Rain
Ministerial Meandering
Rain
It’s hard to tell sometimes - whether what I’m hearing is rain or the wind in the trees, or another train. We’ve had a lot of rain recently, and whether the weather people like to call it an ‘atmospheric river’ or not - it’s a lot of wet.
I like the rain, but I like it in its season, and I like it when it is warm - not icy and slicing through the skin on your face horizontally with a blistering wind behind it.
When we came from South Africa it was May, but to my way of thinking it might as well have been September, though there were one or two days that year when it almost approached warm - by my African standards. By the time we reached the actual end of September it then rained solidly for 6 months, and I was aching to get back to the South African springtime, with the purple-flowering jacarandas and the bright red flamboyant trees.
I stared out at the rain and remembered fondly the time Sheila and I had lived for a while in a Transit Cottage in Durban University, where I held a Visiting Fellowship for six months. It was a tiny cottage with a corrugated iron roof on which the Zululand rain would drum its deafening tatoo for an hour or two - then stop - as suddenly as it had begun, the sun coming out and showing off the local jewels of colour in our native forest garden, decorated by hundreds of different bird species.
On Saturdays, a troupe of vervet monkeys would scamper across the roof of our cottage, to swing through the trees and across a piece of dual carriageway, to reach the school on the other side, where the playground rubbish bins would be no longer surrounded by screaming children - nor would they be emptied until the following week. Good pickings for hungry monkeys; and I never met one that wasn’t!
In the last fourteen years since we left South Africa, I have tried to acclimatize to the temperate rain forest climate of the Fraser Valley. I don’t think I’ve done a particularly good job of it. Very few days go by when I don’t think of the country we left - and how we would still be there if it hadn’t gone down the road of state-sponsored corruption, led by president after president, since Mandela demitted office. What hope we had on April 27th, 1994, when ‘Madiba’ won the election and apartheid had been abolished! How fast that dream faded when he resigned.
Twenty years before - the first time I had been in South Africa - apartheid was still fiercely in play. It was safe for me then, a white man, to travel on the train from Johannesburg to Dundee (Zululand), but thirty years later, in 2004, passenger trains were dangerous for all travellers - black or white - but especially white. Black ‘scabengas’ (armed thugs) would rob you and throw you off the moving train - with or without a few bullet holes in you, depending on how high or drunk they were. Or just how vindictive they were feeling that day. The rail ‘service’ was therefore not often a preferred method of transport, and anyway there were few enough rail tracks to travel. It was just another symptom of a failing state. In such a beautiful country with such a cornucopia of natural resources, this was - and is - a tragedy.
We lived behind a high electrified fence with barbed wire and broken glass at the top, and barred doors, both inside and outside the house. The police force would be the last to show up in any emergency, so we paid - as did all our multicoloured neighbours - for a private security firm to protect us. Their armed response to any alarm was less than 30 seconds to the phone, and less than 5 minutes to the house. It’s funny, but we got used to it.
And now African ‘rain animals’ have begun to appear in British Columbia - in the form of ‘atmospheric rivers’. And the summers - or should I say, ‘hot weather’ - is as hot or hotter than when we lived in Zululand. This year we hit 50 0C on our stoep (in the sun, admittedly), and we never had that in Empangeni.
So when the rain animals come to Agassiz at night, and drown out the sound of passing freight, I can close my eyes and dream of the veldt, sugar cane fields, and the soft hills of Zululand. Don’t get me wrong - I like BC; it’s a compromise - but probably the best I can hope for.
Philip+