Silver Trees

Dearest fellow wanderer

I have a thing about windmills. I cannot possibly have a ‘thing’ for a windpump. Or a turbine.

No, it is most assuredly the windmill to which I am drawn.

If pressed on the matter in the past, I am not sure that I would have been able to provide a decent explanation for this particular … condition.  

Fortunately, no one has ever enquired.

I have a theory, as you will see, but it lies in the dusty embrace of a novel I read many, many years ago, when I still yearned for the answers to “life, the universe and everything” and searched for them in the pages of countless literary travel guides.

I recall a trip to Nieu Bethesda, in 2006. Early one Autumn morning, with the sun at my back and my low-slung Golf struggling down a winding gravel road, I crept into this historic village. I fell in love with the place, which is tucked away in the hills beneath the Sneeuberge in the Eastern Cape, and felt compelled to take my family back a decade later. However, what I remember most clearly about that first visit – aside from that tricky entrance – is the rickety old windmill on the way out, on the road south, when I left two days later. Not the wonderfully idiosyncratic collection of “outsider art” by Helen Martins in The Owl House, or even the opportunity to peer at the home of Athol Fugard, like a bespectacled post-grad on pilgrimage. No, the abiding memory has been that of a cranky old beast belching up water while servicing the land.

I must have a photograph, somewhere, but I do not need it. My faulty faculties seem to latch onto such the oddest details when in step with the plod of life’s minutiae. I am often left with fragments of information that really would make existence so much simpler if they were whole. Yet, for whatever reason, the strange mechanisms at play within my skull have imprinted upon me this lasting visual memory of Nieu Bethesda – or, rather, of that metal fountain just beyond its borders.

I do love a road trip and this has taken me across South Africa on a number of occasions. Consequently, I have taken many photographs of these iron giants. Most of the images I have chosen to share with you were taken at the end of 2021, but I found this old chap, long since decommissioned, in the Karoo National Park in 2019:

 

I have had to concede that these chaps are not made of iron. Not entirely, at any rate. There may well be some in there but I gather that they are made of galvanized steel, and wood, and other bits and bobs. But there is something about The Iron Giant that lives on in many of us of a certain age who sat through that wonderful film with their children.

That is what drives this meandering reverie, if there is actually anything of substance to impart to the more covetous traveler:

It matters not that it is her windpump, or his turbine, or your Iron Giant. Or my windmill. When there is wind, this creature breathes life into the land.  

 

It was on one of our family rambles, many years ago, that my young son furnished this goliath with another moniker: the ‘silver tree’. A spiritual devotee of the arboreal variety, his face would light up if our trips incorporated visits to forested terrains. Indeed, we had to arrange to spend a couple of hours at the Sunland Baobab in Limpopo, which is said to be at least a thousand years old. It was thus not a surprise when my son enquired about the silver tree in the distance while we were driving through the Karoo. After it was explained that this individual was not made of wood, we spotted loads of silver trees as we continued to wend our way through the Eastern Cape.

We still talk about those silver trees, every now and then.

 

The purist must be addressed at this point. If one is to adopt the parlance of those in the know, apparently one is supposed to refer to this particular type of ‘machine’ as a windpump, not a windmill. Of course, this depends on the nature of the establishment in which you find yourself, and the bushiness of the beard at the other end of his brew or the size of the clogs on her feet.

However, I simply cannot bring myself to lump these beings into the category of ‘machinery’. That is why I have always called them windmills.

Or silver trees.

 

Addressing this fellow as a ‘multi-bladed windpump’ simply does not sit right. Of course, I must concede that I have never worked the land, while these creatures have long been workhorses of the functional, less glamorous variety. For centuries they pumped water for farmers across the world, from Afghanistan to the Netherlands, before making their way to our shores. These are all noble endeavours, so I must emphasize that I am not here to besmirch the legacy of one dedicated to watering the fields and feeding the masses.

Furthermore, technology marches on – as it must – in order to unearth evermore sustainable methods of providing the energy we need. So, again, I am not throwing shade at the wind turbine.

