Boggy Pond

Saturday 6th September 2014

My first overnight stay at Boggy Pond in sixteen months! (A Quart Into a Pint Pot Sunday 19th May 2013) Although I came to Tesselaarsdal for a week end in December last year, I stayed with Stephen & Sandy on the other side of the village. (Near the End of the Road Monday 16th December 2013), since I had not yet replaced basic appliances stolen in the burglary. (A Tin Mug of Whisky\ Saturday 29th June 2013)
In a previous era, before children were seduced by pocket video games and real-time text “chat rooms” instead of actually playing together, we used to build “Club Houses”, preferably in a large tree or well hidden in a thicket of thorn trees in the veldt. We would spend days gathering planks, boards, poles and whatever else our ingenuity could turn into a crude shelter. When it was completed, parents would supply picnic lunches for “Club Meetings”, grateful for several hours of peace, although at the risk of losing some cutlery. We seldom had a clear idea of what the Club was for and soon membership would dwindle and the Club House would be deserted.
Opening the door to Boggy Cabin last December was rather like being the last person to visit a Club House, waiting forlornly for someone to arrive. Two months ago Christa and I paid a fleeting visit to the village to deliver the pickup licence disk to Stephen on our way to visit our friend Penny in Onrus. The ten minutes or so that we spent on the property was the first time Christa had seen where I’ve lived on and off since we bought Boggy Pond four years ago…
I noticed that the solar water heater mounting was leaning a little, since someone had looted a diagonal wooden brace, so I would have to make a trip as soon as I could to repair the damage. Although the “Winter Season Break” should have allowed me time to spend a week at a time here, it isn’t exactly officially announced in a media blitz – work just dries up and one doesn’t know that until a week or two have passed. This year was further complicated by casting for the new Sean Penn / Charlise Theron movie starting at the very end of the “Season” and three films suddenly getting the green light to film around Johannesburg, which has been dead quiet for a while. It was only when we were certain that no casting would be required in Cape Town that I could even consider escaping for a while. I did, however buy a small microwave and a thermo-electric cooler just in case. While we waited for the situation to settle, I enjoyed teaching a weekly audition class at ACT, in my view the best of the acting schools in Cape Town.

When I arrived here on Thursday afternoon, impending disaster was apparent as soon as I approached the cabin. After a diagonal bracing timber was stolen, recent high winds had tilted the Solabox mounting and the unit had partially slipped off, bending it grotesquely. Fortunately none of the rather expensive collector tubes had broken.

 

Problem – I had decided not to pack my tool-boxes, thinking I would just relax, enjoy the country air and write a little. On Friday, Steven left early for meetings in Caledon, so obviously I would have repair the support and secure the solar heater with whatever tools I had to hand. I couldn’t even have a hot shower, because the unit had tilted away from the outlet. Wrestling 140 Kg of hot water three metres above the ground on my own didn’t seem like a good idea, so the first step was to siphon the water out with a hosepipe. I gave my car a desultory hot – water wash and collected the rest of the water in drums and buckets for domestic use while I had to leave the water supply turned off.
I lifted the tank as far as I could by threading some nylon laundry line under it, but beyond a certain point the angles just don’t allow for enough lift to clear the top of the support beam. Since I was alone, I decided it would be unwise just to balance on the narrow frame, heave the tank up and shoulder the frame back underneath it.
A friend once said that if he were ever exiled to a desert island with just three useful things, he’d only ask for two. A Swiss Army knife and Digby Young! I had a reputation to maintain, apart from needing a shower at some point.
I experimented briefly with my car jack and a piece of wood, but it was just too precarious. A quick scan around the workshop, a cup of coffee and some cogitation presented a solution. I made my own jack out of a piece of plastic drain-pipe, a length of screwed rod and two hefty fender-washers, stuck together with masking tape. If ever I was sent to a desert island as a Consultant, I would insist on a length of screwed rod and an off-cut of PVC drain pipe…

Of course, this whole operation was still somewhat risky, so I tightened the ski rope strop under the tank every now and again, just in case. Eventually I jacked the tank up far enough to be able to push the frame underneath. With a loop of laundry line diagonally around the frame and a scrap of timber, I was able to pull the mounting upright and replace the diagonal brace.

 

There was of course still a little water in the header tank and in the collector tubes, so by the time I had finished in the late afternoon, steam was rising from the vent hole. I badly needed a cup of tea and a shower, but I couldn’t turn the water on in case the cold water cracked the inner collector tubes. I would have to wait until a while after sunset to restore the water supply.

After a cup of tea made with the water saved in buckets, I could at last walk around the property. There’s an old “Good news – Bad news” joke which has it that the Bad news is that there is no Good news…. I wrote last time of the enormous damage caused by a massive downpour last year at about this time. Well, there’s been more heavy rain this season, resulting in further erosion generally. My top dam is now so full of sand and silt that the stream now flows through the fence onto the neighbouring property.
Poor old Jeffrey drifted into alcohol-induced dementia soon after I last saw him and now spends most of his energy escaping from a Home in Caledon or hiding away in derelict homesteads around the village. The wet season has resulted in an astonishingly rapid growth of alien blue gum saplings in the lower field. Jeff was sparing in his efforts to get the saplings out by the roots after hacking them off, so many have simply re-grown. The smaller field, which we cleared together, hoping to start a vegetable patch, has largely recovered it’s fynbos with very little evidence of blue- gum saplings. Home field, next to the cabin, is also fairly free of aliens, since I pecked away at it whenever I visited, kicking out dry stumps and digging out new growth. I’m going to have to find someone else to carry on the clearing and maintenance while I’m away.

