Excerpt from God Awful Acres

Late the next morning, with the Kalahari sun a furnace upon our skulls, we were out in the vineyard of the DeBruyn Brothers Boerderie. Anton DeBruyn briskly led us to the section that was infested by the dread bug of grape growers the world over. It didn’t look bad, the vines had not yet felt the full pinch of what insects the size of a pinhead can cause, when a bunch of them get together to enjoy a party. The little group of humans carried two picks, two shovels, two pruning shears, indelible pens, plastic bags, and one notebook. Not high-tech work. Two Tswana men carried the picks and shovels.

            “This is about the middle of it, right here.” announced Anton, pulling up to a halt.

            “Is it just this block?”

            “Pretty much.”

           I knew that wasn’t true. It took a few years before the symptoms appeared and you could pretty much bet the little fuckers had already made it over to the next block, at least. I explained the sampling plan to the Tswana guys, and gave more detail to Hugh so he would have an idea of what it was I was trying to do.

            I was very uncomfortable with the two staff doing all the work. It had always been me hoisting the pick against rock hard clay; in fact, in my experience the whole team sweat and ached, working in the egalitarian spirit. It was an American trait that I was proud of. But the soil there in the Northern Cape had enough sand that we didn’t need the picks. The shovels slid beneath the roots with a few beats of the gumboots. I was down on all fours leaning into the holes, clipping off samples of roots. Hugh had volunteered to hold the bags to receive the samples. He stood with the open bags stretched in his sweaty fingers like some beggar hoping for crumbs. Some of the roots appeared to have the tiny golden globs sprinkled along them, like a spice, and were blistered and scarred from their bite.

            Ah, grape phylloxera!

          Few insects have wreaked such havoc upon an agricultural industry. It nearly brought the French economy down in the mid-1800’s, simply by taking advantage of the wonderful opportunity humans had provided them. The fact that the industry involves wine holds special place. Eat our broccoli, our squash, our tomatoes, fine, but our grapes? That is too much!  The elite need their wine, the history of it, the aura of it, the swirl of it, and the opaque status that knowledge of it seems to bring to them. The word ‘phylloxera’ brought shivers all along the bones of grape growers and wine lovers the world over.

            All in all, a magnificent insect. That something so small could plunder something so large in such a way was something to ponder.

            “Here, let me try for awhile.” I said.

            I took the shovel from the Tswana worker, whose sweat gleamed off a middle-aged face, grey hair like a white pepper sprinkled on his scalp. He stood back in his blue coveralls and looked displeased.

            Digging in, the shovel slicing into the soil with a dull shi-ick sound, the sweat began to pour off my forehead, finding its way into my eyes to burn like an acid. I became rabid, salivating over each new shovelful, leaping into the pit with pruning shears poised, pulling out a bundle of roots lined with droplets of gold.

            Ah, grape phylloxera! A magnificent insect!

           It laid waste to the human race. How the mighty shall fall! The grand and wonderful human race was nothing before the onslaught of a tiny bug. The Great Chain of Being indeed!

          But the message was lost among that crowd, the restaurant and fine dining set, the supper party bunch; wine will always win out.

         When we had our samples we all trudged back through the churned up soil, headed for the bakkie and a few cold ones. The two Tswana held back a bit behind Hugh and I. I didn’t like the feeling, the stink of ingrained subservience like a polluted gulf between us. It was a stink that held the whole history of this place in its fumes, indelible along the linings of one’s nostrils.

           Back at the bakkie I opened the cooler and cracked beers open for myself and Hugh. I looked over to the workers, whose names I’d been told but couldn’t possibly pronounce. Hell, I’d failed first year French.

            “You want one?” holding up a can of Castle.

            “No baas.”

            No baas. What was with that? It was 11 years since the fall of apartheid.

            “I’m not your baas. I’m Jack.”

            “Yes baas. But no beer baas.”

            The voices of workers singing, unseen among the vines, wafted across the oven baked air like a cool breeze.

            I looked at Hugh and Hugh looked at me. We tilted our heads and lifted our eyebrows. That’s it. Let’s go.

