Over mugs of tea and hunks of cake we discussed the problem of access. Rob and Laurie believe deeply in the need to retain or renew our links with the natural world and in the therapeutic and spiritual value of wilderness. At the same time they realise that the rugged nature and sheer scale of the British Columbian landscape can make it inaccessible to many people. The long walk from the sea, while part of the adventure for the young and fit, would be too much for many people. The option does exist to be flown up to the cabin by helicopter, enabling guests to enjoy the wonderful alpine world above in a manner as relaxed or as energetic as they choose. Rob is ambivalent about this, however, not wishing to deter the elderly or the disabled, yet wary of packaging wilderness or bowing to the convenience ethic.
For us, the next two days were by turn highly energetic and utterly relaxing. There was no hurry, no schedule and plenty of time to do whatever we wanted. When we were not hiking or bouldering on granite bluffs or helping with the chores, we would each wander off and find a quiet niche somewhere to read, or write or simply be alone. Despite the attractions of a hot bath and proper bed, it was with regret that we barred the cabin door securely against marauding grizzlies and headed down through the trees back to the sea.
– Chapter 30 –
FLOWER RIDGE
A frog croaks briefly
dragonflies hunt dark water
the pool quietens
Bats swoop jaggedly
far peaks harden in amber
the pool is silent
Trees tall black outlines
teeming constellated sky
the pool disappears
Day’s end journey’s end
another step on the way
tired eyes close sleep comes
1994
– Chapter 31 –
UMFOLOZI TRAIL (1996)
‘If a white rhino comes for you, just step behind a tree and keep still. Usually it will veer off or simply charge past and keep on going. But if a black rhino charges, it’s more serious. You must climb a tree – quickly!’
We look around at the prickly thorn trees in our immediate vicinity, none of which look either easy or inviting to climb, even in an emergency, and laugh in disbelief. But Mike, our lean, bearded leader, is not joking. He has been treed a number of times, once dangling by his arms with his feet only inches from the horn of an angry rhino.
He is briefing a group of eight at the start of a five-day trail organised by the Wilderness Leadership School of Natal. Apart from my wife, Netti, and myself, they are all white South Africans. We have driven in a minibus three hours northwards from Durban to the Umfolozi game reserve. This is an area of 95,000 hectares famous for a conservation success story, the saving of the white rhino from extinction in the nineteen-sixties. Now, the bus has been parked out of sight of the dirt road, our rucksacks are packed and we are ready to set off into that section of the park designated a wilderness area, where there are no roads and access is allowed only on foot.
‘Where exactly are we going?’ asks Stuart who lives not far away at Richards Bay on the coast, and has some knowledge of the area. ‘What’s our route?’ He served as an officer in the South African army for six years so he is used to reading maps and keeping tabs on his position out in the Bush. He is nonplussed when Mike replies: ‘I haven’t decided yet. It really doesn’t matter – where we are going is where we are ... ’ There is silence while we digest this nugget of Zen wisdom. Mike has no map, it transpires – it is all in his head.
‘How far are we walking today?’ asks Natasha, a young secretary from Cape Town. ‘Far enough,’ Mike answers cryptically, ‘but not too far … ’ and he hoists his pack on to his back before he can be asked any more questions. Clearly he has no intention of being pinned down about destinations, not physical ones anyway.
The packs feel heavy at first but the straps and waist belt can be adjusted to take the weight on hips as well as shoulders. Inside each pack is a sleeping bag, food for four nights, a full water bottle and one piece of communal equipment such as a canvas water bucket, a large cooking pot, a folding metal tripod for cooking on or a light tarpaulin to rig between two trees as shelter should it rain. On top of all that we add our own spare clothing, torch, camera, sandals and washing kit. On the outside we each carry a small groundsheet and a sleeping mat of closed-cell foam, rolled up together tightly.
