Groot Kloof

December 18th, 2012

A lazy morning, to recover from the two days of travel to get to South Africa, meant more time to bird on the deck for me.  Then in the afternoon, Oliver took us on a short hike in the Magaliesberg Range (across the valley from Mabela Rantjes) to Groot Kloof (Great Canyon).  Hot and muggy on the way up through a thick forest where we could hear but not see Red-chested Cuckoos (called Piet-my-vrou (which means "Pete my wife" (?),really), for their call, in Africaans).  Then we broke out into a more open scrub, a type of thorn veldt maybe, that was just gorgeous and was like what I had imagined Africa would look like.  Every now and then we heard the deep bark of a baboon coming from the forest. After a sweaty hike up, we came to a junction of three kloofs and made our way down into the canyon to a creek.  A nice pool had been scooped out so we all had a snack and cooled off in the water.

                                                              Kari and Sara in the "pool"

                                                          Poppy and Dani cooling off

While we were relaxing it started to cloud up, so Jason got us moving so we wouldn`t get caught in a lightening storm.  We scrambled out of the kloof and when we got to the top there was a family of 3 baboons across the kloof from us.  Grabbing my camera, I just could not have been more excited.

                                                        Baboons across Groot Kloof

 And then the strorm hit, almost on top of us.  We were totally exposed, and Dani was in a metal framed carrier, so Jason beat feet out of there.  We followed suit, but the storm caught us pretty quickly, before we were half way out.  Thunder and lightening, and it just poured rain.  Torrentially.  Like we never see in the Northwest.  We got completely drenched, and towards the end we started running down the rough trail, I don`t know why, we were already as wet as we could be.  Running and laughing and singing - it was just a great joke.  When we got back to the farm, I had to very carefully dry out my bird book over a period of several days so the pages didn`t stick together.

Birding at Mabela Rantjes

So we strolled around the house upon arrival and immediately noticed the dangling nests of the Southern Masked-Weaver on a tree between the house and garage.  Heading out to the deck to relax with a cup of tea after the long flight, surrounded by birds singing and flitting around, it was impossible not to grab my bird book and bincs.  There was an occupied birdhouse in a tree growing up through the deck.

The occupants were a family of Crested Barbets - with their general scruffiness, dyed hair and mohawks they reminded us of punk rockers.

Next I saw a Green Wood-Hoopoe fly up into the yard - it was hard to miss the cackling and the flashing black and white.

We heard the "harsh, nasal" kay-waaaay of the Grey Go-Away bird before we saw our first one.

It wasn`t till the next morning that I spotted the spectacular African Paradise Flycatchers nesting in a tree between the house and Judith`s studio.

I continued to bird throughout our 3 week stay at the farm.  What a pleasure to be surrounded by these wonderful creatures and to have the time to pay attention to them.

Seattle and Tahoma

Had a great spring weekend in early March with my sweetheart and I heading into Seattle on Friday night for dinner downtown (The Icon Grill) and The Music Man at the 5th Avenue Theatre.  Kinda took us back to our childhoods when it seems like musicals were a bigger part of the culture and swept across the country every so often.  It was a slower, preinternet time and would take a few years after the Broadway opening before the ripples would make it to Fircrest.   The Music Man movie and soundtrack was big for a while just before our teenage years and we had a blast reliving that.  It`s Broadway  premier was in 1958 which was the same year as West Side Story.  But while Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins all collaborated to make West Side Story,  Meredith Wilson wrote the book, music and lyrics for The Music Man himself.  And it was the first musical he had written, and he was 55 years old at the time.  And it won that year`s Tony.   Bruce Partridge reminded me the other day that the Beatles covered one of its songs, Till There Was You.

And then heading up to Ashford on Saturday morning with the kids and babies, leaving the fog (and Kari ( sure looking forward to her knee surgery and recovery)) behind into the clear sunny day.  We headed up a Mt Tahoma Trails Association trail to the Copper Creek hut, about 4 and a half miles and 1100 feet elevation from the gate where we parked the cars.

 

We had a variety of gear, from snowshoes to lightweight touring skiis to heavy duty Alpine Touring skiis.  There was a little gear envy going on, especially when we turned around after lunch and the skiiers could just mostly coast back.
 

