Hugh Paxton’s Blog resumes the serialisation of Hugh Paxton’s book The Diary of Abbot Buggly; an account of his daughter’s first year of life in Namibia. As always strange, but true.
Hey ho! Let’s go!
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Into The Namib.
My, but we’ve just had an interesting four days.
On Saturday morning I saw my father packing Nocera (our Mazda) with great flasks of water, boxes of coffee, dried fruit, tins, long life milk, biltong meat jerky, cooler boxes, first aid kit, camping chairs, and other intriguing and frequently unwieldy items. The more unwieldy ones were mine.
He and my mother were talking about how important it was to “make an early start”.
As it turned out “the early start” didn’t.
Start early, that is.
My father had just tugged my ear playfully and said, “See Buggly ? This operation is going like a smooth well oiled machine! We’ll be hitting the road in ten minutes! Less ! Five! Then its Namib Desert time!” when the security gate decided to open by itself.
It wouldn’t close.
Once more the phone lines connecting True-Tech to Number 11 Wurlitzer street were buzzing, nay seething, with outgoing invective and incoming assurances that “the guys will be there any minute”.
Once more (several hours later) a team of Basters arrived.
Once more they had forgotten to bring any welding equipment. Or tools of any description.
There was a great deal of yelling, coming, going, and the long hot morning ground its way with a dismal, familiar and raucous violence of noise towards high noon.
One Baster, an imposing individual who Mally calls Mr. Naughty Naughty on account of the way he routinely demolishes illegal drinking establishments known as shebeens and punches out anyone who gets on the wrong side of “his pride”, approached my father and, looking rather meek, said that the gate was now working.
“About fragging time,” my father answered. Or a few more words to that effect.
“The guy who put the gate job didn’t do it so nice,” Naughty Naughty said.
“YOU put the gate job !”
“No, it was Reggie.”
“Ah, ag, fok. OK. Reggie, huh ? Now I know who to shoot. Thanks. And NOW we can go !”
“Enjoy the weekend,” said Naughty Naughty.
“I will. I intend to. I must!”
Then the phone rang.
On the other end was a woman from Rundu (check the map at the front of my diary if you want to know where Rundu is) who comes to Windhoek on a vaguely regular basis, sets up temporary camp on the outskirts of town accompanied by rough sawn timber and two subservient masculine family members.
Her breasts are immense, her bras are left in Rundu, her hat is colored the burning red of the wild fire lily and her wood it is cheap.
My father had bought seven planks with a view to constructing furniture and she wanted him to come and collect them because she’d decided – on a whim – to go back north.
There was some spluttering from my father – something about how they’d agreed he was going to pick them up next week – but it didn’t amount to much. He hared off to catch the woman before she caught a bus and disappeared with 450 bucks worth of paid-for wood.
By one o’clock the smooth well-oiled machine was still not in evidence. I was beginning to get ticked off. People were running around. A welder wouldn’t go away. The phone kept ringing.
Then we finally left.
Finally.
….
I woke four hours later in my car seat conscious of a new vibration. We had left tarmac and were on a gravel road that threaded through hills.
Some were black and conical. Others were flat topped, yellow or rust brown. Dinosaur hills. Dinosaur views. A dinosaur world.
In the valleys there were tufts of dry whitened grass – straw, really – and occasional suffering trees, bent and twisted and old. It was a lonely view, quite beautiful and very unfriendly, and I stared out of my window and watched it roll past feeling small and shy.
This was a landscape that didn’t care.
During the following two hours we met no other vehicle and saw no other person, though twice we passed troops of baboons who stared at us flatly from the rocks and curled their lips, showing teeth.
Far away, where we were going, there were repeated flashes of heat lightning. On the car’s cassette player Sherlock Holmes was smoking shag tobacco and pondering the conundrum of the man with the twisted lip while fog curled in London and hansom cabs rattled their wheels on Victorian English cobbles.
The miles passed. My father smiled, munched at a pie he’d bought in a very small place called Maltahoe, and as he watched for sudden curves, he just munched his pie, swigged water, and looked totally satisfied with the world.
My mother was asleep, looking serene, young and very beautiful, her long black hair tied back in a pony tail. I looked at the desert sky. A vulture was riding the thermals. I slept.
…..
When next I woke, we were driving on a sand track. The sun was low in the west. All around me stretched a plain covered in that same white, withered grass.
“Almost there,” my father informed me. “We’ll make it before dark.”
“There” turned out to be an old farm called The Family Hide-Out. If there is a lonelier, more isolated farm I have yet to see it.
The Hide-Out has three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and nearby there are some outhouses and a shearing shed all semi-buried by sand. The place is mysterious.
Just outside the front door (which had been left open for us) is a small water hole.
There were three ostriches standing by it looking lost and foolish, and further away a line of six oryx were moving steadily, heavily away.
For the next four days, I was informed, this was to be home.
….
The Hide-Out is located in the NamibRand conservancy, one of the largest privately owned nature reserves in southern Africa. A group of farmers and wilderness enthusiasts decided that instead of struggling to rear scrawny sheep, they would pool their resources, tear down their fences, and restore the land to its original owners; the oryx, springbok, hyenas and lynxes, the hartebeest, leopard, lizards and eagles.
They built small luxurious bush lodges, laid down cellars of vintage wines, mapped out hiking trails and 4×4 courses, organized a hot air balloon or two, and opened for business.
