It’s not true that male menopause is only about younger women and faster cars. Quite a few men of a certain age yearn to own a farm in the Karoo. My husband, for one.
It wasn’t an overnight obsession. For years a limited budget and carsick children restricted our holidays to short trips close to home in Knysna — usually no further than the little Karoo.
As soon as we hit the Outeniqua mountains outside George he would relax. While the boys threw up along the winding Meiringspoort pass near Oudtshoorn, he enthused about the red colour of the soil.
We camped on a dry riverbed in an old canvas tent the wind whipped through and stayed in bleak self-catering places (one with greasy sheets, another with ubiquitous duck motifs and a third where a dirty stove caught fire). And he loved every minute.
When he turned 42 — coming up for the time when in the words of my older and wiser brother-in-law ”women stop hitting on you like they used to” — we began talking about leaving the lagoon-side cottage we’d rented for years and buying a house.
My husband contacted a single estate agent — Oom Bartus from the Karoo town of Uniondale. Bartus would phone every Sunday night while I was reading the boys to sleep. After a few weeks of animated telephone conversations I suggested, somewhat stridently, that perhaps we should first find a home in the town in which we were living.
He was crestfallen. There was this neglected farm with hot springs going for a song. He could see the transformation: an ecofriendly retreat with rivers of hot and cold water running through the rooms.
We bought a house in Knysna, halfway between school and work. But on the first weekend in our new home we drove over the Swartberg Pass to Prince Albert for the night, to visit the local astronomer.
I love wide-open desolate spaces and night skies littered with stars as much as anyone. It’s just that after a childhood in the landlocked Free State I prefer to experience both at the coast.
It seems for some the Karoo symbolises freedom: wide perspectives, a break from the clutter and noise of modern life, invigorating air, silence. For killjoys like me it represents hard work. Scorching summers, icy winters, driving kilometres for basic provisions or growing your own in unyielding stony ground, isolation.
Still, the Garden Route can get very green and soggy in winter so I went along on our next inland excursion a year later quite willingly. That was when a bone-rattling dirt road led us to an old school house in the Maatjiesvlei valley outside Calitzdorp.
From the outside the elongated grey building didn’t look promising. But inside was airy, comfortable and lovingly restored, complete with blackboard and school desk with inkwell. The owners, a former philosophy lecturer and graphic artist/model, were barely out of their 20s.
There were heaps of classic novels, comfortable beds and preserves, vegetables and milk to be bought from their organic farm. I looked in vain for a fireplace. The house breathes, our host said, it stays warm in winter and cool in summer. She was right. And you spend longer at the braai outside looking at the stars and listening to silence you can slice. Finally, I understood the attraction of the Karoo.
When the kids have left home we can come here for three months every year, I suggested. My husband looked at me sceptically. Is it the place you like or just the fact that this house is furnished by two former Capetonians?
We went back to the old school house for long weekends the next winter and the following spring. I always felt happy the moment I opened the narrow front door. I remember swimming in a farm dam in water that looked muddy, but was astonishingly soft and clear; eating the best artichoke I’ve ever tasted; walking for ages on farm roads; getting scratched hiking up koppies.
It was enough for me, but not for him. Don’t you want to try somewhere else, he asked? What about the Gamkaberg?
For a few years he went on solo day excursions on arid farms, researching rock art. Whereas his contemporaries bought motorbikes and took sabbaticals from their professions, he grew his hair and took up surfing.
I thought the Karoo mistress’s attractions were fading.
But for his 47th birthday all he wanted was to visit that derelict spa Oom Bartus had told him about. Our younger son went with him. They left in high spirits and returned disconsolate.
It was too ugly to photograph, they said. Ruined buildings. An estranged alcoholic spouse of the owner living in poverty. Hills plastered in goat droppings and urine.
I might have sounded too relieved when I reported back to a farmer friend. Just get rid of the goats, he said, cheerfully. The manure will break down and decay and the Karoo vegetation will soon recover.