The rain storms were also accompanied by unusually high winds, which have toppled several large trees, which is a good thing. However, the temporary corrugated iron protection of the collapsed end of the homestead has also largely been ripped away, which is a very bad thing. Our present thinking not to expand the house as planned, but simply to rebuild the wall to a legal height, raise the other walls to match, re-roof the structure and consolidate the place as week end accommodation. That will still require considerable spending.
So much depends on lifestyle decisions we have been too busy to face and on factors beyond our control. The rhetoric around Land Use is increasing. The current working visa shambles has already caused the jitters amongst the foreign film companies upon which we depend for an income. The political farce playing out in South Africa at the moment is, I suspect, only in it’s Second Act. My fear is that they will not wait around for the Third Act. Is Boggy Pond worth developing as a hidey-hole, or will it become an expensive encumbrance?
Decisions, decisions…

Monday 16^th December 2013

Five and a half months since my last visit, and this won’t be a long stay. In truth, I’ve spent the week-end with Steve, across town, since I have not replaced the appliances stolen earlier this year.

In previous years I would be looking forward to at least a month in the cabin, while the outside world indulged in the annual spending ritual previously known as Christmas. I’ve managed to escape that bruising ritual for three years, but it has meant being away from Christa for too long.

The “big story” in the village is the flood that swept through here in mid November. Over 240 mm was recorded in one night. The sandy ground was already waterlogged by late winter rain, so almost all of the new water headed straight downhill, often taking trees and minor flood-defences with it.

The deep channel dug to protect the housing development was barely adequate, and also had the effect of channelling a lot of water down my Western border. The deluge overwhelmed recently installed concrete culverts and simply tossed them into a deep gorge, cutting Boggy Pond and Juffrou Smal off from the village.

Two trees have disappeared from the turn-off to the cabin, and the old road up the middle of the property has become a “donga” of note, completely exposing the water supply to the old house and the cabin.

_______________________________

My efforts at rehabilitating the top dam have been wiped out completely. So much sand was carried from the farm up the mountain, that my dam is now completely silted up, and Boggy Pond itself is about a quarter full of sand, but very little water.

The village water-works had a narrow escape. Water is piped down from higher up the valley for processing on the edge of the town, fortunately well away from the gulley which continues past the town. In one night, a new canyon was eroded, leaving a five metre waterfall where it had been an easy skip across to the other side.

 Just as much ground has shifted in the village, metaphorically speaking the ground has shifted beneath my life during the past year. I took on Boggy Pond as an escape from mounting unease and unhappiness with life in Gauteng. The move to the Cape has changed that, and the world we work in has also changed.

Ironically, I was only able to spend as much time at Boggy Pond because our stream of work was barely “adequate”. The move to Cape Town has brought a flood of work, and the need to re-assess priorities. The world-wide economic crisis has increased pressure on budgets and shortened pre-production time, which means we work extremely long days, often into the week-end. By the end of a week, I simply don’t have the energy to fight traffic for two hours for the sake of two days making very little progress at Boggy Pond. I supose I was being idealistic, and certainly unrealistic, to think that I could build an alternative lifestyle out here. On a practical level, it is just not financially sustainable. On a personal level, it doesn’t appeal to Christa, and I don’t want to do it without her… she is too precious to me. The enforced separation as a result of the move has not been easy for either of us. We’re going to have to re-assess Boggy Pond’s part in a new future – if it has a part at all.

Saturday 29^th June 2013

The Cape film season virtually shuts down in winter, so I could normally spend a few weeks at Boggy Pond, but I haven’t been here in six weeks. Four weeks were spent in Johannesburg renovating our studio. Seventeen years of mercifully constant use have taken their toll, and the gradual changes in the technology we use needed to be consolidated. Some time ago I replaced the electricity-guzzling film lights with custom built low-power fluorescent lighting. I constructed the housings from re-cycled cardboard, and although the units worked splendidly, Christa was embarrassed by the fact that the main light advertised a popular brand of edge-trimmer! The fill light was incomplete, causing flare in the camera lens, and just looked very… cardboard-ish!

My gluing, stapling, cutting and painting twenty-hour days were darkened somewhat at the end of May by a text message from Stephen “Cabin broken into at Boggy Pond. Fridge, microwave and other stuff taken. Workshop OK”

Other than a certain sense of inevitability, I was left completely unmoved by the news – I was just too busy to give it any thought and there was nothing I could do about it anyway. Within an hour of the message, Caledon Police phoned me for directions to Boggy Pond, where Stephen was handling the situation on my behalf, already receiving texted tip-offs from outraged community members. Dealing with it in person would have to wait while I worked my way down an extensive “to do” list.

Early in June, things began to get pressurised – I was invited to give a class at an acting school in Cape Town, Christa had to fly down to meet a Director wanting to bring a major Television series to South Africa, another series based in Cape Town got the “Green Light”, and we had a working actors’ workshop booked for the still tool-strewn studio!

My “break” ended on Sunday 16^th June when I flew down in time to give my audition class. I then went straight into long days of directing auditions, then processing and transmitting the video until 02h00.

My first opportunity to drive out here came on the 28^th of June and I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was looking forward to a few days in the country, but my “domestic arrangements” here had been set back three years, so life in the cabin would not be fun. I was also on the verge of whimpering with fatigue. Luckily, perhaps, my packing and preparation was getting off to a very slow start when I received another text from Stephen; a major traffic accident had closed the N2 for at least three hours.

The thought of arriving after dark to a trashed cabin settled the matter.

I hardly slept at all on Friday night – for the first time my sub-conscious anger rose to the surface and churned my mind with pointless plans of revenge and strategies to mark the next unwelcome visitors with a variety of noxious substances. I very nearly got up and completed packing at about 04h00, but then I finally fell asleep…

I was still tired, confused and dispirited on the drive across the mountains, but my mood began to lift as I neared Caledon. The sight of the rolling green fields of Canola and Barley always lifts my spirits. I stopped only briefly in Caledon to refuel with the last of cheap petrol, and to buy some milk for Sandy and a bottle of Whisky for myself.

The “Road Closed” signs on the Hermanus road have been removed, so I decided to drive in via the slightly straightened and eased Shaw’s pass. Although the weather was sunny and clear, the valley to Tesselaarsdal from Shaw’s pass coddled a wisp of low cloud in the midday sun, and I admonished myself loudly: “Enjoy the bloody view! That’s why you came here in the first place!”

