I am a bushveld addict.

Having grown up and lived in it for most of my youth it is where I always felt most settled and where my heart belonged. No other environment has affected me the way it did nor created the same feeling of mystical bond. Recalling that early period of my life never fails to excite the deepest nostalgia.

It is the romantic in me, I guess.

The true bushveld has a spirit, ancient and impassive. It is a spirit which lives on; I know it, I feel it. It lives on despite the ripple of human effects. It lives on despite our attempts to tame and domesticate it. It lives on despite our plans to commercialise and exploit it and turn it to profit. It lives on despite the encroachment of farms and cities…

Even when I am not in it, I can still imagine it: the dust, the heat, the dryness. It is a place of extremes. In the bushveld the sun is brighter, the full moon seems bigger than anywhere else.

Its summer storms are a wonder to behold. The high, piled, whipped cream clouds. The gradual darkening to an intense blue. The sudden ragged bolts of lightning.

And then the rain drumming down and getting soaked up by the parched ground. There is no smell on earth quite like the liberated scents of dust, grass and vegetation released after the first bushveld storm of the season.

Immediately you feel a new energy, a new hope. A quickening of the blood. A rising excitement.

Everything suddenly seems to come alive. The buck start leaping and cavorting, the birds become a flutter of activity, twittering and chirping in the trees.

In next to no time the grass starts sending up new green shoots, the trees break out in bud.

And such trees! What can be more African then the Baobabs, Kiaats, Mopani, Leadwood, Tamboti, Marula, Jackalberry, Nyala trees, Sausage trees, Acacias, Bushwillow, Silver Cluster-leaf, Sycamore Figs and all the other, seemingly infinite, variety trees you associate with it.

These feelings did not diminish when I moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Although I elected to live far from the bushveld, in Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, my heart still lay to the North. On my birding trips you would invariably find me heading up towards the crocodile-infested, fever tree-lined, pans of Ndumo, the broken, granite country around the Crocodile River in Mpumalanga, the enormous sun-drenched plains of Kruger, the red cliffs of Mapungubwe and the mopani-covered Limpopo Valley.

When I wanted to get even further away there was the Matobo Hills, Kariba, Mana Pools, Mangwe and Gona-re-Zhou in Zimbabwe, on the other side of the border.

Although I had done the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands Meander many times, I had never really thought about living there. For me it was just a green, pretty, tranquil, place to escape to when I needed a break from the bedlam and noisy confusion of city life. I liked sticking my nose in to its arts studios. I liked sampling the fare at its numerous food outlets, pubs and restaurants. I enjoyed soaking up the slightly bucolic, Surrey-in-Africa, atmosphere.

That all changed when my friends, William and Karen, bought Kusane Farm in the Curry’s Post area, on a hill overlooking the Karkloof Valley, and asked me if I would like to come and live on it.

Having reached an age where I felt my life needed a change of direction I duly motored up to check it out.

Like William and Karen I loved Kusane from first sight. Staring over the valley below I just stopped and whispered “Oh boy!” softly to myself.
It had just rained and everything about the day was lovely. The pleasing tidiness of the fields below. The tree-clad slopes of the Karkloof Hills stretching along the one side of it and, near the centre of valley, the oddly leonine shape of Loskop hill thrusting itself out of the earth. The Kusane river – from which the farm took its name – passing through a belt of trees and then snaking its way in a series of bends across the wide plain towards the edge of an escarpment.

There was a freshness in the air, an exhilarating quality to the light. The grass underfoot was soft and green and moist with life.

It was clear I had found a place set apart; one which also had its own special isolation of spirit. Relocating to it became, in its own paradoxical way, a kind of homecoming.

I was surprised by my reaction because anything less like my beloved bushveld in Southern Africa would be hard to find.

Curry’s Post is mostly mist-belt grassland with pockets of remnant indigenous forest (or at least it was until the timber companies discovered its potential and despoiled the countryside by planting miles and miles of sterile fir trees).

In summer the mist comes drifting in most evenings, reducing visibility and creating as slightly unreal radiance as it gets hit by the dying embers of the sun.

As the winter cold fronts move through they often bring mist too. From my upstairs balcony I watch it with curiosity as it rolls closer, like a grey wave, until it suddenly enfolds me in a blanket of cold damp.

It is strangely disorienting but also oddly comforting, even as it obliterates all the familiar visual landmarks that surround me and provide me with a frame of reference.

In the end, I did not have to consult any crystal-gazers or soothsayers of some kind to find out why I so quickly fell under its spell. It was my sister, Penny (who is, admittedly, a soothsayer of sorts), who pointed out the obvious.

