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.”
Peter heard the cable car before he saw it. He could not see it because of the fog, but through the fog he heard a clear and unmuffled “Ting.” Then he saw the lights. There was one large yellow light, and above the yellow light there were two smaller silver lights sitting side-by-side. The two smaller lights looked like tiny twinkling stars. Then Peter felt the cable car; he felt it in the vibrations it sent through the road. The vibrations grew bigger until the big yellow light towered over him. The light stopped and Peter used what little energy was left in him to crawl to and up the steps of the cable car. He tripped and collapsed on the floor of the car, and he discovered he was wet through from the fog and he was shivering and numb. But he could feel he was now in a warm place. He rolled to his side and saw he was next to a small wood-fired potbelly stove. He’d never before been in a cable car, but he felt surprised to see a potbelly stove inside of one. The stove had a friendly little fire burning away inside, and on top of the stove there sat a steaming kettle.
Peter gazed at the fire from his place on the floor of the car. Then a face with stars in its eyes appeared in his view.
“Oh-hoh! Welcome aboard, my wet lad.”
Peter felt a large hand rest gently on his shoulder, and he felt calmer. Peter tried to form a word, but words still did not come.
“You’re shivering straight through there, son. Here, warm yourself up by the fire and change into Teddy’s clothes here.”
The face and the stars disappeared from view and Peter heard what sounded like clothes dropping on the seat by his head followed by the sound of heavy bootsteps and the gentle clicking and closing of a door.
Peter felt the car start to move again. It moved slowly and the vibrations from the movement helped Peter know he was safe. He took a breath and he lifted himself up and onto the closest seat and he opened his eyes and stared into the friendly little fire. Then he stared out the window at the wall of fog. Floating streetlamp lights passed by as the car moved forward, and Peter noticed an arrangement of small jars on a shelf by the potbelly stove. He picked up the jar that read “rooibos,” which was Afrikaans for “red bush.” It’s a tea that grows in South Africa in a mountain range close to Cape Town, and Peter visited those mountains once and when he was there he saw low-hanging clouds and a rainbow, and when he hiked in the mountains he hiked past wild rooibos bushes. Peter reached for the rooibos tea in the cable car. He felt that he had a close relationship with the tea because of his visit to the mountains, such that when he drank it he felt he was also drinking the low-hanging clouds and the rainbows in the mountains. Feeling that and remembering the conductor’s reassuring hand on his shoulder, Peter finally stopped shivering. He took a deep breath as he opened the rooibos jar, and he smelled the tea. It was a woody smell that had been in the company of rainbows and clouds.
Peter looked at the clothes the conductor had left and he saw that the tag on the uniform read “Teddy.” Peter felt his shivers returning a bit and he took off his wet clothes and put on Teddy’s uniform. It fit him perfectly.
“Oh-hoh! Thought you and Teddy might be the same size.” Peter hadn’t noticed the conductor return. He looked up from buttoning his shirt and the conductor took the kettle from the stove and poured Peter a cup of rooibos tea. Peter looked at the little stars in the conductor’s eyes, and then looked at his name tag. “Woolie,” it read.
“Woolie?” Peter said.
The conductor grinned.
“V-oolie,” said Woolie. “With a V and an ‘oo’ as in ‘fool,’ oh-hoh! But I’m no fool.”
Woolie reached for a compartment Peter had not seen and he pushed a button. A scratchy sound filled the car, and a song started playing. It was an old song, one Peter knew well. The song started with muffled trumpets, and then there was a clarinet and then a voice that sounded like someone talking but talking beautifully. “La vie en rose,” Peter said. The song returned to him like an old unexpected friend knocking on your door on a cold winter’s night. You open the door and the friendly and familiar smile before you melts your heart, and even the bitter snow now seems happy and good because it’s framing your friend and making him and his smile all the warmer.
“Red tea, and one of my favorite songs. I love these things dearly. How are they here waiting for me?”
Woolie’s starry eyes twinkled and his moustache bristled.
“The car,” he said in a songlike baritone voice. “It is there when you need it. You need it, it is there. When you don’t need it, it is not there.”
“Not there?”
Woolie said nothing as he handed Peter his mug of rooibos, which was hot and which glowed a warm red light.
“Voolie,” whispered Peter. “There’s something out there.”
“Yes, my lad.”
“You know?”
“Mmmm,” said Woolie, who, furrowing his brow, looked intently into the little fire. “I do know, and I don’t know.” Woolie’s tone was somber but it still managed to sound like a humming baritone song. It made Peter feel safe.
“I don’t get you.”
“Mmmm. I know my lad because everyone who gets on my car is getting away from something. Some are getting away from walking. Others are getting away from something else, and when they all get aboard the car is what they all need – a ride, a cup of tea and a fire, or a dear song.”
Peter looked at Woolie and saw the fire’s flames reflected in his starry eyes.
“Who’s Teddy, Woolie?”
Woolie again said nothing, but Peter saw in the way Woolie’s starry eyes skipped a twinkle that the song inside him had gone out of his heart for a beat.
“Rusks!” Woolie hollared. How could I forget them? You cannot drink red tea in this country without rusks, my boy. Here, these are from Teddy’s recipe.”
Woolie reached for a large jar and opened it, and with careful and tender focus he selected a small brick-shaped biscuit and handed it to Peter. Peter took it and dipped it in his tea and let it soak for a moment. He lifted the rusk out of his mug and the tip of the rusk glowed a soft red light, and when Peter took a bite he felt he was not only drinking low-hanging clouds and rainbows, but also the happy fire that made the tea glow and maybe the warm memory of an absent friend.