The babies got out of their packs and into a photo shoot during our picnic lunch at the hut.The nine mile roundtrip wore me out, but we we still able to party when we got back to Foxsparrow and celebrated the March birthdays!



and then I scared myself.  We took it pretty easy Sunday morning ( three weeks still to Kari`s arthroscopic knee surgery),  but then in the afternoon I decided to drop a fat alder for next year`s firewood and to open the summer sunset view.  It got hung up in the top of another tree, which has happened to me a lot during the 35 years we`ve been here.  I did what I do when this  happens, which is cut off about 4 foot chunks one after another until the top finally falls over.  Everything was difficult this time, though.  Each time I sawed a chunk off, I had to wham it with a sledgehammer a bunch of times to knock it down.  And then about the 4th or 5th time when I was getting tired and thought I knew what I was doing,  I was standing at the head of the log pounding on it and instead of going sideways like it had everytime before it came towards me and went though  my legs.  So I`m scrambling to get off the m$#@ing tree and its all happening in slow motion and speeded up at the same time.  And then the top of the tree I`m now spraddling falls out of the neighbor tree and down and lifts the butt between my legs up about 10 feet off the ground.  "Luckily", it threw me off about 4 or 5 feet up from the ground, onto my back about 2 feet from my saw......  There could have been a million minor variations in the action that probably wouldn`t have ended so well for me.  I think I just used up one of my nine lives.  This was the first time a tree I`ve cut has ever touched me as part of the falling process.  And the hell of it is that Kari saw what I was up to about a half hour before this happened and came over and told me she didn`t like the looks of it and I laughed her off and shooed her away.  I felt chastened, subdued.  On this, the first day of daylight savings, I came into the house and put on my pj`s and slippers at 4:30 in the afternoon.  I had a quiet glass of wine, and thought about things.

 Affordable solar can`t arrive too soon  ~

The tree that tried to kill me.

Mabela Rantjes

December 17, 2012

And so we left Seattle at 2:30 in the afternoon, Saturday, December 15th;  and arrived in Johannesburg at 7:00  in the morning (local time), Monday December 17th.  After about a 9 and a half  hour flight to London, a 5 and a half  hour layover at Heathrow, and a 10 and a half  hour flight to Joburg.  About as gruelling as it sounds.  But then, we`d travelled pretty much half way around the world in  26 hours which is kind of amazing to think about.

Oliver met us at the airport and we headed west for a few hours, arriving at Mabela Rantjes, the family`s farm, by late morning.    We were greeted by Boulie, the German Shepherd guard dog, and Simba, a yellow lab.

Within half an hour of arrival, I was ensconced on the deck with a cup of tea, a South Africa bird book (thanks Tom and Gloria) and my bincs.  The bird song was incredible!  Sara, Jason, and Danika were several hours behind us so we had a great morning relaxing and just taking it all in.

The view from the deck.  Afternoon thunderstorms came in over the Magaliesberg Range to the south.  The light was beautiful right before the storms.

 Mabela Rantjes (either "Wild Apricot" or "Wild Apricot Ridge", not sure) is  333 acres overlooking a valley in the Magaliesberg Range of North-West Province. While at least part of it was a working mango orchard years ago, it is not actively farmed now (excepting Judith`s chickens, geese, and garden).

Judith`s  geese.

South Africa ~ The Back Story

We accompanied Sara, Jason and Danika to South Africa for a month this Christmas.  They were going so they could introduce Danika to her Grandpa Oliver, to her Auntie (Jason`s sister) Annathea, and to his stepmom Judith.  Oliver`s family were secular German jews who emmigrated to South Africa in the mid 1930s.  Oliver`s grandfather was a surgeon in Germany who developed the "Oppler Technique", a procedure that had something to do with intestinal surgery, I think.  Sally`s family was from Chicago and her father was a doctor also.  Sally met Oliver in South Africa, where they married.  Jason was born in Johannesburg, but in the mid-eighties, when he was six,  appartheid started unravelling, things got a little ugly, and so the family moved to southern California, where Jason spent the rest of his childhood.  Oliver moved back to South Africa when he and Sally divorced and has lived in greater Joburg ever since, with Jason spending summers with him.  Twenty years ago or so, Oliver bought a large piece of acreage a couple of hours west of Joburg in the Magaliesberg Range.  It had a two bedroom cabin on it that he remodelled into a home for his family.  It`s been a lot of work for Oliver to keep the property going while working in Joburg, so he recently made the difficult decision to sell the house and move back into the city.  Not only could we be a help to Sara and Jason with Danika, but if we wanted to spend some time on the family farm, now was the time.  We signed on and bought our airline tickets last February.

 

The Opplers at Mabela Rantjes

 

A Poem to Begin With

 

Lost 

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~ David Wagoner ~