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.