But it might be a little more enlightening if you’re on a motorbike, going over a mountain pass on a narrow, winding road. Select the fog option and if you’re feeling lucky, select the Frikkie option too. The fog option is self explanatory. The Frikkie option gives you the local in his white dubbel kajuit going full tilt through the pass in the streaming rain and blanketing fog and he’s lazy about sticking to his side of the single carriageway. As the locals might say, fok nee Frikkie. But that’s a blog for another day. We are still just dripping with gratitude that we are even here to share the story.
Turning another ninety degrees opens up a vista towards a sheer mountain face stretching into the distance. In the evening twilight, this range is lit up by the sunset for a few minutes and a casual glance in that direction will have you thinking you’re looking at a range of pink granite. More hoekies here, more vineyards, cattle lowing and long stretches of pristine forest are visible across the cultivated fields. There are even fewer and smaller clusters of the buildings that make up a farmyard in this direction and the silence coming from this side is complete.
A confusion of guinea fowl start up in search of the roost for the night. They streak off to the left and this draws you back to the straight ahead view from up here. Down there is the west coast fishing village and its port. The muddle of human settlements and the inevitable smog arising from human presence hangs over the valley. In the far distance a different shade of blue signals where the sea meets the sky. The horseshoe shape of the protected port is clearly visible from up here. This is the landing ground of the adventurers who arrived here a long time ago in ships, with flags, queens and guns. They gave the locals and natives no choice about their presence and the rest as they say, is history. Ancient history even because since the early nineties, the holy land has been a free country. No more colonisation, no more white supremacy rule. The Neville Brothers, Bird On A Wire springs to mind. Free / Free / Free.
Although being this free comes at a cost. The cost being the global price gouging of the European summer of 2022 A.D. In the holy land, in Sri Lanka, farmers in Germany, in far too many parts of the world, people are feeling the effects of what looks like an IMF structural adjustment project from the 1990s. Everything costs more and almost everyone is as the locals say; feeling the pinch. Well, not everyone is feeling the pinch but I don’t know any billionaires. The people I speak to and interact with in my daily life are feeling the effects of the global price gouging affecting the costs of everything from rice to petrol. In fact, anything that can be bought and sold is being slowly and very surely made much more expensive. Add to this the heatwave about to engulf Europe, other climate-change linked weather events and the properly conservative politics taking hold in the United States and you might be forgiven for thinking we’re being pressed up against the gates of major global turmoil. Maybe we are. I’ll leave that to the experts.
Today, from the hill above the university village all I can see is the milky grey cloud hanging in the air in front of me. The entire vista of the day before is gone. Replaced by this sea of cloud with the dark grey sky hanging low. Even the majestic mountains are hidden and an eerie stillness has settled on the entire scene. Occasionally there’s a gentle rustle of clouds moving through the towering stands of ancient trees and when the wind picks up, this sound increases in pitch to a proper howl. It’s enough to make you step back quietly and seek shelter; leaving the wind, the old forest and the looming weather to their private conversations that have been going on long before any humans were present. And will likely continue with little disruption long after the humans have extinguished themselves.
Still, it’s a privilege like few others to have stood on this ground, in this spot, at this moment of human history and experienced what it must have felt like all those years ago, to gaze upon the space between mountain and sea. To know you are but a fragment of time, space and being itself; in a fragment of space in a fragment of time grappling with the wholeness of being human in one little spot across the multiverses of existence. Infinitesimal.
Mountain & Sea was written whilst in the throes of reading Dreaming The Karoo: A People Called the /Xam from Julia Blackburn (2022, Jonathan Cape).
© Jesh Baker, 2022
