h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My last entry on my father put my memories up to the year 1983. I didn't put it in the previous entry, but my father got his master's degree in 1983, in Afrikaans literature. He analysed the short stories of the author Abraham H. De Vries.

I really think my father was a great asset to the University of the North (it was recently renamed as the University of Limpopo). I mentioned his two short-story collections in my previous postings. He published many articles in literary magazines, a few poems too, and some additional short stories as well. He's written one short story that is one of the shortest meaningful stories in Afrikaans.

I've translated some of my dad's short stories into English ... my Mom and I will see about getting them published. There's still a lot of my father's unpublished work lying around over here, that I think has lots of potential.

Anyways, like I said, I think my father was a great asset to the University. He was passionate about his subject, literature. I'm sure he was a good teacher but I know he didn't always have infinite patience with his students. He really wanted to maintain a high standard, and he didn't like at all the way the standards were slipping, with many students apparently more interested in politics than studying.

In the eighties things got really nasty, as I wrote in the previous entry. There was frequent police activity at the university and there were some incidents of brutality. I can remember one story - it was not my father that told it to me, it was someone else who was connected with the police - of the police going into a hostel and ordering everybody to leave. There was one student who didn't leave, so they went in and *thoroughly* beat him up. Only afterwards did they find out he was handicapped, he was unable to walk.

With retrospect one can understand how angry and frustrated the students must have been.

But my father was first of all a teacher, and he tried to teach. This is one thing I wish I knew more about. I never attended one of my father's classes, so I have no idea in what manner he taught! At least, I don't know how he taught the students. I wish I could have experienced him 'in the act' of teaching. He taught me, simply by giving me material to read, and I took it from there on my own initiative. I was always extremely eager to learn things. It would seem the students at the University weren't like that, most of the time.

(Of course there are exceptions. When I studied German at the University in later years, there was one student who was extremely eager and did more than what was necessary.)

Well, in the eighties, I am very grateful for my father also having been interested in the things that interested me. In 1985 I really got into watching birds. My father had bought us a bird guide in the late seventies; it was not complete - most species were illustrated by paintings rather than photos - and those paintings, while detailed, were not completely realistic. In 1985 my father for the first time bought us some binoculars; we also got ourselves some bird identification guides with much better illustrations - and photos too; and we set off that year for a holiday in the Kruger National Park, and there, for the first time, we focused on birds - and not just mammals! That was for me an amazing experience, and really got me going with the birds. Readers of my journal will know that I am still a great bird lover!

It was so nice that my dad and mom participated. We shared the binoculars around, and all of us worked to figure out what bird we were looking at. My father was also a very perceptive man, and had sharp eyes, spotting tiny little birds in thorny bushes. I of course did my best to match or outdo him! Today, I am convinced that our intense birdwatching efforts starting in 1985, helped both of us with our art later on. Perception is the key underlying ability, and looking for birds and their identifying features, from long distances and amidst confusing background elements, is a great exercise in perception.

I developed an incredible yearning for exploring wild places and seeing birds and other living things in those years. I constantly bothered my father ... I wanted to go to this place, I wanted to go to that place ... and he wasn't as adventurous as I. He wanted to stay home and relax ... he had a tough job ... of course he had already seen many things ... so I was a bit frustrated. I dreamed and fantasised about being able to go to wild places, while being stuck in town. I did some exploring on my own, since we were then (and to a degree still are) close to some nice wild land, and there were some friends also who were willing to go exploring with me. But that's a different story since it doesn't relate to my father.

My father did what he could, and the times that we did go and do some exploration together, are precious in my memory. We fairly frequently visited the municipal game reserve here in Pietersburg, which is actually a fine place for watching birds and mammals. We also visited the little Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in Potgietersrus. In 1986 my father took my sister and I on a hike in one of the most beautiful spots in the entire country - the forests of the Magoebaskloof region!

These forests are in one of the (comparatively) tiny high-rainfall regions of our country. South Africa is generally a *dry* land ... over half of its surface qualifies as desert and semi-desert. The rest is mainly dry grassland and scrubby savannah woodland. True forests cover less than a single percent of the land. But Magoebaskloof is part of that. It is a moist mountain mist-forest, with up to 2 500 mm (100 inches) of rain per year in some places. The Grootbos forest is the largest indigenous forest in northern South Africa - and that is where we went!

My father knew people at the University who are into hiking and nature, and we went along with them. The hike through the forest was very tough going - my sister went along, and was *not* amused - but it was beautiful. We didn't see that many birds, but we did see some Knysna Louries flying overhead with their incredibly bright crimson flight feathers almost luminous in the sunlight. One thing I saw that I really loved and have *never* seen again, is the yellowthroated warbler, a tiny little bird that only inhabits moist forests. The one we saw, came quite close to us, and was a very pretty little thing. (It is related to the Willow Warbler of Europe, but is more brightly and boldly coloured).

I was very grateful to my father for having arranged that hike. From then on, the Magoebaskloof forests became a topic of fantasy for me ... I couldn't get enough of them.

Of course in the eighties I was growing up, and getting very involved with school work, and with friends; this was the case for my sister as well. Consequently we started more and more having our own lives, separate from those of our parents. So from this stage on, my father is no longer almost the sole source for my meaningful experiences. He was still always there for us, though.

