Sam's Best Shot

by James Best

  I took a step towards him and chopped the crisp air with my hand. ‘No!’

  He moved away, but continued to circle the complex, glancing in our direction occasionally. I watched him carefully. After twenty minutes and no car I started to worry. While extracting my phone from my pocket to google the number for our hostel I dropped my glasses on the road, breaking the frames. Suppressing swear words and trying to read my phone through broken glasses, I felt the tension rise.

  Sam wasn’t helping. When he saw me break my glasses he launched into an impersonation of Nelson from The Simpsons. ‘Ha-ha!’

  The car finally turned up. What a relief! It was rattling relic with a top speed of eighty kilometres per hour. The driver spoke little English but I was reasonably confident we were heading to the right place. Well, I hoped we were. He was playing a heavy rap song that I soon realised was on a loop. We got to listen to it more than twenty times as we bumped up the dark road through the mist.

  After an hour, without warning and in the middle of nowhere, we were moved into a new hire car with a new driver. I could only assume this was so the cars and drivers remained in their local area. At least the music changed. Sam leant on me heavily in the back seat—as he tends to do when he is tired—because of his low muscle tone, which is common in people with autism. This car was faster but, like the first, there were no back seat seatbelts. I started to see why South Africa’s road toll was so high. As we neared Sani Lodge, the road became steeper and windier but that didn’t stop the driver using his mobile phone constantly while driving.

  Finally we arrived at nine p.m., an hour after the restaurant had closed. A kind hostel worker rustled up a loaf of bread from the restaurant to supplement Sam’s sausage roll dinner, despite Sam suggesting she was a man because she had short hair (she most definitely did not look like a man).

  Sam then realised he had left his Nintendo DS in the car. Fortunately, I had the driver’s number as I had arranged for him to drive us back to Kokstadt in three days. I rang, he had it, and he’d bring it back tomorrow.

  A game of cards in this much quieter and laidback hostel with a German, a Dane, an American and a Chilean soothed my rattled nerves. We were at 1,500 metres above sea level, so the room was fitted out with wall heaters, thick blankets and hot-water bottles.

  The days seemed longer and the nights darker but that had nothing to do with seasons or geography, it was all in my head. I was becoming worn down. We were only a couple of weeks in to the trip and already my head was starting to drop. I had nearly managed to lose Sam, the DS was proving to be an albatross and we could have easily got into some serious strife in the mix-up with the transport here.

  I wanted to go home and was embarrassed that I felt that way. Sam just seemed unhappy. He didn’t seem to enjoy the aspects of the trip I thought he would. The whole thing was a chore to him. Yet we were ticking boxes on what we needed to get done, including the filming for the university, and I could detect subtle improvements in his conversational skills. Must push on, must push on.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Mountain Kingdom

  We awoke to a crisp, clear morning. For the first time we could see where we’d arrived: above the lodge towered the dramatic escarpment of the southern Drakensberg Mountains. Early European settlers called it the Drakensberge—Afrikaans for dragon mountains—because they believed it resembled a dragon’s back. Sharp ridgelines demarcated treeless rock and grass slopes in subtle mauve shadow and pale green highlights where mist danced in valleys. Muted grey rock pushed up through a lime-green grass carpet that covered the treeless slopes as they headed up, ever steeper to angular ridge lines, cut rough and crooked way above us. Mauve shadows filled the valleys, where mist hung in the still, cool air. The only sound was birdsong.

  The lodge owners led us up the mountain, and also into Lesotho, the neighbouring country. We booked a day trip over the 3,200-metre Sani Pass for the second day of our stay. But today I wanted us to relax, and refocus on Sam and on the neuroplasticity exercises. In addition to his school lessons and a one-hour walk on a nature trail, we were able to complete more neuroplasticity activities than on any other day of the trip to date. We boxed in the morning sunshine on a back verandah with a view over the jagged mountains and played chess on the hearth of the fireplace in the lounge room, still smouldering from the night before. Then Sam completed a Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle, as well as half of a game of South African Monopoly—played on a bilingual board with the familiar Pall Mall and Mayfair replaced by Monument Road and Eloffstraat—before his attention, never brilliant due to his ADHD, started to wane.

