Men at Work
For years during a previous desk-and-meetings job and a life carefully negotiated around keeping those commitments, I used to really look forward to work visits to coastal villages. It was a welcome change from daily life and I recall staring longingly at the sea on my visits, wondering if I might live there someday.
In particular, visits to Durban elicited warm and fuzzy feelings and a not a few late night Facebook posts about how much I missed the place.Winter visits to the West coast fishing village hardly elicited such warm and fuzzy feelings, probably reflected by the corresponding drop in surf temperature and that oddly fishy smell that comes off the Atlantic. Like the smell in the fresh-fish Midrand speciality shops, but let me not digress. The last time Midrand rated a mention, I was severely admonished for speaking poorly of the soulless cookie-cutter security complexes people live in. I tried to explain that the description applied as much to the people as the architecture but that was lost in the flurry of why such types of living arrangements were vital in a country with such a high crime rate.
For the rest in the Western Cape, I was mostly trying to keep my feet on the ground in the heavy winds, keep dry, keep warm or wonder if the clouds and time-off schedules would synch so I could get on the cable car and visit the top of their famous mountain.
Having now spent the better part of two years being largely resident in this fishing village on the East Coast of the holy land, the yearning to be close to the sea and in particular the warmer side, remains entirely intact. I’m surprised that I’ve not tired of the empty sky (thank you lockdown for that treat) reflecting shades of blue that would bring tears to Pierneef. I’m still giddy with butterflies in the tummy each time I see the vast blue expanse of sea as I approach some village beach and I often stop to take in the rolling fields of green (or brown during harvest) against the sky as you move inland.
I am still every bit as excited by the prospect of a hike along a riverine forest trail; the deliciously cold air redolent with the smell of the fecund ground. And despite knowing just how cold a mountain stream is likely to be in the winter months, I will stop and get as much of myself into it as I dare. Provided it’s close to midday that is, anything earlier or later and meditative listening will suffice. Despite being the product of a random mix of genes, there are no Scandinavian ones in the family pool just yet.
Which is not to say that the locals don’t get into a tizz when I let slip that I had a dip in the sea during the week. Partly because they know I don’t own a wetsuit and mostly because it really messes with their minds that a grown male of the species is visiting the sea on a weekday morning. This is not normal behaviour for the male of the species. Normal behaviour means going to a job, miles away, in an office, factory, business et cetera and doing so by driving in a swarm of traffic to get there.
The process of work for a normal grown male of the species is meant to start at 4am and continue through to just after 6pm. Lunch should be skipped because there’s just not enough time, unless it is a liquid lunch at a beachside restaurant on a Friday. The work involves some sort of uniform or straightjacket clothing, scraping your face clean of any naturally occurring hair, closed shoes, maybe a tie (preferably not to hang yourself with) and if you’re really bringing home the macon (Babe has been successfully shamed into non-availabilty in the village) you might sport a proper old-school briefcase.
Being male in the village is about work; working hard all day because that’s what the men do. The Corona virus inspired lockdown has done some of the initial heavy lifting to shift the idea of work-from-wherever but if the early mornings are anything to go by; the majority of the male species in the village dutifully go off to work everyday. And look smug as anything about it. And they are duly celebrated for fulfilling their part of the (increasingly tenuous) social contract of our current day rabid capitalism. And it’s headline sponsor, male privilege — but that’s a blog for another day.
The less celebrated who wander off to tend gardens and the aged, take a dip in the sea, bake brownies and fiddle around with things like writing and other creative pursuits are either fabulously wealthy (and thus entitled to any and all idiosyncrasies) or gay. Because some of the elders amongst the villagers know my family, the former is ruled out and, it has now surfaced that the latter must therefore apply. It was probably the loud pants from last Monday that brought us to this hilariously myopic cul-de-sac of my fellow villagers ill-minded logic.
Either way, the mere act of being you, in a space where outmoded tradition weighs so heavily upon everyone, is a tough act for daily social life — just ask Makhaya Ntini. While the space that has always been a temporary home has now morphed into a lockdown refuge is appealing — the people in this village are unfortunately what might be politely described as insular.
Still I live in hope that if rabid capitalism can consider the idea of a four-day working week, there might be hope yet for my birth village to catch up with other equally radical ideas; in a hundred years or so.