However, Mike proves to be right. We always travel ‘far enough’ with these burdens, but it never seems ‘too far’. Wilderness Leadership School Trails are not Outward Bound courses. The backpacks are simply a means of enabling us to live closer to nature than we ever do normally. We carry them only far enough to be beyond sight or sound of human habitation and to move camp every day to a new location.
‘Oh yes, there’s one more thing,’ Mike says casually. ‘Please give me your watches. You won’t need them in the Bush and they will be much safer here.’ Startled, but compliant, we hand them over and Mike locks them inside the bus. We are, it seems, entering a realm where times, distances and schedules have no place. I sense that this could be a venture into the interior in more ways than one.
We set off in single file, Mike in front, Quagasa our Zulu game guard, veteran of many a skirmish with poachers and with scars to prove it, bringing up the rear. Both carry rifles. At first we walk through typical African savannah, or bushveld, flat-topped acacias dotted about scrubby grassland. Soon, however, the trees become denser, the shade darker, and we are picking our way with care through forest that feels somehow threatening. Later, Mike tells us that this spot is known as Ambush Alley from the close encounters that have occurred here with rhino, buffalo and lion. However we disturb only a huge bird that flaps away silently through the trees. ‘Spotted Eagle Owl’ Mike whispers.
We emerge on to more open ground and make our way down to the banks of the Black Umfolozi river. We wade across as the sun goes down and make camp 100 metres upslope from the river in a clearing among some thorn trees. Shortly afterwards, a white rhino and her calf come down to drink. We wonder whether we will have to pack up and move in a hurry, but they do not cross the river and we watch entranced until they disappear back into the bush.
Making camp is simple enough. We unroll our mats wherever we intend to sleep. One party fetches water from the river in the canvas buckets. Another collects firewood, keeping a wary eye open for scorpions or spiders on or under anything they pick up. Mike prepares the fireplace with care. Minimum impact camping is practised here and there must be no trace of our passing when we leave next morning. Instead of a circle of stones or digging a pit, he brings a pot full of sand and makes a raised circular mound on which the fire will be built. In the morning, the sand and the ashes will be mixed together thoroughly, like sand and cement, and then scattered over a wide area with the trowel.
The other use of the trowel is to dig a hole at least four inches deep when we go to the toilet and to fill it in afterwards, so that our faeces can quickly be broken down by bacteria in the soil. Toilet paper, which does not biodegrade easily and can be dug up by animals, is burnt on the spot with a lighter or wrapped in more paper and burned on the campfire. The fire itself is kept small and wood used sparingly even though there is no shortage, an example of practical conservation.
Once, a small, yellow scorpion scuttles down the piece of wood I have just placed on the fire. I make a mental note to be more careful in future. Scorpion stings are not life-threatening for adults but they are intensely painful for at least two days. Instead of killing the scorpion, Mike carefully catches it in a mug and releases it a hundred yards away. Nobody says anything. We have come together as a group too recently for ethical discussions just yet, but the message is not lost on us. Mike, we are discovering, is a man of few words, not given to delivering homilies. But actions speak louder than words, and his restraint in the use of resources and his evident respect for all living things have made an impression already.
Over the next four days we gradually becom
e attuned to our surroundings. The four elements – earth, air, fire and water – assume an importance they would have had for our ancestors, though it has been lost in our everyday lives, and something deep in our psyches stirs in response. We sit and sleep on the ground. We become conscious of the direction and strength of the wind and the implications this has for our safety, carrying our scent to wild animals. We swim in the icy water of the Black Umfolozi (for this is June, the South African winter) and wash with biodegradable soap, specially provided. We gaze at a night sky alive with shooting stars, and learn new constellations – the Southern Cross, Scorpio … The fire that we cook on and sit around for warmth and companionship in the evenings, is kept burning all night as a deterrent to animals. Every night we take it in turns to keep watch for an hour at a time. For that hour, each individual is responsible for the well-being of the rest of the group, and alert to every sound outside the small circle of firelight – be it the grunt of a leopard, the eerie howl of a hyena, or the sudden, startling crack of a twig nearby. But it is a time for reflection, also, and the hour never seems long enough ...