Unlike Donald Trump did in 2019, while he was still hosting his reality show in the White House. He (in)famously proclaimed: “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much.” During his ‘war on wind’, he railed against the wind turbines that were supposedly polluting the environment and killing wildlife in Scotland.

Others have written off this orange-headed buffoon as our own latter-day Don Quixote, so I will not cover that ground again. Suffice it to say, a Twitter user (Brooklyn Dad Defiant), got to the heart of the matter: “The truth is that President Don Quixote is tilting against #windmills NOT because of bald eagles, but because wind power cuts into the profits of his planet-destroying fossil fuel donors. It’s all just hot air from a blowhard.”

Because, of course, the wind turbines were near Trump’s golf course.

Having said that – and it does gnaw at me to admit this – I do share one peculiar malady with this narcissist: our preoccupation with the term ‘windmills.’*

[*But there the similarities end, to be clear. Any other aspersions of this nature cast in my direction will be vigorously defended in court.**]

[**Duly noted: apparently we share this rather reactionary trait as well.]

Ken Olin, the somewhat famous actor of yesteryear, was responsible for this particularly damning appraisal: “Don Trump has surpassed Don Quixote as the craziest person in history named Don to make an enemy of windmills.”

“Don Quixote”, the renowned novel by Miguel de Cervantes, tells of “the excellent outcome that the brave don Quixote had in the frightening and never-imagined adventure of the windmills”:

Just then, they discovered thirty or forty windmills in that plain. And as soon as don Quixote saw them, he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have ever hoped. Look over there, Sancho Panza, my friend, where there are thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives, and with their spoils we’ll start to get rich. This is righteous warfare, and it’s a great service to God to rid the earth of such a wicked seed.”

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.

“Those that you see over there,” responded his master, “with the long arms—some of them almost two leagues long.”

“Look, your grace,” responded Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants—they’re windmills; and what seems to be arms are the sails that rotate the millstone when they’re turned by the wind.”

“It seems to me,” responded don Quixote, “that you aren’t well-versed in adventures—they are giants; and if you’re afraid, get away from here and start praying while I go into fierce and unequal battle with them.”

And saying this, he spurred his horse Rocinante without heeding what his squire Sancho was shouting to him, that he was attacking windmills and not giants. But he was so certain they were giants that he paid no attention to his squire Sancho’s shouts, nor did he see what they were, even though he was very close. Rather, he went on shouting: “Do not flee, cowards and vile creatures, for it’s just one knight attacking you!”

This brings me back to my theory about the source of my preoccupation with windmills. My passion was probably kindled by Cervantes when I came across his tale while at university. In this aging warrior’s quest to defeat imaginary enemies I found something disturbing and magical and uniquely insightful about the misadventures of humankind. I am not sure I fully grasped it as a teenager fresh out of high school, despite my age-appropriate pseudointellectual leanings, but I suspect that the image of that innocent windmill fending off that bumbling old man left its mark on me:

He attacked at Rocinante’s full gallop and assailed the first windmill he came to. He gave a thrust into the sail with his lance just as a rush of air accelerated it with such fury that it broke the lance to bits, taking the horse and knight with it, and tossed him rolling onto the ground, very battered.

Sancho went as fast as his donkey could take him to help his master, and when he got there, he saw that don Quixote couldn’t stir—such was the result of Rocinante’s landing on top of him. “God help us,” said Sancho. “Didn’t I tell you to watch what you were doing; that they were just windmills, and that only a person who had windmills in his head could fail to realize it?”

Of course, this glorious story gave birth to the iconic phrase “tilting at windmills.” It must be said that, like dear Mr Trump, many of us will have walked this path in the course of our daily travails, at some point or another, “attacking imaginary enemies” while looking for ‘the answers’ to our questions.

I know I have.

Which is why, I surmise, the windmill is so dear to me, and it matters not that it is her windpump, or his turbine, or your Iron Giant.

For you will find this silver tree silhouetted on so many barren landscapes across the land: the past living on, resisting rust and demanding nothing, drawing from the dirt and offering sustenance to dwarf shrubs and parched goats.

 

Safe travels.

 

Play

Yours indefinitely,

Lemuel