  From my low point the previous evening, this day made me feel we were starting to get into a groove. This was what I needed to concentrate on. While it’s pretty hard to visit the Drakensburg Mountains and not do any sightseeing, we didn’t have to emulate the twenty-somethings and fill our days with twelve-kilometre hikes, canyoning or abseiling. One of the principal reasons we were in Africa, apart from its dynamic and unpredictable environment, was to find the time and space for neurological growth, undistracted by all the stuff that normally intruded on our days back home in Australia.

  That evening, sitting in the lounge room in front of the log fire, I chatted with one of the female Zulu staff members while Sam listened to music in our room. We talked about Sam, our travels and where we were heading next. A bullish, bow-legged and obese white South African dressed in biker leathers loped into the room and joined in the conversation. He was moving gingerly as he took his seat.

  ‘Are you injured?’ I enquired.

  ‘No,’ he said in a thick Afrikaner accent. ‘Just rode eight hours on the bike from Jo’burg through the mountains and I’m feeling like I’ve been getting a good going over in a prison. Ha ha!’

  The staff member stared at her tea with a bland expression and kept to herself from that point onwards.

  He started amiably enough, asking about my impressions of South Africa. Then I volunteered that I was pleasantly surprised by the positive vibe, given the recent history, and I thought the country had a lot of promise.

  He bristled. ‘Oh no, this place is going to shit.’ He leant forward, speaking with a pointed finger and clipped tone. ‘Look what’s happening with the bloody electricity. It’s the African way. The whole continent works on corruption and it’s going to be like that here, just like it is everywhere else.’

  I grimaced inwardly. ‘But don’t you see the potential?’

  ‘The ANC will just stuff it up,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. ‘All they have to do is hand out t-shirts every five years and they get voted back in. It’s not the fault of these people; they’re uneducated and don’t know any better.’

  I suspected ‘they’ was code for black or coloured. The staff member continued to look at her tea. I was tempted to take it up to him harder, but what was the point? I sat in silence.

  After a long awkward pause, he said, ‘So, Sydney? You have lots of refugees there.’

  I’d had it with this guy. ‘Yes, that’s one of the best things about my city. I love its multicultural makeup.’

  That night a huge thunderstorm erupted over the mountains. The power went out again, but this time it was Mother Nature’s fault, not administrative or political incompetence, perceived or real.

  The next day we left South Africa for the first time, entering the mountain kingdom of Lesotho on our tour of the Sani mountain pass. I was surprised to learn that Lesotho is the highest country in the world; that is, it has the highest low point of any country in the world. I was excited, but one particular worry was niggling at me. It was going to be very cold…and Sam had refused to wear long sleeves at all since he was nine.

  The sensation of fabric on his forearms irritates Sam—another quirky and limiting manifestation of his autism. By and large this aversion had been manageable, with the exception of the day he decided to impose his will on his primary school mates. One wintry day in his ninth year, Sam’s school had partic
ipated in a ‘Special Olympics’ for primary schoolchildren with special needs. It was held on the oval of a large private secondary school on the upper North Shore of Sydney. As Benison was working that day, it was my turn to supervise Sam.

  I was rugged up against the cold but Sam would only consent to don a puffer vest over his t-shirt. I was chatting to the mother of a boy in Sam’s class when out of the corner of my eye I saw Sam struggling with a girl he knew. He was trying to wrench her jumper off. Her mother was not impressed. I rushed across to intervene.

  ‘Sam, what are you doing?’ I shouted.

  ‘She shouldn’t have long sleeves!’

  ‘Leave her alone!’ I marched him away from the shrieking girl and her mother but he was clearly agitated, jabbering constantly about all the children with their long sleeves.

  ‘But it’s got nothing to do with you! It’s their choice!’

  ‘I hate long sleeves!’

