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ERNS GRUNDLING
Queillerie
For Catharien
“I particularly wanted to go alone, because one is so much more dependent and therefore so much more receptive if you go alone.”
– Elsa Joubert, Water en woestyn
“… I’m going to stay away for a long time so that
I can become completely ordinary again …”
– Jeanne Goosen, ’n Uil vlieg weg
DEPARTURE
“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walking
7:28 a.m. on Sunday 3 May 2015
Cape Town International Airport
WhatsApp to Sophia
Thanks for the lovely message. Wedding was wonderful but ja, afterwards I was bloody tired and got on the plane with Slagtersnek. I’m going to finish it between Doha and Paris, chuck my laptop into a bin and head for the Camino. I’ve had enough. It’s not work’s fault, or anyone there. I haven’t been in such a bad space for a long time, but anyway, perhaps it’s for the best for what lies ahead. Thanks again for your support, my goodness, yesterday especially. All I can hope now is this whole shitty business will make the Camino all the more meaningful. Ag, I’m going to stop moaning now – as Bun Booyens Snr said to Doc Craven after losing a game: “Grit the back teeth but smile with the front ones.” This too shall pass.
* * *
My mother says we Grundlings are always rocking up with our ears flat, like rabbits, because everything is always such a bloody rush and a fuss. This morning I’m the rabbit with the flattest ears at the airport, tired and bewildered and bloody annoyed and struggling with my heavy red K-Way 35-litre rucksack, the monkey on my back for the next six weeks.
I’m sweating from the stress and last night’s wine. I was best man and incidental videographer at my friend Le Roux’s wedding, on a farm on the Polkadraai road outside Stellenbosch. A wonderful, intimate Boland wedding, but I didn’t get to sleep a wink afterwards. I actually had to sit and struggle with a Go travel magazine article I hadn’t finished, on what was the eve of my Camino – a feature on the Slagtersnek Rebellion of 1815.
I shared a self-catering place with one of the wedding guests, who’d got a bit legless and had a rambling conversation on his cell phone in the middle of the night. “I’m feeling very randy now, honey.” Then, he walked around the house repeating, like a mantra, “It’s a fuckin’ breakdown in communication.”
At three thirty I realised what I had known for days: I wouldn’t be filing the Slagtersnek article on time, before my brother arrives at seven to take me to the airport. The wedding guest was still awake, so we sat down together to watch the Floyd Mayweather–Manny Pacquiao fight on TV. Lauded as “The Fight of the Century”, like so many things it was a massive anticlimax.
The Bag Wrap machine wraps my rucksack up in thick plastic, the two trekking poles poking out on either side like short kieries. It all seems completely absurd. As my friend Le Roux often says, “The lonely places we take ourselves.”
* * *
“At Slagtersnek there is a triumphal arch that casts black shadows on the path taken by South Africa.”
– C.J. Langenhoven
* * *
Qatar Airways flight QR 1370 takes off. I take one last look at False Bay through the window, before the plane banks slowly northwards. If everything goes according to plan, I will see the Atlantic Ocean again in about five weeks’ time, somewhere near Finisterre on the west coast of Spain. The carry-bag on my lap contains a handful of things: my wallet, sunglasses, notebook, a pen, cell phone, a range of wall plugs and a small Samsung N150 Plus laptop (actually a netbook). And J.C. van der Walt’s book Rebels of Slagtersnek 1815. The iPhone and the laptop irritate me the most – they were not supposed to come with me. A voice makes announcements in Arabic and English. The seatbelt lights go off. My only thought is the desire to chuck the phone and laptop in a bin at Charles de Gaulle, then walk away all nonchalant as if I had thrown away an orange peel or a KitKat wrapper. But first, I have to finish the article. I am amazed at how my old patterns trip me up anew. Will these old patterns ever let us be?
* * *
The last thing I showed up on time for was my own birth. Actually, I was born much too early, at thirty-two weeks. My birth was a difficult one. My mother had kidney failure and very nearly died. When she told the doctor she wanted a little boy, all he said was, “Listen, let’s just hope you get through this alive.” The gynaecologist had a slightly different attitude: “This child is either going to be state president or a big crook.” These days, it seems you can be both.
My grandmother Charlotte Rens, a dignified and deeply religious woman, would tell me in later years that, while my mother was in theatre, she sat in the parking area and read the same verse from the book of James over and over again: “But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.”
Now, thirty-five years later and twenty years after my grandmother’s death, I’m leaving – an absolute sceptic – on a pilgrimage that will end in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, where this very apostle is said to be buried.
* * *
Douglas Adams wrote: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
I know that whoosh all too well. I despise deadlines; they never go away. And I love testing and teasing them. There must be an arrogance underlying this, the kind of thing one’s not eager to admit. Or total incompetence when it comes to time management. Or maybe a bit of both. I’m not sure exactly when this started. After all, the motto of my primary school, Laerskool Handhaaf in Uitenhage, was “Do it now”. (This was years before Nike’s Just Do It rallying cry …)
In my first year at what was then the University of Port Elizabeth, I realised my procrastination problem was getting out of control. I scratched around in the psychology section of the library and came across Overcoming Procrastination by Albert Ellis, a compact book with a purple cover. This I must read, I thought, and put it on my bookshelf at home.
Every morning I walked past the book, looked at it and thought: I’m reading you all right! Eventually, tail between my legs, I returned the book to the library, unread and two months late. And paid a hell of a fine.
* * *
Last Facebook post on 2 May before my departure
I’m going off the grid for a while. Into the mild. I’m flying to Europe the day after tomorrow to walk the Camino Francés, about nine hundred kilometres over forty days from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela, and then to the sea at Finisterre in northwestern Spain. That’s my plan, more or less. I’m leaving my phone in Cape Town, it’s time for a digital detox and radical mindspace clean-up. Or as Toast Coetzer put it: “One man against himself.” I will probably check in on Facebook again when I return later in June. Until then, adios! #intothemild
* * *
One man against himself. Toast, a good friend and confidant, and my neighbour in Go’s open-plan office, knows me well.
For an incurable extrovert with a kind of teddy-bear persona, I can be extraordinarily