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The weather is bipolar today — a climate trend we knew was coming more than a decade ago — but the good news is that it should be OK over Easter.
SAWS tells travellers to stay sharp, but the “rainfall will start to ease off in most parts of the country” and that Friday and Saturday will be great along the coast.
Get out there and live!
But Sunday and Monday we are back in the troughs, one on the surface supported by another in the upper air.
We have a 60% puddle over our area with scattered showers and thunderstorms.
They may be go-there-and-see days, because you have a 40% chance of enjoying awesomeness.
The temperatures will be delightfully warm and cool.
Right now, as I sit here tick-tacking away it is susurrating, rain is glorting in the downpipes and splattering on the cement.
Just non-stop all day. We have had 80mm in 24 hours out here on Gonubie Point, according to the late Dr Beorn Uys’s still-active rain gauge.
It started arriving on Tuesday evening.
I was in Beacon Bay. One look and I knew the forecast was accurate
Like a white bomb, cloud was billowing higher, higher, the sunset rays giving it an luminescence which, honestly, made me knype.
For I still had to get to Gonubie Point!
I bade a hasty farewell to the dorter, leapt astride Hetty — OK, I don’t really leap onto the bike much these days — but for the sake of the story, I mounted that machine.
I had the anxiety in me.
The problem was that I was riding alongside this brewing climate monster heading northwest and still needed to get across the upper Quenera, up the hill, under the N2, down the flawless 4km white cement road into Gonubie Main Road.
And I did that and could see down the road — a head!
Old family joke, but there it was ahead.
I was riding straight into this dark, terrifying, morass of roiling air.
I was to be enveloped and knuckled — yet another paradox of this carrot and knopkierie SA life.
By now it was above me and the grey underbelly was dirty, more like the dark brown smoke of the buildings I have seen burn in then-Grahamstown, the building next to Grocott's Mail, Kingswood College’s Schoolhouse, even my old journalism offices next to the high court, just lots of lovely old yellowwood and Oregon pine, all burning.
Once, a poncey little student wearing only his sleeping shorts while their digs went up in a roaring inferno, threatened me saying did I know who he was?
He would be getting his lawyer dad onto me if dared to report his indisposed dress code.
That quote was manna drifting down like the ash — a rare, gratifying moment of journalism.
Back in the helmet, here comes the meteorological sjambok.
Gone is the Bard’s famous “majestical roof fretted with golden fire”; here we have a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”.
I was spooked.
That grey cloud colour actually has a name: Nardo.
It is described as dirty, raw, brutal and honest.
When I first laid eyes on a muscle car wrapped in Nardo, it felt like judgement day, as if to acknowledge that global pollution and climate decay had led us to this point where even our car fashion will speak of it.
Nardo! One meaning holds that it is Spanish for the oil of the spikenard plant.
Anyway, heading into the maelstrom, I had this naar feeling that, finally the risk we talk of all the time, was in fact coming true.
Some of us have a pragmatic fatalism about where all the fun ends — “If I get clipped by a shark, well then, that is my time. Hopefully it will be quick and where better a place to depart?”
But we rarely talk about actually being in that moment, and right now it felt that the k*k was hitting the fan.
As I approached Gonubie Primary I got drilled by the gust front.
Rain was so fine and hard it felt like desert dust spiking my cheek bones.
I flapped down the visor.
Now the world is one blur of rain streaming down the plastic, gushing and snaking down the road.
Cars are swerving, I have no idea how deep it is.
I’m riding by touch, feel and faith, which is odd for a dedicated atheist.
And then it happens. The squidge. The back tyre slips out.
Why? Could be a touch too sharp on the brakes, or a change-down was too quick, or even just not being sweet on the throttle, possibly a bit of deceleration.
Anyway, the back rubber is out, traction is lost and now ... as they say in those ads that just draw you in further and further before you get zapped with the pay-here button ... I think of folk rocker Damien Rice’s soulful lyrics:
Stones taught me to fly,
Love, it taught me to lie,
Life, it taught me to die,
So, it's not hard to fall,
When you float like a cannonball
It’s beautiful but also utterly delusional: it is indeed hard to fall when you are astride a 290kg cannonball!
Yeah, there is definitely that floating feeling. Like why didn't I see it coming?
Did my mind’s eye drift? Did I break my promise to never let go of the hyper focus demanded to keep you upright on a death machine?
For what hope is there at 140km/h (at least) when something goes wrong — mostly caused by you, the rider?
But here’s where being in the eye of the storm gets interesting.
Seven years ago when I first got on the KLR 650 — the dear, beloved, semi-retired Delores Koan, mutton dressed up as gothic lamb — had the back wheel set sail, I would have crashed.
But today, on this wild street, there is no snatching at levers, no adrenaline spike, just a calm acknowledgment that, well, this has come to pass.
And I ride it out.
Just let the bike do what those clever Germans designed it to do. I will deal with the psychological fallout later.
And we right ourselves. Hetty and I, calm, tranquil even.
It has to be progress, muscle memory, new grooves in the brain, skills learnt?
Hopefully not early dementia, where you really don’t give a damn.
Even when it’s not dementia, people of a certain high age in our province still don’t seem to give one.
And who would know, that you dear reader, would make it this far with me. I am still here. Are you? Send me a sign.
You do know it was never about the motorcycle.
It is a metaphor, a muse, a way of telling a story, wordplay, ideas, yes, a commentary on Gary Larson’s dreadful Grotogs who occupy our world, and then there are the saints, the good ones, who wear Tees like “English is important, but woodwork is importenter”.
Everyone's story is different, and valid.
You may not have chosen to ride a life-threatening motorcycle, you may have had another story of risk and danger, a dread disease came knocking, a cancer, and every day there are shadows and lighter moments, every check-up is a frightening instant of reckoning. Is it back, am I down, or am I still tall in the saddle.
Today is Good Friday — a day for a crucifixion? But there really is no need for anyone's soul to leave their body.
What there is time for is dinner!
And it’s a slow roast, cauliflower steak, with melted vegan cheese, mash with butter, and an old bottle of port.
Two sets of rentals and their adult kids raising a glass to a time where we ought to let our spirits rise and celebrate, because we have made it this far.
We are here, it’s the we-e-eeeeekend!
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