  I tried to get him involved in the activities—T-ball, running relays, mini-football—but it was futile. He just couldn’t focus because of those long sleeves. Twice more he lurched and grabbed at other students’ clothes, but I was able to step in quickly. I decided to pull the plug on the day early, depressed that my son couldn’t even cope with an activity designed for children with special needs. It had been a long drive home. By the first year of high school he had consented to wear his compulsory high school blazer, but outside of school hours, forget it!

  Going over a mountain pass higher than a European ski resort with exposed arms was going to prove a challenge. Sam was issued a rug from reception, and I dressed him as warmly as I could otherwise, with two t-shirts, a padded vest, long pants and hiking boots.

  Ten passengers piled into two four-wheel drives. I let our driver, Stuart, an ex-park ranger, know why the boy in the passenger seat was wrapped in a rug. He presciently enquired whether Sam would mind if we had an extra passenger in the back of the car: a poisonous snake in a secure container that he intended to release in the mountains. Sam did mind, of course, but I managed to talk him around and off we went.

  Stuart and Sam sat in the front seats, two Dutch backpackers and myself were in the middle row, and at the rear was a young female Japanese hitchhiker getting a free ride to the base of the mountains, and that large plastic cylinder containing the mysterious snake. As we headed north towards the range the sealed road gave way to gravel and started to climb. Before us was the mother of all South African mountain passes: the Sani Pass. A family of chacma baboons crossed the road, scratching their armpits and eyeing us curiously. A long-crested eagle sat on a roadside post, and soon our sharp-eyed driver spied a lone eland, the largest of the antelopes, grazing on the steep ridges lining the valley. Red-winged starlings and double-collared sunbirds darted among the marsh pokers and marmalade bushes, sugarbirds fed on proteas, and jackal buzzards and Cape vultures, with their two-metre wingspans, soared and circled high and mighty on the drafts coming off the cliffs. Nature was on show.

  Pulling to a stop, Stuart lifted a small sack out of the cylinder in the back seat and deftly opened and inverted it, gently spilling the slithering contents onto the sand near the edge of a thatch of bracken. The short squat adder sat motionless until it was gently prodded with a stick and it slithered off into the undergrowth, safer from the ever-present birds of prey above.

  Sam was transfixed. He tried to speak to it in parseltongue, the language of serpents in Harry Potter, but the snake obviously wasn’t in the mood to chat. Our fellow travellers were amused.

  As we started off in the car again, I decided to pick the brains of our knowledgeable guide. I leant forward from the back seat and asked, ‘Why do they call them puff daddies?’

  ‘I am not sure why they would call them puff daddies,’ he yelled over his shoulder, ‘but they call them puff adders because they puff out their necks when threatened.’

  Sitting behind me, one of the Dutch backpackers clarified it for me. ‘I think you’ll find Puff Daddy is a rap singer.’

  I felt my face burn and wondered, How do I manage to consistently do these things?

  We dropped our Japanese hitchhiker at an outpost where the road started to climb steeply. Stuart couldn’t take her any further as it was a commercial tour and she had politely declined to pay. She might possibly have to wait alone for up to four hours before the local minibus turned up, but she seemed undeterred. The buildings were formerly a trading post down to which Basotho herdsmen would drive their sheep and goats from their mountain pastures to be sold, buying wood, grains and other supplies in return. The trading post had become obsolete when the old mule trail had been hacked into a primitive road, and vehicle access meant the trade could happen in Lesotho itself, up and over the pass. The first car, a war-surplus Jeep, came over the pass in 1948, driven by an ex-Spitfire pilot. He needed labourers, equipped with ropes and various block and tackle, to make the summit, a journey that took six hours. The road was made functional in 1950 and the west of Lesotho had transformed its trade route.

  We ascended thirteen hundred metres over nine kilometres, bouncing through creeks while we clung to the vehicle that clung to the track that in turn clung to the walls of the cliffs. Hairpin-turn left, hairpin-turn right, we wound our way up. Sam said it was a ‘crazy road’ and he was right.

  The border with Lesotho was at the top of the pass, though the South African border post was sensibly at the bottom. The Lesotho post, a white-plastered one-room building with a side door and one small barred window at the front, had a single bored customs officer inside. On the outside of the building were hand-painted large black letters spelling out WELCOME TO LESOTHO. Behind it lay the treeless plains of the mountain kingdom. Sam sat on a rickety old desk outside the building. Wrapped in his rug he looked like a local. Our entry and exit passes to Lesotho were stamped into our passports at the same time.

