wildflowers.
Half a dozen people on the bus got out at Springbok and, relieved to be home, reassured by their arrival, overcoming their shyness, called out “Safe travels!” to the rest of us.
Darkness fell. We had come almost four hundred miles and were near the border of Namibia. Later, in the glare of lights on tall poles, we pulled into a gas station, and while the other passengers scrambled for food — platters of fried potatoes served up by smiling women dressed like nurses in white smocks and white caps — I looked for someone to talk to. I found a man at the edge of the lights, which was the edge of the desert. He wore a wool hat and thicknesses of ragged clothes. He turned, surprised, because he happened to be shouting at his dog, a poor, beaten-looking mutt that seemed submissive and confused.
“Where are we?”
Instead of answering, the man shouted at me and walked away, his dog following.
“Steinkopf,” a bystander said.
Farther down the road, not long after that, we came to a high chainlink fence surmounted by razor wire and looking like the perimeter of a prison. Making it more prisonlike were watchtowers and dazzling lights and men in uniform with wicked rifles slung under their arms. The border.
Some people collect antiques or stamps or Beatles memorabilia. I collect border crossings, and the best of them are the ones where I’ve had to walk from Cambodia to Vietnam, from the United States to Mexico, from Pakistan to India, from Turkey to the Republic ofGeorgia. To me a frontier represents the life of most people. “I became a foreigner,” V. S. Pritchett said of being a traveler. “For myself that’s what a writer is — a man living on the other side of a frontier.” It’s a thrill to go on foot from one country to another, a mere pedestrian exchanging countries, treading the theoretical inked line that is shown on maps.
Often a frontier is a river — the Mekong, the Rio Grande, the Zambezi; or a mountain range — the Pyrenees, the Ruwenzoris; or a sudden alteration in topography, a bewildering landscape transformation — hilly Vermont flattening into Quebec. But just as often — perhaps most of the time — a border is irrational yet unremarkable, a seamlessness that goes by the name of No Man’s Land, a width of earth bounded by fences. You can hardly tell one country from the other. Often there is no visible difference, as any migrant who crosses the Sonoran Desert from Mexico to Arizona can testify — wasteland straddles the frontier; if there is any drama, it is imposed by the authorities, heightened by the presence of police or the Border Patrol. Otherwise, the border is a contrived and arbitrary dotted line, a political conceit dividing communities and people, creating difference and disharmony. I suppose the act of walking across a border is my way of undoing difference and seeking harmony, even if it is only in my head. It is nearly always a happy act, even in the darkness of night, slowed by officialdom and inspections.
There’s an equality in pedestrian border crossings, too: no first class, no fast lane, no preferential treatment. You line up at the office, get your passport stamped, your bags searched, and off you go, perhaps to find a ride on the other side or to reboard the bus. The bus doesn’t leave until everyone is processed, and while waiting the travelers shuffle their feet and become restlessly talkative.
My map gave this limit of South Africa as Vioolsdrift.
“
Viool
means ‘violin,’ ” a woman told me. We had gotten off the bus and were going through immigration. “It’s a funny name for a place.”
Drift
means “ford,” as in fording a river. The Orange River was the border, but “violin”? One story had it that a Nama man, named Jan Viool after his fiddling, lived here and gave the place its pretty name.
The woman I was speaking to, one of the passengers, was elderly but uncomplaining, standing in the chilly night carrying a small bag.
Half a dozen people on the bus got out at Springbok and, relieved to be home, reassured by their arrival, overcoming their shyness, called out “Safe travels!” to the rest of us.
Darkness fell. We had come almost four hundred miles and were near the border of Namibia. Later, in the glare of lights on tall poles, we pulled into a gas station, and while the other passengers scrambled for food — platters of fried potatoes served up by smiling women dressed like nurses in white smocks and white caps — I looked for someone to talk to. I found a man at the edge of the lights, which was the edge of the desert. He wore a wool hat and thicknesses of ragged clothes. He turned, surprised, because he happened to be shouting at his dog, a poor, beaten-looking mutt that seemed submissive and confused.
“Where are we?”
Instead of answering, the man shouted at me and walked away, his dog following.
“Steinkopf,” a bystander said.
Farther down the road, not long after that, we came to a high chainlink fence surmounted by razor wire and looking like the perimeter of a prison. Making it more prisonlike were watchtowers and dazzling lights and men in uniform with wicked rifles slung under their arms. The border.
Some people collect antiques or stamps or Beatles memorabilia. I collect border crossings, and the best of them are the ones where I’ve had to walk from Cambodia to Vietnam, from the United States to Mexico, from Pakistan to India, from Turkey to the Republic ofGeorgia. To me a frontier represents the life of most people. “I became a foreigner,” V. S. Pritchett said of being a traveler. “For myself that’s what a writer is — a man living on the other side of a frontier.” It’s a thrill to go on foot from one country to another, a mere pedestrian exchanging countries, treading the theoretical inked line that is shown on maps.
Often a frontier is a river — the Mekong, the Rio Grande, the Zambezi; or a mountain range — the Pyrenees, the Ruwenzoris; or a sudden alteration in topography, a bewildering landscape transformation — hilly Vermont flattening into Quebec. But just as often — perhaps most of the time — a border is irrational yet unremarkable, a seamlessness that goes by the name of No Man’s Land, a width of earth bounded by fences. You can hardly tell one country from the other. Often there is no visible difference, as any migrant who crosses the Sonoran Desert from Mexico to Arizona can testify — wasteland straddles the frontier; if there is any drama, it is imposed by the authorities, heightened by the presence of police or the Border Patrol. Otherwise, the border is a contrived and arbitrary dotted line, a political conceit dividing communities and people, creating difference and disharmony. I suppose the act of walking across a border is my way of undoing difference and seeking harmony, even if it is only in my head. It is nearly always a happy act, even in the darkness of night, slowed by officialdom and inspections.
There’s an equality in pedestrian border crossings, too: no first class, no fast lane, no preferential treatment. You line up at the office, get your passport stamped, your bags searched, and off you go, perhaps to find a ride on the other side or to reboard the bus. The bus doesn’t leave until everyone is processed, and while waiting the travelers shuffle their feet and become restlessly talkative.
My map gave this limit of South Africa as Vioolsdrift.
“
Viool
means ‘violin,’ ” a woman told me. We had gotten off the bus and were going through immigration. “It’s a funny name for a place.”
Drift
means “ford,” as in fording a river. The Orange River was the border, but “violin”? One story had it that a Nama man, named Jan Viool after his fiddling, lived here and gave the place its pretty name.
The woman I was speaking to, one of the passengers, was elderly but uncomplaining, standing in the chilly night carrying a small bag.
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