The dam in question is brown and long, squeezed in as an affront by water nymphs between desiccated farmlands and the ruddy oven walls of the Cedarberg mountains to the east. Last weekend it was three-quarters full, but the sun-crushed bluegums on the waterline haven’t been dampened in years, and the grass, optimistically spreading across the mud flats, is already yellowing. The white sky and ticking, desperate rocks of January are coming.
But at least for now the dam has a domesticated air about it. The breeze in the afternoons is pleasant, not yet the blowtorch of Christmas, and the geese in the shade of the willows fuss and flirt with gusto. It is a scene that you might consider photographing, if the camera wasn’t packed so deep in your bag, and if it wasn’t so damned hot. Next time.
And so the dams of South Africa pass by, with their weaver nests and their disconsolate gangs of rehydrating sheep, their surfaces sometimes stirred by hot gusts, their perimeters patrolled by rusted barbed wire, here and there an optimistic sign declaring the privacy of property and threatening legal action against the children of farm labourers who trespass like gleaming naked otters among the reeds.
Pass by, that is, until one finds a boat; because boats change everything about dams. The Water Rat from The Wind in the Willows spoke true when he declared that there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Which is just as well, since most who get their lubberly hands on boat, on a weekend sojourn at a distant dam, are unfit for anything more than simply messing about.
Each grind of oar in rowlock, every foundering averting by wild bailing, confirms Ratty’s assertion. One has never truly known happiness until one has stuffed the prow of one’s boat into a mudbank, out of sight of civilisation, and got free again by gyrating back and forth while pushing wildly at said mud-bank with an oar. This is freedom.
And then comes the slap of a little ripple amidships, and another, and you look up from the cans floating about around your feet and the mating dragonflies on your shin to see a wake intersecting with your plotted course; and over yonder, like some sort of piratical tennis-shoe crammed with gadflies in bikinis, a motorboat fishtails its monogrammed rear all over the tranquillity.
Suddenly the jetty looks terribly far away. The laughs of the gadflies and the virile belching of the tennis-shoe seem to mock these honest efforts, these splintering timbers that even now are insinuating themselves into your underwear. The breeze has come up, and along with it the sobering realisation that you are being pushed crabwise towards something that is either a tractor tire or an anaconda.
Back on shore with hands cramped into blistered claws, the joyful musings of the Water Rat seem terribly naive. What this lark needs is engines, one decides, great big things fed on terribly expensive fuel. And suddenly another character in that novel begins to materialise by the water’s edge, one with a cigar in his green lips and a mad twinkle in his bulbous eye.
The speed-crazed Mr Toad was, you will remember, an incorrigible hedonist, a fallen amphibian brought low by his fetish for automobiles and the hellish delights that they provided in the region of 40mph, and by his penchant for grand theft auto. Indeed, his final reformation and transformation into a toad of substance was at the expense of those leaden-footed ecstasies of velocity. But oh, one now wonders, what would Mr Toad have made of these sleek white launches that torment the lay rower?
Would he, as I did, suddenly understand the lustre of water-sport? Would he gaze entranced at the little throttle lever, enticingly topped with a Red Button? What would that Red Button do if pushed? Light afterburners? Launch photon torpedoes? Would he too stroke the little plastic bucket seats, noticing the intriguing way some of them faced backwards, as if their occupants had been unnerved by rushing towards destiny like a stone skipped across a pond? Would he catch himself murmuring ”Nyeeeooowrrrr!” as he fingered the steering wheel?
A rush of blood, a choked cry, a splashing lunge, a splutter of engines! On, you beast! On! Ownership and tomorrow be damned! Fly! Run! Roar! Nyeeoowrrrr!