by James Best
I had been thinking ahead with trepidation to the point where our long separation from the family would begin. In my mind’s eye, it would be on a walkway at the airport underneath a sign that read ONLY PASSENGERS BEYOND THIS POINT. Sure enough, that was exactly how it transpired. We stood as a family unit in a tight circle.
I had an intense, tearful hug with Benison. ‘You take care. I am so grateful to you for letting us do this,’ I said. ‘I love you so much.’
Tears were coming down her cheeks. ‘Just stay safe,’ Benison said. She hugged Sam with a bear-like grip and seemed reluctant to let him go. Eventually she did, rubbing his shoulders and patting his hair. ‘I love you, my baby boy. You be good.’
‘Yeah.’ Sam was smiling but I could see his tension in the way he was shifting his weight from leg to leg, wringing his hands and scanning the terminal.
I hugged Matthew and Nicholas. Sam followed suit, on my prompt. ‘Use arms, Sammy,’ I instructed. He duly turned his usual lean-in-with-a-shoulder embrace into a more conventional hug for his two older brothers.
It was time for Sam and me to go. The two of us walked through the departures gate. The big adventure, the big experiment, the big gamble, had started.
Standing in the queue for customs, Sam began the first of several thousand attempts to terminate or shorten the trip. ‘What do I say to not be allowed to go?’ Sam asked.
‘Don’t you dare! This is not the place, Sam. These people are like police. You can get in big trouble,’ I implored. He behaved himself at the counter. Phew.
Sam had flown before so he wasn’t fazed by the flight ahead, but I could sense he was agitated. He continued to lobby hard to bring the return date forward. I continued to divert him with a ‘We’ll see,’ which seemed to placate him better than a simple ‘No’ or ignoring him or changing the subject.
As his eyes flitted around the terminal and he paced around our seats in the gate waiting area, I wondered to myself what was going through his head. It had begun, we both knew it. I was scared. I wondered if he was terrified.
CHAPTER 2
Hell for leather
The flight to Cape Town was via Singapore and Johannesburg, taking twenty-two hours in total. Sam didn’t like the fact that we stopped over in Singapore because he had read about its strict laws and was worried about being arrested. I assured him that this wasn’t a concern in Changi airport. Sam and I both managed to grab six much-appreciated hours of sleep on the second leg, but we were feeling pretty ragged when we finally landed in Cape Town.
Flying with us was a cinematographer from the independent documentary company Heiress Films, who were filming our trip. The company specialises in human interest documentaries, often about health issues, and had been drawn to the novelty of what we were attempting. We had agreed to a participate because we felt the message of our journey was important. We did worry about the potential intrusiveness of the filming process, but weren’t really sure what it was going to mean on a practical level.
Sam and I had met the cinematographer, Max, briefly a few days earlier when the filmmakers had filmed us packing and discussing the upcoming trip. He was in his early forties, a good-looking fellow with a sharp mind. Sam said he looked like Matthew Lewis, the actor who plays Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films. In the world according to Sam, everyone has to look like someone from the Harry Potter films, which were his latest and most intense obsession. Sam also dubbed him Fax. (Sam gives everyone he gets to know a nickname, usually based on rhyme or slight distortion of their actual name. Mine is Germs.)
Max would be travelling with us and filming us for the first ten days of our trip; documentary filmmaking is so prodigiously expensive that that’s all Heiress Films could fund. He was very understanding with Sam. On the flight, Max asked lots of questions about how Sam thought and behaved, and also about the trip and its design and purpose. I’d grow to really appreciate his company, but I already knew from the brief taste of it at home that documentary filming is very intrusive. Set-ups, retakes, waiting, me being interviewed on camera, Sam being interviewed on camera, asking permission from people in shot and at film locations; it would all make for more work every day. We’d be living in a fishbowl.
Also, Max would be cramming as much activity as possible into the time he was with us. This had positives and negatives. It was great to have what amounted to a tour guide for the first part of our trip. And thanks to the film company there were some activities planned that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford. Finally, I hadn’t backpacked in twenty-five years and wasn’t up to speed with the modern travelling challenges of smart phones, internet access, travel websites and social media on the road since then, so it was very handy for an old bugger like me to have a savvy and experienced travel advisor on tap.
