This weekend I’ve spent some very happy time on WhatsApp with my sisters in South Africa, relishing the rain. There, in the Great Karoo, not here in Cambridge in the much soggier Fens. Yesterday outside my study window it was clear blue sky and sunshine all day, not even that chilly for February. Today has begun grey and blustery and ‘Strong Winds and Heavy Rain Showers’ are predicted pretty much all day as Storm Ciara arrives on these shores. I ain’t going nowhere. But my heart’s in the Eastern Cape anyway right now, in my heartland of the Karoo.
It’s hard to describe to those who grew up in places of abundant water what it’s like to live through long dry spells, or deep, persistent drought. Places where every conversation is not just about the weather but specifically about the rain, or lack of it. A call and response of questions – ‘Have you had rain? We had a little last night’ – with the answers coming back in precise measurements – ‘Yes, but only a couple of millimetres’ – and geographies – ‘Ag nee, there was rain over by Compassberg, but nothing at all here by us.’ Litanies you learn from childhood, as I would listen to my mother talking to people she met in the local Checkers supermarket, or hear her chatting to her brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, on the phone. Among the news of what local character had died, who had gone in for what operation, were always, always, reports of rain.
Photo: Isobel Dixon
Or drought. My home town Graaff-Reinet has been held in that dry clenched fist for five years. Heartbreaking over these last years to see the impact of those relentlessly cloudless skies, the local Nqweba Dam empty, the water table falling, the town’s borehole supply struggling, and locals suffering – especially the poorest communities mostly situated higher along the slopes of the ringed mountains, outside of the horseshoe shape of the Sundays River which encircles the central part of town. That horseshoe long a dry riverbed, filled only with thorn trees, reeds and rocks.
We’re used it being dry in the Karoo, but this has been a particularly long, harsh drought, desperate for the farmers on whom so much of the regional economy depends, and difficult for the growing tourism business as well. The very real lack of rainfall has been exacerbated by failing pumping and purification infrastructure, aged and sometimes vandalised equipment, mismanagement of the water supply, and poor education and preparation for a water shortage crisis. And the poorest in the community always the hardest hit, often no water at all in their taps, trucks supplying bottled water coming too seldom to meet everyone’s need. NGO Gift of the Givers deployed to help with the supply, but deep infrastructural and inequality issues are at play here, not just the lack of rain.
Photo: Isobel Dixon
In late October last year, local helpers scoured the parched surface of the dam to pick up the thousands of dead fish rotting on its surface – clearing up an estimated 36,000 fish. In November I walked the top of the dam wall and took photos of aching stretches of desiccated clay and silt. “Rain!” was scratched into one of the wooden posts of the Camdeboo National Park sign above the dam. The exclamatory word heavily, doubly underscored, followed by “It is coming soon”, signed by the eventually prophetic Elijah on 20 March 2019. Months later, every conversation in town was still about the drought, the hope for rain, and debates around water management. Could the silt could be dredged now, with the dam so dry? Is the dam wall, almost a century old, still strong enough if floods come after the eventual hoped-for rains? I remember when the dam overflowed in the floods of 1974, as it has a couple of times since. And many questions remain, with local people trying to work with local government to improve matters.
Photo: Isobel Dixon
But at least there is now rain, a silver thread on our family chat timeline. A story of longed-for rainfall, starting with a WhatsApped video from Laura of rain falling on the paving slabs of Brighton Keep B&B’s back garden on 30 December, and lovely pictures of locals walking home from work, splashing barefoot through puddles, shoes in hand. Hoping that the day’s shower wouldn’t just be an isolated occurrence. Thankfully, it wasn’t, and rain has fallen every week this year since. And I have the images on my phone to prove it, of course. The conversations about the number of millimetres, which towns and farms have had rain or not are exactly the same, just in a different medium and over greater distances.
I’ve named 2020 The Year of the Tortoise (sorry, Rat), not just because I love D.H. Lawrence’s poems about tortoises in his Birds, Beasts and Flowers collection (and still have my own tortoise poems to write for my collaborative project linked to Lawrence’s book), but also because of local Graaff-Reinetter Nicola Belden’s glorious photograph of a venerable old Karoo mountain tortoise drinking from a roadside puddle at New Year. A photo that happily made it into the local newspaper, the Graaff-Reinet Advertiser’s ‘Pic of the Week’. An ancient local resident slaking his considerable thirst with fresh-fallen water, beside the empty Nqweba Dam.