“It is wired in to your DNA,” she explained.

Originally of Viking descent, my Scottish ancestors, the Moodies, had dwelt for centuries among the heather and bleak, rain-swept hills of the Isle of Hoy on the Orkney Islands. Another branch came from Ireland, the original ‘Misty Isles’. Such scenes would have been familiar to both. Accustomed to the mist and rain, they, too, would have felt quite at home here.

I have always been very proud of my Norsemen roots although I fear that something must have gone wrong with me because although I may have inherited the complexion and hair, I completely lack the marauding temperament! On the contrary, I am a very friendly, peaceful, law-abiding sort of chap, quite happy to let my neighbours keep what is rightfully theirs.

In this respect, maybe I take after my mother’s side of the family.

I do like to roam though. One of the pleasures of being in the autumn of my years is that I am now a man of (limited) independent means, beholden to no one.

I get to decide when I want to be active and when I want to be passive. Should I dig a hole and plant a tree, or just sit and look at a tree?

Or should I be both active and passive and go for a walk? It on these daily ambles that I get to delight in my new found sense of freedom.

I especially like walking in the mist. Something about the half gloom brings out an ancient instinct, a memory buried deep in the back of my brain. There is a healing magic about such weather, it is very evocative of the mysteries, it induces a feeling of solitude in me. It is like having the whole universe to myself.

The Kusane, after which the farm is named, is a small stream but has a waterfall and pool further up, closer to its source. To get to it you follow the path that runs along the ridge that forms the backbone of the farm. Near its highest point is a bald expanse of rock, Lizard Rock, which on a sunny day offers a clear 360-degree view but that window closes down altogether when the mist drifts in. I often like to pause and sit here, alone with my thoughts.

From the top of the ridge the path zig-zags its way down from the one end of the valley all the way to the other. As it winds along you can hear the river but you cannot see it.

Sometimes, if I am lucky, the vague shape of a reedbuck will emerge out of the dripping greyness. Momentarily startled, we will both stand and stare at each other before it bounds away, out of sight.

Other times I will hear the strange whooshing sound of a gaggle of Spurwing geese winging overhead.

The half light can play tricks with your eyes. Even the rocks can take on the appearance of something living: a crouched lion, a sleeping hippo or some sort of dragon-creature, the fissures on the surface of the stone becoming its hide.

At the path’s lowest point you reach a river crossing near where the old pump-house used to be.

Once I get here, I like to sit on the river bank and listen to the sounds: the conversation between rock and flowing water; the plaintiff call of the Longclaw as it rises high in the air; the thin beleaguered cries of the plovers flying overhead and the wind whispering in the grass.

To the ancient folk such sounds carried meaning. I like to think they still do, it is just that our busy, modern minds have forgotten how to hear.

For some reason our local black crows become more vocal on these grey, overcast days. They, too, speak a language which comes from a remote, mysterious time. Their raucous yet eerie sound-shifts, echoing through the swirling mist, conjures up both the natural and the supernatural, magic and wizardry.

You can understand why they were associated with the dark arts in traditional European folklore.

In Zulu society, too, crows and ravens are seen as an omen of misfortune and death (although in New Mexico, as I discovered, the native Americans believe the exact opposite. They see them as bearers of good tidings).

Crows are also, arguably the world’s smartest bird so perhaps it is a little unfair to cast them in such terms. Maybe our irrational fears and prejudices say more about our own morbid thought patterns and preoccupations than it does those of these maligned and often misunderstood birds?

The Black Cuckoo, a summer visitor to our parts, is another wisp of a figure, barely glimpsed but often heard. His mournful call ‘hoo hooee’ is sometimes rendered as “I am so siiiiick!” With climate change casting its grim spectre over our lives, it is a sound which, for me at least, seems to capture some mystical truth about the state of the natural world.

Sitting in the grey gloom I find myself imagining something else – what if one day there were no birdsong at all? What if, in our hard-nosed materialism and clumsy efforts to dominate the planet, we drove all the other species to the edge of extinction?

I do not think I could live in a world where their beautiful cacophony of sounds exist only in memory.

For me there is an important truth to be acknowledged here. While the misty landscape invariably infuses me with a sense of well-being, this feeling is, at times, tinged with a touch of melancholy. I am only too aware that what I am enjoying offers only a temporary escape from the troubles of the rest of the world, lying just over the hill. Yet, in a strange way, this awareness only sharpens one sense of momentary pleasure. It makes you enjoy it all the more because you realise how transitory it is.

And so, as I continue to totter along the straight, stony, path to old age and beyond I intend to keep glorying in the mist.

KARKLOOF GALLERY:

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