We see and discover much about the African Bush. We watch white and black rhino, and buffalo, cautiously, from downwind, acutely conscious of their size and power. We see giraffe, zebra, wildebeest, impala, nyala, warthog, hyena, baboon and crocodile, and learn to recognise the spoor and the droppings of some of them. We identify Bateleur and Crowned eagles and distinguish Cape vultures from Lappet-faced. We watch fascinated as a dung beetle resolutely pushes a monstrous ball of dung many times its own size. We carefully skirt around the elaborate webs of huge but beautiful Golden Orb spiders. One night we exchange calls, hoot for hoot, with a wood owl and his mate until eventually he perches overhead as we lie in our sleeping bags.
From Mike and old Quagasa we learn, too, of the importance of trees in traditional Zulu culture. There is the Marula, for instance, from the fruit of which beer and a spirit are made, while a nutritious oil is extracted from the kernel. The tree is a symbol of fertility and a bride will still carry a bough with her at her wedding. There is the Nthomboti, a very hard wood which burns well with a pungent smell, but which can cause sickness if used to smoke or roast meat. There is the Coward thorn, with its wickedly long, straight thorn which grows steadily thicker and longer with age. In the days of Chaka, the notorious Zulu king of the last century, one test of a warrior’s stoicism was to stand unflinching as one of these thorns was driven through a fold of skin from his stomach. Should he fail this, or any other test, he was thrown from a cliff top ten metres or so on to the canopy of a massive old tree with thorns several inches long and hard as bone. Or there is the wait-a-bit thorn, with a curved thorn pointing in one direction and a straight one in the other. It is sometimes called the Spirit tree, for if a Zulu dies and is buried away from home, his spirit must still be brought back by his relatives in the form of a branch from the tree; in fact, on a bus or train an extra ticket is bought to be occupied by the spirit-branch.
Slowly, we come to feel a part of the Bush ourselves. On the afternoon of the fourth day I wander away from camp, with permission, along a dried-up river bed. A buck of some sort crashes away through the undergrowth making me jump, then all is quiet. I sit beneath a large tree long enough for a vulture to return to its gigantic nest in the topmost branches. A pied crow flies in and conducts a raucous conversation with a friend some hundreds of metres away. When eventually I leave, I do so stealthily and avoid disturbing them. Climbing out of the riverbed on a well-used game trail, I come to a clearing with a solitary tree stump, about a metre high, in the middle of it. This is a rhino scratching post, polished smooth by the rough hide of generations of animals. However, it is unoccupied at present and it is the perfect height to rest my backside against. Gradually the Bush comes back to life around me, until there are birds everywhere – iridescent green and purple sunbirds, scarlet-headed finches, emerald starlings, and many more. I feel accepted and at home. Three days ago I would have felt uneasy and uncomfortable here on my own. I would have been worrying about the presence of dangerous animals – rhino, buffalo, lion, snakes, scorpions … now I acknowledge that all these creatures could be nearby but feel that so long as I remain alert and regard them with respect, I will come to no harm.
I lean against that post for maybe an hour, senses tuned to every thing around me, before I become aware that for all that time I have been totally in the present. Not for a moment have I contemplated the past or made plans, however trivial, for the future. I have been totally in the here and now – calm, quiet, still, yet alert and utterly alive. I recall T.S. Eliot’s words about ‘living, and partly living’ and realise that on this wilderness trail I have been truly living.