My psychological problems also started coming to the fore in the eighties. I sometimes wonder if my father's problems weren't affecting me, as well. I only learnt about many of my father's struggles later on, but as a kid, I must have been aware of it on some level. There were some really petty conflicts with other people at the University, and there was the frustration of the situation ... I know that he sometimes asked himself if it was all worth it. My father taught, because he wanted to impart information and enthusiasm, and he must have frequently asked himself if he was actually succeeding at either of those.

With his own art and writing, my dad was most active in the seventies up till about 1980 ... in other words just before starting at the University. After that, he didn't do much ... the occasional poem or short story or article ... but hardly any painting, sketching, or print work. But in the late eighties he started again. In about 1987 he started painting in pastels, and produced some nice work from then on forward. In the late eighties he and I started going to art classes together. There were art classed by a lady called Elsabe Moolman, and we also went to painting classes under the landscape artist Rudolf Mocke. My father produced out a few paintings every year since then, working when he could.

In 1988 my parents took us for another big family holiday, this time to the Cape! It was the first time I went there... the closest before then was in Durban (Natal). We planned on going to the Addo Elephant National Park, and then to the Knysna/George area. The first day we had problems with the car - which were extremely frustrating! We had to wait for the car to get fixed and missed the entirety of the first day of our holiday! But finally we were off ... and it was a monstrously long drive, we were driving in the middle of the night through parts of the Orange Free State, and then eventually we were in the Cape and driving through the Karoo, that enormous flat semi-desert landscape with the flat-topped hills.

This holiday was an incredibly rich experience for me. I know I bugged my dad perhaps to the limit of his endurance because I wanted to go to this place and to that place ... in the end, I am happy to say, we did see some pretty wonderful sights: Addo Elephant Park, the Suurberg National Park, the Tsitsikamma Forest National Park - and there we saw the Big Tree, one of the biggest native trees in the country, an Outeniqua Yellowwood. We hiked through the Suurberg Park, we hiked through the Outeniqua Forest, and we went for a forest drive in the Knysna region. These forests are also part of the very few indigenous forests of our country, and just as beautiful as the Magoebaskloof forests - but they have a different 'atmosphere'; they are the forests that are furthest to the south in South Africa, remnants of a temperate forest that was much more extensive in the past.

We also went for magnificent scenic drives over the Outeniqua mountains into the Little Karoo. We drove to the Oudtshoorn region and visited the Kango Caves. When we went home, at last, we went by way of the Meiringspoort Pass over the Swartberg range, one of the most spectacular bits of scenery in our country. These are rugged, folded, convoluted mountains deeply incised with river gorges:

http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1141307299035267408dqoJma

My father specifically wanted to show that to us, since he remembered from his own past how impressed he had been to see them.

There were so many other places along the way that I would have liked to see! But we saw so much that this is for certain the most 'adventurous' holiday that I've ever been on. I remain grateful to this day, for my father having done that for us. And of course we were together as a family throughout, we did things together, we saw things together, we appreciated things together. My father and I were at that point also starting to get interested in plants. We took note for instance at the Suurberg National Park, of the Suurberg Cycad that grows only there - we saw some on our hike. Also on the hike my dad collected (surreptitiously!) a few small succulent plants that we managed to keep growing for a while in Pietersburg. My father also collected some seeds of a Karoo Boer Bean tree - a small and rather shrubby tree, with a compact shape and lovely bright red flowers. He germinated the seeds, and we still have *two* of the resulting Karoo Boer Bean Trees. My father at first wanted to make them into bonsais, but this became too much of a chore later on, so we planted them in big pots and they're currently growing in front of our house.

But again let me note how the political situation in the country intruded on our pleasure. When we were at the Suurberg National Park, I wanted to go for a hike but my mom couldn't have made it - she never was very fit. So my dad, my sister and I went for the hike while my mom waited at the 'base camp' in the car. When we were finished and got back at the car, my mother told me how some coloured people had come and made threatening and racist comments to her. My dad was shocked and this is ONE major reason why from then on he became much less adventurous. He just was worried about the situation safety-wise. Whenever I wanted that we should explore this place or that place - since most of these places were in remote-ish rural regions, populated by non-white people, he was afraid of potential conflicts, attacks.

OK ... I will stop for now; next posting will take us into the nineties.

Keep going. This is a new world......the names alone...

Fascinating stuff Willem, and I am so glad you fully appreciate how lucky you are, both in where you live (aside from politics) and in having such a wonderful father. So many young people miss out on fathers, or their attention for one reason or another.

I look forward to the next instalment.

Websailor

Very dear Willem,

How wonderful to find and read the third instalment of your life with Pa. It reminded me so much of all the beautiful places in the Cape, and I am also pleased to see that you have been to the Cango Caves.!! That trip must have given you wonderful memories. I am sorry that your Mum had that unfortunate experience. I am definitely going to down load it and take it to Keith today. It will remind him of the Cape and its environs. I knew practically every single one of the Forests which you mention. Especially the TsitsiKama Forest....Wonderful name ....

What beautiful country and thank you for the explication of the diverse kinds of forest.

But I must admit I never thought of the Karroo as a desert. !!

With much affection


Christiane
AR80

Sat. 10/IV/2010 7.40 BST

Hello Christiane AR80! I'm glad you enjoyed this posting. Yes I have wonderful memories of that trip and I certainly want to visit the Cape again. The Karroo is not a true desert, but a semi-desert, most of it being dry grassland but some parts covered with succulent and xerophytic (drought-resistant) plants.

Best wishes,

Willem