THE FISH RIVER CANYON

The fabled list keeps on ticking over.

Recently returned from the Fish River Canyon, and I started on my new book...

This is how it goes.

THE NERD AWAKES
I was a fat kid.
I have this theory that people who were fat kids never really shake off their sense of being out of shape and unattractive, even years later, when we become really really ridiculously good looking. We never quite believe it…
Anyway, fat kid. In time, I would add some regular nerd standard-issue thick rimmed glasses to my iron-clad persona, but for now, allow me to explain why I have always been kind of chubby.
I like to eat. Snack, more accurately. And my folks, bless ‘em, always had all kinds of good stuff hidden away which I would find and devour. I was on my own a lot at home, the folks both worked at the travel agency.
For the first 14 years of my life, I had no concept that I might be good at a sport or physical activity. I therefore just had not desire to participate.
I found, quite early, that there are things a lot more interesting than people. They’re called comic books.
Let’s focus on Point 3, which led to a whole bouquet of anti-social behavior that would dog me to this very day. It’s important to assign blame for my stunted emotional growth, preferably to someone that can’t fight back. So I blame my grandma (recently deceased at 94, the old girl knew how to hang on). As a backup, I’m going to choose to point a fat finger of accusation at Rico too.
Grandma. My family loves to read, and Grandma loved to read to me when I was a toddler. Before I could help myself, I was insistent that she, my mom, or whoever else close read to me whatever was at hand. The world of words and pictures fascinated me almost straight out of the crib, and she indulged me.
So I have great memories of her reading me all kinds of books, and in later years, those were the memories she always grasped at to find a point of reference with a grandson that was increasingly disconnected from her.
Rico was the first boy I remember being friends with. He was a year older, but our parents had been good friends even before I was borne and they lived in the same neighbourhood, right round the corner. We attended the same kindergarten, but we went our separate ways roundabout 5 or 6 years old.
My dad took a job in Johannesburg, Africa’s biggest and baddest economic powerhouse of a city and a shithole these days. But back in 1980, it was the place to be. My mom kicked up a fuss because we had to leave the pristine academic town of Stellenobsch, until she settled in to the vibrant social life up there.
Anyway, we move to Joburg. Meanwhile, Rico’s dad (a professor at the University) goes on academic sabbatical to the United States, taking the family with him. Six months later, we hook up at their place after their return, and he reveals to me all the treasures of Alladin’s cave.
He had a toy spaceship which looked kind of weird. What was cool was that it had this trapdoor feature, where two of the characters could hide. He also had a bunch of guy dolls. Their names were Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Han Solo. I remember it was so cool, the dolls had these retractable swords that came out of their arms.
All the toys were related to a movie that I had not yet seen called Star Wars, but I was immediately fascinated. He also had picture books related to the second installment, The Empire Strikes Back. As every sci-fi nerd can tell you, the big surprise at the end of the second movie is that Darth Vader is Luke’s dad. Well, duh, I knew that before I had even seen a single second of the movies.
At this point, I had expressed an interest in comic books. I’m not talking about Casper, Archie or Richie Rich. Those aren’t comic books! No, comic books are vivid worlds inhabited by big green monsters, guys who dress like bats or spiders and alien supermen who just want to save the world and kiss the girl.
But of course, when Rico came back from the US with this variety of amazing comics, stuff that I’d never even SEEN before… I was hooked. His collection kept me fascinated for years afterward, everytime I came to visit I would spend hours rereading his X-Men, Ghostrider and Superman classics. Some of those books would be worth a ton of cash today.
So Bam. That year, I saw Return of the Jedi, the third Star Wars movie. And became a devoted fan for life. I just really really, to this day, wanna be able to move things with my mind and run around with a sword that looks like a lazer. Who doesn’t?
So your first year in primary school they teach you how to read. My collection of comic books became new worlds of wonder when I could actually read what these folks were saying. An immediate side benefit was that all the books were in English, so I started reading English almost as soon as I could read (my first language being Afrikaans), and this is why I was the Jedi Master of the English Language for the rest of my school career.
