The Tree That Taught Me

The fire took everything.

My photographic studio in Oranjezicht was gone, not in the dramatic sense of walls and roof, but in the quieter, more devastating way that a working life disappears. Equipment. Cameras. Archives. The infrastructure of a livelihood. The cause was a heater. My heater. The insurance company had no interest in nuance, and my landlord, a kind man caught between his own decency and the hard language of a policy document, had no choice but to ask me to leave.

He softened the blow the only way he knew how. With my notice, he pressed a book into my hands. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.

I didn’t know it then, but that book was a door.

Table Mountain, sunset. Aquila beside me. The tree kept its end of the arrangement.

Around the same time, I had been to a musical performance somewhere in Cape Town and watched a band called The Earthlings who had a guy playing didgeridoo on stage. I couldn’t explain what it did to me. It was less like hearing music and more like being reminded of something, something old and wordless. The sound moved through the air differently to other sounds. It seemed to arrive from somewhere beneath the floor. I needed to learn to play.

I bought a length of PVC pipe, long enough, the right diameter, and began to make sounds with it. Strange, wet, uncertain sounds. I asked my friend Richard Kraak, who I knew could play, what I should do. His answer was not what I expected.

Find a tree, he said. Sit next to it every day. Play for fifteen or twenty minutes. The tree will teach you.

I went up Table Mountain to a small lake that sits quietly on the side of the mountain, away from the tourists and the cable car and the noise of the city below. Each evening at sunset I went to the same tree. I sat with my back near its roots, my Border collie Aquila settled beside me, and I played my PVC pipe into the gathering dusk.

The first day I was clumsy. The second day less so. On the third day, I was playing.

Not practicing. Not attempting. Playing. The circular breath came as though it had always been there, waiting for permission. The sound that came out of that pipe was full and continuous and alive. I don’t know how else to say this: the tree had kept its end of the arrangement.