andamu

Any post over at Briggy's is the signal for the party to start. Somewhere after the 15th comment, the conversation turned to Orkney. The real one, or actually ones: 70 islands off the north coast of Scotland. As usual, this was enough to send me off on a tangent.
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I lived in Orkney for three years. Starting when I was twelve. Of course, this was Orkney in South Africa, in what was then Transvaal, and is now the North-West province, nestled on the banks of the Vaal River across from the Free State.
Vaal refers to a non-descript color, something like a mousey-brown, a taupe, a brownish-greyish-khaki, which is the color of the river. Rather more prosaic - but a lot more honest and realistic - than "the beautiful blue Danube."
(Transvaal => across the Vaal (river))
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The lopsided triangle Orkney forms with Klerksdorp (13km away) and Stilfontein encloses the world's largest goldmines. The parents of most of the children in my class were employed by the mines, as miners, artisans, administrative staff or executives.
We became used to the earth tremors indicating that yet another dynamite blast far far beneath our feet has laid bare more of the gold vein.
Many myths sprang up around the transportation of the gold to Johannesburg; hushed tones on the playground weaved fantastic tales about decoy trucks, calling in the entire army, armored helicopters, subterfuge, and once even teleportation.
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At that stage, car license plate numbers started with a T (for Transvaal) followed by one or two letters indicating the town of residence, and ending with a variable number of digits as a running tally. The town letters for Orkney was OY.
My father took endless gentle delight in the experience of living in a TOY town.
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The region's hospital was in Klerksdorp, the larger of the towns, and there my mother worked as a radiographer.
The cemetary was situated halfway along the road between Orkney and Klerksdorp, with the airfield directly across on the opposite side of the road. My mother had to X-Ray many a hapless parachutist who miscalculated or was blown off course, landing in the graveyard. In the process they broke ankles on headstones, tangled in the large trees, and once even extended their descent by six feet, landing in a freshly dug hole.
My father is buried in that cemetary.
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My father was Town Secretary, the second-in-command at the municipality. Of all the departments under him his favorite by far was the public library. He championed it, jealously guarded funds for book purchases, and spear-headed the building of the new, spacious public library. Shortly after the relocation of books started from the dingy basement of the municipal buildings that had served as library, he was killed; hit by a drunken driver as he was walking on the sidewalk.
A reading corner in the new library building has a plaque honoring his memory: to me that is a much more fitting and lasting monument than his headstone.
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Elisabeth Eybers wrote a poem about the region, called Wes-Transvaal. It concludes with:

God het geen berge of bosse oorgehad
toe Hy die land moes maak, en kon toe net
die vrede van voleindiging hier laat

A rough translation reads:

God had no more mountains or forest
when He had to create this region, and could only
leave here the peace of completion.

It sounds better in Afrikaans.

It is a flat region, with scrub and occasional isolated thorn trees, and breath-taking sunsets. The main reason for that was the dust in the air, causing the sharply angled rays to summon forth fantastic and almost surreal colors in the sky.
When severe winds would blow up from the South, the sky would go dark with dust and no matter how tightly windows were closed, all the drapes would need to be washed afterwards.

It was said that if you had a bowl big enough you could catch an entire Free State farm on such days.
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It is the town where I started high school, first kissed a boy, and lost my father.
I think someday I would like to go and visit the original Orkney, perhaps gather some new memories.


* The photograph of the sunset was taken in Norman, OK in 2001. The general landscape there is vaguely similar to that around Orkney.

I was a student (the first time around) in the late '80s in South Africa, before the death of apartheid during a very turbulent political period. In Pretoria where I studied, several bombs had cost many lives over the preceding years.

For a while I lived in a high-rise block atop a midtown shopping mall. This was very convenient for doing groceries or going to late night movies - just get in the elevator, and when next the doors slide open you have arrived. It had other obvious and not-so obvious drawbacks too, though.

At the height of the unrest, I would hear the police megaphones blaring, and look out my window to see an entire street block frozen in place. All pedestrian immobile on the sidewalk, all drivers and passengers out of their vehicles and standing next to them, the police conducting searches for goodness knows what.

Sometimes at night there would be a loud bang! and I would freeze, heart thumping, wondering whether it had been a bomb. It never was; instead it would be one of the famous Highveld thunderstorms, the flashes and rumbling interspersed by thunderclaps that followed showing me how paranoid I had become.

One evening, sitting up in bed, reading, I heard a whump! - really loud, and different somehow. By now my thoughts were first "Bomb!" then "bomb?" then "Naah, probably just a thunderclap."
Less than a minute later, a second whump!
"Aah, now I know it must be thunder, because there won't be two bombs so close to one another." And so I finished the chapter, turned off the light and went to sleep, anxious heart comforted.

Only to wake in the morning to headlines screaming about "Double Bomb Blast Rocks Midtown" or some such. Two blocks from me.

I don't take anything for granted anymore.

It has been a rather unusual week. I have had arrays of meetings that take large chunks out of my days, leaving only disjointed snippets of time to try and get some work done, and consequently have stayed really late at the lab.
The lights are automatically switched off at seven. There's a manual switch to turn it back on, but that goes off after an hour too, so every hour you're plunged in darkness with only the walkways illuminated, playing the waiting game, hoping that someone else is making the trek to the switch to turn it back on, and wondering at what stage you should capitulate and turn it on yourself.

Thursday I went in much later than I usually do, driving in full sunshine and noticing the beauty of everything, finished by the thick coat of frost on every detail glinting like gilded edges in the bright sun.
It made me realize that I have been missing winter, its beauty. Going in early (7) and leaving late (5.30+) meant that until recently I have been making the drive both ways in the dark.
It is better now, but still the faint morning light is mostly obscured by thick clouds and/or heavy fog whenever it is not actually raining. This is after all winter in the Pacific Northwest.
But it made me appreciate that the experience of the day (and the season) for people who come in a couple of hours after I do would be quite different.

It reminded me of my student days back in South Africa, while I was living in the same high-rise apartment block perched on top of a midtown shopping mall I mentioned in a previous post. For a student job I worked in a bakery in the mall which was a really convenient commute! But on weekends and during break my days consisted of waking up and glimpsing the grey light of early morning over the city, locking my apartment door, walking down the internal corridor, getting into the elevator, and getting out on the bakery's floor. At the end of the day I would reverse the process, the only difference that the grey light I saw when I returned to my apartment was that of early evening.
During breaks I would live for entire weeks never setting a foot outside, and never seeing more than a few brief snatches of daylight except on Sundays.

At the time I could not tell you what the source of my vague discontent, perhaps even depression, was. It was only once I moved to a different apartment that it sunk in. Just like the unusual experience on Thursday showed me what I have been missing recently.
Perhaps I should reconsider my work schedule. I am fortunate that my company allows us great leeway in deciding which hours we want to work; to some extent the main focus is getting the job done on schedule, and being available for required meetings - beyond that it doesn't matter when exactly you are there. It is a great way to help the employees make the necessary choices to maintain the work/life balance.

On the other hand if I make the choice to go in later and stay later, it would negatively impact my family. For the sake of experiencing a few minutes of pleasantness during my morning drive I would be coming home after Angel Face has gone to bed, gulp down dinner alone or, if my precious one decided to wait for me, force him to have cold or drying food as well, spend a desultory hour unwinding, making sketchy conversation, perhaps flip through a few channels, sort out the laundry, have a shower, and crawl into bed.

Perhaps then not such a good idea.