Back of Beyond

Finding herself unexpectedly vulnerable on a deserted road to Sutherland, writer SARAH WILD was reminded that the natural world can be an alien place.

This LAND remembered a time before

PEOPLE, and CELLPHONES with no reception, and cars

with tiny engines. I was ALONE, and the only person

in the WORLD.

It isn’t every day that you do something life-threateningly stupid. Our cities and towns are bubbles of civilisation, and just outside their confines are South Africa’s wild lands – great open spaces in which the landscape is the same as it was thousands of years ago.

It was March 2014, and the sun beat down on my little rental car. I was on a solo road trip, navigating the silver ribbons of Karoo road between telescopes in the Northern Cape. I was travelling from South Africa’s radio telescope site near Carnarvon and the concrete pads that would eventually sprout the giant metal flowers that form the MeerKAT telescope. The Google god, that omniscient presence in the city, suggested I take a road between Calvinia and Sutherland, where more than two dozen optical telescopes populate a hill just outside of town. It was 80 kilometres away, Google said. It would take an hour, Google said. Google lied. Two hours later, I was 20km in, with half a bottle of water in the car, no cellphone reception, and the sickening knowledge that no-one knew where I was. Road was a generous term for the collection of rocks I was inching over; every so often, a “boing” would reverberate through the tense silence as a rock bounced off the chassis. Was this it? The final knock of calamity that popped a tyre or punctured something vital in the car’s underbelly? The last house had been at the turn-off, and any future house – if there was one – would surely be inhabited by ogres, trolls and murderers. I was hours away from possible assistance and without enough water to quench my present thirst, let alone the future’s.

Undulating hills of tufty grass spread out in all directions. More than 250-million years ago, when the continents shifted, this had been a giant inland ocean and these hills were under millions of tons of water. In the heat of the long afternoon, it held the same silence. This land remembered a time before people, and cellphones with no reception, and cars with tiny engines. I was alone, and the only person in the world.

Most of South Africa’s inhabitants live in or near cities. We seldom experience that sense of space in our need to bounce from one meeting to another, trapped in cars amid a torrent of traffic. But there are panoramic landscapes that have sat in their own stillness for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and a giant blue sky that stretches from horizon to horizon. In those places, when you breathe in, you inhale the rarefied air of heaven.

The sun was setting as I rolled over a hill and saw the lights of Sutherland in the distance, still clammy with eight-hour-old sweat, my knuckles sore from having gripped the wheel so tightly for so long. The town lights sparkled like fireflies as night fell, ephemeral and warm. But overhead the vaults of heaven had opened, and millions of diamond stars watched me just as astronomers in the distance were observing them – another great frontier waiting to be explored.