In a year or two, books entered the fray. Not surprisingly, the Tarzan books were the notable first foray into actual novel fiction. Tarzan was not a world removed from Superman, Batman and the rest of the guys. Hero? Check. Lost his family? Check. Has abilities beyond that of normal men? Check.
Yep, there was a pattern here.
A couple of months before we moved back to the coast, I won my first prize at school for being the best writer in class, based on some composition I had done.
When you’re seven, the world is really your oyster. My parents were very supportive of whatever I wished to do. Turns out I wished to read… and write.
My dad bought a business in a town called the Strand. It was neither the social beehive of young professionals that we had in Johannesburg, or the academic stronghold of self-important intellectuals that we were part of in Stellenbosch. My dad gets along with everyone, though, and was soon part of the social network that was more of a middle-class industrial environment.
My mom felt herself out of sorts, however. In her heart, she always felt a little bit superior to the people in that town, and some of that robbed off on me. She threw herself into working for the company, and I threw myself into my own little worlds.
When you’re in primary school, it doesn’t really matter to people that you spend your breaks reading by yourself in a dark corner and your days huddled over your desk in your room writing picture books about imaginary characters with super powers. They leave you alone.
Of course, your parents might worry. But when you finish no 1 in your class in academics (I was a smart kid who loved to read – I was way ahead of the curve) they also tend to cut you some slack.
So while other kids were playing rugby and football, getting into trouble and forming their social orders and building blocks, I was off in my own little world, happy as can be. I met a kid called Hermanus who was my partner in crime when it came to the comic books and scifi movies, and our relationship would remain an important yet irregular feature of my school years.
The teachers thought I was a writing genius, and I often received full marks for my pieces. The other kids loved reading the comic books I wrote, and I got beaten up roundabout when I was 11, after which the bullies also decided I wasn’t worth their attention and I got to get on with my life without much pain.
Then, High School.
It’s a fucked up feature of puberty that social interaction suddenly becomes wildly important. Guys need to show off, girls seem to like that kind of thing, and there’s a lot of pressure to do the stuff that gets you noticed. Play rugby, which was a religion. Be friends with the right people. Be a sheep.
Suddenly, no-one was interested in reading my comics. High School transformed me from a slightly odd loner to a full on nerd. Of course, I had no social skills, I was chubby and I had a particular affinity for my English teacher, which translated to full teacher’s pet/suck up status.
I was a social outcast, but now I started to be aware of it, and it kinda hurt. Taking my lead from my mom, I decided that everyone in school were idiots and jealous of my intellect. This helped make me more popular, of course.
Then, a boy called Deon Coetzee came across my path.
He, in his own way, was a bit of a lone ranger. He had less of my mom-inspired sense of superiority, which always made him more acceptable if not popular, because he too was no follower.
The one sport I had dabbled with as a child with my dad was squash, and so it was something I could play. Deon played too, and we started to go the courts together. No-one else in school was really doing it, but somehow it became our thing, and would dominate our after shool days for the rest of the year.
He was also a golfer, and that year, my dad also took up the game. We happened to have a teacher at school who was a golfing maestro, and when I was 13 or 14 I took up the game.
At this point, I was quite used to being the subject of peer ridicule. So when, at a first public testing of skills, in front of a dozen other boys, I swung and missed that little white ball over 10 times. I finally made contact, and the ball travelled a few metres.
The teacher was not impressed, and the other kids chuckled or even laughed outright.
But, my dad was encouraging me, my new best friend was willing to help and I was determined to show them all.
So I did.
For the next 3 or 4 years, afternoons spent reading or writing comic books were replaced by afternoons spent on the golf course. Deon and I would get on our bicycles and cycle out there, rain or shine. Sometimes there were torrential rains, but we faitfully put in the practice.
And we became pretty good at it. Deon’s ability – and temperament – was always better, but in school I always matched him, although adults kept on giving him praise. We both won the school championship once, I in our penultimate year and he in the last year. We were really the only two contenders.
