Another one bites the dust

Where and how did we get the idea that the desert was just a sea of sand?
John Charles Van Dyke, professor of art history, can not help asking himself this question, after spending three years in the Mojave Desert, between the end of XIX century and the beginning of XX century. Van Dyke then publishes The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances, the text that would become, with Travels in Arabia Desert by Charles M. Doughty, a powerful source of inspiration for Reyner Banham's raids in the American deserts.

The charm of Scenes in America Deserta, published in 1982, lies in the patient research of the purest source of the perception (especially vision). The desert is interesting for Banham as the realm of light in its extreme form, it is his clarity of expression and understanding that is the reason why the British historian is infatuated with the text of Van Dyke, and, as a result, of the North American deserts.

Are we still capable of pure vision, free of philosophical categories (such as the triad sublime-picturesque-beauty) and consumer images that make us seem familiar with far away places? A precondition seems to be the total extraneousness of the cultural milieu of the observer (in his case the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and Western philosophy in general) in relation to the one that permeates the places visited (the Native Americans' traditions).

Glossy images in magazines, westerns, flyers, manifesto designs by architects with messianic nature, all are unwanted baggage, weighing him down. Sure, it's almost impossible to cross with virgin eyes deserts as the Mojave, icons such as the Desert Valley and Monument Valley, battered fragments of utopias as Arcosanti and Taliesin West. Banham does not lose heart, and turns pragmatism and the obstinate search for clues in his method of exploration and narration. And it is just the breaks, the travel between well-known destinations, or unexpected places with alien names like Zzyzx, that provide him, and provide to the reader, the most significant passages. The narrative ranges from meticulous descriptions of buildings elsewhere insignificant to moments of almost ecstatic empathy with endless landscapes, and apparently paradoxical aphorisms ("Deserts may need man more than man needs the desert").

Thirty years after the publication of Scenes in America Deserta, does it still make sense to try to tell an experience starting from similar assumptions?

A recent trip of 700 km by car, in an area straddling the provinces of Eastern and Western Cape in South Africa, has offered an interesting case study. Neither Cape Town nor Johannesburg. Neither the endless townships nor the mines that make the country one of the emerging CARBS members, the five countries dominating the global commodity markets. Some stories previously read, as Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories, or Nadine Gordimer's novels, as The Conservationist, stories set in the vlei, in the veld, somehow built more a blurred expectation than a repertoire of predefined images. Starting from Addo Elephant National Park (149 metres above sea level), which provides the last reassuring shots from a documentary film Africa, then moving north, and finally reaching the dense enigmatic whiteness of the Swartberg Pass (1583 metres above sea level).

Seems like there are no alternatives: here people move by foot or, who can afford it, by car. Buses and trains appear from time to time without notice on the horizon, and you watch them with the same surprise with which you might look at a group of zebras crossing the road: an occasional natural phenomenon, not a reliable and frequent public service. The average quality of the roads, paved or dirt, is good, and allows the car to become an extension of the body. Paradoxically, in many nature reserves, including Addo, it is forbidden to walk or simply stand outside, except in prescribed points. The penalties consist in monetary fines, or, in very remote but possible events, death! (a number of animals that roam in the reserves can be quite dangerous). Landscapes and wildlife are thus filtered through a screen, be it a car window or the camera lens. But sometimes the temptation is irresistible, you must descend, come what may.

From Addo onwards those who will be two inseparable travel companions come on board, mud and dust: a thin layer on the clothes and on the front window, a gradually increasing layer on the mudguards.

After driving along the R342 up to Paterson, take the N10 national road, heading north. Large expanses of dense bushes form a sort of huge plant blinkers, and gradually diminish going up to the Olifantskop pass. Beyond the pass, across Cookhouse, follow the Great Fish River, a wet wedge which flows at the bottom of the valley, laid down in a range of barren hills. Along the river, and until there is enough water, crops and herds follow, like in trenches, up to Cradock, the collector of a linear agricultural system a hundred kilometres long. It is here that the market products of the whole valley converge: wool (mohair especially), meat, dairy, fruit, alfalfa.

The main religious building of the town, the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church, refers to St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London — it's unclear if with conscious irony or not. The buildings in this city are plastered in strikingly various colours: warm colours on the poor houses of brick and sheet metal of Lingelihle, a low cost social housing neighborhood built by the State. Acid greens and blues for the arcaded central buildings, dazzling white for the row of buildings in Stockenstroom street. The grey stone of the Protestant church seems a little out of place. Like many other towns of the Karoo, Cradock is the result of urban meiosis: two agglomerations of equivalent extension, an area of low cost social housing (or informal settlement of shacks as alternative) mainly inhabited by mestizos and coloured people on one side, a town established by Englishmen or Boers on the other.

Leaving Cradock along the R61 towards the west, after about ten kilometres a dirt road leads to the Mountain Zebra National Park, established to preserve the last Cape mountain zebras (Equus zebra zebra). These are distinguished from other zebras by their brown-toned coat. The park covers a large part of a smooth wind-swept plateau, which, in contrast with Addo, is deserted. The vegetation is low, dry expanses of grass scattered with bushes let the gaze wander over the plains and the Bankberg mountain range. A relentless and hypnotic fluctuation between of rough and smooth: is this the veld then?

