Steven Watson

Bitter Pastoral: The Meaning of the Cedarberg
10 June 2005 by Stephen Watson

I

When I was first asked to give this talk , I thought it would be an easy matter to prepare. Over the last twelve years I've published, among other things, a personal essay, a sequence of poems, as well as part of a diary, all of which have to do with my experience of the Cedarberg. Moreover, I'd spent relatively long periods in these mountains, including a two-month long stay at the farm Kromrivier in the winter of 1992. Given all this, I imagined it would not be hard to talk about the meaning that the Cedarberg holds for me, to say something about the spell that these mountains have long exerted - and, given that I'm a writer and not a geologist or botanist, to approach the spiritual and psychological dimensions of this place, its especial charisma.
I was forgetting, of course, that no one ever satisfactorily explains anything they love (a rule to which this talk will be no exception), and that the difficulty of doing so increases in direct proportion to the extent of that love. When the object of one's passion is a range like the Cedarberg, one soon discovers that any attempt to define its spell, no matter how much one might have written about the place before, is rather like trying to hit Mars with a pea-shooter. I am, after all, talking about something huge, a range of mountains which has always awed people, and which more than justifies the hyperbole which an early surveyor like William Mann introduced into his account when, in the 1840s, he first saw its peaks from the far side of the Citrusdal valley: “From the top of this Mountain we had a magnificent view of the splendid range called the Cedar Mountains, distant only about 10 miles to the Eastward, enormous fellows upwards of 7000 feet [sic] in height.”
At the same time, no one who has ever visited the Cedarberg can escape awareness of the fact that this is an area of the world which has a special, indeed unique, power to compel the mind and imagination (as well as exercise the legs and lungs of those who climb there). This is a place which calls to mind the Plato who once spoke of place itself as “a veritable matrix of energies”. It also reminds one of D.H. Lawrence who, in recognition of the singular influence and character that certain parts of the world exert, spoke of “the spirit of place”, or genius loci.
For my part, it is always the height and breadth of the land itself, its huge self and huge sky, that strike me when I return to the Cedarberg. I am compelled once again by its contraries, the fact that here is a mountainscape both dry yet shining, desolate yet so rich. I am reminded once more of the singularly South African poetry in its place names - Krakadouw, Wupperthal, Welbedacht, Tanqua - words which have for me, almost, the power of prayer.
But each person's encounter with a place has a starting-point and in attempting to define the spirit of this place, of the Cedarberg, let me quote a passage from a personal essay entitled “In These Mountains” which appeared in a book of my essays in 1990:

It was my father who first brought me to the Cedarberg, climbing here on an afternoon of rain somewhere in the early Sixties. I can remember a boy's happiness in mounting higher and higher on a path packed with stones, cloud-shadows crossing the valley of Algeria below, the shafts of sun, the rain-squalls, and a watery rainbow spanning the horizon. Back then I did not know…that after an hour of zigzagging up the valley wall, the path would cross the skyline, flatten through a grove of young cedars, suddenly coming upon two huts, dumpy as farm-labourers' cottages. In this wilderness of mountains, I never imagined the sawpit of cedar chips, smelling in the rain, the wet pine-trees, black as conifers, massed behind the huts, the sound of an axe in the middle distance of the rainy afternoon. I had not expected the signs of foresters living temporarily in one of them: a smell of crushed slangbos, charred billy-cans, cold sweet potatoes, goatskin.
Nor did I expect the stream … It flowed through this natural bowl in the mountains, in a narrow channel between oaks and pines, over a bed of quartz pebbles. Its water, then as now, was never dark, as if pine-stained, like that of the mountain streams in the Cape Peninsula, but clear with a clarity that was almost unbelievable. A pale green hue floated in it, changing to palest blue as the currents drifted. Even though the light was poor, a rain-light, this water varnished the rocks, laminated its green water-grass, clarified the tree-shadows that fell into it. I had never tasted water like this, the coldness flowing in it like another substance, tasting of rinsed stone, not water. Nor in all my seven years had I seen anything like the fresh-washed grain of its bed. I had never seen anything more clear.
Henceforth this place, Middelberg, would be sacred to me, as are all those places and occasions where we first grow aware of the beauty of the world.

