Paris in the Spring
Before I lived in the Highveld mining dump village, I’d barely noticed Winter. The east coast fishing village hardly has seasons or you tend to miss Autumn and Winter because it’s almost always green, everywhere, all the time. Except where they’re uprooting pristine forest on the coastal dunes on the North Coast to build enclaves of privilege for the hardworking and harder-consuming class. The good consumers of the culture of privilege as much as its baubles.
Since living in the Highveld mine dump village, not only have I very much noticed Autumn and Winter, I began to want to escape the dry Highveld winter months. Mostly to other winter villages in the holy land. Having both politely perspired and outright sweated in the east coast fishing village for years, I have developed an abiding love for Winter in places that know how to winter. Not that half-baked east coast fishing village winter that has loads of Highveld locals descending on the village to sun themselves on the beaches and swim in the by now “too-cold-for-locals” water.
The Highveld mine dump village is cold in winter and locals tend to turn their homes and offices into overheated germ festering death traps. This tendency to overheat spaces and wallow in them does not sit well with me, so escape was at first a wish and then eventually and most thankfully; a limited reality. Not unlike the Constitution of the holy land. And if I could have Paris in the Spring as an escape from a Highveld mine dump village autumn, that’s not too shabby. And it’s a sensual, languorous, deeply enriching thing, the European Spring and Summer.
When a recent email landed, I wondered if the gig I’d been spoken to about a very long time ago was yet again stalled or if I might be in luck. Now you can imagine the feelings of confusion when the logistics bit of the email included the words “you will spend two nights in Parys.” Parys is a common spelling error in holy land emails, it is after all the Afrikaans spelling for Paris. Turns out, it was not my day. Note to self, make sure you don’t mumble when making intentions known to the universe. This is what you get for not speaking clearly, as I have been told several times in my life.
But enough of meandering, forays and excursions. We’ll keep that for when on the road out of the Highveld mine dump village. Now, to Parys. What we have here is a village about an hour south of the Highveld mine dump, sitting on the banks of the muddy Vaal river. It’s a popular tourist spot with a few thousand ratings on TripAdvisor, a chunk of those referring inevitably, back to the neighbouring farming village of Vredefort; famous for its huge crater made a while back when an asteroid landed there. A world heritage site, it understandably draws the retired, camera wielding, safari clad visitors in their number. “That” as the tall one from that car show that invented car shows would say; “is good.”
There’s also a fair number of escapees from the Highveld mining dump village here, the current model year SUVs number plates giving the game up. The proximity of the village to the Shrines of Mammon (Sandton Chapter) has prompted some folks to live in this semi-rural village and commute daily to their glass encased towers to trade futures and options on goods they don’t own, nor expend any sweat creating. Nice work; if you’re a vulture or a kindred spirit of said bird. The village of Parys thrums with life. Well, what passes for life in the holy land and its cultural lodestar, the Great Imperialist Homeland (aka the United States of America). Meaning the village of Parys thrums with cars, bakkies, trucks, SUVs, more bakkies, sports cars and the occasional motorcycle. This being the holy land, the foot traffic in the village is almost exclusively melanin positive except in the hour before sundown when the melanin negative crowd take to the wide leafy streets with steely determination to erase all the calories their rank entitles them to.
On summer weekends the motorcycles take precedence as the holy landers truly manifest the depth of their cultural leanings towards the Great Imperialist Homeland. They descend on the village in their throngs on their overweight, loud, overwrought and under-engineered cruisers (aka the Harley Davidson). Of course, it’s no stretch of the imagination that the riders of the said overweight, loud, and overwrought motorcycles are human replicas of their steeds; with various iterations of dubious facial hair, startlingly bad clothing and far too much bravado. The pillions are generally indistinguishable from the riders, except by the preference for brittle, bottle blonde hair. But enough observations of the privileged and their crass imitations of the Great Imperialist Homeland’s cultural markers. As is often said in the holy land, ag shame.
Autumn mornings in the riverside village are cold. Properly cold with temperatures in the low single digits (calm down Great Imperialist Homelanders, we’re talking Celsius here) and for the hours between night, twilight and almost into dawn itself, the village is blissfully quiet. If you’re on the west side of the main street, you can usually hear the Vaal flowing. Being Autumn, it’s not a roar but more of a steady burble as it passes over the rocks and fallen trees that litter its course through the edge of the village. The joys that come from being in close proximity to flowing water are beautifully manifest here and the lucky folks of this village tend to have clipped lawns and spectacular gardens extending all the way down to the water.