After a tasty lunch of curry & rice with Steve and Sandy, I had to face opening the door of my cabin….

No fridge, microwave, toaster, kettle, snackwitch maker, heater or food stash. My vacuum flasks, one a souvenir from a movie, were also missing. A glance under the bed among the scattered books and papers confirmed that my scanner, portable printer and lightweight tripod had also been taken. I gathered the papers and books and decided to start by sweeping up the rest of the mess… which is when I discovered that the broom, dustpan, brush, and light-bulb had also gone. So had the toilet paper. I unlocked the workshop to raid my store of basics. Steven had said that the workshop was OK, and had removed my drill press and agricultural tools as a precaution…

The workshop was a mess! The place had since been ransacked, with a few light hand-tools, hardware, recycled shade-cloth and everything that had been on the shelves jumbled on the work bench or on the floor among the tipped-over barrels of the infamous gas-digester-in-progress. The thieves had clearly returned after the police had been. Curiously, there was no obvious sign of forced entry… They either found a spare key I’d forgotten about in the cabin, or they simply unscrewed and replaced the bolt on the door. The most obvious missing item was a 150 litre electric geyser, recycled from an unwanted and illegal addition to our old home in Johannesburg – and my store of food and toilet paper!

After a day like that, what can one do? Retire to one’s plank Boudoir perhaps and down a stiff glass of whisky, or a favourite mug of strong coffee – even better, perhaps a mug of strong coffee laced with whisky!

Nope!

My collection of cheap glass tumblers had disappeared. My bright red promotional Nescafé mug was no more, and my faux Art Deco mug, a last memento of Johannesburg commune life in the Seventies, had also been looted!

A tin mug of Koffiehuis Gold and a dash of Vat 69 was very welcome, and most consoling…

A hot water-bottle, bed, and the second tin mug of Vat 69 with a tincture of coffee did even more good…

Sunday 19^th May 2013

The quick trip turned into two wild-goose days…. There was a forlorn hope of a few auditions for an “Elderly Black Man” for a Warner brothers movie, which would have paid for my petrol at least. As it turned out, there were no suitable gents in Cape Town who were interested in being a non-speaking extra in front of a grass hut in Africa. I also received an email from the leading acting school in Cape Town about a Seminar Christa and I had been asked to do. One of the tentative dates was Friday, so I was suddenly on stand-by to do that on my own. After a quick exchange of e-mails we all decided to wait until we were both available to do it.

Sorting and packing stuff from our minuscule back porch took most of Friday, so I left in mid rush-hour to drop off Christa’s security access card at CTFS on my way past, and arrived here well after dark.

I was up early on Saturday morning and took it easy, just enjoying the silence and the sunrise while having a breakfast of muesli and tea outside the cabin. I wandered out into Home Field to check on an experiment I’m running for my friend Vianne, but more of that later…

A quick walk to inspect the top dam turned into half an hour’s work – I just couldn’t resist wrestling another fallen tree in the East bank out of the dam and onto my pile of firewood nearby. I also managed to at least loosen and move the remaining huge grey tree trunk, but there is no way of removing it until I can borrow a fairly robust block & tackle.

Vianne’s Solar Distiller Experiment

I’ve been mulling over a fairly sophisticated solar distilled water gizmo for several weeks, so it was curious that my friend Vianne sent me pictures of a solar distilling watering system made from recycled plastic water containers. Although I liked the simplicity of the idea, I had my doubts about the yield, so last week I set up two versions.

I didn’t have to walk very far on my property to find two five-litre wine cannisters discarded by itinerant inebriates and two one-litre bottles discarded by impecunious inebriates! The idea is to cut the bottom off the five-litre container and the top off the smaller bottle. The smaller bottle is filled with brackish water and placed under the larger one. In theory, the water evaporates in the sun, condenses on the inside of the improvised plastic dome, then runs down into the soil to deliver desalinated water to the plant.

I taped a foil tea-bag packet to the back of one of the jars, hoping to reflect more of the sun’s heat onto the water and improve performance. It was noticeable how quickly water droplets began to form inside this version, so I was optimistic.

The next day, however, my turbo-charged version appeared to be lagging behind, with a much lighter misting of water droplets. The reason became obvious when I peeked behind the foil. Since it was keeping the plastic warm, no vapour could condense on it. It was also probably keeping the front slightly warm, further reducing condensation, so I removed the foil and was immediately rewarded with condensation all round the covering bottle.

Eight days later, 30 mm of water has evaporated from each installation. Since the water containers are different diameters, that means that each has delivered different amounts of water to the soil, but in any case not enough to counter broader environmental effects. Humidity of the soil beneath the distillers has in fact decreased due to the hot dry weather during the past week. I’ve just “run the numbers” in a spreadsheet, with interesting results:

Distiller “A” uses a one litre cola bottle of 82mm diameter and has produced 0.1584 litres of water in 8 days. Distiller “B” uses a one litre fruit squash bottle of 77mm diameter, delivering 0.1397 litres. Temperature, airflow and humidity of a given environment being equal, the major determinant of the amount of evaporation is the surface area of the body of water, so I compared the yield in relation to the exposed surface area in each distiller. The results were so surprisingly consistent with the theory that I had to double-check my formulas! Distiller “B” has 88.1766805473 % of the surface area of Distiller “A”, and the yield per day is also 88.1766805473 % of the yield of Distiller “A”! Of course, ten decimal places of precision on such a rough experiment is ludicrous, but that is what spreadsheets do, and it does make the point!

Without a few tweaks, I doubt whether this method would provide sufficient water for even a balcony garden, although it might save your plants while you’re away for a week. Replacing the water container with a cut-off rectangular two-litre milk bottle would approximately double the surface area of the water, and therefore at least double the output of water vapour. (I don’t have a two-litre milk bottle to measure.)

Another suggestion would be to paint the water container black on the outside, which should increase the water temperature and improve evaporation.

