I have the privilege of living in a country that affords so many opportunities to immerse my children into nature. This time around it came in the form of a weekend in the Pilanesberg National Park. My parents have timeshare at the Bakubung Lodge and I am lucky enough to be invited along every year.
The park holds a very special place in my heart and the escape to the wilderness quenches some elemental part of my soul. Its landscape has become familiar to the extent that as I drive the spiderweb of roads, I am often lost in my thoughts, reminiscing of previous sightings whilst trying to scan the bush for new ones. I remember the cheetah pair (Rain and her cub) I found at the edge of a dusty wallow on the way to Ruighoek Dam, the herd of elephants that enveloped my car near Kubu Picnic Spot, the pairs of Pied Kingfishers that I love to watch from Mankwe Hide and the Brown Hyena that lives near Lengau Dam. I remember the leopard, Orion, that I just missed at Ratlogo Hide and the pride of lion that I followed along the Tlou road. There was also the time when I saw a pair of secretary birds engrossed in their mating ritual near the Hippo Loop. My favorite sighting involved an elephant bull that wallowed in the mud outside the KwaMaritane hide, so close that I was splattered with mud and I could smell his musky scent. These moments all stand out because by-en-large my vehicle was the only one at the sighting and I felt like I had the entire park to myself. I was enthralled by my own little piece of paradise. Sharing these memories with my children and making new ones whilst driving through the bush is one of the most rewarding experiences of my adult life. We gave Bella, my seven year old, her first bird book, by Faansie Peacock, and she began exploring this new hobby with much gusto. Bella was looking for birds wherever she went, trying her best to navigate through the colour codings on the edge of the book to identify them, and then proudly ticking off her sightings on each page. When she wasn’t doing that, Bella would sit on my lap, steering the car along the quiet dirt roads, her face steeled in concentration. We would stop to look at all sorts of things, from broken open termite mounds to chameleons. We would pick the leaves off Velvet Bushwillows that overhung the road, debating whether their texture would really make a good substitute for toilet paper or not. Sometimes we just stopped, turned the car off, and listened to the life around us. I would try to identify as many of the calls as I could, pointing out the Rufous Naped Larks, Diederik Cuckoos or Twinspot Batis. We would scan rock koppies, hoping for the glimpse of a leopard, but satisfied at seeing a klipspringer or European bee eater instead. For my one year old son, Dean, this was his first experience in the bush of which he was actually aware. Dean has always watched the animals around our home, from the birds on the feeder outside the kitchen window to our pair of dogs and cats. He often points his stubby little finger at them and mutters something incoherent, so I was eager to see what he thought of the wild animals. He wasn’t happy being in his car seat, so when Bella wasn’t driving, Dean would stand on my lap, hold the steering wheel confidently and peer out of the window. His first sighting that was close enough for him to really appreciate was a herd of sixteen elephants, ranging from the old matriarch to a calf that could not have been more than a month old. We were lucky to have the whole herd to ourselves as they calmly surrounded the car, crossing from one side of the road to the next. At times they were not more than a few feet from our vehicle, and wide-eyed Dean was pointing, smiling and babbling away the whole time. His jumbled syllables slowly formed into a word and he began saying dog, gesturing towards the elephants. We thought this a fluke at first but when we came across some giraffe, he again pointing his chubby little finger at the long-necked animal and said “dog”! The story repeated itself with any four-legged animal that was close to the car. We saw impala-dogs, kudu-dogs, wildebeest-dogs. The only variation was his starting to wave at them as well! Eventually we came across the most beautiful white rhino with her calf. Seeing rhinos is always bitter-sweet as upon seeing these magnificent creatures one cannot help but think about the poaching plague which is ravishing our wild spaces. The pair came very close to our car, and as we watched them munching away at the rain-sodden grass, the calf began to mew to her mother. It was a soft, whining plea for some milk. Dean was very interested in the youngster, and listened curiously, his head snuggled in the hollow between my neck and shoulder. He raised his hand, extended a finger and said “dog”. My heart melted.
