THE LOVELINESS AND THE LYING TREES
city men loaded gear onto a deep-sea boat — fishing tackle along with cooler boxes for the catch and filled, no doubt, with ice-cold beer.
Sun-screen and peak caps and shorts and cameras and backpacks and rods and bait and binoculars and … in they went, and out they went. A day trip to catch that big one, earning the right to tell Hemingway-esque tales around the braai on a city Sunday.
As I walked along the curve of the bay I happened upon a pair of Bermuda shorts half buried in the sand, the pockets swollen and moving. It was a CSI moment — me using a piece of driftwood to poke the moving pocket and disturb a sand crab.
The beach was littered with shells and my eyes searched out a rare and wonderful paper nautilus, which are every beachcomber’s dream find.
By now the sun was rising ever higher in the sky, warming the earth. The water lapped lazily. The trees grew closer with every step.
Women carrying jerry cans usually reserved for petrol came walking down the beach, two little Mozambican girls of no more than six or seven came to introduce themselves — one called Ayesha, the other Anna.
“Are you not going to school?” I asked. They giggled like little girls everywhere do. “What’s your name?” was all they could say, over and over till it became a game. A woman emerged from behind an upturned boat, shouted something in Portuguese and the girls ran off shrieking, “What’s your name?”
It was calm, not a breath of air. I thanked the weather gods for such a perfect morning.
It had been a cold winter in Johannesburg, bone chillingly cold. The kind of cold that wakes you up in the early hours of the morning demanding a refill of the hot water bottle or that the electric blanket be cranked up to a blistering three.
Being here on this perfect beach on this perfect morning was, well, perfect.
The trees grew ever closer. One of the small battered boats came in to collect two young men with more jerry cans. In they got and out they went, rowing hard to get far enough out to sea to fish.
Then there they were, these ridiculously healthy green trees, growing in sea sand, on the water’s edge. Luxuriously abundant with swollen fleshy leaves. They were so close to the water’s edge it was obvious that when the tide came in, they’d be covered. How they survived in salty, briny water was a mystery to me.
I mentioned the “trees” to one of the locals, who laughed. “No, no, not trees. Mangroves! They grow in saline water.”
Before, when I’d still thought they were just trees, I had walked around them and marvelled at their beauty, their magnificent emerald leafiness against a shimmering azure background …
Now I felt foolish and a little annoyed with those mangroves masquerading as plain, old trees.
On my next walk along that stretch of beach, I turned my back on them. — © Charmain Naidoo
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