It is also important that there is a flow of cool air over the outer bottle to dissipate heat from the water vapour to allow it to condense at all. I wonder whether piercing a few very small holes in the base at the back of the cover, and one or two near the top might help? Of course, some water vapour would be lost, but over-all the cooling effect might result in increased condensation.

*****

There was no point in unpacking the loaded pick-up until I had space to put the load, so I started by emptying the workshop. Just as I was contmplating lunch, Stephen Skyped me that the Old Folks club was having a Kermis (Fête) at the Dutch Reformed Church next to the School, so I took a walk down the hill. It seemed as though not many people other than the church’s own congregation were supporting the Fête though, so it was not crowded. I bought a delicious chicken curry, served in a margarine tub, and good value it was too, at only R10. Dessert was several generous chunks of candied watermelon rind dripping with syrup in a large yoghurt tub. Very swe-e-e-t indeed! I’m mindful of the fact that I fly to Johannesburg in just a few days, so I didn’t buy a bag of home made cookies, but later kicked myself for missing the opportunity.

I had severe doubts about fitting all the “stuff” into the workshop, but the stacking boxes are very useful. Although they take up space, they also provide a greater variety of storage spaces, which is much more efficient. The biggest problem is going to be the sound damping blankets from a defunct audition studio. They look like huge duvets, and I’d left them in the sun to air. As the evening got chilly, I needed to get them inside to prevent them becoming damp again. By the time I’d roughly packed them on top of the digester drums there was a lot less room!

This morning I considered attempting to vacuum-pack the sound duvets, but didn’t bother because there are too many small holes in the plastic bags. Eventually I just rolled them tightly and restrained their attempts to become Michelin Men with ski-rope, before shrouding them in plastic and lashing the package to a roof-beam with more ski-rope.

Between sorting, packing and sweeping the workshop, I took frequent breaks to watch the week-end Arts and Technology programmes on BBC World News via my laptop. Although I have a cap of 1Gb per month, my rural ISP allows unlimited “carry over” when I’m not here. The download speed is normally faster than any other connection I have, but this week-end was frustrating, with several interruptions in every half-hour programme. Luckily, most programmes are repeated for people in different time-zones, so I’ve watched several presentations twice, hoping the breaks occur at different times! BBC journalism is so dense that one can miss a lot in the minute or two that it takes to reconnect.

Up early tomorrow to swap the pickup for the car, pack, and head back to Muizenberg – for more housework and packing, since I’m flying to Johannesburg on Tuesday night, for the first time in just on a year! There have been several developments on the work-front during the past few days, so Christa is saying I might be back in Cape Town sooner rather than later…

Monday 13^th May 2013

I arrived here on Thursday 9^th May with a car-load of surplus “stuff” from our back porch in Muizenberg. Although I’d wrapped it in the plastic removals bags, rain has managed to get into it and is not doing any good at all. I also need to clear the porch so that I can get started on making the deck and screen which will house the laundry. The other reason is that the view of a pile of plastic-wrapped “stuff” through the kitchen window drives Christa crazy whenever she is “at home”!

We had a very enjoyable few days showing Christa’s brother Paul and his wife Wendy “Alternative Muizenberg”, as they put it! We also took them further afield though – a trip to Kirstenbosch botanical Gardens and the amazing “Butterfly World” at Klapmuts, near Stellenbosch. A thousand square meters of tropical forest under shade-netting enables one to get very close to thousands of exotic – largely South American – butterflies. The place also provides a home for abandoned or confiscated illegally imported pets of various kinds – snakes, monkeys, tortoises and exotic parrots. One of the parrots was extremely pushy, hopping onto one’s shoulder as you passed by!

Although the huge American miniseries has been extended by two weeks, our work on it is done, so I am once again “unemployed”. Christa has crises looming on several productions in Johannesburg, so the plan to drive up has been abandoned. I loaded up the car, dropped Christa at the airport for the umpteenth time, and headed straight out here to do what I can to prepare for the winter rainy season.

I arrived to signs of great “busy-ness”. Local council trucks charging up and down my West Road, other council workers paving the footpath from the school, yet more preparing to cast concrete culverts under my approach road to handle the heavy winter rains coming off the mountain after last year’s fire.

After just “chilling” on Friday, I continued the clean-up operation on the Top Dam. By working with levers and rollers, a bit like an Egyptian Pyramid builder, I was able to remove three large tree-trunks from the dam. A fourth will just have to stay in place for now, as a perch for Hadedahs or any other birds which may visit the pond when it is full. I cleared some of the mix of leaves, twigs and sand, but while working in the dam I realised that there is a lot more to do. The wall will need to be properly shaped and the spillways are far too narrow and close to the wall. That kind of work will have to wait – for several reasons: Time – I don’t have much left on this trip, and the more important chore is to protect the road from the worst of the impending winter flood. Ideally, I would need to hire local labour after winter to get the job done efficiently. The other reason is that since water has been declared a National Strategic Resource, there is an astonishing amount of regulation to navigate, even for an existing piddly little Pond like this. I need to investigate where the boundary between “Maintenance” and “Improvement” lies, for fear of being exiled to Robben Island or something. My idea of re-starting vegetable farming in the village appears to be receding behind a wall of red tape, complicated by inter Departmental politics that have bunged up the system for several years. Just another example of well-intentioned, blind legislation actually hampering initiative.

A quick trip to Muizenberg and back to bring more “stuff” to store here for the winter, then I have to fly North, to catch up on the other half of my life. It will be just short of a year since I was last in Johannesburg, and the first time that I don’t really have a “home” there, other than Christa’s “bed-sit” at the studio – but at least she’ll be there! Yay!

Monday 22^nd April 2013

I had planned to spend today in the workshop, picking up where I left off working on the bio-gas digester months ago, as a break from the hard physical labour of clearing the waterway. It seemed, briefly, as though I might have an extra day out here, before having to return to the studio in Cape Town, so I could have finished the hard labour tomorrow. However, by working late on Sunday, Christa has managed once again to pull a rabbit out of the hat and arranged auditions for Tuesday afternoon. Since I have to return to Johannesburg for a few weeks, I decided that it was more important to get the waterway sorted in case we have a heavy rainy season.