I had neither a natural ability – what people call ‘ball sense’ – or the right temperament (for years my temper would just get in the way), but I managed to become good enough to compete at the top junior levels and play league for our club. Deon would go on, after school, to play with some of the top amateurs in the country. If he had more competition than little old me, he might have gone even farther in school. But there you go, we had a blast.
So I had a lot of good times with my dad, and my mate, on the golf course. Golf was nowhere on the importance ranking at my school, but it didn’t matter. I had a friend and had found a social environment that I liked, even if it was a bunch of old farts on a Saturday.
Meanwhile, my younger sister was showing me what it meant to be social. She was pretty and rebellious, and a stream of boyfriends came through the door. She gained and discarded friends almost weekly, and her life was completely different. I longed for the popularity that she seemed to enjoy, but had no idea how to access it. She was desired by men, girls were repulsed by me.
Oh well. At least I knew that I could hit a golf ball.
Meanwhile, Hermanus came and went to and from my life. His dad was kinda shifty, and kept on changing jobs and home towns. Hermanus was a promising kid, but all the changes made him hungry for acceptance and a sense of belonging.
So he learned how to ingratiate himself quickly with his new social environment. When he left our school at 14, he moved to a rural town called Ceres. The next year when I went to visit him during the holidays, my comic-book lovin’ friend had morphed into a smoking, drinking cool cat who was tongue-kissing girls two and three years older than him and hung out at the pool club all the time. I was horrified.
He had learnt the trade of social acceptance. When he returned to our school a couple of years later, our friendship resumed – briefly. I was 16, and I had my first kiss with his girlfriend’s friend that year. Wasn’t special.
Anyway, he quickly decided to upgrade his social group, and fell in with the cool kids, my arch-enemies. I was discarded, but I decided to bide my time in self-righteous indignation. And, true to form, he got tired of the pretence and started seeking my company again less than a year later, and settled into a sort of social middle ground. It seemed like a lot of work for a nerd to get in with the gang.
But Hermanus introduced me to tequila, and my first session of vomiting. So with him, I started to take my first baby steps into booze, girls and parties.
At the end of that year, my cousin (who was one of the cool kids at a different school) and I clicked on a family trip, and I went into my last year of school playing less golf and doing more party time of things. I had my first drunk fling at a school disco, my first girlfriend, and threw the afterparty at my place after our final school dance (parents were away).
I was no longer an academic giant, although I did graduate with honours. My writing was still valued by my teachers, but I had stopped writing beyond school tasks. Still liked to read comic books, but had stopped writing them. And I had slimmed down a little bit and gotten contacts, so here and there a girl even expressed interest in me.
It was time to go to University. A chance for a fresh start.
FACTS, FIGURES
So I pitched up at the University of Stellenbosch, the venerable institution that had supplied both my parent’s tertiary educations. I went to the same house that my dad went to 20 years before, full of hopes and expectations, and signed up for a degree in accounting.
I was ready for an exciting future. Popularity, lots of parties, girls… it would all be mine.
Turns out that there was nothing wrong with the kids I went to school with. The problem was all me.
It didn’t take the folks in my house, or in my class, to by and large conclude that I was a self-involved slacker who really had nothing much to add. I could never quite figure out why they would think that, and concluded once again that they were jealous of me, this time because I came from a bit of money.
See, my dad was an extremely successful – and well-known – business man in the region. My studies in accounting was largely at his prompting, and I was even then being groomed to take over the family business, a travel agency.
I hated it. People either thought of me as Matie’s son or Karla’s brother (all the guys thought she was hot). What about me? Did I not count?
Wallowing in delicious self-pity, I spent the next two years in that house fighting the system, generally being very unpopular. I stopped playing golf, wasn’t writing and studied a bit. Managed to pass my first two years, which was an achievement given the absolute zero effort I put into it.
