Run for shelter on wonky knees
Vagabonding this year has been go, go, go! Today it is go to the doctor. Damn knees packed in, like pistons blowing a gasket. Glonk!
But I am on the road, even if I am reduced to a strange half-knee, pant-end grab, grovel to swing over and onto Delores.
It was the latest windstorm on Saturday and Sunday that broke my spirit, and I knew I needed to get out of the climate crisis shooting range. Just 49km away down the mountains at Graaff-Reinet the wind speed halved.
When there is no wind Gite du Pondok is magical. I had also made my first online purchase ever, an Astronaut cat backpack for the baron from Takealot, and, a little wickedly, gave my free-delivery address as Avonleigh farm.
Then came the vision of the little Takealot Tuk-Tuk having to negotiate 36km of corrugated cobblestoned twinspoer and a bouncy river crossing or two, and I took heart and tried to arrange a delivery in Graaff-Reinet.
I was up against Hal, the almighty online cosmic computer, who seemed disgruntled that, having taken my 619 rond, I was deigning to change my delivery address. I dreamed of a rational human voice to understand my effort to save the Tuk-Tuk from having to also climb two solid security gates and, at the end, negotiate the steep, ponded Moordenaars river 100m from my gite. I have not achieved my goal of touching Takealot’s human side, but I live in hope, rather than raging against the machine.
I left my slightly feral tomcat in a field of dreams surrounded by multiple plates of food and water. I called to say goodbye, and far away in the resurgent green of lucerne saw this streaky little ball of pubescent cathood leaping up and then doing a few crazy circles in the crop. So this was where the nightly parade of semi-dead field mice was coming from!
The road to PE felt good. The R75 is one of those excellent tar roads small enough to feel remote but taking Delores and I efficiently to the motorcycle glory hole in the wall in PE which would deliver that gorgeous new rear tyre rubber.
With the wind having subsided and the sky an extraordinary blue, we purred happily across dun plains and poorts and watched with joy as the blades of Cockscomb peaks slid by on the horizon.
PE, such a strangely familiar Eastern Cape economic and retail capital, where I started my journalism 36 years ago, feels as commercial as the day I did my first ever assignment in 1980.
I was a wild-haired blond student surfer boy from Rhodes journ department stuffed into a mottled green sports jacket, throttled by a tartan tie, doing a caption for a photograph of a local beauty pageant queen at a bed store in Old Cape Road.
My return in ‘84 as a reporter for the Evening Post started with an ominous sign, a car blazing on the side of the N2 with not a soul in sight. Should I have just kept going and returned home to the hearth of East London where I could easily have slotted back into a life of industry and surfing?
But I didn’t. Instead I hooked up with an even tinier minority, the six white lefties — and entered an unbelievable world of mass rebellion, sturm en drang. I met and worked with amazing people.
And I wore the most fashionable clothes from the Watson’s store, for which I paid straight cash. Those years of war in the 80s in PE were replaced in the 90s by years of joy for my family. My toddlers and then teens were thrilled to go to the boardwalk, the malls, the movies, the beach.
We rode from then-Grahamstown to Walmer Park for the first showing of a Harry Potter film, and you just imagine the bragging at school the next morning.
The now-ex and I borrowed a trailer, splurged on the credit card at Boardmans, celebrated with a seafood dinner at the harbour and rode home in good spirits in the dark. Was the trailer still hooked to the car, I had asked? She could not see it. Ah well, we will just see if it is still there when we get home, we agreed and laughed like maniacs. See, it was the 90s. Freedom. It was intoxicating.
But it is now 2020, the girls are independent, educated young women, and I am a vagabond, with a little cash in my account, no debt, and a motorcycle, still looking for a good deal in PE. And I got it from Sharwood. A two for the price of one trail-andtar tyres.
But the westerly had arrived and I was happy to leave the windy stolen city with my sweet purchase rumbling away under my seat.
I was headed to the dominee’s log cabin with its darkwood deck leaning over the Bushmans River, to my people, my creatives, Steve, Jenni-lee, tall Jaques and a little boy with golden syrup curls.