DELORIS KOAN

I see the end!

I have walked hard and strategically for one who abandoned his legs for years.

But the 5km finish lines are there and as I make my push to proudly hand in my non-existing barcode, thinking, well the knees held out sort-of, there is a rumble and whoosh.

Noooo! I am being passed by a woman pushing a pram with an infant having fun inside!

This is beyond humiliating. Or possibly a moment of wonderful celebration.

I see there is a father running alongside her — but why isn’t he pushing the pram?

There is one “hill” in the brand-new Orient parkrun — a faint rise in the bricked paths between the pools, about 30m from said finish line — and this mom actually uses it to speed up, pram, infant and all.

I see her man start to fall back. He tries a little spurt of speed, but this Madonna mama has dropped us all.

The okes trot in a little beaten but full of admiration.

I see a lot of this along an extraordinary course, which takes on a new dimension when you actually put takkies on the ground.

You literally feel the infrastructure and what is happening to it from your soles.

The start, near the gate at the pools, is excellent, if you can ignore the uncollected bags and gaping hole in the main building where a roller door has stood broken for how long.

And a city refuse truck parked for a few days now with a flat tyre and load on the back.

But it is all good, until you hit the Orient Pier. From here on, for 768m out and back, you have entered the futuristic utopia-dystopia world.

The view of the port, with Transnet’s 1,559 tonne Italeni hopper dredger digging out the entrance, a sailboat on the horizon, kelp and grey-headed gulls wheeling, the Quigney looking so familiar, comforting and resilient, and of course, our urban core, the wildly exquisite, under-pressure, Nahoon Point Nature Reserve.

It’s an out-of-body moment, but right now our eyes are grounded.

This pier, scuffed and scoured, is a concoction of colonial origins, liberation neglect and sloppy maintenance. But it too stands proud, resilient and integral to our socio-psychological centre, our cultural heritage, a survivor like the rest of us.

It may not be that loved by officialdom, but the public sure do dig it!

Anglers, runners, soul searchers and the odd official van taking a jolly out into the ocean to have a smoke.

Its bedrock engineering DNA remains in place 102 years after coming into existence as a rough breakwater in 1924, and then, in 1927, as a “super-imposed” 384m-long promenade pier with seating bays, and wood-and-brass entrance gates, turnstiles and lanterns.

In terms of colonial nostalgia, it was a place of stylish masters and madams strolling out in billowing dresses and suffocating corsets.

In 2026, we are a grittier society struggling with inequality, the hangover of these systems.

Those corsets and tie-down bonnet creations are replaced by peaks, Lycra and high-tech takkies which must pick a way between gnarly, pitted cement, sand, rusting railway tracks used to build the pier, and some smooth cement.

Promenading is replaced by an elderly woman seated on the rough cement of those larney “benches” with blood on her nose being taken care of by volunteer marshals. She is in shock after a hard fall but is holding the line.

Earlier, during our race briefing, the race director warns they are “running out of medics”.

It is a treacherous and stupendous course all at once. Here in the liminal zone, we all huff and puff, pound and pitter patter.

We are a mixed bunch, as we have always been. But here, in the wasteland of ocean-and-politics battered public infrastructure, we also endure.

And it’s such fabulous experience, that we return in the afternoon with Friesland milkshakes in hand, and stroll out, still in takkies, to the lighthouse at the end of a world now populated with anglers.

What a stinky, lekka bunch! Covered in bait, with their wheelie carts and Assassin bags showing clever arrangements.

There is great excitement as an unattended rod goes into a bend.

An angler rushes up from the lower tier and leaps onto the parapet to start the fight. Others abandon their stations and rush alongside to leer and cheer.

When the catch appears, there is a collective groan — another “skate”!

They would not say this if they were walking into the EL Museum’s maritime gallery where a 5.3m manta ray caught in 1948 floats and flows majestically in the air.

I see a plastic cooldrink bottle stuffed with small fish and a little water — live bait or dead bait.

But this is how it goes in angling, and later we enjoy a fish and chips from our local shop. It’s how life is right now.

Messy, mangled and magnificent.

The pier anglers chirp and growl, and one young woman leaps out offering to take our picture, saying she once worked for some “fine dining” restaurant.

She takes pics against the lighthouse, now decorated with some rando spray-can warrior’s anarchic tag.

Yet, it’s easy to rise above all this grime and grit — just stand at the very end of the pier and look down and out.

The waters are dark and green, full of mystery and danger. It’s scary to think of how I have swum around this orb poking into the ocean with someone called Joy, to whom we swimmers famously do not say ‘no’!

But out there, it is all dark and light greens and blues, ships, birds in the big watery desert.

Your hobo-bohemian reporter prefers being out here than in the air-conned office.

Parked off at the Southern Cross Cruises cafe on the first floor overlooking the harbour on Thursday, I hear about how thousands of youths are discovering this oceanic treasure for the first time.

I ponder the derelict places in this port, the recent being the fencing out of the community from a strip of land next to the Orient Pier.

I pray harder than any atheist should, of the days when even just a handful of these children are ignited by that one boat trip to take a career in marine science. I pray they will fight hard to keep on defending this natural, urban glory.

I am slightly without hope, but then again, I look on the faces and body language of my 546 parkrunners and see so much determination.

It’s grit versus grit out here.

Surely, this phenomenal public spirit will win out against gangsterism — in corporations, the state or the private sphere.

Surely.