So this, then, was heaven. Or, if you prefer, a kind of Eden. And I knew this as a child knows such things; which is to say, spontaneously, pre-reflectively.
Later, that child would become a university professor - of English literature specifically - and I would be able to place this initial reaction of mine (which would be repeated throughout boyhood, adolescence, adulthood) in another context or framework of understanding. I was able to see that this sudden love-affair was something more than a happy reaction to a pleasant place. In fact, with my first experience of the Cedarberg, I was also encountering what is called, in the traditions of literature, “pastoral”, a term which will provide my point of departure.

II

On the face of it, it might sound absurd - much too literary and certainly overly professorial - to associate some mountains in the south-western corner of South Africa with a very old, very English literary convention which mostly has to do with poems about shepherds. What one finds in the literature of pastoral, moreover, is a kind of stereotypical scenery which would seem to be at the furthest possible remove from everything we associate with the hard-bitten, sun-bitten terrain of the Cedarberg. Pastoral poetry is invariably populated by quiet inland waters, shade trees, sheep-filled meadows, its silence unbroken but for the songs of shepherds and birds. It belongs to the temperate zone in the northern hemisphere where it first arose. If standard anthologies like The Oxford Book of English Verse abound in poems about shepherds, these latter, like their often Greek names, are mythological light years away from the actualities faced by real shepherds in that very real place which is the Cedarberg. In fact, pastoral and its rural idylls would seem to give any amount of ammunition to those who are inclined to regard all poetry as fanciful nonsense, and worse.
All this is undeniable. But, it must be said, pastoral is much more than the antiquated name we give to an outdated literary convention. Although nobody in the year 2000 writes poems about shepherds, the pastoral impulse itself has never died out if only because it is based on a constellation of human needs that can never be eradicated from the human psyche. This is the universal, undying human need to find a place in the world other than the world as we ordinarily know it. Pastoral is, in fact, that other place which the human mind ceaselessly constructs as a place apart from the pressing actualities of the everyday - whether these be political oppressions, domestic irritations or tyrannies. In this sense, “pastoral” is much more than a word that belongs to the history of literature. It points directly, rather, “to one of the finite, universal impulses - the urge to escape the actual to lodge in something closer to the ideal” (Paul Fussell). Its devices, we can go so far as to say, are crucial to our psychological and spiritual well-being.
Enduring as the impulse itself has been, its literary expression has changed dramatically over the centuries. When Hemingway's hero, Nick Adams, sets out in a famous story called “Big Two-Hearted River” on a trout-fishing expedition in upper Michigan, he is not simply returning to a loved place to camp and to catch some fish,. He is, in fact, engaging in a latterday version of pastoral - reanimating one of the forms it can take in the modern world - and thereby serving his own therapeutic purposes. He is discovering the spiritually healing properties that that place apart from a civilisation overshadowed by World War I enables. And he is also implicitly endorsing our need - our all too human need - for such a place.
The child that I once was was little different. Why I responded (as a seven-year-old) so immediately, so passionately to Middelberg Hut and its environs was because this was my first, spontaneous experience of that sacred place - that place apart from the world - that pastoral has always celebrated. And it had its power, at least in part, precisely because it seemed to embody so fully, indeed completely, one's idea of what such a place should look like.
Admittedly, there were no shepherds at Middelberg Hut that day. But foresters are a kind of shepherd; it's only that they tend the stationary flocks called trees. But the sheer otherness of the Cedarberg from any world that I'd ever known was underscored by its every feature, particularly if you were a city child like myself. Not only did its water seem to be a liquid quite different from the standard municipal variety, but so were the trees that gave the place its name - the cedars, their wood smelling of scented smoke. Then there were its rock-formations: I'm thinking especially of the walk down from Rif Farm through the shale-band to Driehoek - one of those places where the world is pared back to its geological origins, to the stone which is the real floor of the world. And then, as if to underscore this otherness, here was to be found the presence, located in hundreds of caves with their rock-paintings, of that ultimate other, the Bushmen and -women - people so far removed from us that, in their conception of life, there was no such thing as dead matter.
Over the years I've crisscrossed the trails that thread these mountains. There have been nights when I've slept in Panorama Cave, the snow thick outside. I've done the long trek from Crystal Pool to Wupperthal in February heat or September coolness. I've come down the jeep-track to the river-ford at Sanddrif hours after dark. And no matter where or when, one thing has never been displaced. This was the connection, in my mind, between the Cedarberg and an image of freedom.
In my childhood, this freedom was associated with release from that routine affliction of one's early life: the necessity of going to school. Later, climbing in that high, clean mountain country, and knowing all 'the clarifying, restorative force' of its high plateaus, one could find release from other, no less generic afflictions. One could forget, at least for a while, that one was black or white, male or female, English- or Afrikaans-speaking. In short, one could elude that most dismal necessity of South African life, now as then - politics and the political. And even if one remained oblivious to the Latin motto “Solvitur ambulando” (It is solved by walking), one could appreciate anew the kind of solution that mountaineering has always embodied in itself, and which Jim Slater, the doctor to the American Everest expedition of 1963, once expressed as follows: “I have come to feel that one of the deepest attractions of mountaineering is its potential, for a time at least, to allow us to feel whole, pulled together, undivided, undistracted - in a word ourselves.” I myself would render my own version of Cedarbergen pastoral in the essay “In These Mountains”, which I quoted at the outset:

