A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  * * *

  It was a hot day when I first decided to begin breaking my specimens down into smaller pieces using the only way possible—brute force. Just outside the geology building garage was an area designated for this. I took my shirt off and was working the sledgehammer as if on a chain gang. My muscles were hard from fieldwork, and the heat caused veins in my forearms to swell, while my longish, naturally curly hair had lightened to blond from sun exposure.

  “Don’ hit your fingers, To-zan.”

  I looked up to see a girl smile. Her brown eyes danced with mirth, her white teeth brilliant against her olive skin.

  “It would help if someone held the rocks for me,” I replied.

  “Use other hand,” she said in heavily accented English. “Like in garage.”

  “What?”

  “You university mechanic, helper?”

  I laughed. “Why would you think that?”

  “You sweaty and your clothes, they are dirty. Maybe you fix my old car?”

  Her impression contradicted how I saw myself. I remained silent. She walked away. She wore tight jeans and a T-shirt. Her backside was exquisite, going up and down on either side like a seesaw as she walked. I got a brawny taste of desire in my mouth. A real Jane, I realized, unable to look away. Was she curious about me?

  “What’s your name?” I called after her.

  “Catina,” she tossed over her shoulder.

  “Do you want to know my name?”

  “It’s To-zan,” she answered, not looking around.

  What a snippy little thing! Still, with such a lovely protruding, proud chest and a trim waist emphasized by her tight jeans, she had a right to be. She was beautiful, a few inches above five feet tall; her crow-black hair was pulled back to the nape of her neck and wandered far down her back, lifting gently with each wisp of wind.

  I had to meet her.

  The next day, I was surprised to see Catina eating and reading in the geology building’s small lunchroom. I walked over and asked, “Do you mind?” as I held my sandwich and gestured at the available seat next to her.

  “Whaaat?” she asked, half turned in my direction.

  “Chair,” I pointed with my sandwich.

  Holding her sandwich, she looked up from her book, which I later learned was written in Portuguese.

  “Chair.” I pointed again with my sandwich.

  Still apparently shocked at seeing To-zan next to her, she looked at me and blinked. “You want to chair my sandwich?”

  Speechless, I shook my head vigorously and held up my own sandwich as if to say, “I have one.”

  Oh God, does she really think I want to share her sandwich? Not waiting for an answer, she went back to reading her book. I glanced around and sat down. It seemed that everyone in the room was watching.

  More discretion was required. I gently touched her leg with mine under the table.

  She recoiled slowly, apparently considering the encounter accidental. The second time I did it (stretching) she looked up at me with her sandwich poised halfway to her lovely open mouth in surprise. I would have eaten what she had partially chewed.

  She gobbled her food, stood, and slammed her book shut. I guess I’d violated her view of introduction protocol. As she headed for the door, she looked back at me with annoyance.

  I’d made an ass of myself.

  About a week later, she and I both attended a department social function, and I took the opportunity to explain I was not a mechanic or hired to break rock, but I was a PhD geology student. She asked why I’d rubbed her leg.

  “Mine itched . . .”

  She looked at me. “What a cheek,” she replied with a half-smile. Her eyes were then full of mischief. She had a sense of humor. My heart skipped a beat.

  After a drink or two, Portuguese Catina (the nickname I eventually gave her) explained she was a master’s student, working and studying in the geochemistry department in the same building as the PRU. “I born and raised in Mozambique with its sugar-white sand beach. I came here, to university, when I eighteen. My parents sent me here when they returned to their native Portugal.” Later I learned her wealthy father lost all seven of his grocery stores, taken over by a new black Marxist anti-colonial government based on ideological fantasy. Almost all the Portuguese population was left with nothing, while fearing for their lives. They watched the graceful avenues of flamboyant jacaranda trees hacked down for firewood, while locals moved into unfinished homes and hotels. University students from Rhodesia warned that their country, too, would likely fall within several years. A cloud of fear and uncertainty hung over South Africa, the country bordered by both Rhodesia and Mozambique.

  With little money for her education, Catina was on her own. It was a story I was to hear many times during this very restless and scary period in southern Africa’s history. I liked Catina. She wasn’t afraid to go forward with little support in a new country and try to further her education.

  We met frequently after that and from time to time discussed her life. She performed research work for others and sent money to her needy parents. Such a reversal of what might be expected of a student. I tried to console her but wasn’t able to say much. Not to mention, I found my own concerns overwhelming at times. One stormy evening I found myself in her apartment, lying on a rug and trying to get my large hand up the leg of her tight jeans.

  As I was praying, “Please, just a little farther . . . ,” a bolt of lightning ripped across the turbulent sky with ear-shattering thunder. Startled, she flung herself at me. Her supple arms found my neck and her legs my waist while our lips became ziplocked together. A moment later she jumped onto the bed and stood looking at me. My eyes opened to dish size; my blood became a raging spring stream. I gasped . . . a prayer answered before my eyes. The magnificence of youth slips away each day, but some magical moments remain embedded in memory. This was one . . . thank you, thank you . . .

