Feb 2006
Firestorm Day
Bruce Jack

In a runaway veldt fire, the world turns a dirty orange. The gale force wind is stripping life off you like a prayer flag on Everest. And it’s loud – much louder than your worst memory of your most disastrous teenage disco.

You are standing on the back of your farm bakkie, hurtling over dirt roads, the radio blaring maydays from neighbouring farms. You have strapped onto the vehicle a 500 litre water tank, a petrol driven water pump and attached a 20 metre length of hose.

A 10 km wide fireline gnaws down the mountain snapping through mature fynbos like the Doberman Pinchers of Hell crunching brittle bones of inevitability.

You jump off the bakkie, unravel the fire hose and run into the young shiraz block on the crest of the hill – you are surrounded by exploding knee-high fires. You feel the warmth before seeing that your trousers are burning around your ankles. You momentarily watch in wonder – then aim the water onto your boots and retreat.

The deafening hot point of the fire has suddenly caught up with you. Finally you have to breathe. You might as well be underwater – it’s dark and there’s no oxygen.

You buckle over. Your eyes are scorched shut by the barbed smoke. You have no idea which flank of the fireline is closing quickest.

You see the driver gesticulating wildly at a wave of flames pilling up behind you. Around the tires dry vineyard mulch is peeling paint off the bodywork. You jump up. There’s cooked blood against your face where a burning plastic irrigation pipe hit your cheek. The bakkie wheels spin and the fire hose snaps off the pump, caught around a vineyard pole in the teeth of the monster. You abandon it to melt and burn with the irrigation pipes and the vines.

My farm managers, Quintus le Roux and Garth Sinclair and their teams somehow saved the two farm houses. And helped by the epically selfless efforts of Dirk Human and Conrad Vlok, fellow winemakers from Elim, we saved 50% of our vineyards.

Remarkably no one was killed on our farm that day. Afterwards, the scalped mountain is draped in dark grey ash. For days we have been picking up tortoises singed to death in their shells. Half a Cape mountain range and fourteen farms were burnt that day.

We know eagerly anticipate the re-birth of our mountain fynbos – an ancient cycle of reawakening. It is impossible to ignore the trembling, vital energy just below the surface of the soil. The hard knocks of farming are nothing compared to the privilege of belonging to this renaissance and to this place.