DELORIS KOAN

Not one more disaster, but yes, rain is coming.

I am high on the Winterberg and it catches a cold quickly.

The roads on the way up from Adelaide have been abrasive, scoured, klonky-klonk underfoot but Hetty, the 1200 GSA, has picked her way through three or four passes on this Makanzana-Spring Valley road, commonly known as the R344.

It is marked as a thick white-line district road, but like many roads in SA, it can be reduced to a sketchy, skinny hustle around puddles, dongas and washouts.

Who doesn’t chuckle at some of the now-dumb and rusty signs which ask trucks to slow down, or sharp curves ahead when, really, there is barely a road to talk about and any trucker out here has definitely taken a wrong turn and is in the dwang.

But right now, I am in joyous disbelief at the glory of the weather.

It rained in Makhanda last night — a finale to a dark and scary time nursing sissie who turns out has bird flu.

But today, on my long way home I am soloing up into blue. Just blue and green and the bright, glittering stony bangle which leads me higher.

I could not be nipping more, nor be any happier.

I am overnighting at the mountain home built by my maths prof emeritus out of the alien poplar patch on the banks of a delightful stream somewhere under the peaks.

If I stop to take a picture or try and ferret out what is being braaied by my exhaust through the saddle bags (it was a banana), there is always a Land Cruiser or bakkie that stops or does a thumbs up query.

I am alone, but never feel truly isolated. One convivial hunter has Belgian father and son customers and they look like this is the most fun they too have ever had.

Earlier at my must-stop De Oude Fabreek in Bedford, I encounter a gang of hunters, with tight broek, bush boots and takkies and all in uniform camouflage.

They are quite a meneer bunch, and my query about the state of the dirt up ahead is dismissively batted away.

But the Spring Valley farmers are a different bunch. Many descendants of Scots forebears, they are always warm and welcoming. They believe in farming, and education.

The Winterberg Trust School, which serves mostly farm workers’ children, is 30 years old and it is a testament to excellence and survivalism.

The prof took me there in the ’90s when it was just getting going and it is one of those projects that gives one the gees to carry on when all around there are troubles and corruption. It just works.

My mate is checking in on me and I arrive close to sunset as his staff are finishing off a fire pit.

We take a rutted ride up to a farmhouse where the furnishings and fittings are vintage simply by the fact of growing old in use.

The woman farmer is also a leading sheep show judge.

I feel like I am going in deep now. Sad, exhausted, dinged up Makhanda is far below me and I am acutely aware of how tiny a window of excellence this is before I have to get back to the industrial rust belt on the coast which I call home.

A massive raptor drifts past on a thermal. It has a very white rhombus-shaped marking on its wing. I will be finding out what it is.

Its confident soaring above weeping slabs, and green valleys below is in direct contrast to the crowned eagle I spot on its favourite lightmast on the NEX near Checkers on Monday.

Who is the real survivor, who is really at risk of pellet guns and other urban abuse meted out to nature.

Ironically, I learn from a litter clearing exercise down at the Nahoon River Mouth towards the lifeguard shack, that pack hunting has become such a problem that even dassies at Corner are skittish.

Little buck are rarely seen as the Nahoon Point Nature Reserve, in desperate need of rangers, is under the kosh of party-goers.

Most of the 10 bags of litter plucked from the bush are booze bottles, and many of them are fancy liquor affordable only to the rich and apparently indifferent.

One broken bottle is baring its fangs in a sandy pathway waiting to gash a happy beach-goer, possibly a child.

The Broubart Security team of 10, Nahoon-Stirling CPF Sector 1 patrol head Brendan Jacoby — the last man standing, DA councillor Jason McDowell and Save Nahoon stalwart Kevin Harris lead the community charge.

Actually, it’s just them and a few other stalwarts.

And yet a crisis is looming.

The message comes through loud and clear, there is very little appetite for city law and order and SAPS to clear out the estimated 100 bush-dwellers from this much-loved area.

They are a sad and not-so sad collection of homeless people, mentally ill, addicts, copper wire thieves and some nasty home and car invaders, I am told.

It’s a complex issue, requiring a shelter, policy and political will from the top, none of which are in evidence today, but for the local councillor who says it is a big struggle.

Ironically, minutes earlier on Sunday I was passing the Stoep — I was a week too early for the inaugural Orient parkrun on Saturday which is going to be an absolute community jol.