But the downside of fitting so much activity into the first week was that it would be exhausting for both Sam and me. We were already setting ourselves a very big challenge on a range of levels, and now from day one we were going to be going hell for leather. Sure enough, this would soon prove a problem.
At Cape Town airport, we were met by Liza, a local who had previously been involved with documentary making. Heiress Films had hired her to be our fixer—a film industry term for a local person employed to make things happen, using their local knowledge, when filming away from home, but which disconcertingly reminded me of The Cleaner in Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs. Fortunately, Liza was nothing like Harvey Keitel’s character, with her long hair loose around a kind face. She shepherded us to the airport Vodacom store and navigated us through the tedious process of organising local SIM cards, and data and prepaid data access for our phones and computers while Sam wrung his hands as he paced around the airport terminal. He has a distinctive ‘bouncy’ gait, a legacy of autism, whereby he springs and shifts on the balls of his feet, like a boxer in a prize fight. My anxiety in dealing with unfamiliar technology in a sleep-deprived and jetlagged fog, all the while keeping an eye on Sam, was palpable. On to the car-rental shop across the terminal: more paperwork, more stress, more filming. I had bribed Sam with about five chocolates by this point, so now the bouncing boy also had a chocolate-covered face and hands.
Our first drive in Africa was surprisingly easy. A motorway took us straight into the central business district of Cape Town. Traffic was light. Then Sam saw them: an entirely new set of road signs! And, wait for it: they were written in a different font than in Australia! No way!
Road signs had long been one of Sam’s obsessions, since he was tiny. A prized fourth birthday present from some of his favourite therapists was a replica stop sign (which was also my personal favourite).
Sam had had myriad obsessions over the years. When he was in primary school it had been The Wiggles, Thomas the Tank Engine, Super Mario Bros and Windows operating systems. The last had been particularly challenging. He’d scoot past us into random offices to turn on their computers, or duck behind the counter in a supermarket and ask the confused shop assistant, ‘Is that Window XP?’
For a while Sam had been fixated on the number five. At cafes, we’d have to wait for the number five table to become available, or Sam would swipe the number off the occupied table. One freezing winter day in Melbourne, Benison queued for an extra half-hour at a Ferris wheel at Luna Park because Sam refused to get in any other car than that marked five.
His obsessions and interests have become more sophisticated over the years, but he retains an affection for ‘rare’ signs, so it wasn’t surprising that, faced with this anxiety-creating new environment, he latched on to this old favourite. He wiggled in his seat and flapped his hands. ‘They have a one hundred and twenty on the motorway!’
We arrived at the hostel I had booked, and crashed—literally in Sam’s case—into the room, flinging backpacks onto beds. The hostel was relaxed and well run; a warren of hallways and arches around a central courtyard where backpackers chilled on phones or iPads, drank beers around the pool table and
swapped stories about travelling.
The challenge now was to stay awake throughout the afternoon and evening to get our discombobulated diurnal rhythms back into some sort of sync. I let Sam chill in the room, using the wi-fi to satiate his internet withdrawal syndrome. Google searches of Super Mario Bros and Emma Watson probably weren’t typical of previous backpackers, but then this was Sam. Meanwhile, I sorted out our packs. The shampoo bottle had lost its lid in transit and leaked everywhere, which led to a few hours of cleaning and a fragrant backpack.
We were to get to know the staff quite well over the next few days. I found here—as I would subsequently discover everywhere we went—that people were fascinated by us and what we were doing. This wasn’t something I’d expected.
I went for a stroll around the district to orientate myself. As soon as you walk out the door, you immediately look up as Cape Town’s majestic Table Mountain towers above. The flat ridge at the top gives the mountain its name and cool moist air from two oceans—the Indian Ocean to the east and the South Atlantic to the west—sweeps up and condenses at the summit, leading to constantly swirling mist, its tablecloth.
