Sheer Kalk Bay Mountain, Kalkbaii’s fringe of steep-stepped houses, Main Road, the train, the tidal rocks, Woolley’s Pool, all close-in to the mountain, then the Atlantic straight out through False Bay, the Indian Ocean off to the east at Cape Agulhas
A fine week of early mornings sloshing with the frothy combers in off the blue of the Great Southern Ocean alone for half an hour in Woolley’s Pool, a marine-terrace tidal pool, before any of the regulars arrived
Except a strandloper one day picking through, beachcombing the rocks and swash pools below Main Road and the rail tracks that pass toward Muizenberg, early, much as she would have a million years and more ago
In Sterkfontein off north of Johannesburg are hominid remains from three and a half million years past, forebears of San people and those before them across South Africa as long as Homo sapiens have been
Africa, from where it all comes
The strandloper passing quickly eight meters from me was San, small, moving gracefully and fast over the rocks, we had quick eye contact, no exchange, it would have taken me too long to clamber out onto the rocks to approach her before she was off down the strand
Wizened narrow San face, over forty, dark rags, dark even in the low brilliant sun rising out of the bay, slouch hat, torn rubber beach shoes, she was collecting flotsam and jetsam in a large and dirty white polypropylene woven mesh bag
Many eons ago before Main Road, the train, the houses, before the first Portuguese and Dutch ships entered False Bay possibly Phoenician too, before anything strandlopers of the first humans were passing right here beachcombing
In another Western Cape sunrise, a 1964 apartheid sunrise on the far side of False Bay, up over a dune into sun glare to a startling head-on silhouette while sure I was alone out there on wild and empty Hangklip
He was surprised like me but with the sun at his back he may have seen me first
He stopped, I stopped, in the low direct glare and it was difficult to read his African face, I had a tinge of fear, that was apartheid
We smiled effusively, he seemed not to know English and I had no Xhosa or Afrikaans, but we smiled, passed, and went our ways on across the dunes
That also was apartheid, a feeling that we could not talk, he probably anxious meeting a European (as whites were called) where with no Bantu (as Africans were called) area nearby he maybe had no right to be there but seemed to want to talk
I think we almost touched hands going away
Both of us probably figuratively scratching our heads wondering, but then for him it was the same old story
Strandlopering off ourselves in opposite directions on white Blesberg sand out on Cape Hangklip to the sound of surf, the precipitous Kogelberg high, kloof-like behind
The geography of the imagination thinking back to what was half a century ago
On the way to Cape Town from there, then Gordon’s Bay was almost quaint and Strand was a mildly seedy beach town with a wide esplanade
As Guy Davenport might verify, the way things were matters only as they still exist
A building, a road, a quality of landscape gone is not only gone, to those who do not remember it never was
We imagine the Ice Age world and down the line they will imagine a steady climate world of wild flower fields and balmy breezes
Leaving us where we are in our edgy present until the next irregular disruption
Woolley’s Pool will be there for centuries but for some Hottentots Holland seismic mountain shift, the pool’s boulder-bedded marine terrace is anciently stable and only if the swash line moves dramatically inland under the surf of sea-level rise will it disappear
In the impossibility of comprehensible placement in time-space continuum of anything other than the present’s commonplace
Three billion years or more of life, and behind that cosmogony’s querulous near-infinity
Ancient Africa’s first-life rock-pool tufa stromatolites from three billion years past, layered cell skeletons of fossil algae
Working backwards, from the individual, to the historic, through the human epoch, to sequential eras into the planet’s evolutionary fluorescence, to life-dead volcanism
Our solar system’s stabilization, to the history of the galaxy, to the perception of the eternity of other galaxies, to the universe’s or double universe’s existence and its vast enigmatic unknown definition of itself
Sits Africa, sits us
At the Cape Town Philharmonic in Cape Town City Hall, the evening of February 20th, 2014, for Hector Berlioz, Benevuto Cellini overture; Édouard Lalo, Symphonie espagnole; and Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5 in D Minor
After an anti-Zuma reading by an African journalist critical of the post-Mandela African National Congress in the cellar theater of the Book Lounge on Roeland Street at Buitenkant immediately south of where District Six used to be
Walked through District Six more than once before it was demolished in 1966 after that close-in valuable real estate was designated a White Group Area
A lot of stoops and colorful Cape stucco, Caledon Street, or maybe Tennant Street, was wide with large cobbles, high blue sky and the pitching street angle
Sitting now upstairs in a Book Lounge low-down overstuffed chair browsing the English version of The Afrikaners: Biography of a People to have an engaging woman doing a project at Stellenbosch concerning Afrikanerdom lean in to see the book and talk
It was nice, one of those bookstore episodes that bookstores foster, ten minutes full of lucid content, then gone, nothing written down, little remembered except how pleasant and attractive she was
