view from the treehouse
A perspective on the Anthropocene – and the beauty that persists in spite of us.
Before I returned to Cape Town from the Lowveld, I spent a couple nights in a treehouse. Notwithstanding its delicious, bracing lack of cellphone signal, the Anthropocene certainly still intruded into the nighttime aural tapestry enshrouding it. Sometimes a train unzipping its way to Mozambique; occasionally, when the breeze turned, lorries making begrudging, harrumphing groans as they climbed or descended a stretch of the N4 highway. On the second night, I also heard a sermon or rally rippling in the wind from speakers (where?!). And, as I tried to fall asleep that evening, there was a persistent hum not unlike one emanating from a ventilator duct. I think this was the noise of the machinery spraying hormones on nearby macadamia fields so that the trees surrender their precious nuts.
You get away from it all, and what – it's here, too: agriculture, religion, transport. However! In this noisy rural not-entirely-an-idyll, there was nature, too. So much of it! Crowding in, the insects at dusk. Owls hooting, hooting. Barking so rich and wild it couldn't have been from a dog. Volcanic rocks bursting from gorges and tree-tangled slopes. A landscape so lovely, so generous, so grandly, defiantly beautiful and alive that my heart was almost bursting to be inside it – and the only way I could deal with that bursting was to take pictures compulsively with a pocket-sized digital camera that once belonged to my late dad.
(literal views from treehouse)
Do we resent human encroachment, despoiling, pollution? Or savour the remnants of wildness that still exist – often exuberantly – in spite of us? There is space for both, I suppose. To mourn what is lost, what is disrupted and imperilled. To mourn the costs of extraction, 'growth' and movement – that are so often not borne by those profiting from those things. To mourn all that while treasuring what remains. Savouring, relishing, loving it to the point of bursting.
I took a walk and this is what I saw.
This is the latest in a sequence of irregular Field Notes from a swimming pool library.
