The Curtain at Rietvlei

The morning the weavers were building

I have been chasing birds with a camera for the better part of twenty years, and if you asked me what I loved most about it, I would not talk about the rare sightings or the long lens I saved two years to buy. I would tell you about ordinary mornings like the one at Rietvlei, when the light comes up soft over the Highveld and the reeds are still cold and the whole dam seems to be holding its breath before the day starts properly.

That Saturday I was set up near the water on the edge of the reserve, out past the southern side of Johannesburg where the veld opens and the traffic finally lets go of you. The weavers were building. If you have never watched a colony of Southern Masked Weavers stitching their nests, you have missed one of the small miracles of Gauteng. The males hang upside down, wings shivering, calling that dry swizzling call, tearing strips of grass and looping them around a reed with a patience I have never had in my whole life. I had my tripod low, my hat pulled down against the sun, and I was as happy as a man can be with cold feet and a flask of coffee going lukewarm beside him.

I remember the exact bird. A bright male, almost egg-yolk yellow, working a nest that was half a globe of green. I lifted the camera to my eye, and that is when the morning changed.

A shower of soot

At first I thought a swarm of gnats had drifted across the front of the lens. Little dark specks, dozens of them, swimming and drifting whenever I moved my eye. I lowered the camera and wiped the front element with my cloth. Nothing. I looked at the sky, that flat Highveld blue, and the specks were still there, floating in my right eye like a scattering of soot someone had flung into clean water.

I blinked hard. I did the thing we all do, pressing the heel of my hand against the socket, telling myself it was tiredness. I had been up since four. I was fifty-eight years old. My eyes were allowed to be tired. That is the story I told myself while I packed up earlier than I meant to, telling my wife when I got home that the light had gone off, which was a lie, because the light had been perfect. The light was fine. It was me that was going wrong.

Over the next two days the floaters settled a little, the way silt settles, but they did not leave. And then on the Monday evening, standing in the kitchen in Bedfordview while the kettle boiled, I noticed something worse. There was a softness at the bottom edge of my vision in that same eye. Not a spot. A shadow. Like the very beginning of a grey curtain being drawn up from the floor of the room, and I could not blink it away no matter how many times I tried.

The thing I did not want to say out loud

I want to be honest about the fear, because I think men my age are terrible at admitting it. My whole life sits behind my eyes. Everything I love, I love by looking. The weavers. My grandchildren pulling faces at me across the Sunday table. The Magaliesberg going purple in the late afternoon on the drive back from a shoot. My wife's face, which I have been looking at for thirty-one years and still find new things in. The idea that a curtain could come up over all of that, quietly, on an ordinary Saturday, while I was busy being happy, put a cold hand on the back of my neck that I could not shrug off.

So of course I did what people do. I sat at the computer that night and typed my symptoms into the search bar with two fingers, which is my typing speed. I read about migraines and tired eyes and vitreous something, and then I read the paragraph I should not have read, the one about retinas tearing and detaching, and how a shadow and a sudden shower of floaters can be the sign that the seeing part of your eye is coming loose like wallpaper off a damp wall. I read that it is one of the few true emergencies in eye care, that the difference between saving the sight and losing it can be measured in days. That every one of the ophthalmologists whose pages I skimmed said the same thing, in the same firm way. Do not wait. Do not sleep on it. Do not tell yourself it is nothing.

I closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a while. My wife found me there and asked what was wrong, and I finally said it out loud, the thing I had been swallowing for two days. I think I might be losing an eye.

The waiting room, and the words that turned it around

She did not let me talk myself out of it, which is why I am still photographing birds today. First thing on the Tuesday she was on the phone, and by mid morning I was sitting in the rooms of an ophthalmologist in Johannesburg, a proper eye specialist, in a quiet waiting room with a fish tank and old copies of magazines and an elderly gentleman across from me who kept telling me his whole cataract history without being asked. Normally I would have found him tiresome. That morning I was grateful for the noise, because it kept me from listening to my own heartbeat.

When they called me through, the fear made everything very sharp and slow. They put drops in that stung and then made the world go swimmy and bright, so that the reception desk on the way past dissolved into a smear of light. In the dim examination room the specialist pressed his forehead close to mine, shining a light so intense that my whole eye filled with red, asking me to look up, down, left, far to the corner, hold it there. He was quiet and careful and unhurried, and there is a particular comfort in watching an expert concentrate, the way I concentrate on a bird, except now I was the thing being studied.

He sat back at last and told me what was happening inside my own head, in plain language. The jelly that fills the eye had pulled away as it does with age, and in doing so it had tugged at the retina and caused a small tear at the edge, which was where the soot and the shadow were coming from. It had not detached. Not yet. But it was the kind of tear that becomes a detachment, and the fact that I had come in when I did, rather than a week later after another few mornings at the dam telling myself it was tiredness, was the whole difference. I did not fully understand every word an opthalmologist uses, but I understood that sentence completely. I had come in time. Barely, but in time.

They sealed the tear that same visit, a strange business of bright flashes and a smell I will not forget, my chin locked in a rest while the retina was welded back down at its edges with light. It was uncomfortable and it was over quickly and I walked back out into the Johannesburg afternoon with a plastic pair of dark glasses perched on my nose, my pupils still huge, the sun like a physical blow, and I have honestly never been so glad to be dazzled by anything.

Back at the reeds

The floaters are still there, some of them. I am told they may drift and fade with time, and that I have made my peace with. They are a small price. What matters is that the grey curtain never rose any higher, and that the bottom edge of my world is still there, still solid, still full of reeds and water and light.

I went back to Rietvlei a few weeks later. Same spot, same cold feet, same lukewarm coffee. The weavers had finished their building by then and there were young ones about, clumsy and loud. I set the tripod low, pulled my hat down, and lifted the camera to my right eye, the eye that had frightened me so badly. The bright male was there again, or one just like him, hanging upside down and shivering his wings, calling that dry swizzling call across the water.

I could see him. Every strand of grass. Every fleck of yellow. I sat there for a long time with my eye pressed to the camera and I did not take a single photograph. I just looked, and looked, the way a man looks at something he very nearly lost, and I thought about how close I had come to telling myself, one more time, that it was nothing.

Look after your eyes. Do not be like I nearly was, packing up early on a perfect morning, blaming the light. The light is almost never the problem. And the seeing, once it starts to go, does not always wait for you to be ready.