  Morning came. Sunlight marched into the room. She had risen early and came to me, lowered her hand for a kiss, and then left for the university with unparalleled dignity. I stumbled home wondering if I was still on earth, if it had really happened. It had. Afterward, we became very good friends.

  * * *

  Several weeks after meeting Catina, I began to realize data from my field trip suggested a story drastically different from what a previous researcher, who had worked in my area, had published. I was flabbergasted.

  This researcher claimed that the length of the fifty-mile area I was studying had been “divided up” into sequential metamorphic zones. Each approximately fifteen-mile-wide zone merged into the next, and each was created under definably and vastly different temperature and pressure. Those divided zones and the relationship between them were what I was to study. However, I had been unable to identify distinct zones. Instead, my tests showed that all the metabasite dark minerals in each zone were the same; in fact, there were no zones!

  My initial deductions said that the whole area was formed under one continuous temperature and pressure zone. If I was correct, the researcher, who had received his PhD for his work, had made a huge mistake. In short, he presented the whole region known as Namaqualand in an erroneous geological fashion. How the hell was I to investigate zones that were not even there?

  Worse, his published findings had misled all subsequent researchers who built on them. It was a house of cards ready to fall. And now I, a student, was the first to reinvestigate his findings. Would I bring the house down?

  “How could this be?” I lamented to Catina over coffee one afternoon.

  “You need go back to field and check everything,” she advised, looking at me strangely.

  I could tell she thought I was wrong. “Catina, it’s not unusual for scientists to disagree, but this seems very clear-cut. The previous investigator is an Afrikaner, though, and pretty well known. His name is Joost, and I understand he, along with most Afrikaners, likes to be right. Actually, they are sure they are right—and they don’t give u
p. He works for a huge international mining company and submitted his findings as his PhD dissertation. I hope this won’t create a problem for me.”

  Now she looked anxious. She knew what power the Afrikaners had. She knew what could happen when people had power. She would never forget Mozambique. “You probably wrong. You need to calm down.”

  “Okay, perhaps . . . But his work . . .” I couldn’t let it go. “This is tantamount to saying something like two plus two equals five. It’s just wrong. The results are a research disaster, like having a basketball team play basketball with an oblong American football, it’s that crazy. I can’t believe it, or . . . that I’m even embroiled in this.”

  The whole thing felt heretical. “This fellow has many influential friends,” I continued as I rolled things over in my head, trying to understand. “There is an old-boys’ network among Afrikaners. They will be on his side. With those kinds of connections, would he let a student—a foreigner—criticize him? Prove him wrong?”

  I don’t think so. I’m in deep shit.

  “Why would he make untruth like that?” Catina asked. “What he gain?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know,” I repeated quietly. “Maybe something strange? Whatever, it will have to come out in the months that follow.”

  “Two and two not five, Beeg George.” (That was the nickname Catina had given me.) “You can’t make it five, but maybe they won’t let you say it four, either. This is Africa. There is no middle in Africa. This university awarded him the degree. They will not want you to show they were irresponsible to accept such erroneous work. Rocks can drop down well with no splash.”

  Rocks can drop down well?

  Chapter 7

  “The Last Bushman Was Shot by My Father”

  I didn’t want to be in the situation I was in, afraid of what I might find. I hoped I couldn’t be right about Afrikaner Joost, as he was referred to by some. I said nothing to anyone and packed my Land Rover for the trip north to my field area. I’d been in Cape Town several months. On this trip I wanted to visit a large Afrikaner cattle and sheep farm to the far east of my study area to compare the rocks there with those in the central and western areas I’d been reviewing. Maybe I missed something. I also wanted to experience how rural apartheid, or the master-slave arrangement as it was guardedly called, worked.

  The farm was some sixty miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, in a land curiously pierced by smooth, dome-shaped, pinkish granite-gneiss rock some fifty to one hundred feet high. These polyps resembled massive heat-cracked boils on stretched skin. Due to erosion, they became decidedly convex as the outer layers peeled off, or exfoliated, like the skin of an onion.

  In some areas the domes appeared to have comfortably spaced themselves across a sea of sandy, brownish soil. In other areas, they overlapped and formed extended knotted ridges that scarred the perfect horizon like an old, badly healed wound. Vast cattle farms dominated the land, and the dry Buffels River ran through it. Not a cloud was in sight; the sky was infinite blue as I plodded along small tracks interrupted by cattle fences.

  The sun beat down. A troop of baboons barked fiercely. I was in their space. Although a quarter mile away, I could see their silhouettes clearly, in single file like slow-moving black roller-coaster cars following the outline of the dome ridges.

  I stopped to open a cattle fence, one of many. Next to the gate were the small, dehydrated bodies of skinned Karakul sheep. It was not unusual for farmers to leave such a warning at fence gates, staking their territory.

  I looked up at my watchers. They barked an alert. A huge gray patriarch stayed behind the curious foraging troops, protecting their rear. He paced back and forth as if to challenge me. Adolescent males led the group and in the center were the females and their young. Some of the young clung upside down below their mothers’ furred bellies, their strength already remarkable. Others rode on their mothers’ backs, surveying all with the clear, large eyes distinctive of their species while picking lice and whatnot from their fur and eating them.