Having cleaned and prepared the channel, I now had to dismantle the “beaver dam” of driftwood, barbed wire, plastic sheet, leaves and other debris just inside my boundary. Somewhere higher up the mountain, last year’s bush fire had weakened a fence, which had somehow made it down here, poles and all, and tangled with tree limbs in the channel. The wire tended to snag the fork and rake I was using to pull the blockage apart, which was not only irritating, but dangerous. I was initially at a loss as to what to do with the damp, decomposing plant material. I considered adding it to the compost bins, but abandoned that idea for several reasons: carting it a wheelbarrow at a time to the bins would take too much time, it probably had all kinds of alien seeds in it, and lastly, yesterday I had taken a pH reading against the wall of the dam, where a lot of this stuff had obviously collected – the pH was so acidic it was off the scale!

The blockage had caused flood water to run around it by eroding the banks of the gulley, so I laid fallen branches, rotted fence poles and so on against them, then shovelled the acidic compost against the tangle of branches, followed by a thin layer of sand from the bed of the cleared channel. I’m hoping that the initial rain will settle and consolidate these into protective barriers before the flood waters arrive later in the season when the ground is waterlogged. I also left part of the “beaver dam” in place to protect a deeply eroded section of the channel bed. I had extracted a triangular piece of corrugated steel roofing and a number of rocks from the tangle, so I weighted down the sheet steel in the pit of the eroded “sump” with the rocks to prevent further erosion there.

It was after 14h30 by the time I collected the smaller plastic litter in plastic shopping bags and made my creaky way home for a late lunch of left-overs. Christa contacted me on Skype, with the news that Tuesday’s auditions had backed up to before lunch, so I’ll have to be on the road by 09h00 tomorrow to earn my daily crust. Next week end is a mess of public holidays, so hopefully I can make a very long week end of it, because Christa flies down on Mayday, followed by a visit my In-Laws for a few days. When Paul & Wendy leave, we plan to drive the Opel up to Johannesburg together for Christa to use as a runabout, since we have to drive her Namibian registered car back to Windhoek to sell there. Officially importing a second-hand car into South Africa is just not worth the bureaucratic and financial hurdle. While in Johannesburg I’ll be project-managing some overdue maintenance projects at the studio, so it will be some time before I’m back at Boggy Pond…

Sunday 21^st April

With all our productions winding down for the Cape Winter, I’ve had more opportunity to get out to Boggy Pond. I left around midday, to avoid the very early Friday traffic congestion, which is well under way by 15h00. After a quick stop at Caledon Spar to pick up some groceries, and popping into the Co-Op for some new working gloves, I trundled along the dirt road to Tesselaarsdal, where I encountered a rural traffic jam. A farm labourer walked in the middle of the road waving a grubby red flag, so I just stopped and waited for a large herd of sheep to flow around the car…

Spending a long-weekend here has become a bitter-sweet experience though, since the future of this place is in the balance. A few weeks ago I sent emails to the two Estate Agents most active in the area to enquire about property market conditions and the possibility of selling. Frankly, I don’t quite know how to deal with the news that we are going to struggle to get what we paid for it. There are a surprising number of properties for sale in the area, almost all well away from the village itself. Stephen feels that it may be a tentative beginning of a “second wave”, after some rather lop-sided publicity on TV (“Passella”) and in some of the Afrikaans Press. Apart from the economic conditions, “Second Wavers” are not likely to be interested in a property cheek-by-jowl with an RDP housing area. This leaves me in Limbo – not enough capital to restore the house, and not able to sell quickly enough for enough money to finance our own studio, which necessitates a re-think of my objectives here.

Perhaps the most important reality is that we won’t be retiring here to do veggie farming – we can’t afford to retire in the conventional sense. Additional labour to run a viable operation would be a problem for several reasons, and mechanisation, even on this small scale, requires capital. My labours over just the past three years have made me realise that a small tractor would be essential. Even the smallest “ordinary” tractor would be overkill and just stupidly expensive. One can now get quad-bikes developed for use on small farms as multi-purpose tractors, but f you think motor-cars are expensive, try walking around a farming equipment exhibition. A quad-tractor alone costs the same as a medium-sized car, then you have to buy the attachments, which cost rather more than the Mag-wheels and sunroof option on a car!

Expecting Christa to fit into this community on a permanent basis is also unfair. No fault on either side – it is just that the cultural and language gap is too great, in spite of her wonderful “just get on with it” attitude.

I am left, therefore, with keeping Boggy Pond as a week-end getaway while I gradually improve it as much as I can until we find out what we can, or want to do with this phase of our lives, which means concentrating on providing an agricultural water supply. Deepening and sealing the existing “folk dams” should provide enough water to extend the growing season from July / August into January, perhaps to February, which might make the property attractive to a younger Eco-nutter.

Erecting a larger wooden cabin would also be very do-able financially, quite suitable for week-ends, and a little less bureaucratically complicated. Technically though, a “wendy-house” intended for habitation requires a concrete plinth, which still requires building plans and permits…. there’s no escape!

I still look forward to tinkering with various ideas for sustainable living in rural areas, such as solar heating of homes and greenhouses, solar composting toilets, and minimal water consumption small-scale vegetable farming. I have no illusions about feeding the world, or even the country. I haven’t had a hobby in decades, and I miss being able to tinker about in a workshop – facing reality allows me to do that without the pressure of having to earn a living from it. I’ve also been sedentary for too long – the physical work necessary to maintain Boggy Pond certainly won’t do me any harm and it is no more daft than pedalling a bicycle nowhere in an expensive Gym!