That evening we walk as a group up the hillside behind camp to watch the sun set. Afterwards, around the fire, while Mike prepares stir-fried vegetables and rice, we talk about what the trail has meant to us individually. For Stuart it has provided a perspective from which to review his everyday life – its frantic pace, the constant pressure to meet deadlines, the lack of time to spend with his family. For Dieter, a German-born businessman settled in the Cape, it has been nothing new. It is his fifth trail with the WLS. But he sees it as a vital reconnection with the natural world, a periodic reminder of the other side of life to ‘getting and spending’. Netti describes her nerve ends as tingling, raw even, from the impact of so many new sensations. She finds it hard to put her feelings into words so, instead, quotes from R. S. Thomas’s poem The Moor:
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
Although neither of us are church goers, I know exactly what she means and, recalling my vigil at the rhino-post that afternoon, the second stanza of the poem seems equally apt:
There were no prayers said. But stillness
of the heart’s passions – that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
of it’s Kingdom.
Later, I realise that our ‘wilderness experience’ has not occurred by chance. The whole trail has been orchestrated to make it possible for each one of us, in different ways, to be ‘touched’ by the wilderness, for that is the raison d’être of the Wilderness Leadership School.
The school is a small but remarkable organisation that, over the last thirty years, has taken 40,000 people out on trail. It was founded by Dr Ian Player, then a conservation officer with the Natal Parks Board and largely responsible for the saving of the white rhino, with help and encouragement from Sir Laurens van der Post. The aim of the school was, and still is, to provide people in general, but especially leaders and opinion-makers within society, with a profound, first-hand experience of the African wilderness. This causes them not only to value wild places and fight for their preservation, but also to see themselves as an integral part of nature with all the implications that can have on their everyday lives and behaviour. From its inception in Umfolozi, the WLS has grown so that it now has five branches in different parts of South Africa, five full-time field officers, a sizeable administrative back up and a large team of dedicated volunteers. Dr Player maintains close links with WLS but today is more actively involved with the Wilderness Foundation, an international body that promotes the concept of wilderness worldwide and has helped to stage five World Wilderness Congresses over the last twenty years. He is also a trustee of the Wilderness Trust, a UK charity inspired by the work of the WLS to do something similar with young people, in particular, in the wilder parts of Britain.
At the end of our trail, when our watches have been returned and the members of our group have gone their different ways, Netti and I are privileged to spend two days with Dr Player at a nearby game lodge. We hear from his own lips the story of the WLS and the extent to which his vision has been shaped by the work of C.G. Jung. One of Jung’s books was entitled, significantly, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. It was Jung’s belief, echoed by Ian Player and by Laurens van
der Post, that the crisis of our world has two root causes: one is the divorce of our physical lives from the natural world, so that we no longer feel ourselves a part of it; the other is the over-development of our rational, analytical consciousness at the expense of the instinctive, intuitive side of ourselves that is expressed in dreams, myth, fantasy and art. We have become cut off from both inner and outer nature. Traditional faiths have lost their authority and a loss of meaning in the lives of many people is reflected in the statistics for depression, suicide and mental illness. Wholeness can only be regained by acknowledging the ‘primitive’ side of ourselves and one of the most powerful and effective ways of doing so, Dr Player believes, is through a wilderness experience. That experience is essentially a spiritual one. It has to be, if people are to change. Having a good time or learning more about wildlife is just not enough. It is a message that is endorsed again and again with passionate conviction during our stay in South Africa by everyone connected with the WLS. As Thoreau said long ago:
‘In wilderness is the salvation of the world.’
– Acknowledgements –
My grateful thanks to: Helen Berry for speedy and accurate word processing and helpful suggestions; Netti, my wife, for proofreading, constructive comment and infinite forbearance; Jim Perrin and Ken Wilson for advice and encouragement; and, last but not least, Peter Hodgkiss and Jack Baines for their commitment to mountaineering literature.
Most of the articles published here have appeared before in magazines, journals and anthologies. For permission to reuse the material, my thanks to the editors of the Alpine Journal, Climber, and The Great Outdoors; and to Peter Cliff, Baton Wicks and Mitchell-Beazley.
Over the Hills and Far Away Page 21