And it was okay. Deon had gone abroad to work overseas a bit, and my cousin Sergej had stepped in to fill the best friend position. I fell in with his whole crowd of school friends for those two years, who were neither at University with me nor had been at school with me. They might have thought I was a dickhead too, but I was Sergej’s cuz and as such had a free pass to inclusion.
This was roundabout the time that I was forced to play some rugby for the house. From initial resistance, I actually came to enjoy it, and would’ve continued to play if I didn’t dislocate my shoulder when I was 19.
I developed a strong sense of appreciation for the Springboks, our national rugby team, and became one of those overzealous fans who knew all the detail. Sergej would joke about my grasp about the facts and figures pertaining to the team and games, he scoffed as I had never been much of a player. But hey, you wake up late in life.
The reason I bring up the rugby is that it took up a big part of my third year at University. Not playing it. Watching it.
Sergej also left for abroad, and I moved into a flat with a friend called Hugo. Hugo decided after less than a semester to quit university and start work as a barman at the most popular bar in town. Which was in the same building as our flat.
Recipe for disaster.
Aided and abetted by my free-drink supplying flatmate, a national success in the rugby world cup and a general dissatisfaction with my life and studies in general, I proceeded to superslack my way through my third year.
I didn’t study, watched a lot of sport, hung out in the bar and even pitched up at some exams drunk.
Given my stellar academic performances in school and my ability to get by in my first two years, I was quite convinced I lived a charmed life and would simply cruise through my third year too.
No so.
Suddenly, I was faced with a fail in three of my four major subjects. Pleading and cajoling with my lecturers did not help, and I wasn’t even allowed to write the exams in two of them. It was that bad. I scraped through the third, and narrowly failed the fourth, prompting a rewrite.
Now, in a lesson in abject stupidity, here is what happened. The subject was financial accounting, and I have always been good with numbers. So good, in fact, that I was sure the lecturers were all idiots and I had the answers. I didn’t follow their advice even when I did bother to listen in class (which was rare).
Because of my insistence to do things my way, I failed that exam. But I did well enough to merit a rewrite, which would be on the following Friday morning.
My favourite band, Bon Jovi (Owah, we halfway there… oh oh, living on a prayer…) was performing their one concert in Cape Town that Thursday night. I was devastated. How could I attend the concert the night before my all-important rewrite exam?
Of course, it never even occurred to me that I could study real hard for the rest of the week, be prepared and then take the previous night off and go enjoy the concert. No, the only option open to me was to slack off for the rest of the week, then jam like crazy the day before. This meant I had to sell my ticket to the concert.
You guessed what happened next. Missed out on the epic concert event of the year (EVERYBODY was there), and… drumroll… failed the rewrite too.
For the next 10 years, I would harbour a not insignificant obsession with Bon Jovi… which would finally be satisfied. But I’ll come to that tale.
Cue the livid father. His golden boy, the protégé that could do no wrong, had failed his third year. Miserably. What do I tell the friends? The shame of it!
I was kinda pissed off, as you do. My dad kept going on and on about how much it had cost him, and like a real brat, I kept on pointing out that my education was costing a tenth of what my sister was paying at a school in Austria.
That was a bad summer. But I did knuckle down and go waiter like a demon, making enough cash over the season to pay for my own courses the next year.
Something happened during that time. I guess it was a sense of mortality. I woke up, and realized that I would have to work harder and give more if I wanted success. That fourth year, I stopped the slacker behaviour. I became involved, joined societies. I achieved good grades, and worked on my health a bit more. I even signed up for some extra courses.
I made a few good friends, and the old ones kind of stuck around. I even dated a few nice girls, but none that stuck yet. I was still very insecure about not knowing who I was, though, and felt people prejudged me within that microcosm, for whatever reason. I had been an asshole too long, and needed to break the image.
When I was 22, my dad arranged a job for me with a ski touring company, to go be a ski guide in Austria.
Confident in my final results, I was on a plane to the ski resort with my new boss and my first real job before I even knew whether I had graduated.
I was tired of being labeled, and maybe overseas I could start being my own person.
I was right, and I was wrong. What happened next would shape the next ten years of my life.