Each of us has an image of freedom, however submerged or overlaid by time. My deepest sense of it never had anything to do with the political connotations of that term; it pre-dated such awareness by many years. Coming round the contour towards Tafelberg, the September shadows already blue in the early afternoon, I know that mine is this, was always this: days of walking across high, upland country, the earth open to the sky, the sky raised, pushed back by the elevation of the peaks, and wind like this one now, rising at our backs, rendering the body as I once knew it, momentarily: something almost bodiless.


III

Many of the signs would seem to indicate that the convention of pastoral died about a century ago, unable to survive the mechanised slaughter of WWI, as well as its collision with the industrialised and post-industrialised worlds. But in reality - as I've also suggested - pastoral has persisted because it is so deeply rooted in psychic needs. So far from dying out in our time, pastoral has merely taken on displaced, alternative expressions. You might think, for instance, that when people go to the beach today, they're merely going to the beach. But, as the writer Paul Fussell has also pointed out, it is in fact one of the great cultural revolutions of the last two centuries that the sun, formerly regarded as malign, as positively hostile to the shadedness always seen as essential to the rural idyll, has been elevated to a point whereby its influence - and that of the beach holiday specifically - has become essential to one new definition of pastoral. Club Med is distinctly in the same line of descent. Which is to say, we nowadays most commonly unburden our psyches by changing our clothes for swim-wear.
The Cedarberg is another, still more recent mutation of the pastoral ideal. Quite obviously, it differs widely, not to say wildly, from the English stereotype of the rural idyll. This is only to be expected in a part of the world where the rainfall is low, often uncertain. Sheep there may be aplenty, but heat and drought, frost and snow, not to mention wildfires, are much more the essence of this place than milk and honey. In point of fact, if one wanted to know the original harshness of the natural world, and in all its stony, inhuman hardness, it would be hard to point to a better instance than these mountains.
Here we meet with an apparent paradox. The beauty of the Cedarberg, its power to hold us, its charisma, is not separable from its desolation, its aridity, its poor soils, frequent droughts. At the same time, the fact that this mountain world is at the furthest remove from conventional ideas of ease and luxury - this does not establish it as a kind of anti-pastoral.
It is sometimes said that the ability to be two contradictory things at the same time is often much more powerful in its effect than one single, unalloyed thing. This is a paradox the Cedarberg undoubtedly embodies. Let me explain by quoting from a diary I once kept. This is part of an entry for 11 May 1996:

The hold of the Cedarberg on the imagination: an arid region which is also a region of oases. Quite simply. And an oasis is nothing but another form of an island, land-locked instead of being surrounded by water. As such, it has the same effect on us, spiritually and psychologically, as does any island. It is a place where we make landfall, where we can find refreshment, where we know our journey across the barrens of sea or desert is over.
How often, at Kromrivier, I've felt the heat of the impending day in a night that's dewless, the moon dryly misting in the pines at daybreak, and, at the same time, have heard the flow of irrigation water, supple in its channel, shaded by oaks and pines, carrying a vein of coolness through a valley otherwise dry with sand and stones.
The fynbos out on the veld might be sun-bitten, boulders lying there like driftwood in the heat. But here there is a channel of water guided by the work of human hands. There is an avenue of shade trees and orchards of pears cultivated right up against the dry, archaeological chaos of stone, that anarchy of scree where field becomes mountain once more.