I certainly gave myself a work-out clearing the “throat” of the upper dam this week-end. The “loop” (gulley) that brings run-off water down the mountain has become overgrown and clogged with sand, driftwood and an astonishing amount of discarded plastic – from bottles and buckets to five metre-long sheets of thin black plastic. As a result of the clogging, the water has begun to erode the banks of the gulley. The water also tends to seep uselessly into the ground to be sucked up by the huge Blue Gum trees at the rate of about two hundred litres a day each, leaving very little to trickle into the dam

On Saturday, the first step was to clear rubbish and soil from a sump that the water has eroded when pouring over the blockage. As soon as I can, I’ll place a layer of rocks in the bottom of the sump to prevent further erosion. Although I’ve repaired the erosion to the East, I’ve left the depression wide and deep at this point, to allow the water to slow down and drop much of the sand eroded from higher up the slope. Eventually, of course, the depression will fill up, perhaps providing a source of sand which would otherwise have silted up the dam itself.

Step two was to remove the leaves, twigs and sand trapped by the growth of saplings in the bed of the channel which was preventing the water reaching the dam, flowing instead onto the neighbouring property and causing more erosion. For now, in anticipation of the impending rainy season, I’ve just cut a channel through the build-up. Now if I had a quad-bike tractor fitted with a scraper blade….

I had planned to spend today (Sunday) in the workshop because I thought I’d be fairly sore and creaky. I was, but went out this morning after a breakfast of oats porridge “for a little while” just to lower the lip of the channel leading to the dam. By the time I’d emptied my litre bottle of cold water, it was 14h00 already, and I was pooped! At least I’d sculpted a workable channel and created low walls in the forest of saplings to guide any runaway water toward the dam.

Repairing the eroded Eastern side wall of the dam is a big job, ideally done with the aid of a small digger I’ve seen in the area occasionally. I would also need to make a heavy roller to compact the soil, so that will have to wait for a while. Instead, on Monday I’ll clear as much as I can of the tangled driftwood and rubbish out of the gulley between the throat of the dam and the Southern boundary of my property.

Although I would still like to get a crop or two out of Boggy Pond, even if I manage no more than veggies for our weekend visits and perhaps some for the elderly folk of Klub Tessalonika, just being able to walk around in the misty quiet of early morning spotting the glistening spider webs would make the journey out here worthwhile.

Of course, quite often the silence is shattered by the sound of argument… between the Hadedah and the Guineafowl…

(Click on the link below to play the sound, or Right-Click to download. After playing on-line, use the “Back” button on your Browser to return to this page)

{Hadedahs and Guineafowl at Boggy Pond Mp3 format 1 minute 1.36 Mb}

Friday 19^th April 2013

Last week I spent so much time talking about life away from Boggy Pond I wrote nothing about my activities here…

I started by just taking a walk-around, particularly up my Western road. I had graded it at some expense last year, and since it perforce runs straight downhill it suffered a little last September from the heavy rains pouring down from the fire-scarred mountainside, in spite of my efforts to put a few “speed-bumps” in place to channel the water away. The problem is that the soil here is generally sandy, but there are unpredictable layers of impervious clay at various depths under the surface. Water running down the hill of course seeps into the sand until it reaches the clay, then migrates downhill to emerge in inconvenient places – one of which happens to be at the top of the steep ramp at the foot of the hill – the entrance to my land. In spite of keeping surface water off the road, the sub-surface water in the heavily-wooded area next to the road emerged a few days later and completely washed away the track from under the ground. Embedded roots provide channels to conduct the water down the slope, as can be seen from the photograph.

At the time, Jeff and I filled the gash with rock & stone harvested from the mountain, but there is no stopping water, and some erosion has clearly occurred since the start of this rainy season.

Fortunately the local Municipality finds my road very useful to access the area behind the housing development next door, which gets flooded every year because of what I can only describe as lunatic planning, so they generously dumped a few loads of building rubble to repair the damage. They also dumped building rubble at the very top of the road, which was washed away as collateral damage resulting from their emergency effort to direct flood water away from the RDP houses last year. They also destroyed the existing access road to the pig farm above me.

In anticipation of this year’s rainy season, they have contracted a civils company to grade a new road to the piggery and dig a proper ditch across the back of the houses to direct the water down the hill – more or less straight at my road!

Luckily the contractor has turned the ditch quite sharply into the bush a little distance away, guiding it into an existing channel just across the boundary fence. They have also re-graded my road and replaced the silly 30 cm. pipe under our approach road with a much larger concrete culvert, which is apparently soon going to be secured by a concreted guide channel. If it doesn’t happen within a week or two, the brand new culvert is likely to be washed away cutting me and the Smal family off from the village.

Jeffrey appeared – surprisingly sober – on Saturday morning, eager to be set to work, so I assigned him digging out the re-growth of alien saplings in the Northeast Field, while I tackled the Northwest. A few day’s work with mattock (bos-pik) and panga (machette) was necessary to protect the nearly R1,000 I had spent on a front-end loader to clear the infestation as soon as I arrived here, three years ago.

The fynbos has recovered quite well, but I was able to see the disproportionate effect ofthe Bluegum and Port-Jackson saplings.

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A single alien sapling appears to kill off fynbos in a radius of about half a metre around it, probably by starving it of water. Clearing the aliens is slow work – by lunch-time, Jeffrey and I had each cleared about half our allotted fields. Jeffrey had clearly lost his appetite for work, and I had developed blisters through my tattered gloves, so I decided to call it a half-day – it was Saturday, after all.

On Sunday I installed my last half-sheet of plasterboard as a side to my clothes storage corner – I wouldn’t call it a cupboard, let alone a wardrobe! The main reason was simply to get the board out of the way – I had stored it between my bed and the wall, where it snagged on the bedclothes. By the time I had swept the cabin thoroughly for the first time in a while, it was time to go to Steve & Sandy for a braai, after which I just took it easy, catching up on the Blog and watching the fascinating variety of BBC World News on my astonishingly fast Radio Internet connection.

I had auditions to run on Tuesday, so I was undecided whether to leave for Muizenberg on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, until I received an e-mail about a Community Meeting with the TWK Municipality on Monday evening. I’ve missed these very occasional events before, so didn’t want to do so again, especially as they are being increasingly well-attended by the locals. I only had four auditions late on Tuesday anyway, so I was glad of the opportunity to get more clearing work done too.

In the past, these meetings could apparently become quite argumentative, largely because the villagers had no clear understanding of the political and administrative limitations faced by the Local Authority. Monday’s meeting was more subdued, partly because it was largely a feedback session from the Council, and partly because the financial news was sombre. Although the TWK Municipality performs quite well in Administrative terms according to an independent report presented, the harsh fact is that it is a large area encompassing many poor rural communities, so it has a very restricted revenue base.

This situation is by no means unique in South Africa. Many local authorities find themselves squeezed by unrealistic promises made by central Government and a lack of finance, exacerbated by “lack of capacity” due to inexperienced staff. I believe we are heading for a gradual, whimpering collapse unless a concerted effort is made to enthuse villagers and small-town folk to undertake their own basic maintenance and improvement projects. For that system to work, though, central Government has to back off its attempts at “oppression by regulation” as I call it. Too many rules made in the Parliamentary ivory tower simply cannot be applied to impoverished communities. The other barrier to community action is that we essentially have to change the very psyche of the great mass of South Africans… we have to shake people out of their “hard done by” passive Socialism and foster a culture of active community building.

Quite how we do that is the subject for a very different blog… for now I’m faced with perhaps earning a place in this community half a field at a time…

Friday 12^th April 2013

I started out on this trip to Boggy Pond on Thursday 28^th March – it has taken me two weeks to get here, and cost me just on R4,000. I wish I could say I’d had a rush of blood to the head and tarried at some of the fine Wineland hostelries, imbibing prodigious amounts of the nectar they produce while pondering the deeper meaning of Life. Unfortunately, my detour started with a trip to work at the Cape Town Film Studios on Thursday afternoon – or perhaps, very fortunately.

The huge American TV series we’re working on is drawing to a close, with most of the cast established, so I was looking forward to a five-day Easter weekend to get some maintenance done at Boggy Pond. Any production gets a little ragged toward the end though, and I had to put some male models on tape at the studios because they needed to be on set on Easter Monday. The decision about this thirty-second, non-speaking role had been deferred down to the wire for some unknown reason, although I suspect it was due to a power battle between the Director of the episode and “The Execs”, quite common on large American television productions.

Anyway, since the Studios are actually on the way here, I loaded up my tools, personal baggage and computers, and started out in my jalopy. The temperature gauge has been a little puzzling recently, but halfway along the Coast road, it started climbing to new heights. The usual trick of opening the windows and turning on the interior heater and fan to cool the engine didn’t help – leading me to suspect a faulty water-pump. I nursed the engine gently to within four car-lengths of the Studio security gate, where the motor simply stopped – luckily quite suddenly and without a hint of clanking and grinding noises. The engine churned easily enough when I tried to restart, but there was clearly “no fayah” in the motor!

With an equanimity that surprised me, given my recent state of tension, I simply pushed the car off the road into the Visitor’s parking, took my video and computer equipment from the boot, and set about the trudge to Studio Four to keep my appointment with the Director and six male models. I found myself remembering the late Alistair Cooke’s reaction to a VHS tape collection of his life’s work being destroyed by a combination of a New York heat wave and an air-conditioning failure. “There are some calamities so great,” he said,”that there is absolutely no point in remonstrating with Fate. One has to accept, mend what one can, and move beyond what one can’t.”

We taped all six models dodging imaginary moonbeams while carrying an improvised grenade, – don’t even ask – chose the only one with a brain and squeezed his essence across the internet to Santa Monica for approval. (What is the male equivalent of “Bimbo”, I wonder?)

I walked back to the car and quickly determined that there was indeed no spark at all reaching the plugs. I took the distributor cap off and churned the starter motor – the rotor didn’t rotate, indicating a snapped camshaft drive belt, which I was clearly not able to sort out with a claw hammer and a Swiss Army knife! It was now so late that I decided to defer rescuing the car until Tuesday – no point in chasing up costs over a long week end. Luckily the Production was kind enough to provide a Runner take me and my boot-load of tools home to Muizenberg.

I let Stephen know not to expect me that week end, and he gave me a contact for an old-time “Motor Macchie” he had used when living in Somerset West, so I left a message on an answering machine and settled down to enjoy a Hermit’s week end, determined to not even think about the impending repair bill.

The enforced leisure enabled me to start scribbling again… nothing likely to earn me a Booker prize, but at least something to get the fingers flexing again. I also set about finding and linking more of my earlier Short Stories and a Short Film script on my Writing web site. Reviewing work I had not read in several years did my confidence a lot of good. I’m wary of saying that, because I deal all the time with actors who are convinced they are better than they really are, but the passage of years gives one a better perspective.

At some point I twigged that I have business insurance on the ageing Opel Kadett , so on Tuesday morning I made towing the car to TS Motors in the Strand their problem. I received calls from the local towing contractor, which revealed that they had no idea at all where the Cape Town Film Studios were, but needed no direction to TS Motors. Unsurprising in a way, but one has to ask why they have not noticed two three-masted Galleons sailing across the fynbos a few hundred metres from a National highway. On the other hand, perhaps it puts the self important Film Industry into its rightful perspective.

My brother Christopher joined me on Sunday with the idea of going to “Navy Day” in Simonstown. During the bad old days of compulsory National Service he was lucky enough to be one of only three conscripts to serve on our then very new Daphne Class submarines. Unsurprisingly, he volunteered for an extra tour of duty, so was eventually the only conscript on the subs, since the experiment was discontinued. Now, he hoped to take a tour of one of the new Type 209/1400 (Heroine class) vessels. After a catch-up chat, I suggested that we take the train – that coast road is impossible during the week, so it would be murder on “Navy day”.

The Display was… disappointing. There were no signposts to the various sheds which contained trestle-tables carrying a few bits of what looked like dummy training equipment manned (or often not) by bored looking ratings who didn’t appear knowledgeable at all, judging by the minimal engagement they appeared to encourage with the public. The Navy displays were also almost swamped by stalls belonging to estate Agents, loan companies and purveyors of Safari holidays!

By the time we made it all the way around to the “Charlotte Maxexe”, recently out of dry dock after being crashed into the ocean floor, the visitor line was closed, so we charged around through the excess of food- and trinket-stalls to the other end of the dockyard to the “Assegai” Museum submarine, which Chris had served on when she was known as the “SAS Johanna van der Merwe”. The submarine is the last example of the Daphne class subs, and is maintained by a team of civilian volunteers.

We were lucky enough to be in the last tour group and to have a guide who had also served on “The Johanna” and was still in the Navy. Chris entertained some of the women visitors to tales of cooking for up to sixty crew in a galley smaller than a porta-loo!

An interesting aspect was the revelation that shortly after he left the Navy, almost the entire French navigation equipment was ripped out and replaced by a South African designed and manufactured system. The “Johanna” was the very first sea-going vessel of any kind anywhere in the world to have on-screen computerised charting! (Ya-haa Boet! Local used to be very lekker – sometimes!)

By the time we got out of the sub, the entire show had closed and we were hustled out of the gate by a gaggle of Military policewomen, and had to take a brisk walk to catch one of the last special trains laid on for the day.

******

I was back on the train again on Monday to pick up a rental car in Cape Town so that my pal Joe could help me recover my repaired jalopy from The Strand.

I discovered that Thys Schoonwinkel is an old-time “Motor Macchie” of the best sort. He repairs rather than replaces where possible, and takes into account the value of the vehicle relative to the cost of repairing it. He was also clearly very thorough, because when he phoned me to tell me that the cam belt had snapped because of a seized water pump, he pointed out additional maintenance that was worth doing at the same time, so I was quite happy to pay his very reasonable bill.

The rest of the week was quite “bitty”, involving half-days in the studio to cope with specific crises on two films, which rather scuppered my plan to come out here on Thursday afternoon. The next plan was to leave on Friday morning, but late on Thursday night Christa warned me to stand by to go into the studio on Friday! I packed anyway, and received confirmation on Friday morning for just ONE audition after lunch!

Of course, by the time I had encoded and uploaded the actor, I drove onto the N2 highway and sat in the Friday afternoon mobile car-park all the way to Somerset West.

Does anybody remember the gap-toothed grin of the Mad Magazine character “Alfred E. Neuman” back in the Sixties and Seventies? His catch-phrase was “What! Me Worry?”

That’s me these days…. I’m learning, slowly.

17^th March 2013

Boggy Hollow? Well, the hollow only has enough water in it to be a Pond for three months of the year… and my trips out there are becoming more “hollow”…

The See-Saw is entirely in my mind. All the good hard-headed reasons for ending the adventure get tilted out of kilter when I sit on a camp stool outside the cabin, listening to a Night-jar in the trees around me having a slanging match with a distant Duck. The stars above are just stupidly Disney-clear, and the breeze wafts the smell of dew on the grass mixed with just a tincture of fresh cow-dung…

The dew turns to fog, which hides the stars, shuts the duck up, makes the security lights around the School glow like a fairground, and at least mutes the thumping bass and drink-sodden altercations from the Bar…

The Night-jar continues provoking the Duck – there’s no reply, and suddenly the bird’s call sounds lonely… as I am.

“What the heck, maybe this place could work,” I muse. It wouldn’t sell quickly anyway, so I might as well carry on, getting some pleasure out of it whenever I can, and perhaps adding a little value by clearing more aliens and rehabilitating the existing dams. With fair rains this winter, I might even scratch out a crop of some kind…

Hmm, let’s see: The round-trip from Muizenberg is 270Km. That’s about 27 litres of petrol at near-enough R13 per litre, which is R351 a trip in fuel alone. How much produce would I need to harvest to pay for that?

Based on The Farmer’s Weekly Market prices in late December, I would need to sell either 167 Kg. Cabbages, or 115 Kg. Carrots, or 120 Kg. Onions, or 110 Kg. Potatoes, or 44 Kg. Tomatoes just to pay for the petrol to get to Boggy Pond. Add half again for just one day’s Labour and assume I manage that without buying fertilizer…

Considering that the growing season would be very short due to water supply issues, and my fantasy comes crashing down.

When the frustration of living and working in Gauteng started becoming an issue for me a few years back, I muttered in jest to my friend Vianne about “Becoming a subsistence farmer instead,” she quipped “But you wouldn’t even know the right time to plant subsistents!”

[Whoa! I am officially spooked! The very second I finished that sentence, Vianne “oinked” through on Skype – the first time in about six months!]

Not knowing how to grow and care for “subsistents” wasn’t an issue for me at the time, because I was also tired of being the guy with the answers – on just about everything. I longed to learn something new from someone who knew what they were talking about – someone who had the same enquiring approach to their field of knowledge. When I first started working at Boggy Pond, I was quite hopeful, because I met a veteran farmer living nearby who clearly had the knowledge. Unfortunately his personal circumstances soon changed and he moved nearer Caledon. Not that the distance itself is an issue – the problem is that he manages a large chicken farm, which is a 24/7 operation. The man has his hands full holding his own life together – I certainly understand that! The main issue of course is that – as I know from the other side of the fence – you can’t hope to “mentor” somebody who isn’t actually engaged in trying to do what they want to do!

I considered teaming up with somebody from the village – but small-scale vegetable farming stalled here a generation ago when the spring water was piped into the houses. Of course the system was expensive and had to be maintained and paid for, but water became too expensive to use in the quantities required for even subsistence farming. Too often, we fail to consider the possibility that impoverishment and loss of hope could follow as unintended consequences of “progress”.

In my dream world, getting one smallholding productive again would be a catalyst for others…

A dream world indeed…