Peter looked out of the window at the fog and it made him think of the pain he had felt. The pain was not there anymore, but the memory remained and that was real.
“Woolie, I don’t know what happened to me out there. But I knew it felt like I was about to die. All of me froze and there were no thoughts or sensations aside from the cold. It was just droning pain and the cold fog.”
Peter knew as he spoke that he was able to talk about what happened thanks to the red warm light in his belly and things like low-hanging clouds and rainbows and Woolie’s happy starry eyes.
“The fog is what it is my boy: just a cloud, and different people see different things when they look at clouds. They’re like mirrors that way, but mirrors for what’s inside, not outside.”
“But I did not see anything in the fog.”
“Mmm, I say you do not need to see something for it to touch you,” said Woolie as he watched the fire’s flames dance. His voice seemed to be dancing with, or at least being lead and conducted by, the leaping flames. “Tell me what you felt, my lad, if you like.”
“It is hard to say. All words left me when it came.”
“Your words are returning to you now here before the fire with the tea and the rusks.”
“Yes.”
“Think of those things and the words will come.”
Peter closed his eyes and focused on the light in his belly that came from the tea that had resided under rainbows.
“It was a cold dark nothingness where there is no hope for a sunrise. It was knowing for sure you will die without love in your heart.”
Peter opened his eyes and saw the fire, and he saw how the new warmth in him moved him and drew out his words the way the fire’s flames seemed to draw words out of Woolie.
Then, suddenly, Woolie moved to Peter and hugged him. Woolie was more than twice Peter’s size, and while Peter knew and felt like he was an adult he also felt in that moment like a child. This was due to Woolie’s size and also because Woolie had hugged him as he felt feelings he had first felt as a boy: fear and loneliness.
But right then Peter had a warm red light comforting him on the inside, and a hug from a cable car conductor with stars in his eyes and Edith Piaf on the radio warming him on the outside. He felt safe and happy.
“You’re safe, my boy,” Woolie said, as if reading his feelings.
“La vie en rose” was over now on the old radio. Gone was Piaf’s voice, which had vibrated with both sadness and ecstasy. The song was over and afterwards there was silence, but inside the silence there was the memory of the song and the joy and love feelings Peter had listening to Piaf’s voice.
When he was a boy Peter lived in an empty room in an empty house far from other houses. There were no Woolie hugs and no Edith Piafs there. Just a boy at his bed praying very hard that an owl would come to his window with a letter telling him he’d been accepted into a far-away magical school where he would have friends who wanted to hug him and listen to what he had to say when they saw him. Peter would leave his window open for the owl, even if it made his room freeze. But the owl never came. Just the cold came, and it was so cold that it made Peter shiver for the rest of his life like an immortal fog that lived inside him and made him forget things. It made him look for anything, anything at all, that would make the shivering stop and the fog clear. Other people, places, and things.
“I’m hugging you here and in that room, my boy,” Woolie said. Peter did not wonder how Woolie knew about his room memory. “I cannot take away what happened to you and which is still happening to you, because it is all a part of you, and some flowers only grow on trails in dark parts of the world. But I can tell you that you have never been alone.”
Woolie released his hug, and the hug was over like “La vie en rose” was over: the love feelings remained.
“I saw someone in the fog,” said Peter, who remembered things now as he saw the world through the lens of the memory of a loving hug and not a cold fog. “I did not think I knew her but I did. I’d met her in a café before the fog came. Then I went on my walk and the fog came and I forgot who she was and then I forgot everything else. I remember how happy I was to’ve met her after moving here and being new and not knowing anyone, and only hearing silence and seeing emptiness around me. She seemed like an answer to that.”
“Remember what I said, my lad,” Woolie said, his eyes twinkling. “The fog is merely a mirror: it showed you the pain, yes, and someone you met who seemed the opposite of pain, but you also found me and Teddy’s rusks and the music you love here. It’s all in you.”
Peter listened to Woolie and as he did he noticed a light growing outside.
“The car is what you needed. And now it has taken you where you need.”
Peter saw that the car had stopped where it had found him. Peter understood and he stood up and stepped down the stairs of the car, and when he turned around a beam of sunlight burst through the fog and the car and a pair of happy twinkling stars disappeared from view. The fog was still there in front of him, though, and inside the fog was an image of Zena.
“I remember you,” Peter said to her. “We met at the café with the plants in every corner. You were the first person I met here and the first person I’d ever met who had the same favorite philosopher as me – or who has a favorite philosopher at all. We talked about him for a long time and it felt like dancing or like we were playing music. It made me smile and after we spoke I said I wanted to see you again but you said you couldn’t. Then you got up and like a firework you vanished as quickly as you appeared. It felt good with you.”
Zena smiled at Peter. She reached out a hand and moved toward him, and then she and the fog vanished for good. Inside the place where Zena had been Peter saw Table Mountain and the clouds that the mountain made and which it sent cascading into the city like waterfalls dreaming they are clouds. “Here I am,” the mountain whispered to him in its welcoming way. It was not a silent nor an empty place before him. The clouds and the mountain stood against a blue sky, and Peter, straightening the collar of Teddy’s jacket, smiled and walked home filled with the memory of the mountain and the cable car and wrote a story for his paper about what Cape Town and its people had said that day. 