Leaving the Karoo and coming back again

There are places in South Africa that are like separate countries with their own weather of the soul. You leave one and enter another as though crossing some invisible line unmarked by government.

When you leave the Karoo, you come out from under an old silence into other ways of living.

I had first gone east into the mountains to Hogsback. The roads curved up through wet country where the soft earth was secretive. There are forests that belong to different stories, moss-covered trees and ferns growing in greenish shadow. Mist hangs between trunks like smoke from unseen fires. A forest on the mountain that forgets the world. At night there are small lights in windows and the trees whisper with water. The mountains disappear entirely into cloud and reappear.

Then came the return west. The long descent from the mountains. The roads widening and the trees thinning until the horizon opened into the vastness of the heartland. The Karoo did not seem emptier than the forest.

The Karoo has its own oldness, unsecretive and exposed. The oldness of stone and dry riverbeds and distances so great they silence the mind.

You have left the enclosing mountains and the dripping forest onto the great plains of minute-changing light. Sheep whiten the veld and windmills turn and small towns gather loosely around their churches. The Karoo receives you, untroubled by your leaving.

Then came Johannesburg, urgent, sudden and loud. The city had been washed clean by strange rains, the streets shone beneath afternoon light. Traffic moves endlessly and the energy exhausts and fascinates. Glass buildings tower above flooded highways, overlooking the endless movement of money and worry and ambition. Everything temporary and immediate, reaching for tomorrow. At night the lights spread endlessly across the ridges and highways like another sky laid upon the earth.

Then one returns again.

Back through the Free State. Long roads and fuel stations and grazing land. Back into the Karoo where autumn began while the cities were busy with themselves. A deep silence lies between house and hill. One can hear dogs barking kilometres away. One is surprised by roadside lights.

The cities may flood or burn or build upward and still the Karoo keeps its old habits. The poplars yellow in the sharpened mornings while smoke rises from chimneys at dusk. Somewhere a gate creaks in the wind.

The leaving is necessary sometimes. One must remember that the world is large and strange and crowded with different lives, but then one must return to something that predates urgency, that predates human life itself. Gives a silence you must sit with and live alongside. The silence will outlive you and forget your ambitions.

𝑊𝒊𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝙝𝙖𝗻𝑘𝘴 𝐟𝘰𝑟 𝑟𝙚𝐚𝒅𝒊𝑛𝙜,
𝘕𝘰🅼𝗶.