Any visitor to the area will know this. The Cedarberg is so captivating, so powerful in its effect on the imagination, because its terrain embodies, I think uniquely, a version of South African pastoral as well as anti-pastoral. On the one hand, there is the austerity of its stone world - all the dryness of its cold no less than the dryness of its heat. On the other, and all the more compelling by virtue of the contrast, there are its springs, its streams, its mountain pools, its disas and snow proteas - as well as the more obvious oases like its valley farms and the missionary village of Wupperthal. If pastoral itself has always been a kind of oasis, a mental space where we take refuge from actuality, then the Cedarberg is one living instance of what I would call 'the oasis-effect' - and all the power that is contained, and released, when two opposed realities are brought into close conjunction. Here, it is as if pleasure and reality principles, so often at each other's throats, are brought into relation in such as way as to augment rather than contradict the gratification that each can afford. William Mann again implies as much when, coming upon the farm Driehoek in the 1840s, he speaks of “a grove of majestic oaks”, of finding “an abundance of all kinds of fruits and more delicious apples I never tasted”.
I hardly need to multiply examples. Anyone can provide their own instances of those oasis-like spots in the Cedarberg where, on one or other occasion, we have taken grateful refuge from heat and thirst - and, as the case may be, cold and rain and snow. It was this, at any rate, that I was concerned to capture in a small poem, entitled “The Spring above Rif Farm”:

Traveller, mountaineer, passing through these mountains
and coming on this cedar grove to be delighted by the spring
that you'll find flowing here, pure as the sandstone aquifer
from which it wells, cool as the ferns that shade its source -
remember that I, myself reminded, once thought to gather, place
this handful of quartz chips in the clean sand at its mouth,
white pebbles catching the light, shining as if freshly cut,
so the water would flow clear, still more purely from this spring,
and you'd continue on your way, even in the noonday heat,
a clearness lasting in the thirst you've slaked.

(from A Kromrivier Sequence)

When we respond to such places with the pleasure that we do, we are participating in a latter-day, albeit differently inflected version of what so gratified the English aristocracy when, living in London, it read poems about country pleasure - shepherds, brooks, and dales. And more than this: we are encountering a version of pastoral which is more in consonance with present needs, even with what we might call the spirit of this age.

IV

The pastoral is always the other place, at the furthest remove from civilisation and its discontents. Of course, for all I know, there may be plenty of pastoral refuges around the world, from the beaches of Mexico to the imaginary palaces of Walt Disney and beyond. But there is a further reason why the effect of the Cedarberg is not simply that of a dozen other places; and why, moreover, that power is destined only to grow in the future. Nowadays, it is not merely fanciful to say that our conception of the pastoral ideal - of what that other place might best look like - has undergone a sea-change. If many of us no longer hanker after the traditional ideal - what has been called “the matronly luxuriance of greener places” or “the contented pregnancy of midland fields” - it is because, more and more, we inhabit a world which, if it has hardly altered the existence of our deepest psychic longings, has certainly changed their direction.
This is the contemporary world, our world, much written about by ecologists, the global site of current ecocide - “the systematic destruction of dwelling-places in the name of progress”, as Jonathan Bate defines it. More particularly, it is a world which has become ever more subject to that highly ambiguous triumph, the colonisation (which also means the contamination) of its every corner by the technologies (and other designs) of one single species, the human one. So total has this domination become, so far-reaching its effects, that it has given rise to a form of loneliness that no one before our time had ever dreamed of.
It is given acute expression in a book by the American writer, Bill McKibben, entitled The End of Nature:

The idea of nature will not survive the new global pollution - the carbon dioxide and the CFCs and the like…We [human beings] have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. We have changed the atmosphere - changed it so much that the climate will be dramatically altered. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. (Even the rain that falls in the Arctic today bears traces of our pollution). We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning: without it there is nothing but us.