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It all stared when I decided to plant a tree for Dean and Bella. I have always wanted to plant a tree for my kids, but somehow I never managed to organise myself well enough for the purchase of a tree to coincide with an important event. A birthday would come and on the day it would dawn on me that I should have bought a tree. Next year I would get it right, I told myself. But after I had missed the opportunity on Dean’s first birthday, mum offered me two avo trees which had been planted from seeds by an overseas friend who had visited three years earlier. I jumped at the opportunity, and that afternoon, took Bella and Dean to plant the trees side-by-side in my garden.
Bella was really happy not only because she claimed the larger one, but also because after we had helped Dean plant his, our lab-cross-retriever promptly lifted his leg onto his tree. Bella is really good with Dean, and despite the dog’s intrusion, she lead her younger brother by the hand and helped him water the trees using a plastic, elephant-shaped watering can. She also asked me a whole lot of questions about the trees, including whether they would survive and how big they would get. Her little mind couldn’t wrap itself around the age of the surround trees, and how long it would take to get to that point, so we started talking about how trees grow and whey they need to become gargantuan garden dwellers. That same week, as fate would have it, I had a meeting which finished early, and whilst walking back to work, I noticed a seedling forest of yellow woods that had germinated underneath a single huge tree. I knew that they would be weeded out of the flower bed, so I decided to collect as many of the as I could to plant somewhere else myself. If you don’t know, the yellow wood is our national tree, so relocating them seemed like the patriotic thing to do. After all, they have existed all over our country for the past 100 million years. While I moved the soil away from each fragile stem and gently prised them out of the ground, I was struck by the contrast between this colossal tree towering above me and its minute offspring on the flowerbed floor. It is incredible how something so small can become such a giant. With that, I thought about the wild olive tree that I had planted near the school dam when I must have been about ten. It was still there, but without a clear recollection of planting it, I was not sure which one from the grove of trees was mine. I was sure that the slow growing olive would outlast me and long after I am gone, it would nourish that little space at the edge of the water. Hopefully I would be right about this point because the oldest tree in the world is 5069 years old, rooted in California. 5069 years...can you imagine that! The people and places it has seen are just incredible. That figure is debated on various internet sites, but being in the region of 5000 years is simply breathtaking. The oldest tree in South Africa in the Sunland Baobab that is 1060 years old (seeded around the same time as Great Zimbabwe). It houses a pub in its hollow core and recently the tree broke in half near its base. Baobabs do this, and it will continue grow, leveraging from its new limb. Like most South Africans, I have a soft spot for Baobabs, an am proud to have grown two from seeds which are slowly growing in terra-cotta pots outside my kitchen. I think not enough people plant trees and it should be one of our core ideals as human. Plant trees. That got me thinking about my favorite stained glass windows at the back of the chapel. It is an arching of coloured glass fragments that all emanate from a single, yellow round sphere. It is meant to depict the parable of the mustard seed which goes something like this: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” So, trees are incredible...but what can we learn from them? Thanks to a colleague of mine, I managed to get my hands on a DVD produced by Dame Judi Dench called ‘My Passion for Trees’. It was an exploration of the trees in her garden, especially a prized oak tree, coupled with quotes from Shakespeare. So just up my street. She had a company use lasers and unpronounceable technology to digitally map her oak tree, and as a result found out that over its lifespan, it housed over 25 tonnes of carbon. I knew that trees took in carbon dioxide and released oxygen, but had never given much thought to what happens to the carbon (I am quite simple when it comes to chemistry). Obviously it is stored that by the tree and that is why the tree is made of carbon. Amazing..and this tree having 25 tonnes of it...incredible! Judy’s oak tree also had more than 12km of branches and a staggering amount of leaves...260000...enough to cover three tennis courts. And that is all just coming from one tree. It is simply staggering. So trees are amazing, and as they say, with age comes wisdom, so what wise words could the trees offer us? This question was ultimately where I got to from planting the avo trees with my kids, to now. As Bella and Dean’s trees grow, what could I tell them about the lessons that I have learnt from trees, and maybe the lessons that they could learn about too?
The Truly GreatBY STEPHEN SPENDER
I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded from the Spring branches The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms. What is precious, is never to forget The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love. Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit. Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour. |
ContentSome thoughts about things, sometimes philosophical, sometimes just musings. The world through my eyes... Archives
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