            We waved as we drove off, dust clouds billowing behind us.

          The myth of the dark continent fell over the other continents like a sheet, but a mystery remained even when the myth was shattered. It wasn’t an ancient mystery though, it was a mystery born a mere few hundred years before the time Hugh and I waved goodbye to two Tswana men standing in blue coveralls before a backdrop of green grapevines, the peaked roof of the palatial DeBruyn estate just visible on the horizon.

Excerpt from novel, Two Trains Running

Chapter 16, from Two Trains Running

Bill was a biologist. He’d done a world of things in his life, not all of them pretty, but he’d finally decided to study life.

            People struggle to find a line of work that can keep them satisfied, fuel their interests, and maybe provide a living. Bill became convinced that the study of life had to be the greatest endeavor you could set for yourself. People were born, lived, and then died, as sure as the snake captured the neck of the mouse. We were caught up in the middle of it all; it surrounded us, this life.

            Yet, in the middle of the grandeur so many people schemed like petty scriveners, apparently oblivious of any of this green and pulsing panorama.

            At first it was the microscopic, it was the utter fascination of being able to peer into an entirely foreign world; foreign, yet a world that crept on your skin, and teemed in the tiny pools on littered sidewalks or in the rain filled footprints of moose or bear or fisherman. There were ecosystems in a drop or a dust mote. There were ecosystems in the colony of cells that composed the body of a bear, or a mite, or a blazing anemone, or a plant, or a human. The alarming activity that took place inside a single cell sitting on the tip of a vine climbing up some old oak tree deep in the forest and reaching toward the sun was enough to alert him to a life worth leading. This view of life was how Darwin had seen it; and what a view it was. It went from the microscopic and finally to the macroscopic until it seemed to encompass the whole panoply of life. The world buzzed for him like no electric sizzler frying the flies could.

            Tromping through the forest or tramping up a mountain the microscopic world would ever be with him. He could almost hear the movement at that fine level as sure as he heard the cicadas banging about in the bush. Then there were times when the whole sphere of the earth seemed to be nothing more than a cell in a larger body.

            And still it was all lost on a people who saw only the tips of the trees.

            It was clear that humanity knew nothing. But science seemed like a way to know something. The knowledge was just crumbs falling off the table, he knew. But it was nice putting things to the test. Once you were convinced that nature was the overarching dome of your life, and that not to understand it, or at least not to try to understand it, was to suffer a kind of eternal death, it became the simplest step to ask questions of it, and when no answers were forthcoming, to devise the answers and build the tests that would see if the predictions came true.

            It was so much like play, but with so much more reward Bill thought.

Election

I’ve seen a bit of self-righteous posturing about ‘undemocratic’ whining over the election result. I think the protests that are going on are mostly, but not completely, unproductive and the violence completely counter-productive, but it’s important not to forget a few key features from this election: 1) Trump got a minority of votes – the majority of voters rejected him; 2) Clinton got more votes than Trump; 3) neither candidate got a majority. In many countries this would mean a run-off election so someone got a 50% + 1 mandate. In this country we have the electoral college system, which overrules the popular vote so a run-off is not considered as long as someone gets 270. The founders had a pretty rational reason for the electoral college system, so large more densely populated states couldn’t consistently dominate smaller states in elections, and for them as a compromise between direct popular election and election by ‘qualified’ electors. It’s time may be past – that’s a debate worth having – but the result is what it is this time round. Resistance has to take a different direction than protesting the election.

It’s also true that if the result had gone the other way we would surely be seeing much shouting, protesting, and likely violence over the ‘rigged’ system.

American democracy has long been overrated, as all kinds of undemocratic influences have impinged on elections, notably but not only big money, but this was one of the most undemocratic elections I’ve witnessed, with outside influences playing an outsize role, and lies and distortion and character assassination featuring far more than policy or issues – far more than the normal abysmally high level. No one should brag about, or be too satisfied about the result.

Some humility is called for given the facts above. Humility is not likely to come from Trump, since the concept is nowhere in his constitution, but it should come from his fans (Hillary’s too).