organic grapes of…

to try and get a break from the madness of living in cape town, and to try and not get totally overwhelmed with intellectual labor, i contacted a grape farmer through WWOOF and asked if i could come and help him pick some grapes for a couple of days a week. he agreed. i only went twice. it was nothing glamorous, and i can’t say i exactly ‘liked’ it, but then again it was exactly what i was looking for. i would ride the train out to wellington (which took about an hour and a half, so i could read or write letters) then the farmer would pick me up and put me to work.

picking grapes is hard (because it’s pretty damn hot out, because you have to bend over a lot, and lift lots of heavy crates, and because it’s repetitive and basically mindless), and even on an organic farm it’s done in a really industrialized way. a set start time (usually 7 am, sometimes 6 or 8, depending on the heat) and a set end time (always 5:30), with highly controlled short breaks for breakfast and lunch, and highly controlled monitoring of exactly how many grapes are picked by each worker (which then determines the wage. the boss sets the work hours, and the worker is not free to decide whether they agree with them, and cannot possibly be late without penalty – so his time is under someone else’s control – and all the same he is paid based on his productivity, not per hour. it seemed to me a rather cruel system, a type of double penalty. but i was, as the white worker there, immediately given the job of standing up in the back of the truck and helping receive all the crates from the workers, literally the ‘right hand man’ for the white boss, who merely drove the truck and kept tabs on which baskets belonged to whom.). a ton (literally) of grapes can be picked by eight workers in one day, and they were immediately thrown into a machine to be processed to begin fermenting into wine. that was of course the most industrial part of the job. and there it was really clear the racial stratification of industrial labor in south africa, as the coloured men lifted the crates up over their heads and dumped them into this machine while the white boss squirted some liquid into the mix, and encouraged me, the other white man in the room, to keep the empty baskets tidy (i did, of course, also do the work of lifting the baskets and dumping the grapes, but the boss would have been content if i had left that all to the coloureds…)

the workers all spoke afrikaans only, so i was completely isolated in my repetitive labor. after work i would be alone in a little trailer, which was burning hot in the day and freezing cold in the morning and late night…

complaints aside, it was, like i say, exactly what i was looking for. my body was tired, because i used it. i got paid in organic food. i also got some time away from the computer, enjoying a beautiful natural environment, and also time to read, or write, or just think… in fact, i was thinking so much while i was out there that it was truly unbelievable. i felt as if i was having vivid dreams all through the day and night, remembering distinctly the taste of different meals, the sight and smell of different places i’ve been, conversations i had years ago, visions of what i would like to do in the future, and on and on…

the heroes of the cape argus cycle tour

since i completed the cape argus in 2008, libby had held a strong desire to do it as well, if she could. by the time the race actually came around we were at the height of our most stressed out time period in cape town, feeling totally ravaged by two robberies in one week, and deeply ambivalent about what to do with our next months, our relationship, and so on and so on… in fact, emotionally at least, we were damn close to just buying a ticket together and running away from south africa as fast as we possibly could…

so, the cape argus gained a special significance. we came to feel like we must try and complete it, and that we must try together, even if it would be our last act together in cape town…

we got ourselves together and registered for the race at the last possible moment. we somehow scrambled together a couple of helmets from friends and did some emergency repairs on libby’s relatively clunkerish bike. then we got a couple of hours of sleep and woke up to the sound of pounding, brutally pounding, wind…

yup, it was one of the windiest days of the whole year, amid a week in which every other day was completely just hot and dry, not a bit of wind in the air. just for the race day, the wind was gusting up to 100km/h and more, and keeping a steady pace of 50km/h. the wind was so bad that when we got to the starting line, everyone had been delayed nearly two hours, and the MC was saying that it was the worst ever race that he could remember.

we pushed forward, insanely, with our crazy outfits, and with libby doing all kinds of crazy tricks to try and keep me motivated, like pretending to be pulling me along on my bike with an imaginary rope, singing crazy songs loudly, and so on and so on…

at simon’s town i again took a break to feel the ocean on my feet and to reflect. but unlike last year, i was already defeated feeling. already i had gone through multiple sections where i had to walk my bike, peddle on steep downhills, struggle to breathe because the wind was so strong that my mouth was being flooded with air, and being pelted with sand all over my face and body being whipped up in big clouds from the beach… since simon’s town is the last place to catch a train home, i was ready to just give up and go home. but somehow libby convinced me to carry on.

but it didn’t get much better. the wind continued, and even got worse nearer to cape point. at some point we calculated that we were going so slowly, as a result of the wind, that it would take another sixteen hours to get to cape town…

going across the peninsula was a breeze, in the best sense of the word, zooming 15 kilometres in less than half an hour, with the wind at our backs. but as we moved back up the coast towards cape town, the wind was again against us, and eventually the race organizers simply canceled the race and told everyone to stop cycling. so, just before chapman’s peak, we had to get off our bikes and wait for a big bus to take us home.

technically, then, we failed. but then again, we biked 75km in some of the worst wind imaginable. that’s not a small accomplishment. and actually, it was probably exactly fitting for where libby and i were really at in our ‘cosmic’ relationship with cape town. the city was spitting us out, flooding us with every difficulty it could throw at us. and we weren’t quite overcoming those difficulties, but we weren’t quite totally knocked out either…

and, we kept smiling and laughing…