Twidle Show Me The Place

Essays
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-77619-321-9
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Apocalyptic futures surround us. In films, books and in news feeds, we are subjected to a barrage of end-time possibilities. Award-winning writer Hedley Twidle, in quixotic mood, sets out to snatch utopia from the jaws of dystopia. Whether embarking on a bizarre quest to find Cecil Rhodes's missing nose (sliced off the bust of the Rhodes Memorial) or cycling the Scottish islands with a couple of squabbling anarchists; whether learning to surf (much too late) in the wild, freezing waters off the Cape Peninsula or navigating the fraught polities of a Buddhist retreat centre, the author explores forgotten utopias, intentional communities and islands of imagination with curiosity, hope and humour. Ranging from the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin to the 'living laboratory' of Auroville in south India, Show Me the Place investigates the deep human desire to imagine alternatives to what we take as normal or inevitable.

HEDLEY TWIDLE is a writer, teacher and researcher based at UCT. His essay collection Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, was published by Kwela in 2017. Experiments with Truth, a study of life writing and the South African transition, appeared in the African Articulation series from James Currey in 2019. His work has appeared in international publications such as the New Statesman, the Financial Times and Harper's magazine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Twidle, Hedley

Leseproben

Thirty-six is no longer young, promising or even emerging. It’s one year too late to join the Youth League and twenty years too late to start surfing, especially in the wild, cold waters at the southern tip of Africa. All that lost time weighs on us, Alex and me. We watch teenagers or outright children paddle onto some heaving Atlantic swell, make the drop, carve some shapes along the moving, blue-green wall then kick out like it was the easiest thing in the world. ‘Poets,’ he would say, beard in hand, as we watched from a car park in the depths of winter, when the swells come in. ‘There are poets among us.’ Alex and I both have beards that are beginning to go silver, but I’m average height and skinny while he is tall and rangy, muscular. We are both only children, sort of, both loners who like having someone to play with, now and then. We both have odd surnames that nobody can spell or pronounce. After sessions that had gone more than usually badly – when we had fluffed a take-off in front of Coach, or our boards had gone vaulting over the white water, or (worst of all) we had pretended to paddle and miss a wave when in fact we were too chicken to take it – Alex could be less philosophical: ‘All those years, doing what? Jerking off in the suburbs. When I could’ve been at Long Beach in fifteen minutes.’ His new cold-water hood made him look somehow Nordic. Hooded, bearded, grizzled: he looked, I guess, better than he was. Out in the back line he seemed to get the kind of respect I never do. He looked like the kind of Kommetjie big wave surfer who might get towed onto a moving hillside of ocean out by Dungeons, then keep it monosyllabic in the post-sesh debrief: ‘It’s a team effort out there, I rely on my guys.’ But the fact is we were struggling to deal with a dirty two-foot shorebreak off the Milnerton lighthouse carpark, where the water tasted of phosphates and Alex had at one point emerged trailing a nappy from his leash. And this gap was getting to him, to us: the gap between our surfing aspirations and abilities. Between the utter sublimity of what we were seeing – up close at the Gat or the Hoek; online in YouTube clips from Portugal, Ireland, Bali, the endlessly spooling barrels of Namibia’s Skeleton Bay – and the prolonged humbling that the middle-aged kook (beginner) must endure. When we were younger, Alex did a school exchange and as a result still holds the Scottish under-16 record for high jump. Many of us remember how he would sail over that bar in a state of grace. That strange, floating, corkscrewing motion – I didn’t have the vaguest notion of how it might or could feel in the body: it was literally unimaginable. He played club football in Cape Town for many years with great focus, forbidding anyone he knew to come and watch him. He venerates the one-time midfielder Zinedine Zidane and in fact looks a bit like him: craggy and intense. His mother has dementia, as mine once did: something we have discussed far out to sea in a world of grey glass and mist, or in a howling offshore that whips our words away as soon as they are spoken. The only memory that his mother has left of me is school sports days, when all those who didn’t qualify for anything else were placed in a 1 500-metre race at the end of the day, a sort of hold-all charity event. ‘And I remember how he used to wa-a-a-a-a-a-ve when he went past!’ This is what she would say, and he liked to bring it out. ‘With a big grin on his face, so happy! W-a-a-a-a-a-ving to the crowd.’ My only claim to sporting prowess was a brief period when my tennis was good enough, or infuriating enough, to earn me the nickname ‘The Wall’. And this difference between Alex and me – not just in athletic ability, but also sporting philosophy – has played out in various ways during our surf career to date. He wants grandeur, the Romantic sublime, feats of perfection and beauty. He has known them in his youth, and so expects them, hopes for them again. Any success for me would come, if at all, via attrition and doggedness. But mostly it was undiluted humiliation out there: being whistled off a wave by a seven-year-old, or chucking your board and diving for the bottom as the next set rumbles in near the Koeberg nuclear plant, on a day when no one else is in the water and your car window’s already been smashed, when you start hyperventilating to get enough air into your system ahead of what you know is coming: the underwater somersaults of a long, glorious Atlantic hold-down. ‘Five years,’ said Alex, who had been googling, ‘Five years to get to a decent level. If—,’ and this was the kicker, ‘you surf every day.’ Coach believed there was still time for us. He grew up near Vic Bay, one of the most reliable point breaks in the country: endless afternoons of peeling rights. What one needed to learn, he said, was a consistent wave without too many changing variables. One needed the closest natural equivalent to Kelly Slater’s wave pool in California, recently constructed and consistently delivering identical, mud-coloured inland tubes in front of all the Budweiser stalls and corporate boxes. Working with chaos mathematicians, the ex-world champion had engineered the surf equivalent of cracking the human genome: truly we were living in the end times. Coach’s build was compact and muscular. He had that mystical quantum of extra time afforded the athlete. When catching a wave (seemingly without paddling – he was always at the right peak at the right time) he would do a sort of mini cobra pose, a half-press-up, looking left and right before deciding whether to pop up. If yes, it was already done, and he was now moving along the face, describing thoughtful curves, his gaze far ahead and down the line. Though ten years younger than us, Coach brought great emotional intelligence to bear in the role of surf mentor. Never too quick to praise nor to blame, he was a master of understatement (to Alex’s annoyance he would never specify how big a swell was in figures), and a paragon of back line etiquette. On his own time he mainly surfed the feral, kelpy breaks near Cape Point. Snorkelling once in those parts had been enough for me. As I dropped from a rock ledge down through water so planktonic and full of nutrients that it was almost soupy, I had a strong bodily sense that something was near, was aware of me. Coach downplayed such dangers and said these breaks were the only places left where surfers had any manners. But for a year or so, right at the start, he graciously accompanied us to wherever the wind was offshore. The on/offshore question is the fundamental binary of surfing; it determines everything. Onshore winds (blowing from sea to land) are pure evil: they mangle the swell, breaking ranks, knocking waves on the back of the head, spilling them over themselves into a grey-brown mush. Offshore winds (blowing from land to sea) are godly: they comb the swell into stately lines, with spray pluming behind, walls going green and barrels hollow. Offshore winds ‘wreathe waves in glory’, writes William Finnegan in Barbarian Days: ‘They groom them, hold them up and prevent them from breaking for a crucial extra beat … On a good day, their sculptor’s blade, meticulous and invisible, seems to drench whole coastlines in grace.’ His epic memoir of a surfing life ranges from the warm-water tubes of Hawaii and Bali to the cold-water bombs of San Francisco and Madeira. And since the author spent some time teaching at a ‘Coloured’ school in Cape Town’s Grassy Park during the 1980s, the book even touches on Surfers’ Corner, the nursery at nearby Muizenberg. Vaguely embarrassed even to be thinking about waves at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Finnegan quickly dispenses with it as ‘a wide, shapeless beach break’ that he surfed when not too busy grading papers or planning lessons. It stung a little, seeing a patch of ocean where I’d spent so much time reduced to those four words. Because Cape Town is at the head of a coastal peninsula, you can, in theory, always find a break where the wind is offshore. If the summer southeaster is turning False Bay into a foaming algal mess, it will be producing crystalline A-frames on the other side at Dunes. If the winter northwester has reduced Glen Beach to a disgusting slop of stormwater and sewage blowback, then Muizenberg might finally be coming into its own. Pulled over near the Shark Spotters booth uphill, you will see dark-blue lines queuing up from far out to sea. There is, however, a problem with learning to surf in this city, or at least with advancing beyond beginner. Yes, there is the broad, sheltered, multidenominational church of Surfers’ Corner. Here, young and old, short-boarders and long-boarders, stand-up paddlers and surf tourists, can all have a grand old time getting in each other’s way and being very decent about it. ‘Too happy clappy,’ said Alex. ‘It’s like Sunday school out there’. But as soon as you want to move out and up a step, there is no intermediate stage. The remaining options are the icy, bone-crunching breaks of the west coast, where waves are fast, steep, hollow and (like the local crews who dominate them) unforgiving. ‘The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast,’ writes Finnegan, ‘every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell – a longitudinal study, through season after season, is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break....