Next to Table Mountain, facing out towards the South Atlantic Ocean, is another giant rocky outcrop, Lion’s Head. Locals and tourists make the steep climb up the rock face to watch the sun set over the well-heeled coastal suburbs of the city. Five hundred years earlier, European sailors had traded with the local Khoisan herdsman for food on the slopes of Table Mountain and Lion’s Head, as they replenished their ships in preparation for the ongoing journey to India and the Spice Islands.
The city itself, with bustling shopping strips, restaurants, cafes and pubs, was abuzz with chatter, traffic and music. The CBD and nearby Gardens district were sprinkled with open public spaces where children played near fountains and couples lay on the grass. Verandahs hovered over footpaths, and outdoor dining areas were full with people of all ethnicities. Cape Town appears smaller than it is as many of the sprawling suburbs, including the black townships, are hidden behind Table Mountain. The streets sweep up towards the mountains in all directions. I was reminded of San Francisco: acclivity, hum and multiculturalism.
As a newcomer to Africa, it was confronting to see the ubiquity of security. Razor wire, electric fences and security guards were everywhere. On the street corners, street dwellers hovered and occasionally approached looking for baksheesh. They were countered by men in fluoro jackets who shooed them away if the harassment became too intrusive. I was to learn from The Fixer that the men in jackets aren’t official security guards but rather people who claim a small section of streetfront and survive on tips they receive from the people they protect in their patch. It was a delicately balanced ecosystem, with two species of predator and us as the game.
Late in the afternoon, Liza drove us over the ridge to Camps Bay and its wide white beaches. Her car—much loved, I’m sure, but past its prime—barely held the four of us and Max’s large camera, and she flogged the clutch as we climbed over the ridge hoisted between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head before hurtling around the curving road leading down the other side. Liza drives without fear for herself, her car or its contents.
Camps Bay sits under a line of towering cliffs that sweep south down towards the Cape of Good Hope. The sun was getting low, leading to what Max referred to as the magic hour for filming. As the sun approached the horizon, the arc of the waves flashed turquoise before they crashed forwards. Max filmed Sam and I talking and mucking around on the beach. Eventually the great orb touched the visible edge of the earth, distorted in its descent, and disappeared, heading for South America, leaving a cloudless sky.
‘Sam, what do you want for dinner?’ I asked.
‘Pizza,’ he snapped.
‘How about fish and chips? Or perhaps pasta?’ I suggested.
Sam shook his head. ‘No. Pizza.’
‘Can we try something different?’
‘No.’
Pizza it was. Max knew an expat Aussie living locally so he’d asked her to join us for dinner. Jocelyn was a clinical psychologist who had married a Cape Town IT specialist, emigrated and had a couple of kids. She specialised in dealing with children and teenagers and their exposure to technology so the two of us clearly had a lot to talk about. She was also naturally interested in what we were doing and tried hard to connect with Sam.
Her children were younger than Sam, and wary of him as he fidgeted and bounced around in his chair, making odd noises to himself. Social situations where other children meet Sam and try to figure him out are always confronting. It would always underline his deficits to me. I felt a pang. Not at all their fault, but still the pain was there.
The next day Max and The Fixer wanted to start early. In the courtyard of the hostel, Max decided we could use a helping hand to carry his gear. He turned to a young bearded backpacker sitting behind him. ‘You wouldn’t be interested in coming up to Table Mountain with us today, would you? We’re looking for someone to carry our camera gear. We’ll pay you.’
The twenty-something young lad replied in a thick Scottish accent. ‘Oh, why not? Yeah, sure.’
‘Great, it’s a deal,’ Max said. ‘We’re gonna leave in about ten minutes.’
The young Scot shook Max’s hand. ‘I’m Rory, by the way.’ I had never seen anyone employed by someone who didn’t know their name, but this was to be a trip of firsts. We quickly found Rory to be a very clever and introspective fellow from Inverness. We unanimously decided to nickname him Sherpa.
Sam was confused. ‘What’s a sherpa?’