Today there is water in the dam again. After repeated rain in the catchment area, water flowed down the foothills of the Sneeuberg range and along the rivers that feed the Nqweba Dam: the Sundays, Gats, Pienaars, and Broederstroom, also known as the Erasmuskloof. (While you may not need to know the names, I love to say them. River mantras.) And locals don’t just talk about rain, they photograph and film it – blissful to hear the shushing or drumming of rain in one of my sisters’ videos – and townspeople were out again this weekend, filming water.
I watched Mary Lou and Laura’s shared videos and photos – town and farm, Graaff-Reinet and Nieu Bethesda – and wanted to cry with happiness. Beautiful brown water flowing in rivers under bridges, sluicing across farm yards. A misty silver-grey line of water creeping across the dam floor. Beautiful, hopeful, water.
So I miss my sisters and also my late mother and father, thinking of what they would be saying about the rain now. How my father would be giving thanks for the answer to prayer in his Sunday morning service and my mother saying proudly, over tea and scones, how full our rain tanks are. As I write, the wind ups its bluster around my northern house and I miss the sight and the sound of southern rain, Karoo rain, and its blessed scent. ‘Petrichor’ is a fine word for that scent of rain after a dry time – a word that keeps popping up on social media these days, perhaps a little worn with use. But the experience itself is always fresh and extraordinary, that smell of rain on a hot and dusty street. For me it’s always the smell of the Karoo, rare but precious.
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that rain, water (and the lack of it) runs through so many of my poems. Here are two early ones, ‘Plenty’ from A Fold in the Map (published in South Africa by Jacana and in the UK by Nine Arches Press) and ‘Dry Run’ from my very first collection Weather Eye, published by Carapace (for which I will always be grateful to Gus Ferguson). Now out of print, some of the poems from Weather Eye, like ‘Plenty’ though not ‘Dry Run’ are included in two of my subsequent collections, A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator. Lots of weather, all over the map.
Plenty
When I was young and there were five of us,
all running riot to my mother’s quiet despair,
our old enamel tub, age-stained and pocked
upon its griffin claws, was never full.
Such plenty was too dear in our expanse of drought
where dams leaked dry and windmills stalled.
Like Mommy’s smile. Her lips stretched back
and anchored down, in anger at some fault –
of mine, I thought – not knowing then
it was a clasp to keep us all from chaos.
She saw it always, snapping locks and straps,
the spilling: sums and worries, shopping lists
for aspirin, porridge, petrol, bread.
Even the toilet paper counted,
and each month was weeks too long.
Her mouth a lid clamped hard on this.
We thought her mean. Skipped chores,
swiped biscuits – best of all
when she was out of earshot
stole another precious inch
up to our chests, such lovely sin,
lolling luxuriant in secret warmth
disgorged from fat brass taps,
our old compliant co-conspirators.
Now bubbles lap my chin. I am a sybarite.
The shower’s a hot cascade
and water’s plentiful, to excess, almost, here.
I leave the heating on.
And miss my scattered sisters,
all those bathroom squabbles and, at last,
my mother’s smile, loosed from the bonds
of lean, dry times and our long childhood.
Dry Run
Driving through thunder and into the blue,
my sunglasses bruise this widest of skies
that presses its heaviness onto the plain,
a far scabby stretch of resolute scrub.
Horizons are jointed: an elbow, a hip,
to my left lies a jawbone with half of its teeth
and, I see from the signs, an appropriate name.
I drive on past Hopewell, past Wheatlands
(without any wheat), past crows’ nests, black burrs
spiked on telephone poles. I don’t meet a car
on my way to the coast and my flight –
after miles of fencing, a cluster of sheep.
My forehead’s bound tight by a bandage of heat
and even with shades I must screw up my eyes.
At least there’s a breath, the windmills are spinning,
but bridges stand fast, spanning nothing but sand,
while ahead the tar shimmers its miracle stream.
But the landscape that draws my gaze most
is the slice that is held in the glass facing back.
I lift my eyes often to capture the image:
the softest chiffon, misty veils dropping down.
The sweetness of dark after blistering days,
a study of mountains and buildings in grey:
the blessing of rain falling on my home town.
Should you be interested to learn more about Graaff-Reinet and nearby Nieu Bethesda (both beautiful places), see here:
Welcome to Graaff-Reinet and Nieu Bethesda Tourism Information
And here are a couple of local charities who do vital work in Graaff-Reinet: