A glass of (cloud)water

Bluegummers survive at the brink of the clouds.

Sandwiched between watery sea and watery sky, our abode is a speck of sweet water just before it melds into the sickly salty sea.

We don’t have conveyance systems, pumps, or wastewater stations. Our reservoir is small enough for preschool kids like Tawana to play in. All we have is the mountain, its gravity pumping the waters down, its kloofs funneling them toward the sea, its granite and fynbos filtering the waters to purity.

coasting on the coattails of summer winds, a carpet of cloud streaks across the Blue Gums ridge

We live willingly at the clouds’ whim, through winter storms and (usually) dry summers. Without any municipal pipes, it’s the summers that cause worry. But luckily the summer brings winds as well, as the Cape Doctor whips toward us from Antarctica; throughout the dry season, the Doctor’s clouds collide into our mountainous ridge, allowing the stream to flow through the summer. Lying on our backs after a long day’s work, we watch the clouds stream by, whisked on the wind, streaking over the peak. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the summer day turns dark and a mist envelopes the escarpment, transforming it into a mysterious vertical wonderland, where familiar outcroppings suddenly become hideouts, and patches of shrubs become thickets of adventure.

But it’s usually sun in the summer. Hot, merciless, inconveniently-determined-to-burn sun. In the midst of work on a hot day, singing helps keep the mind off the heat. In dedication to the relief of a cloud burst, there’s a Xhosa gospel song that often comes to mind while on the mountain (which I’ve adopted to a more secular enviro-industrial tilt):

Bayeza, bayeza, amanzi phezulu, onke amehlo ayakhumbona

[They’re coming, they’re coming, the waters from above, all of the eyes are watching it]

Simbonesiza sinzengamafu, onke amehlo ayakhumbona

[We see it coming upon the clouds, all of the eyes are watching it!]

Amidst beads of sweat, our pursuit of the never-ending weeds progresses upstream and approaches the waterfall, our own misty paradise, where specks of water fling through sunrays into golden illumination.

And at the end of the long day, a dip in the pond and a refreshingly cool glass of cloudwater.

Caught in the web

Tranquil, dewey and green, Blue Gums seems as gentle as a babe to our approaching guests. But, once they step out of their cars and onto the stone steps, they realize what being on the edge of wilderness means. Even before our warnings about baboons, newcomers meet the spiders.

It is the webs one meets first. Their webs are layered over every path, from the first sturdy structure of the mother, to the myriad spinnings of her progeny. The slightest brush across a web can startle someone into seeing its maker, a pincer-legged, hairy, blue and yellow beast with a bulbous abdomen filled with prey, eggs, or imaginary poison. These massive arachnids brace themselves and peer down calmly at any intruders.

While they seem to be relaxing for most of the day, the spiders spend a great deal of energy building their webs. And that works up a voracious appetite. Trapping prey keeps the impregnated females busy, and they are merciless. These menacing mothers package one lost bee after another, filling the edges of their webs with takeaway meals. But no fly would be foolish enough to wander through a dense forest. Their captors lie in wait between tree limbs, over trails, from the edges of walls. They need both the canopy and the light, they need habitat on the edge of a transit corridor to harvest bees, just as we need our cozy home on a rural road to soak up the wilderness.

And therein lies the conflict. You see, we Bluegummers commute to work on trails, hiking up the slopes in pursuit of alien invasives. Our trails make the perfect edge between branches and free-flowing air, the perfect place to spin a web and to catch passing insects. So on those same trails, the spiders spontaneously set up camp, like taxis stopping in the middle of the road. Before removing alien invasives we must clear away native arachnids. Their webs are taught and firm, and are textured yellow from the residue of nearby plants. The silken tapestries take a force to break and they break their normal poise and clamber elegantly over their web and away. Harmless after all.

Dreaming of a Green Urban Future

Many of you will have seen the dramatic pictures of the fire that swept through a Khayelitsha shantytown on New Year’s Eve. Some of you may have driven along the N2 this last week, past visible sections of the devastation. And I know that a few of you who read this blog have been in BM Section, working with the thousands of displaced people seeking short term and long term habitat solutions that are safer and generally better than those obliterated by the flames.

For many people our universal future is feared as a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of wild nature and social order. BM Section this week is a sensational and grossly exaggerated manifestation of such a nightmare. But at the same time it is a harrowing reality faced every year by thousands of our fellow Capetonians.

In the ashes of BM Section and scores of similar fires in our slums it is difficult to think beyond survivalist needs. Poverty and the environment seem like polar opposites. It is easy to wonder how one can think about nature when there are challenges that are much bigger and much more immediate?

And so it is that we fail to go beyond traditional imageries, in which environment and nature are seen as elitist interests, while poverty alleviation and socio-economic exclusion are seen as the real priorities, seeking the urgent attention of the State. As a result our policy makers and ourselves do not see the upgrading of informal settlements as a challenge that is fundamentally environmental, and we do not see the preservation of our natural environment as something that should be a matter of concern for the 20% of our urban population that live in slums.

At the very least this is a failure of the collective imagination. We fail to envisage a society better than the one we live in – not just a survivable world, but a nature-rich world in which all children can thrive; a world in which nature has its place in low-income neighbourhoods and our low-income neighbours have a place in our remaining areas of natural beauty.

I am pre-occupied by these ideas when I am working and walking on the mountain at BlueGumsFree. The restoration of the mountainside is not only a nature lover’s project. It is linked to a fervent wish to make a contribution to our city becoming an engine of biodiversity. And by this I do not mean a vigorously managed national park surrounded by concentric rings of gated green suburbs and miles and miles of blighted urban sprawl.

In the limited confines of my own daily life, my conservation work at BlueGumsFree is a small contribution to a nascent movement to create nature where we live and work and learn – whether in Castle Rock or in Khayelitsha.

And Where Will the Money Come From?

I remember my first real encounter with a chainsaw.

A few weeks before I moved to Blue Gums I contacted my friend and colleague Dr. Christo Marais, who works for Working For Water, South Africa’s most well known Public Works programme. He helped me purchase a second-hand Husqvarna, and arranged for a lesson in chainsaw basics at his office.

I left that office with a chainsaw in one arm, herbicide in the other, and my heart in my throat. In the course of the short training session I realized that using a chainsaw was a bit like handling a little crocodile that thrashes and wriggles around and has one end that is terrifyingly sharp.

 

Looks a lot safer than a chainsaw

When I arrived in the Blue Gums driveway about an hour later and looked at the army of invasive alien trees I felt my resolve evaporate. All that my brief training had done was make it obvious that I was not ready to take on the challenge. It was going to take a while before I was skilled enough to handle a chainsaw, but that was the least of my worries. I was going to need an army of workers and lots of money.

I may not have had an army but I did have contacts for a team of Working for Water workers. And instead of money I had the advice of one of my friends whose stock answer to the question “and where will the money come from?” is simply “From wherever it is now.”

Working for Water team

 I made my way up the 53 steps from the main road to the Stone Castle, stopping on the way at “The Good ‘ole” built all those years ago by the Reverend Green and now converted into a storeroom. I dropped off the chainsaw and the herbicide and went into the house to call another colleague, Zolani Matakane who was the manager of a Working for Water team on the Cape Flats. When Zolani told me that he was busy on other contracts for the next three months, I called in our caretaker Michael Mei, handed him a pair of clippers, a bow saw and a panga, and proceeded to show him how to clear some of the younger invasive saplings around the house. I arranged to return the following day to apply the herbicide to the stumps of the young trees that he had removed.

When I returned the next day I discovered that in his eagerness Michael Mei had cleared the single small patch of indigenous fynbos on the property.

First Section Cleared – Fynbos Included

Our plans to clear the invasive aliens at Blue Gums could not have had a more inauspicious start.

Introducing Blue Gums, a Haunting Piece of the Heritage of the Cape, South Africa

The Cape Peninsula is about 75kms long. It has a shoreline that is easily twice that distance and has a mountain chain that runs along its spine.

It is still reknowned for its natural beauty but from an environmental point of view is but a pale shadow of its former self. Rapid urban growth has seen the thin strip of flat land between mountain and sea all but disappear beneath asphalt and concrete.

The mountain chain that stretches from Table Mountain in the north to Cape Point in the South protects tens of thousands of hectares from development, but there are very few places left on the Peninsula where the natural environment stretches from the coastline to the crest of the mountain chain – especially on the False Bay side. A striking exception is in the deep south from Murdoch Valley to Cape Point. The 14 km stretch within Cape Point Nature Reserve is a protected area, forming part of Table Mountain National Park, but the 10 km to the north of that is a mixture of City Council and private land. The rough diamond in this sparkling natural necklace of mountainside and rocky beaches is the Castle Rock Conservancy and at the edge of this conservancy is a small little plot of land that has been known for the last two hundred years by the rather disconcerting but telling name of “Blue Gums”.

Blue Gums, circa 2006, when the property still warranted the name.

The Sun Rises On Blue Gums (Free)