Heading toward west again, the R61 crosses a passage between two colossal iconic mountains (one of which is the Salpeterkop, one of the most evident legacies of the intense volcanic activity that shaped this area), marking the entrance to the wider portion of the Karoo, the semi-arid Great Karoo. The sharp outline of the Kompasberg (literally the compass-mountain) seems to indicate the point at which turn towards south, on the N9, towards the wind-swept Naudeburg pass, and, further, Graaff-Reinet. The roughness of the white plaster covering the historic buildings, courtyards and streets dotted with colourful plants and flowers, make it by contrast an oasis chromatically saturated against a barren landscape. Even more strikingly than in Cradock, the cell defined by the historic city, with its almost perfectly circular outline embraced by the bend of the Sundays River, here seems to have not only divided, but suddenly exploded, and created new neighbourhoods to the north and east. You can guess this coming from the north by car, and it becomes obvious when you reach the top of the Valley of Desolation, the most spectacular section of the Camdeboo National Park. This amazing microcosm is designed by plants and geological forces. At its foot views open of the dam and the reservoir, of Umasizahke and Graaff-Reinet, of totemic relief and the expanses dotted with bushes. Over all, the premonitory singing of the "birds of the rain" (Centropus burchelli), dazing heat and light. To measure with the eye these lands is an operation that seems to require a long time and contemplation. Not a neutral operation, but one heavily influenced by what F.L.Wright, on another continent, defined as a "strange, linear, well-armed, creeping cover of the abstract land". Armed yes, sometimes with violent dazing weapons, and most often with slow, almost imperceptible deceptions.

Abstract is the definition that best suits to the crossing of Karoo between Beaufort West and Graaff-Reinet, along the R61. The tiresome monotony of the landscape, the mythology related to road and nature push the mind to escape reality and recall memories of familiar images, from the clichés of American deserts to scenes of westerns. After Aberdeen, a sudden unexpected event brings back attention to this road: a man walking under the sun, wrapped in a wool sweater, declaiming some unknown litany. "The desert is where God is and man is not" is a proclamation that many have pronounced over the years, paraphrasing Victor Hugo. A slogan very partial and biased, as Doughty earlier and Banham then have testified: the desert is a place of possibilities, "a sly and begrudging barrier; obstructing, rather than forbidding", where to found new social patterns, beliefs, faiths. It would be better to say, then, that this is a place where there are men, who seek God.

And if you do not find existential answers, at least to find a chance to rest, some refreshment. This offers Beaufort West, and few things more, halfway between Cape Town and Johannesburg along the infamous N1. The other few things are collected in a little museum dedicated to Christiaan Barnard, the first surgeon to practice heart transplant, who grew up in this town. The vintage machinery kept in glass display cases, after hours of driving, sand and bushes, produce on the visitor the same effect of alien spaceships of science fiction b-movies of the last century.

The N1 is one of the most dangerous roads of South Africa, being very busy, essentially straight for hundreds of miles and full of bumps and dips with poor visibility, but that does not deter many drivers, often tired after hours of driving, from making risky overtaking. With some relief comes finally the turn for the R353 in direction south, towards Prince Albert. While driving it is possible to glimpse the chain of the Swartberg in the background, and along the way, to encounter the first orchards after hundreds of miles of sand, rocks and bushes. Unlike Cradock and Graaff-Reinet, the town grows in length, around the main street along a north-south axis, while it has in common with them the fact of being the center of collection and sale of agricultural products and livestock, in particular the famous Karoo lamb. Coming from the north you encounter a poor social housing neighbourhood, located at the foot of a Hollywood-style sign drawn on a hill, followed by the old center, composed of Dutch colonial-style houses, with roofs covered with thin packed reed or corrugated iron. If after reading the sign on the hill there could be some suspicion about the eccentric nature of the inhabitants, after a few hours suspicion turns into certainty: thanks to the particularly healthy climate, Prince Albert has become a sort of retreat of elderly people, largely passed by hippies, passionate gardeners and owners of B&B's.

A few kilometres from Prince Albert the road branches off into dirt for the first stretch to the Swartberg Pass. Dramatic, theatrical, it marks a sharp break with the monotonous landscape of the Great Karoo: a gorge between walls of red sandstone, whose planes of schistosity are definitely twisted, a gurgling stream of water, trees and cacti. The road, built in the late nineteenth century, is a masterpiece of engineering and perseverance: the dry stone walls, up to 13 meters high, make the ascent of the steep slopes relatively easy. The wind gets stronger, the temperature drops rapidly, increasingly dense clouds cover the sun, until they form a thick layer on top of the pass. After days of continuous exposure to a crude, aggressive, at times almost menacing light, a feeling of familiarity and relaxation pervades the senses. Because of the flatness of the land, and perfect weather conditions, during the trip developed, in relation to the way of experiencing landscapes, a certain habit to glimpse in advance the places that would be crossed in a few hours. It is liberating, sometimes, not seeing our own future. Ludovico Centis

Epilogue
We stopped at perfect days
and got out of the car.
The wind glanced at her hair.
It was as simple as that.
I turned to say something–
—Richard Brautigan, We stopped at perfect days, in Rommel drives on deep into Egypt, Dell publishing, New York, 1970