And, as he goes on to explain, this is where the new, unprecedented sense of loneliness comes from today. We inhabit a world in which the old conception of nature (as something radically apart from us) no longer really holds. “[T]he wind still blows”, as McKibben says, “but no longer from some other sphere, some inhuman place.” Thus the loneliness: “There's nothing there except us. There's no such thing as nature any more.”
When one adduces all the other changes that post-industrial humanity has introduced - we have lately taken space and turned it into cyberspace; we have, through the techno-sciences, created a 'virtual reality' that encourages people in the belief that they can emancipate themselves from all organic restraints (even the organic itself) - it becomes understandable, I think, why there should have lately woken in the human psyche a different kind of need from former times, a need for that which is radically, even inhospitably other to the human realm, its invasive presence and now pervasive contaminations. It becomes all the more understandable why, for many of us, our pastoral ideal should have shifted from a place which is uniquely hospitable to human ease to one which is even fiercely inhospitable, absolutely other, obdurately alien. In short, it is rock and sand, desert and semi-desert, not those quiet inland waters, so beloved of English pastoral, that nowadays seem uniquely healing, our most contemporary form of solace. They bear no obvious imprint of our species and its depredations. In such places, most happily of all, we do not see ourselves reflected - not even in our most benignly anthropocentric mode.
It is in this present context that the Cedarberg has come to exist as something much more than a range of mountains where one can take healthful weekend hikes in mostly fine weather. More and more it seems to answer to the new form that our immemorial desire for that other, ideal place has come to assume. Being so inhospitable, so other, it is now uniquely hospitable to our deepest, present-day psychological and spiritual needs. Remaining part of the non-human realm, it wears the face of Eden. It is our new pastoral ideal.
It is this very apartness of the place that is the source of its greatest power, that lies at the root of the enigma of that power, as well as the unique solace it affords at the present moment in history. Indeed, it is the very otherness of these mountains which is also the reason why they have drawn so many poets, writers, and other artists. Of course, the latter from the rock-painters of Lascaux and on, have always been magnetised by “the encounter with the teeming strangeness and menace of organic presences” - “the inviolate enigma of the otherness in things and animate presences” - as the critic George Steiner once put it. He continues:

Beyond the strength of any other acts of witness, literature and the arts tell us of the obstinacies of the impenetrable, of the absolutely alien. It is the poet, the painter, the composer…who instruct us that we are monads haunted by communion. They tell of the irreducible weight of otherness, or enclosedness, in the texture and phenomenality of the material world. (Real Presences, 1989)

But he could have added that there are also parts of the world which instruct us no less than the best of the artists. It is in the Cedarberg that all that he speaks of (above) invades us with its manifold presence. Whether in stone or sun, there an other-than-human strangeness presses us towards modes of being which we ordinarily have no access to - modes of being in which “strangeness is made, in certain respects, still stranger”, even to the extent that we become alien to ourselves.
Some years ago it happened that, climbing in the region of Sneeuberg, I stayed out till very late and it was after dark before I returned to the valley floor again. Here are the first two parts of a poem of mine called “Descending, Late”:

IV

It will be dark, in cold, in stars,
stone bedded in the road like iron,
before you reach the final pass,
see far below the small farm lights.

The river beds itself in stone,
in night, as deeply as it can;
along this track, its road-bed sunk,
cold seeds itself in stone,

The cedars passing one by one
and black along the skylined peaks
that move with you as you move on
into the night that mountains make,

Beneath your soles, a gravel's salt,
the juts of rock - against your skin
the charred fynbos a coral, dark
far down this canyon's underworld:

A baboon barks, it almost screams:
the moon is up, over the Cedarberg,
and in the mountains to the east
the planet Mars is disappearing.

II

It will be more than late, long dark,
now this far off the stars convene,
the road more broken underfoot
as it drops through the shale-band.

You halt: far down the valley floor
a footfall rings, comes doubled back
into the emptiness you tread,
a strangeness self-estranging as

The cold in which the stars divide
in still more stars, the multiples
of stone that in this cold intrude
a stoniness against your bones -

Till you can't tell who it might be,
the sound of stone, or knock of boot;
if it was you, or one not you,
still moving down the night skyline,

A figure dark beneath its load,
hurrying through cold shades, the nek -
who halts again, the heavens wheeling,
to hear who moves, who halts.

The American writer Paul Bowles was perhaps pointing to a similar kind of displacement of the human being from the ordinary coordinates of his or her existence when he describes, in an essay of 1963, the characteristic effect of another of the world's radically other places, the Sahara desert, on those who would venture into it for any length of time. For those who leave the desert towns behind, pass through the dunes and onto the desert plains beyond, a rite of passage ensues - “what the French call le bapteme de la solitude [the baptism of solitude]”-which he describes as follows:

It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and it remains to be seen whether you will fight against it, and insist on remaining the person you have always been, or whether you will let it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came. (“Baptism of Solitude”, 1963)


