Bathing Banned
A humpback has breached directly in front of us. Just be present, she gently whispers into my ear. I’m learning to be still and enjoy the sight; not rush for my phone and try to grab pictures. It’s an old iPhone and at this distance, up on the hill, we’re a fair bit away from the giant sea mammals; so a great picture is unlikely. Just be present. The humpback blows as she surfaces and almost simultaneously her calf follows. They frolic for a bit, dive, pop up again, blowing hard and mamma does the classic side and backflip, her large white flippers showering spray as she turns, making an unmissable splash as she lands. I’ve been so focussed on the flip, I lost sight of the wee calf but s/he pops up behind mamma as they just as suddenly disappear beneath the waves.
Looking at the whales from this distant spot, I wonder what it must be like for the sailors on board the huge container ships languishing in the outer anchorages; who get to see them up close. And just as gently, I’m reminded that modern day seamen are often no more carefully regarded than their land-bound counterparts in the illusory capitalist system; but before I digress and lose readers going on about that again, let’s get back to the seascape on this typical Spring day in the village.
It’s blustery, white horses litter the surf and the salty tang of the ocean lands onshore in thick clumps. A deep breath is just a mouthful of sticky saltiness and you’re free to read into that anything you want. Then the wind turns for a moment and the earthy richness of the air that hangs under the canopy of a towering Natal fig fills the space. The indigenous wild tobacco that used to be common here is now a rare sight but it’s distinctive smell carries from the pristine forest below as the wind turns north east. And then it all settles down for a moment of stillness. The sun is overhead, filtering through the canopy and landing on our bare arms in little blotches. Warm against the gentle cool of the forest shield. Not unlike swimming in the little lagoon that’s a long walk over the other end of this ancient dune. The water in that tidal lagoon is the colour of polished wood, the deep rich brown of the mahogany native to Natal, that used to grow in groves on the hills just behind us. But they’re long gone now; cleared away, sliced up, dried, hammered into tables and likely sitting quietly in little antique shops in Parys.
It’s mostly cane fields now but not very long ago these hills were still dotted with patches of older coastal and dune forest. A couple of years ago this was stripped bare for a mall and the developer made a hoo-ha about saving a single fig from all that forest. But again, before I digress into the clearing of forests for parking lots — oh wait Joni already did that with her Big Yellow Taxi; a whole fifty-one years ago. Maybe the developers of the mall (and the rest of us) had collective amnesia — you know — like in that Netflix movie where the world has collective amnesia about the Beatles? Okay, let me get on with it before I too am struck with amnesia and forget what this writing exercise started out as.
It’s Spring in the village; over nine-million people are fully vaxxed in the holy land; there has not been serious load shedding in a few weeks; there’s rain aplenty and the rivers in the Kingdom are rising (the Kingship itself is an altogether different story, but again, let me not digress) and all about people seem just a little more hopeful than a few months ago. Of course, there’s still anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers and because it’s the holy land also the regular issue MSPs; Midrand dwellers, Shetland pony climbers and all manner of dangerous and just plain deranged mofo’s running amok, doing their best to be the worst they can be. And putting up posters about it too because it’s election season in the holy land and this counts for something — what exactly; as opposed to what we’re taught it counts for — I’ve yet to figure out. For those reading from outside of the holy land; or if you’ve just been living under a self-taught lie; the holy land was for the longest part of it’s (geographic) history the world’s largest open air experiment in white supremacy. With global sanction — like when the then League of Nations remained mum about Italy and Ethiopia. Oops, that was meant to be another case of collective amnesia — my bad. Then at some point, it was decided that the legislated white supremacy was bad for business in the holy land and the legislation was dumped. The experiment however continues; but again, I find myself having digressed.
Spring in the village is upon us and despite the ugly news that bathing at the local beach is ‘banned due chemical spill’ — it’s a happy place all round. The visiting Vaalies are chock-full in the low roofed pub the locals seem to favour, where the service is like a magic show — illusory. The spawn of the Vaalies litter the street below (yes, there’s pretty much just one in the village); their feet in desperate need of a wash (or just some flip-flops?). You can see their eyes alight with wonder at being free of whatever traumas are visited upon people living on the highveld these days. Of course, dealing with the questions about why the official city signboard says bathing is banned in the seaside holiday village is an exercise in pure fuckery.
Because in order to answer why bathing (which translates into going into the sea, the actual water — not the ritual cleansing required daily) is ‘banned due chemical spill’, we have to go back to the mall, the one with the one fig the developers gave us. Like how we almost always get just one token (and a compliant one too) on the board and we don’t mean the charcuterie board (which if Twitter is to be believed was discovered in 2020 AD, in the Cape winelands nogal — I wonder what foodies on Twitter will discover next?) — but again, I digress.
And so; just behind the mall (with the now famous fig tree) is the (now infamous) chemical factory that was set alight during the bout of looting and burning in the village earlier in the year. The same chemical factory that has questionable town planning permission to be located where it is. Where any spill from it would flow directly into a waterway that feeds into that lovely lagoon I was going on about before. And of course which flows out into the sea, just next to this nice bathing beach in this little seaside village the Vaalies come to for their vakansie. There’s chatter that the environmental impact assessment for the facility was fudged and hidden away in an all-too-regular case of backhanders and looking-the-other-way by City officials, the connected chommies and their ilk; that the chemical factory burning means there’s a shit-ton of arsenic and other toxic stuff in the lagoon, that the whole story is a cover up for the fact that the City is pumping raw sewage out to sea — but again, I digress.
You can’t swim because — well, you’d have to go figure out what’s real and what’s surreal, add in some of the times I digressed and you might be as far as I am, from understanding it all. And that might be way too much to do on this lovely Spring day in the village. There’s something to be being here and now that feels like the opportune moment to exist — in spite of the macro conditions designed to stymie your hope at every turn. So, with a bow and a by-your-leave, let me not address this beach where ‘bathing [is] banned due [to] chemical spill’ or digress any longer.
A pair of hands are beckoning me to bring my own over — and squeeze some ripe lemon into the glasses brimming with ice, tonic and more than a generous splash of Bombay — although how that name in particular even exists is another whole bunch of things to digress about. And a blog for another day. Just be present, wherever you are.
Bathing Banned is not fictionalised at all. It’s a lone human’s observations of events that are all too real and any similarities to the crazy world we inhabit is entirely intentional. Except the hands beckoning me; I made that bit up — she was shouting at me like a fishwife.
© Jesh Baker, 2021
