CAPE TOWN, South Africa—I am a journalist living in Cape Town, South Africa. The writing I do here comes from ‘listening to the city and its people’ and writing down what both have to say. Cape Town could be any city or place. There is no specific reason why I am writing about Cape Town as opposed to the place I just moved from, Los Angeles, which I wrote about when I lived there and which I continue to write about as a science journalist for the University of California. Cape Town is just the place that’s in front of me right now and so it’s the place I can listen to the easiest.
The more I travel the more I learn that you don’t have to go far to travel and to write. You don’t have to go any distance at all. You can travel inside your heart and discover new feelings and old memories and navigate them like a ship’s captain or like a mountaineer of the soul. This can happen without you ever leaving where you are, where others might tell you that you need to travel to this or that place to build character or something like that.
This is not a vote against travel. It is a vote for travel and all its richness being something that begins the moment we are born. The same internal tension and infinite possible meaning that exists in the lovely Table Mountain that surrounds Cape Town exists in your shifting thoughts and in your heart.
If writing about Cape Town means listening to what the city has to say, then Cape Town is writing these words as much as I am. We are dance partners.
In some dance styles there are leaders and there are followers. Leaders call the shots and the follower responds to the shots. When I write I am following Cape Town’s lead and responding to its cues. It is Table Mountain that towers above me now and which pours the clouds it makes at its summit down on top of me, and in response I write ‘I am at heaven’s gate,’ or something like that. These words are for me an equal response to the way the mountain dances with my heart.
I felt like Table Mountain might have more to say – maybe it had a story to tell — and so I went on a walk to its base to see if I could find a story.
I walked up Orange Street and the wind blew and the leaves in the trees clapped and my attention went to the clapping instead of the story I wanted to find. When your attention is elsewhere your mind goes to work on the question marks hovering over you, such that when my mind returned to the road I saw what I was looking for: a cable car. I saw it and I also didn’t see it, which is to say that I imagined it.
There are no cable cars in Cape Town. Rather, there were no cable cars in Cape Town until I imagined one. I also imagined Cape Town’s cable car conductor: an old man with a giant walrus moustache and stars in his eyes. The stars in his eyes are the first things a young man named Peter sees when the car moves steadily and carefully toward him through a thick fog made by the clouds pouring down from Table Mountain. One moment it was all sunny and blue skies around Peter and the next it was all grey and still, and then Peter finds himself face down on the pavement and all he can see is fog and the two starry eyes and a big yellow light moving toward him. The cable car is yellow with green sides, and it has a single lamp at its front that shines a yellow light.
Peter is struggling with some difficult feelings, and they catch up with him in the fog. The feelings come when he faces silent and empty places, which Peter fears because it reminds him of what it was like when he was young and he wanted to run away from silence and from emptiness but he couldn’t. Silence and emptiness scared him to death as a boy and he carries that death feeling around with him in his heart. He struggles with the feeling that all his efforts in life up until now have been a form of running away from the dead silent-empty void. He’s afraid that none of the stories he ever wrote for the paper that sent him to Cape Town to be a foreign correspondent have meant anything and that they were all only a kind of running away from the fear and the pain inside him.
The fog that comes makes people forget who they are – where they’ve come from and who they’ve met and their hopes and dreams for the future. The cable car conductor’s name is Woolie. When you say his name you say it with a ‘V’ sound, like ‘V-oolie.’ He is ‘Conductor Voolie,’ and though his walrus mustache is overly large you know from the twinkle in the stars in his eyes that he smiles often beneath his giant mustache, and when Peter sees Woolie’s stars far away through the fog he knows from just the twinkle that a warm smile, like a reassuring hot cup of tea or a warm fire in a cozy kitchen, is on its way to him.
Peter was looking for a story for his paper but he could not find a story. He remembered what a teacher had told him once: that he ‘should have fun with reporting.’ That ‘reporting should be a kind of dance that gets your heart pumping in a good kind of way.’
But that was not how Peter felt as he walked up the street past the old homes with their metal roofs and their porches that looked to him like good little stages for telling stories, whether or not the people on the porches knew that was what they were doing when they told a friend about what they did at work that day. Peter looked up at Table Mountain and at the clouds pouring down from its flat summit and he wondered about the silent exchange that happens between a person and a mountain.