There on the Stoep are youths in uniform doing some kind of parade with flags.

There are gazebos and security and down on the front a big fancy stage is set up.

Oooh, it is March 21, it’s Sharpville massacre day.

It strikes me that the Stoep is a great set-up for political rallies, where leaders get to talk to the masses.

It’s not meant to be a place for the people. They go to Ebuhlanti, which is in some state of half-renovated, half still in die bos.

Later, a friend, a leading Eastern Cape academic and former underground ANC activist in the ’80s, headlines her piece — which she just sat down and wrote because she had to get it out the system — “Some humans are more equal than others”.

She is filled with fury over the callous state reaction to the death of 100 illegal miners in the Stilfontein shafts a year ago.

One minister said of the miners, trapped underground, hurt and starving to death that they would get no help.

“We are going to smoke them out”.

Most of the dead were from Lesotho and Mozambique, countries which have made SA gold mining bosses rich for 100 years.

Not a single person was held accountable, not in the SAPS and not by parliament. Questions she sent in were not acknowledged.

She lists police brutality which has crossed over from apartheid into the democratic era: 69 shot at Sharpeville in 1960, 35 shot in Langa, then Uitenhage, in 1985 (we were both part of the public reaction), 34 shot at Marikana in 2012, and 100 left underground to die at Stilfontein in 2024.

Human Rights Day, she suggests, is a day of sorrow. As we said back then: “No cause to celebrate.”

I write back about my horror at how many acts of atrocity have been committed in the name of democracy globally that I no longer trust anyone who makes claims to the system.

I hear it being bandied about by fascists from the right and left, but in the current order, mostly from the far right.

Who do we trust in a time of crass and sophisticated propaganda punted by a potus and their coterie of grifters and gangsters?

She says a leading SA activist academic is promoting the notion of community co-ops.

Once seen as tools of ideology, they are now a means of surviving the global shockwave of the Israel-US-launched war on Iran, the punitive financial effects of which are coming down the supply chain to meet us at the pump and till.

It is time to leave my mountain barn with its cozy bed, fire-heated shower, our little braai of chops and pasta, and belt it home.

The mates are saying Makhanda was drilled by a fearsome storm which knocked out the power last night, and the forecasts are saying the gusts and rain will meet me in a pincer grip somewhere between Cathcart and Stutterheim.

But the day is celestial. I do 29km of dirt with hardly any sludgy bits.

It is as if the Karoo has opened up like a giant lily. It is cool, it is sunny, it was spritzed by a little rain overnight.

There is a moment when you round a corner and the mesa-topped Martha and Mary stand up, in your face. You gasp at this primal undersea remnant.

The mountains are stacked in rows of blue pastel. I don’t need my Gabriel de Jongh mountain landscape to tell me how beautiful they are — I see it with mine own eyes.

The bike, serviced by my new best friend in Morgan Bay, is burbling with joy.

The rear tyre, so in need of replacing, does not blow as I hammer past the taxi trains on the Taka-Komani stretch, and then Cathcart and finally, the Little Vintage Coffee Shop in Stutterheim.

There I am served a presentation-is-everything breakfast of a veggie toasty, speckled chips, a little Rosa tomato, a bowl of curry pasta and a pot of Earl Grey tea with, wait for it, a little glass bowl filled with honey. All this for R100.

The last run is to Beacon Bay. And suddenly the contractors are there.

A random-looking roadblock at the point where the R76 runs under the R63. Something about an onramp being built.

There we sit, about 100 cars. We are now in the system, trapped and waiting. We have no idea what we are looking at.

Suddenly the entire roadblock looks like it is being dismantled. Big signs are being chucked into a truck.

I pin it out of there, feeling bad for the oncoming traffic who probably have no idea that they are about to come to a halt.

The weather is perfect. All predictions of Sodom and Gomorrah raining down have proved false.

I have stolen time, but time has blessed me with safe, happy, solo riding.

A day later, I ride home from Nahoon in rain and a too-tight rain suit.

My pants are ripped at the ass, and my rebuilt rear shock absorber has blown for the third time.

I am bouncing along dangerously on one rear coiled spring.

Definitely getting the message that it is autumn o’clock; the poplars are turning golden, the light is getting thicker and richer, it’s still warm, but starting to cool.

It is the worst and best time.