Suspended
A Personal Essay by Pierre-Henri Joubert
If you find yourself on a hilltop made of charcoal-colored rock and rough, weathered sand overlooking an endless plain of uninhabited valleys and abandoned buildings, be not afraid, for you are not lost. You're in the Karoo.
As my family and I drive through the rolling, winding, and bounding countryside roads of South Africa, nobody is happy. My mother is exasperated at our behavior. My eldest brother, Niels, is looking out the window, trying to ignore the fact that there are other people in the car. My older brother, Dieter, is retaliating at all my attempts to make the ride more interesting by annoying him. We yell, poke, and stick tongues out at each other as my mother desperately attempts to get us to calm down. The only person who seems to truly want to be there is my father - he always was the one that tried (and usually failed) to get us to go on some kind of adventure. Little did he know just how much suffering he would have to endure in order to get us all to our destination.
Just as the fighting seems to get completely out of hand, my father speaks up. "Ons is hier." We're here. We all look out the windows and gasp. Looking forward, we see a singular, straight raod heading into a vast, open expanse of light brown desert.
"Die Karoo." The Karoo.
As we finally seem to be getting somewhere, everyone's spirits are raised. My father puts on some radio tunes, my mother opens up the long-untended box of cookies, and the three brothers in the back seat start laughing and talking as if the fighting that had occurred not moments ago had all been just friendly banter.
I've come to realize that the Karoo is more than just a big, hilly desert. The Karoo isn't just a place. It's a living, breathing world - Isolated from everything else. The most advanced technology around is an old, rusty windmill and a water pump.
The best time for the Karoo is dawn. I always get up early in the Karoo. The morning after we arrive at the old farmhouse that my mother's friends let us borrow, I slink out of the house on my tip-toes. Pulling my tiny, torn up sandals on, I make my way outside. For a moment I stop in the middle of the yard as I realize that the only sound I can hear is the light breeze rustling some bushes nearby, and my feet on the thousands of small rocks that I walk on.
I look to my goal - The lookout point on the relatively small hill next to the house. Like a machine, I start trudging up the hill, running where I can, and going on all fours as I reach the final, steep stretch. I at last make it to the top and stand up, brushing myself off. And then it happens.
It's not the same for everyone. Indeed, some people think nothing of it - but everyone notices it. It's that very precise moment in time where your mind just stops, goes blank, is wiped clean. You can't help but smile, even laugh, when you realize that you notice the silence. A silence so complete and overpowering that you can hear and feel it all around you. With time frozen in place, the aching muscles in your brain get a dose of morphine, and the elation that you feel is incredible. You could stay there forever, you think, and perhaps you try to - You can wake up hours later, standing in the same spot, not thinking of anything. The silence has the serenity of an isolation booth - if you allow it to, it can reflect yourself better than any mirror could. And when it's all over, when you come back to reality, you might not even realize what happened. Like waking up from a dream, everything that was so crystal clear is suddenly fuzzy and gray. After a while, you learn to hate the fact that you have to return to the present.
The thing is, after it happens a few times, you stop fearing the inevitable "back to earth" moment, when you realize that it just seems like everything is perfect, and problems still exist. You stop worrying about all the things in the back of your head, and you concentrate on the front. The present. I've heard live in the present, for the future, but I never truly believed it until I realized the real message of all those times in the Karoo. It's not about the removal of problems. It's about the experience. And there isn't any experience quite like a trip to the Karoo.
This essay was written in English class in Freestyle, and the focus was on a part of ourselves that we want to share. The Karoo was a really large part of my childhood, and I spent a lot of time with my family there. I also wanted to share with other people my South African roots. This essay is really about one of my experiences from my childhood, and a part of my life that I really loved.
Relating to myself, this essay obviously shows how my experiences have shaped me as a person. I've learned to handle the present with more authority and self-confidence. Writing this essay itself also made me realize all this while I was writing it. I hope you enjoyed it.
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