  They were arrogant, invincible, and ready to fight as they knuckled their brawny forelimbs forward. Their forearms were far stronger than a man’s. They could rip most dogs to pieces. Their fangs were several inches long, worse than vampire teeth, and their eye-popping rage, especially to protect their families, unusually explosive. A baboon fights by sinking his fangs into his opponent and pushing away with his well-suited forearms, tearing out chunks of flesh in the process.

  The bull stopped and sat his muscled, hairless backside on the very highest curve of the dome and watched me at the gate, realizing I’d not moved. His elbows rested on his knees. He uttered a deep, strong bark—aaaaaaa-raaaaaaa-hoon—that resounded easily to where I stood. The call was not savage or menacing. If I’d been a lone woman, he likely would have barked more loudly and made indecent gestures. He was simply asking who I was and warning me to be alert to his presence. I cupped my hands and, in a deep, strong voice, mimicked him—aaaaaaa-raaaaaaa-hoon—giving him the same message back.

  The patriarch listened. What kind of bark was that? he must have wondered. He gawked hesitatingly, his doglike muzzle pointing at me as he cocked his head from side to side. He stood and knuckled his way a few paces in my direction before barking again. I did the same. No threat, the old fellow must have rightly assumed. It’s just another asshole human.

  The troop moved on, as I did in my Land Rover, remembering one of the Egyptian gods was depicted with a baboon’s face.

  After passing through seven gates, I reached the Afrikaner cattle farm belonging to farmer James. I drove to the tidy, large, ranch-style farmhouse surrounded by shade trees. By Namaqualand standards, it demonstrated success and wealth. James was in his big barn, wearing a blood-splattered apron over his field clothes. He was treating Karakul skins, which he sold to European merchants.

  He explained that Karakul lambs had to be killed within days of their birth, when their skin was jet-black and curling. The resulting fur was in fashion then. I preferred to think those who wore the fur were not aware it was from two- to three-day-old lambs still sleeping in the manger.

  Stopping to breathe deeply, he explained he also raised cows. “A few years ago one of them trapped me against a fence and punctured my lung, so I only have one left.”

  I grew to know Mr. James and his family quite well over the four years I visited Namaqualand. I liked them. They personified the honesty of the land and were very friendly. Perhaps that emanated from having a good and comparably wealthy life, as I was to see. Someone from town who knew James said he had a very violent temper. I never saw it, but I never gave him reason to provide an example. Successful at farming and guided by his wife, he brought from Cape Town lurid bougainvillea, heady jasmine, trees, flowers, and other shrubs to embrace the sprawling farmhouse, green lawn, and tennis court that he built himself. There were also fruit trees, which the baboons would strip of all nourishment if given the chance. From time to time the primates would kill a lamb or sheep. The farmers shot them when they could. No one questioned that remedy.

  The trees and plants were watered faithfully from the farm’s deep wells, but due to the salt content of the water, most died after about ten to fifteen years and had to be replaced. There were no palm trees like The Oasis farmers had planted, however.

  The James farm did have a sweet-thorn tree like the one at The Oasis farm, and it captivated me. Also known as soet doringboom, the sweet-thorn tree is noted in the light, swingy South African folksong “Sarie Marais.” The song is played by the South African Army, the French Foreign Legion, the British Royal Marines, and others—often during parades. It’s possible it’s an earlier version of the old American Civil War folk song “Foggy Dew,” with words translated into Afrikaans. I found the Civil War connection intriguing. In any event, the tree is capable of sending taproots down more than 180 feet to find water, which allows it to survive in the inhospitable, dry environment without irrigation. Namaqualand pioneers resourcef
ully used its sweet gum for confections, its wood for wagon parts, its bark for rope, and its leaves and pods for fodder.

  An old cast-iron bell hung from one of its limbs. When struck with its clapper, the bell delivered a resounding ring that called the farm’s Khoikhoi servants to work. Effectively, it was a slave bell.

  Just outside the general area of the farmhouse and within easy earshot of the bell was a row of small, identical, one-room, whitewashed concrete blockhouses. Each one possessed a soot-stained chimney, which led to an inside fireplace where the Khoikhoi residents prepared their evening meals and morning coffee.

  The colored women worked in the farmhouse kitchen, cleaned the home each day, changed the bedding, and performed whatever chores the farmer’s wife and daughters asked of them. The men toiled in the field, repairing and building fences, clearing planting areas, feeding the farm animals, and herding the cattle from field to field. They worked under the orders of the farm’s owner, whom they called maaster or baas—boss.

  “On the weekend,” James said, “they get horribly drunk and fight. One man went blind from drinking pure alcohol or something close to it a few weeks ago.”

  One day, like many days, the earth burned with heat. James and I stood talking under a jacaranda tree next to his home. We watched a colored family in a horse-pulled cart filled with belongings unhurriedly come down the sand track leading to James’s farm. It stopped a distance away. The father got out and approached us. His wife and children remained quiet in their wagon, sitting in the sun.