And next February summer day first checking on the wait for the Robben Island ferry and deciding on the city instead
Sunny and calm walking Government Avenue and around St. George’s Cathedral at the top of Adderley Street
On a park bench in the Company’s Gardens, talk with a IT guy who was reading an old Nadine Gordimer novel, The Lying Days, he was from Upington in the far Northern Cape and worked for a startup in Joburg
Years ago made it down through the desert to Upington on the Orange River on the way out of Kalahari Gemsbok Park
And then four hundred kilometers farther on to Kimberley to show up greatly unappreciated at a friend’s parents’ house during Jewish High Holidays
Kimberley, the Big Hole, diamonds and Cecil Rhodes, reputedly assuming that the US had only thirteen states in 1902 when he established his scholarship trust
Now Upington has a thermo-solar boiler with an immense arena of over four thousand sun-tracking mirrors, heliostats, like big music stands encircling the podium of the high boiler itself
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) dropped off a few Dutch farmers at the Cape of Good Hope to straw-boss Batavian (Java) Muslim slaves transported there for resisting Dutch occupation in the East and then employed in growing produce for their ships to and from
Thus the Company’s Gardens
The Netherlands to Batavia, fifteen thousand nautical miles that was then usually an eight-month voyage
Always practical, the scurvy-free Dutch also brought Malay crafts people to the Cape to carpenter, carve, and mason their new port city
The oblong Company’s Gardens, Cape Town’s smaller version of Central Park, watered from streams off Table Mountain, were what the Western Cape’s first European settlement was all about
Three hundred years on, 1964, on brightly lit fire stairs of a new office building on the city’s Foreshore locked eyes with a Cape Malay woman a few steps above, we stopped, we talked and moved closer, then a door below opened and closed and she turned and climbed away fast her bare legs flashing, apartheid careful, apartheid discreet
All that has happened at the Cape of Good Hope has carried more consequence than most ocean-tending episodics
But round Cape Point either way there and advance into something else
Sail on and be gone
The Cape of Good Hope to which the Phoenicians aspired and may well have rounded twenty-five centuries ago, even the Carthaginians were fixed on the ultimate cape and may have been here, indubitably the Portuguese navigators were, Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and Vasco da Gama in 1497
Last century the orange stacks of Union Castle ships on which the exiles from apartheid left for the UK were what stood out in Cape Town’s harbor
Orange River, Orange Free State, William of Orange, the orange livery of the Union Castle Line
William, born of the House of Orange-Nassau in 1650, then an English king, William III, as old Nassau became Princeton orange and black seated in what was variously at that time an Anglo-Dutch colony
Long before the Voortrekkers left the Cape frontier, north and east for the interior in 1830s when the British banned slavery depriving the Dutch of free labor
Some Cape Town Afrikaner farmers packed up too and trekked for Namaqualand north toward the Orange River and the first party of those Trekboers outspanned a day from the city in Philadelphia
With the Klein-Drakensteinberge and the Du Tooitskloof on its eastern horizon, the Western Cape’s Philadelphia is a sheltered village in the open veld down off the ridge of N-7, the way due north to Namibia and Angola
The embedded lore is that it was William Penn who named the American Philadelphia for Quaker brotherliness, but the Dutch were decades ahead of him on the Delaware
So Philadelphia here, Philadelphia there, it was all the classical reference anyway
In the steadfast power of Afrikanerdom taking them over three hundred years on the veld to develop that smart, sun-lined perceptive, vulpine alert and crafty visage of theirs, strongest around the eyes
Their obdurate resolve with no other place to go, Afrikaners are first of all Africans
Occupying the land in the way Dutch and Boer buildings everywhere take up their space, hold their ground, low, thick walled and sure
Lived once in an eighteenth-century Dutch house in the Delaware Valley, low ceilings, tight stairs, walk-in fireplaces, absolutely solid fieldstone walls and low, sheltering eaves, trundle beds, and I went to a school there that was named Van Dolah
The New World Dutch flourished at exactly the same time as Dutch at the Cape
New Amsterdam, the Hudson and the Delaware
And in like fashion across the whole old Dutch empire, the Caribbean island slavery forts and trading factories, the Indian Ocean endeavors like the great Matara Fort on Dondra Head the southernmost promontory of Sri Lanka
The Dutch ejected the Portuguese in 1640 and the fort became a cinnamon- and elephant-trading station
There once watched a rich Buddhist wedding at Matara, silks lifting in the breeze as the magnificent wedding party moved quietly as Kabuki on Matara’s broad stone landing stage, old elephant stables and elephant bathing pool off to the side
And there are the all-out Dutch leavings in Indonesia, as on Lamakera just east of Flores where in an even older Dutch stone warehouse half a dozen Portuguese cannon barrels have been stored since 1594 covered by dusty palm-frond mats
Dutch ships plied much of the world then with Cape Town and the Cape’s wineland a way station to Dutch mercantilism, much as Hawaii has been to American militarism
