Cape Town - My 14-year-old niece is very philosophical.
Besides believing that cheese and sweet mustard is a divine combination and having blue hair makes her special, she has a theory about happiness: if you perform a small task that terrifies you every day, you will be as happy as a politician at a buffet table.
Her scary tasks involve leaving the house without eyeliner, doing the dishes, cancelling ballet, wearing a swimming costume in front of other 14-year-olds and having to eat broccoli. She performs these with grit and bravery, tries to hold down the broccoli, and then reaps the happiness rewards that come with conquering her fears.
I’m rubbish with small scary tasks. I haven’t filed my tax return, I haven’t made that phone call to the Big Editor and the washing machine seems unable to walk itself to the repair shop. However, every few months, I engage in large, sometimes life-threatening activities that make me so terrified I go around kissing strangers with gratitude and all those other New Age things for five weeks afterwards.
As I type this, dawn crows squawk raggedly, the sky is splashed with stars and the open-air kitchen is as cold as a witch’s septum. This is not the terrifying part – this is the scenic reward for a journey that saw me sitting on the back of a motorbike and praying for a kind and instant death as the back wheel slipped out from under me again.
Motorbikes don’t normally scare me. I’ve spent large chunks of my life perched on a seat the size of Gollum’s underpants, whizzing through some of South Africa’s quietest corners. However, on Friday, we weren’t whizzing at all. As the rain fell and the temperature plunged, we slithered and slid our way along Swaers Hoek Pass – a 90km dirt road linking Pearston with Cradock.
We were heading to the Schreiner Karoo Writers Festival, where I was scheduled to do a reading at 4.30pm. It was 2.30pm. The road felt like soap. After just 2km, I looked like a chocolate-fountain yeti, my immensely fashionable waterproof trousers splattered with mud.
It’s funny how the fear of falling becomes stronger as we get older. My nieces think nothing of hurtling down hills on their skateboards and crash-landing on the tarmac. They laugh when they’re thrown off horses or go flying off their bicycles into bushes. The last time I fell was a few years back while riding pillion in the Namaqualand National Park. It was hot, B was tired and the road was as sandy as a beach. We fell gracefully at a low speed. The exhaust pipe singed my calf and B broke two ribs. It wasn’t so much the fall itself that was terrifying but the anticipation of it.
The language also changes as we age. While children fall as a verb, older people fall as a noun. “Och, aye,” my relatives will say about an elderly uncle. “He had a fall.” Sitting on the back of the bike on Friday, clutching on to the panniers and clinging on with my knees, I thought about this falling business and why the language changes. And I realised kids fall because they actively seek it out and older people have a fall because it’s something that happens to them, something they try to avoid. On that silly little seat, I was caught somewhere between the two. Soon, I would be felled.
I opted to walk the worst parts, trudging along the road in my boots and helmet. To make the experience enjoyable, I pretended I was Neil Armstrong: here were craters, there was the air on the other side of my bug-splattered visor. In that silent landscape, the fiery forks of aloes clinging to hills and the occasional nyala bursting out of the bushes, it did feel like a foreign world: pristine and wild with its own sense of order.
After an hour of sliding and slipping, we had travelled just 40km. The sky had turned grey and my fingers felt like icy sticks inside my gloves. Around yet another soggy corner, a shadowed hill was ominously dusted with snow. “We’re too old for this,” I muttered into my helmet. “We should be in a car. I could knit in the back.”
We arrived in Cradock with minutes to spare. We didn’t fall. Nor did we have a fall. I dived into the shower, slapped on some mascara and pulled mud from my hair.
At the reading, a 12-year-old girl recited her poetry and an octogenarian Springbok tennis player read from his memoir. As I listened and watched, I thought my niece’s theory might be right. I felt alive and content, a warm happiness in my bones.
Throughout the festival, I watched the faces of young and old, scurrying in the rain from one venue to the next. I saw a professor with grey hair and a youthful face. I saw a little boy who is recovering from leukaemia. His hair has grown back and he served me slices of cheese. I watched an elderly couple help each other down the stairs and saw two girls playing with a Jack Russell.
And it occurred to me that we’re all just falling, plunging through space with no knowledge of how things will turn out. But the simple fact of just being here, one day at a time, is enough to make things alright.
Cape Argus
* Helen Walne is an award-winning columnist and writer based in Cape Town.