‘Here I am,’ the mountain says in its silent way.
Peter thought that people respond in different ways to the mountain’s quiet statement. Some hear it and take it as an invitation or as a challenge to go and climb the mountain, and they frown as if the ‘here I am’ were a statement about their worth. Others hear the ‘here I am’ as a light invitation to come and dance and to play, and those people will smile and go and climb the mountain and feel just as fine about themselves after the climb. Still others hear the statement and that’s all they need to hear – ‘here I am’ – and they never step foot on the mountain. They smile and feel full. Yet even for the ones who never go to the mountain, Peter thought, it is still a part of the story of a person, like the innumerable words in a favorite book that don’t penetrate you and which you forget about forever and ever after you read them but which are still a part of the book that you told people that you loved.
All of the mountain is there tugging at you like gravity, changing things for you with its millions of rocks in millions of unnoticed ways.
Peter thought these things, and as he thought them the mountain sent down a cloud that was thick and which covered him and the houses around him in fog.
This made Peter nervous, because it was dark and it was only him there on the street. Peter started humming, because humming calmed him. When he hummed Peter thought about music and not about the dark and the cold enveloping him. When a musician reads music, Peter thought, he goes over it again and again and he practices the bits he knows he needs to practice until he knows he is done. Something tells him when he is done. But when a reader reads they usually read the words once in silence and then never again. What then can the reader learn from the musician? That written words represent sounds just as written musical notes represent sounds, and that it can be good to read a sentence you love over and over until you know it is in your heart and it is a part of you. Sound was there before symbols representing sounds were there, and in sounding the word your heart remembers the word more and you may then find yourself singing the words again on some distant day when you are having a conversation, and you will see then that in being a reader you are also a musician.
This felt to Peter like a beautiful thought – a little burst of warm color in the frigid fog that made him forget warm things exist.
Peter continued up Orange Street and the town revealed itself to him. Different things attracted his attention. There were walls around the homes and he did not feel like he could knock on the doors of the homes and say hello. ‘There is no such thing as a welcoming wall,’ Peter thought. ‘Complicated emotions build walls.’ But then there was the mountain somewhere behind the fog, and though the mountain looked like a wall it was not a wall. It was not a wall because it felt welcoming. Even if you didn’t go and climb to its top Table Mountain still felt like it was welcoming you to Cape Town. That is how Peter felt when the mountain said ‘here I am.’
‘Hallo, Peter, here I am.’
Peter thought it was the mountain talking to him.
‘Hello?’ Peter whispered.
‘Hallo, I’m here,’ the voice whispered back.
Peter looked and he saw it: a small window in the wall next to him. The window had metal grating and through the grating there was a face with green eyes framed in golden-framed glasses. The girl had brown curly hair and she wore bright pink lipstick. The girl, Peter thought, was like a little framed firework.
‘It’s Zena,’ she whispered. ‘Like Zena Warrior Princess.’
Zena spoke with a lisp and with a German accent.
‘Why’re you whispering?’ Peter asked.
‘Sssshhh!!’ Zena said with her lisp, before disappearing from view and leaving Peter in the silence and the emptiness of the fog.
Peter felt it before he saw it. It was so dark that the streetlamp lights around them started turning on. The lights were all you could see; they hung there in the air like dim stars. Peter started shivering, and when he shivered no words would come to him and he could not hum.
‘You must run before it comes,’ Zena said from somewhere.
‘It?’ Peter whispered.
‘The thing in the fog. When it finds you it’s over. I’ve seen it – people run for the mountain and they don’t stop running and then they’re gone! They would scream if they had the life in them to scream.’
Then the cold came on harder and it was silent and Peter stood paralyzed. Words and the sound of words were Peter’s guiding lights and he was frozen and the words were not coming. Then the fog grew thicker and even the streetlamp lights started to disappear into the void.
‘Move! You must!’
The words sparked something in Peter and he started moving, slowly at first, and then it was a run. It got colder and colder and because the lights and the sun were gone it also started to get dark as if one giant shadow were falling over him. Peter shivered as he ran and because he couldn’t see anything he tripped and fell on the pavement and he lay there motionless. He was not surrendering to the fog but he could not think and so he could not think to move.
‘Ting.’
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