Three Western Cape valleys with their three individualistic old Dutch towns defined by the ranges of the dramatic Klein-Drakensteinberge, the Jonkershoek and Franschhoek Mountains
Stellenbosch’s oak-flanked Dorp Street with its European open gutters and white stucco Dutch facades, its big university logically the most sophisticated urban site in Africa
Could live a life in Stellenbosch
Enter Paarl on Main Street through more thickly magnificent oaks below the eerily funereal Taal Monument, 1975, that celebrates the Boers’ language, Afrikaans
Mandela learned Afrikaans on Robben Island and at the end of twenty-seven years as a political prisoner he walked free in 1990 from Groot Drakenstein Prison there between Paarl and Franschhoek
From the gate that prison looks like a neatly kept low-rise community college, at the entrance now there is a good bronze Mandela statue, business suit, in stride, right fist raised, the tourist buses come
Look up from Franschhoek’s mildly Napa County-chichi Huguenot Road that points to Franschhoek Pass, those amazing peaks elevating valleys and the three wineland towns, fynbos to maquis
Huguenot, Khoisan, San, Dutch, Malay, English, Xhosa, Cape ambience is like Italy or Lebanon or Perigord, the Western Cape’s past resonates like the mountains themselves
Places with such histories define civilization
Head north on N-7 up the Atlantic coast toward the Northern Cape into high sky and wonderment
On a western road north that ends only in Tangier at the Straits of Gibraltar, all the way, if there were time, the right 4x4, the means, and if the visas had been arranged
And Boko Haram and Ebola willing
Vast Africa, larger by two million square miles than North America
In 1964 on an eastern road north, the Great North Road, drove off from Ezulwini in Swaziland across what was then the Transvaal thousands of kilometers to the source of the Nile in Uganda before selling the car in Tanzania and leaving Africa from Mombasa on a freighter for the Suez and Europe
After half a year in Tanga on the Swahili Coast still the whole length of the Nile from Africa’s northeastern end at the Mediterranean in front of Alexandria
Vast Africa
Spectacular Africa, both times from Cabo da Boa Esperança
From which now on the western road north into the Swartland through Malmesbury and Piketberg to Citrusdal
Between two passes on the Olifants River
The early Boer settlers came off Piekenierskloof out of semidesert over the river valley to come upon elephants there as far as they could see
Herds up and down the rich, grassy, narrow Olifantsrivier alluvial, the ridge of the Middleberg and its peaks to the east up over two thousand meters, redrock barren, abrupt and sheer up from the inland river
Utterly absorbing to watch a family or clan of African elephants in the bush, imagine seeing thousands there on that pleasant smallish river, there through the ages until they were shot out two and three centuries ago
There are hot springs off the western slope of the dramatic elephant ghost valley not far south from Citrusdal
Hot springs like that a short walk down the mountain in Swaziland left fifty years ago where at night the Ezulwini village people would come slipping into the three pools, one above the other, and we would greet one another quietly and over polite murmuring would hear a nightjar’s clean arresting call
Those springs are cemented in now and part of a golf hotel resort with pool bars, towel boys, and massage tables, the small Ezulwini village school is gone, the hillside pineapple field is fairways and greens, and the house I caretakered is a maintenance shed
The local Swazis in my time said that occasionally a leopard was there on the mountain above the Ezulwini springs
Here all the way west the Olifantsrivier baths are a modest old spa and campground, the wondrous elephant herds are imagined
On the Cederberg’s high mountain gravel roads from Citrusdal come out in some hours in Clanwilliam back down on the Olifants River
And then it is either Calvinia direction Uppington with its thermo-solar array and much deeper into the Northern Cape or out to Lambert’s Bay
Where, population six thousand, the fish plant processes frozen French fries now, fish stocks depleted and the local sandy soil fine for potatoes
Lambert’s Bay’s ex-mayor who has a B&B is a paradigm of Afrikaner rectitude and sensibility, that alert and piercing Afrikaner stare, and with more to be learned about the end of apartheid from him and his wife than in any other conversation had the whole time in South Africa
That fixed and level Afrikaner stare again in Lambert’s Bay standing with the owner and his friends within his outdoor beach restaurant, the sound of surf, back on the ocean, talking with them, they all looked two meters tall, about having been in their country half a century before, and walking away to the car very sad to leave at all
The Joburg to JFK fourteen-hour South African Airlines flight calls in Dakar after midnight and its landing path to the Senghor International Airport there on Cap Vert is dead over the colonial city
Gorée Island, Dakar’s slave pen from the Portuguese early 1500s, is not obvious at night but the medina and the empty late-night elephant-gray French colonial street layout and architecture come clear in the sodium-vapor light
No sense of the haunt of Ebola, as from a great West African city of nearly three million the immigration and US Homeland Security board the plane, and no lingering sense of South Africa, already two-thirds of the continent and most of the South Atlantic behind