‘Sherpas are people who live in the Himalayas and are good at climbing and carrying stuff up mountains.’
‘Rory’s a sherpa!’ Sam exclaimed excitedly.
The Fixer arrived at the hostel and beckoned us out to the car. ‘We should go now now.’ We’d already discovered that in South Africa ‘now’ meant some time in the vaguely foreseeable future and ‘now now’ meant right then and there. We loaded the gear into the rental car and drove to the cable car station up on the ridge.
Sam is good with this sort of thing. He has been taught to deal with unusual travel experiences for most of his life. It’s part of our parenting philosophy: dish up difference to him constantly and he will cope better and be more adaptive. Over the years, Benison and I have always kept him doing ‘stuff’, anything and everything different, but at the same time trying not to stress him too much. Make the jelly wobble on the plate, but not fall off.
So getting in a cable car heading up a very steep track was well within Sam’s capability. Max, Sherpa, Sam and I ascended into the swirling mists of the tablecloth. At the top was a bustling collection of restaurants and tourist shops fronting the entrance to walkways around the top of the mountain. Waist-high fynbos shrubs covered the sandstone mountain top like afro hair. The mist swirled around us but right at the edge of the plateau it magically evaporated, allowing sweeping views across Cape Town to the Atlantic, with Robben Island sitting off the coast. Along the ridgeline, mist fell over the precipice like melting ice cream before disappearing.
A cold breeze ruffled our jackets. The cooler weather was ideal as today was to be our first crack at boxing. This was one of our pre-planned neuroplasticity exercises. Benison and I had selected a series of activities designed to increase the range of parts of the brain working in unison. Activities that involve multiple parts of the brain firing together increase the amount of traffic through the middle part of the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres. This neurological superhighway, the corpus callosum, is densely packed with neurones lying in parallel. Its name is Latin for hard body, because that’s what the crowded structure feels like in the brain of a cadaver.
Corpus callosum traffic is reduced in autism. In a neurological sense, autism is thought to be not so much a lack of neurones as a lack of connectivity of the different parts of the brain. We theorised that if we exposed Sam to not only uncertainty and unpredictability but also to activities th
at required the use of multiple parts of the brain at once, it could lead to better brain connections and better outcomes. The activities we chose were boxing, chess, drawing, music, strategic card games and prolonged reciprocal conversations.
The boxing lesson went well enough. I had taken some boxing fitness classes at a local gym so I was familiar with the basics of positioning the hands and feet, and what a jab, cross, hook and uppercut were. The paediatric physiotherapist Sam had seen for motor delay issues in early childhood advised me that, from a neurological point of view, it would be better to get him to use his legs as well, to involve all four quadrants of the body, the left and right and the upper and lower body. So I threw some kicks in as well. It probably looked a bit odd, doing kickboxing amid tourists atop Table Mountain with a film crew recording our every action, but what the heck.
Soon The Fixer rejoined us and we cruised down the peninsula towards the Cape of Good Hope. The road there clings precariously to cliffs that plunge to the sea. In places the road has been cut into the cliffs. There was cliff wall to port, cliff plunge to starboard. Footage of this road featured in the Academy Award–winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, and I remember watching the film and wondering where this amazing road was. Well, now we were on it, with me in the driver’s seat.
Sam and I chatted, mostly about Harry Potter, and his crush, Hermione Granger, while Max sat in the boot of The Fixer’s car with the back hatch open, filming our car as we drove along behind. I was worried I would run him over if he fell out.
Back at the hostel, Sam was having conversations with all the new people he was meeting. He was being pushed hard, and it was exhausting him. I knew it was good for him, but I also worried it might be too much. He was getting stroppy with me and flatly refusing to co-operate at times, especially in the evening, which was unusual. I wasn’t giving him his usual Clonidine—a sedating medication prescribed by his paediatrician to regulate his sleep pattern, an approach commonly taken in autism—because I had realised he didn’t need it. He was falling asleep early on his own, dog-tired from being pushed in areas that he found challenging, particularly dealing with people.