V

No doubt the Cedarberg is, and will be, no less subject than anywhere else to the fact that, as Bill McKibben writes, we have so altered the atmosphere that we have changed the world's weather patterns. But its bitter pastoral (as I like to call it) still offers us compensations which are ever more rare, particularly by comparison with many other parts of the world. I, for one, never return to the Cedarberg without a feeling of relief so enormous that, coming over the Cedarberg Pass to see Algeria in the distance of the valley floor once more, I always find myself thanking (involuntarily) whatever powers may be that I have been spared (yes, this is the somewhat melodramatic word that springs to mind - but that's how it feels) to see this part of the world again. I am simply, extraordinarily happy to see again the bulk of Sneeuberg, say, from the jeep-track on the other side of the Welbedacht valley, or perhaps the slow changes that darken the pyramid of the Sugarloaf when one watches it at dusk from far down the valley floor of the Kromrivier valley. I am always equally relieved to see that such things exist, that they have remained very much the same in my absence.
Here, in addition to that otherness in its terrain, one has access to those three things which are the rarest luxuries in the contemporary world: silence, space, and time. In these mountains, one's experience of the world, so often thinned out and denatured by other time-bound imperatives, starts to deepen once more. One understands afresh, in the presence of these stone peaks, why the word “being” “is not”, as another American writer notes, “a fancy concept in philosophy, but a wordless experience we have from time to time.” And a necessary one as well:

At night
I listen to the river
weave its many voices
into one voice only,
of water flowing
channelled
through the dark.

There is
something moves
through water,
even as it moves,
that is not water,
does not
move.

It cuts
a channel
through the dark,
but not the sound
alone of water
parted by its bed
of stones,
purled between
the stems of reeds,
pacified by
dark pools.

Not the sound
of water braided
or unbraided
through the defiles
of its passage;
nor that wind-
sound a river makes
as it narrows,
quickens,
in its cutting
through the hills.

There is
something moves
through water,
even as it moves,
that is not water,
does not
move - and which
I hear tonight,
silent against
all onrushing,
not travelling
through this mountain dark,
and which I listen to,
myself not moving,
not wanting to.

(“The Water Spirit”)

Such voices, drowned out almost everywhere by now - “like a crazed locust”, Steiner is surely right in his mordancy, “the cellular phone eats up what is left of silence” - constitute what Keats once called “the song of the earth”. It is a song which, though it may bear no moral within it (it is way too subtle for that), though it may have no 'meaning' as we ordinarily understand that word, nevertheless always convinces us that, without it, we cannot lead a fully human life.
There was once a time when the Cedarberg seems to have been crowded by forest. During a tour of inspection requested by Commissary de Mist in 1805, it was noted that the party rode on horseback through a forest of cedar-wood “about 24 miles long and 2 miles wide”. Exaggeration or no, it was only 30 years later, in 1836, that W von Meyer could write that “All or nearly all the accessible cedars of commercial value are gone”, so thoroughly had the local woodcutters ransacked the slopes for timber. By the 1980s, particularly following the great wildfire of 1988/9, the cedar was an endangered species, requiring a special programme to reinstate the tree in its natural habitat. (This is not to mention that other, irreversible form of depopulation which drove the Bushmen out of these mountains, and, much more recently, has pulled many of the local people, including bywoners, out of the area and into the towns.)
Thanks to the Cedarberg Conservancy and some far-sighted farmers in the area, the cedar seems likely to survive. What the global changes in climate will do to the tree and the range itself - whether, for instance, the cedar will survive to flourish once again in the colder climate of the next glacial period - is of course beyond my competence or power to predict. Being a writer rather than a botanist, I have spoken less about ecology that what might be called the ecology of the spirit - or the spiritual dimensions of geography.
To return to the Cedarberg: to drink the water of these mountains again; to hear the sound at night of the Kromrivier flowing through its sandstone bed; to be here to witness, as I have been fortunate to do, the longed-for rains push into the head of the Kromrivier valley, spelling the end of summer that had seemed without end - all this is to know the sweetness of that other world, of that bitter pastoral which is now and ever more the antithesis and necessary complement to our urban worlds. It is to know again that complete sense of being that a seven-year-old child once knew when he first saw the stream at Middelberg and understood, without further thought, even though this was his first visit to the Cedarberg, that this was home. In an essay by the American environmental writer, Barry Lopez, I recently came across a Spanish word I'd never seen before - “la querencia”. Although it can mean a hearth, its connotations are more far-reaching. “In Spanish”, as Lopez writes, “la querencia refers to a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one's strength of character is drawn…a place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.” From what I've written here, I hope you can see why, for me, the name of my querencia, that hearth, is the Cedarberg.

-- Stephen Watson