The idea worked as well as it deserved to. You can drive to the NamibRand (as we did) or you can fly-in by light aircraft; the Dunehopper air taxi. If you’re richer than we are.
All the lodges offer privacy but few get as private as the Family Hide-Out. Five kilometers away on a combination of house, research station and desert activity center, live the care-takers.
And that’s it. The place is yours and yours alone.
That night my parents dined by candle light and the faint glim of solar-powered light bulbs.
Above the Hide-Out the milky way glowed, shooting stars shot, and the desert wind moaned and sighed.
Wonderful.
Peace.
I soon put a stop to that!
….
For several weeks now I’ve been mastering the art of rolling. It took a while to get the knack but it wasn’t until my parents were staring out of the front door watching springbok trotting in from the emptiness to drink that I perfected the back flip.
Back I flipped, and off the bed.
There was a hollow “thok” as my poorly insulated skull bounced merrily off the mat, and to the background accompaniment of my lusty howling the springbok took off for Botswana.
No real harm done. So a bit later I did it again.
Thok! Howl!
Still alive, I noted. Odd. So after my mother had calmed and my father had stopped abusing me I waited carefully for them to look elsewhere.
It took a while but sure enough by mid-morning their minds were beginning to wander. Mother was strumming an Elizabethan English tune on her classical guitar, my father was reading a book about giant squid on the porch (stark naked, I might add) and the heat was relentless.
I made my move.
Young persons of my age enjoy stuffing anything that comes to hand into their mouths.
To keep me orally appeased, my parents had laid out a selection of safe, colourful, chewy things, but I opted instead for a wad of used tissue paper.
Choking myself to death struck me as amusing.
I chortled as I stuffed my face. It was a mistake. My mother lunged. My father lunged. And my new, cherished, if life threatening, friend was removed in sticky shreds
“The hell’s got into her, the silly little beazle,” roared my father. “I mean really! We’ve had five months of no nonsense and then as soon as we’re in the middle of one of THE most remote spots on the planet she catches Lemming Syndrome! Annabel, you’re a moron! What are you?”
A moron.
Yup, that’s me.
…..
After these incidents I was confined in a stockade constructed of Buggly-proof objects. Tissue paper wads were escorted from the premises. I had a crack at inhaling a tok-tokkie beetle that scuttled over the ramparts but it was just too damn big. And before I could gnash it with my gums my father had evicted it.
Tok-tokkie beetles , incidentally, are an ingenious bunch. They’ve by-passed the Namib desert water shortage by devising a technique known as “bums up”.
This involves standing on their heads, letting the cool sea fog that regularly drifts in from the Skeleton Coast condense on their carapaces and roll down in little droplets to their mandibles and mouth.
Purified water. Distilled water, no less. Clever.
Anyway, there I was. Imprisoned. Tissue-less. With not even a tok-tokkie to ingest.
Some holiday !
….
The next few days passed in the way days pass when you don’t have a clock ticking, a TV blaring, a phone ringing (with a voice on the other end saying “Where am I?”), faxes faxing, emails spamming, welders welding, visitors, obligations, or a short wave radio that picks up something more entertaining than a Chinese voice all but drowned in static and some Portuguese language station playing harmonica music.
The days passed like a Namib mirage; dream-like, drifty, there…but not quite there. If you know what I mean.
I don’t think I’ve seen my parents so content.
And, well yes, after I’d abandoned my suicidal ambitions, you know I didn’t have such a bad time.
My parents tended to get excited when an ostrich peered through the window, or springbok herds visited, or when there was an oryx fight at the waterhole while they were drinking coffee on the porch a couple of yards away.
The highlight of my day was when a large plastic paddling pool was brought out and filled with tepid water from a hose. The pool, like a lot of little child-related bits and bobs, came courtesy of the owners of the Family Hide-Out.
The tepid water was trapped and solar heated in the coiled hose pipe. Just right.
After I’d kicked water in my father’s face (no doubt he’ll sign up on a Charles Atlas course and do the same thing to me one day) the pool was removed and it was back in stir for me.
But when a family is happily, gloriously and ever so slightly bored, it soon finds a way to fill in the gently passing hours.
Guess that’s how I became a paramilitary.
With the rank of corporal.
….
The elite unit I now belong to is known as “Bug Squad.” Our mission, in military terms, is probably unique in the history of our fractious and warring planet.
Our unit’s slogan is, “Where others remain vigilant, we sleep! When others stand proud, we sag fatly in our pushchair! When the tough get going we don’t really notice because we’re too busy staring vaguely in another direction!”
Hardly stirring.
But that’s Bug Squad for you.
Bug Squad has been assigned the job of thwarting Al Quaeda operatives who are spotted infiltrating Namibia dressed as small cuddly toys (but NOT those disguised as wads of tissue paper ot tok-tokkie beetles. Those warped and fiendish characters must be left to the Namibian Defence Force or the Special Field Forces ).
Bug Squad is charged with defending democracy and human dignity, and must uphold the sanctity of some other things.
But not if the squad is about to go to sleep.
I enlisted involuntarily. I was effectively press-ganged. But once you’re in you’re in. As a corporal I felt I should make as little effort as possible and thus began my meteoric rise through the ranks.
By day three of Basic Training I had failed to crawl up a small sand dune, omitted to remain awake on guard duty (for that I received a medal) and completely ignored an assault course.
I left the Namib desert a major.
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