For the rest, there’s a profusion of vintage and second hand stores with troves of weather beaten furniture, clumps of patinated lamps, stadiums of mismatched chairs, fleets of ships barometers and the assorted bric a brac that makes up a certain style of decor favoured in the smaller villages in the holy land. And, surprise surprise in smaller villages in the Great Imperialist Homeland too. There’s a bunch of spots serving coffee, the infamous when bad and sublime when good pannekoek, you can get ribs twenty different ways but it seems you can only have a steak served medium, the inevitable cheesecake, towering burgers and the trope-laden calamari. I got a look at a cheese board as it went past and surmised it was put together by a chef with a dairy allergy.
Thankfully you can also find bobotie, Ouma’s butter pastry pies stuffed full with venison from Frikkie’s last hunting trip, Boet Martin’s lamb stertjies, herds of oxtail (you can even have your oxtail deboned, stuck on a pizza, topped with mozzarella and baked) and tannie Sanet’s malva pudding. All local, seasonal and utterly delicious; as it should be. The village has biltong by the bakkie load and loads of bakkies too, a proper tobacco shop, a ginormous booze store, cutie-pie shops with a range of products made in the holy land, and in the new roadside shopping centre (yes, it is a Great Imperialist Homeland strip mall type) the supermarkets offer a good selection of ingredients for people not raised on Mickey Ds or in the holy land, polony. G-d must love Parys and I know this because there is both a bookshop and a flower shop. You can buy twenty types of locally made veldskoene and you can have them in any colour as long as it’s tan. Okay, that’s not true; you can get funked (sp.) up veldskoene in whatever your tasteless heart desires. This is the sweetest, most tender fruit of capitalism after all. Viva Choice! Just not free choice.
But back to the “you can have your steak any way you like, so long as it’s medium” thing I noted a few times in the village. To be fair to the likely long suffering restaurateurs of Parys (and elsewhere in the holy land), a significant cross section of holy landers relish their steak well done. Okay maybe relish is not the best word to use there. A significant cross section of holy landers order their steak well done. Now we might spend some time and energy working out why this is so but that would be akin to spending time and energy working out ‘the why’ of things that add nothing to one’s earthly existence. Unless you’re the human charged with murdering a prime piece of meat until it’s one small step away from being boot leather. Thankfully (my ancestors be praised) I am not that human.
Lucky for me, my time in the village was courtesy of a corporate, so when I did get to order, I chose the steak. After all, the option is neither a daily nor an affordable one in the holy land, so it makes sense to enjoy the privilege when generational members of the Shrines of Mammon (Holy Land Chapter) are paying. I asked for medium rare and all praise to the steak cooking human, it arrived perfectly so! Two of my dinner companions chose the well done versions, despite the menu disclaimer stating; “no responsibility will be taken for steak ordered well done.” Brave, if typically portly, caricatured fellows those; complete with the mixer over the single malt and a virulent rejection of anything outside the norms, privileges and access their positional power gifts them. Still, this is hardly a rarity in the holy land. Ag shame.
By the time we were done with the delicious dinner, fellow diners’ sacrileges notwithstanding, it was once again properly cold in the holy land version of Paris. As I walked back to my billet for the night, the low cloud that had been gathering at sundown, had dispersed. Another gift of being this far out of the Highveld mine dump village revealed itself, the entire star filled night sky shining down upon my hooded head with the startling intensity more often found in the Karoo. If the servants in the local municipality are reading this, please promptly introduce a dark skies policy in the village, it would make the yearly commiseration of my life a celebration instead. That’s in October btw. Send me dark skies in Parys, asseblief en dankie.
Indeed, Paris in the Spring might be a most beautiful thing to experience and surely, one has more in the way of choices to luxuriate in a typical European summer but Parys in the Autumn has those quintessential things that make the holy land, the home it is. Flaws and all, boet.
Paris in the Spring is about mumbling and fumbling your intentions. Who knows?, you might be gifted exactly what you need.
Jesh Baker for Oppi Stoep © 2023
