My mother, bless her iron soul, used to adore the Great Karoo. Perhaps I inherited my strange attraction to this vast, arid stretch of South African hinterland from her. I guess you either love or hate its harsh primordial emptiness. There’s not much space between the endless plains and the desolate sky for anything else.
She grew up on a sheep farm in the vicinity of Petrusville. When she was two years old the entire district was suffocating in the grip of an immense drought. Her father, a gifted musician who was forced to try his gentle hand at farming, walked out into the veld one night after supper and shot himself. I’ve always wished that I could have met him. And in a way, she did too. She was too young to remember anything about him. All she had was a black-and-white studio portrait of a dashing, strikingly handsome young man with a faraway look in his eyes that was taken just before she was born. Now that she has passed away, that photograph belongs to me. Although my grandmother got married again soon after that woeful night - to a gentle, bookish man both me and my mother loved with all our hearts - I turn the pages to that picture often, feeling deeply drawn to this tragic stranger and, I’ve come to realise over the years, the seared earth that soaked up his blood.
Out on assignment with a staff writer for a travel magazine some years ago, we were spending the night on a guest farm a few hundred miles - a mere stone’s throw in those parts - from the place where my mom was born and raised. It would be our last stop before heading back to the city. A week of dust, heat and terrible gravel roads in a dubious company car had found its mark and we were pretty strung out. The harsh light had my Nikon sulking in my lap most of the time, and we’ve basically run out of any form of meaningful conversation a few days earlier. There’s only so much two grown men can say to one another in the midst of all that pregnant silence while the melancholy landscape slowly pressed down on one’s soul.
Needless to say, on that final evening we got totally hammered. It was the desperate, glorious kind of drunk that drowns the Thirst in some but only draws out the hunger in others. Around midnight, as my makeshift companion passed out in front of the fire, I grabbed another bottle along with my gear and stepped out into the night.
Desperate to salvage some form of worthy picture from the trip, I made my way to a rusty old windpump I spotted earlier at the farmhouse gate. I thought a long exposure, while lighting its rickety blades against the dark sky, might work. The rare patch of carefully manicured lawn at the entrance felt cool under my feet as I went about setting everything up. High above the blades were slowly turning in the breeze, crying out softly to nothing at all.
Just as I was good to go, an irrigation system suddenly mushroomed out of the ground around me like a tiny alien fleet, its chirpy sprinklers dousing everything in a fine artificial rain. I was cussing like a sailor as I scrambled to move my gear to dry ground. I tend to take random shit like this personally, especially when it gets in the way of creating High Art. I soon realised, though, that furiously charging this particular windmill like a drunken Don Quixote was simply not going to work. The night was clear and warm. I had a bottle of red and all the time in the world, and being in the heart of dry country, I would not have to wait too long. So I just sat there hitting the wine, listening to the peaceful hiss of brackish water as the night reclaimed its calm.
I’m still not entirely sure where the tears came from. Caught between the soil and the sky, I felt an infinite sadness welling up from deep below as the windpump’s bloodied tongue lapped and drawled within the caverns of the earth. I thought of my mother - slowly wasting away from a rare form of hereditary muscular dystrophy back home - and her father, from whom I’ve seemingly inherited the holy goddamn Darkness that haunted all my days. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a bottle of rotgut wine, I’ve never felt that close to them and their deep connection to this arid, broken land. I don’t remember how long I sat there or how exactly I managed to finally get my shot. Sadly, it’s all a blur. What I do remember is vowing to take my mother on one last road trip back to her childhood home - the only place where she had been truly happy - before it was too late.
It will always tear me apart to admit that, after returning to the city, that strange confrontation with my roots was forgotten all too soon. My silent oath got lost in the clatter and clamor of life in the farce lane, fading like the rosy promise of a Karoo dawn. My mother died without setting eyes on the great plains again.
Still, wheel in the sky keeps on turning, as the song says. In the end, bereft and out of tune, I guess we’re all just dust farmers trying to scrape by under the stars, while the darkest of Rivers sings unheard beneath our feet.

Photography, words, narration © Copyright Jac Kritzinger.

Music © Copyright Albertus van Rensburg.