  Stuart drove the Land Rover across the plains, empty except for the occasional flock of unclipped mohair goats driven by Basotho herdsmen, wearing ragged clothes and carrying metre-length black sticks coloured with decorative twine.

  Stuart was fluent in the local language, Sesotho, and known by all the locals. He stopped to chat to a woman in a village to see if we could visit her house later in the day. She agreed and invited us all to watch a herd of goats being clipped in a shed nearby. There, Sam and his rug again attracted attention. He walked up to the herd in the pen outside the shed and started to ‘talk’ to them in goat sounds, while locals watched him, intrigued.

  Then as Sam watched, the shepherds and shearers dragged the beasts up the ramp by their horns as they bleated and resisted. His face creased in concern. He turned to me. ‘Is this animal cruelty?’

  ‘Oh, maybe a bit, but not too bad,’ I reassured him. ‘It’s just like getting a haircut. They need to get it done before they move down the mountain where it isn’t so cold.’

  He smiled and flapped a little. ‘They’re getting a haircut!’

  Sam moved around the shed, watching the goats and the growing piles of wool. He looked again at the shearers and their long sharp shears. With a worried expression, he asked, ‘I’m not getting a haircut, am I?’

  ‘No, Sam,’ I said. ‘Well, not here.’

  For lunch we ate a picnic at the highest point of the road to the capital, 3,240 metres above sea level. To the west of us lay the 3,482-metre-high Thabana Ntlenyana, which translates as ‘beautiful little mountain’. For an Australian, where the highest peak is a mere 2,228 metres, this seemed strange description, but it actually did appear as a little mountain on this high plain. Thabana Ntlenyana is the highest mountain in Africa south of Kilimanjaro, yet animals graze near the peak and shepherd boys stroll up its summit.

  Stuart drove us back to the village woman’s stone rondavel. These traditional dwellings are built by carefully arranging stones on the circular wall before the gaps are backfilled with a mixture of mud and dung. A similar mixture is used to make the floor. The thatch for the roof is from the s
hort mountain grasses pulled out by the roots, with the dirty roots on the outside and the grass stems thatched together on the inside.

  In the centre of the floor was a fire of slow-burning dung fuel in a hollow, upon which sat a heavy cast-iron pot with a lid. The heat from the fire permeated the floor, effectively giving the hut subfloor heating. The room was smoky, but not unpleasantly so, even to Sam. The warm smoky air rose into the roof before slowly filtering through the thatch into the chill outside.

  The Basotho woman wore, surprisingly, a beanie with an Australian flag on it. She opened the pot to reveal some enticing baked bread, which Sam liked the look of, so I bought a segment to go with his lunch. We drank homemade beer, which tasted more like cider. Stuart translated for her and we learnt a few Sesotho phrases. Here we were, in an extreme climate at an altitude too high for trees, in a poor village hut with no running water or electricity, but we were comfortable and well fed.

  On the way back to the border we called into one of the few buildings we saw besides shepherd huts: the Sani Mountain Lodge. We enjoyed a surprisingly good Lesotho beer as the mist from an incoming front swirled around the building. Sam drank lemonade while flicking through magazines in front of a log fire. On our return journey, I was glad Stuart had driven this road hundreds of times before as he was navigating the descent in dense fog.

  During the two-hour drive back to the hostel, Sam got on a roll about justice systems and modern history. Stuart and the Dutch backpackers were surprised, as was I, to hear his knowledge of the French Revolution and the North Korean government. He must have been googling it. When he gets talking like this, I like to run with it, as it’s an opportunity to direct him back to more functional and mainstream understanding and knowledge. We discussed the Cuban missile crisis, the European and Pacific theatres of war, when they started and ended, and the death of Hitler. Between Stuart, the Dutch backpackers and myself, our cumulative general knowledge struggled to keep up with him on occasions. He can really surprise me sometimes.