The Day The Bakkie Went Quiet On The Klip Road

The sound a bakkie makes when it gives up

I have farmed the same three hundred hectares outside Reitz in the Free State for most of my life, and in all that time the one thing I have trusted more than the weather forecast is my bakkie. She is a 1994 Toyota Hilux, single cab, the colour of a dry mielie field, and she has never once let me down until the morning she did. I was fifty six years old that day and I felt every one of those years when the engine went.

It happened on the Klip road, which is a dirt track my grandfather cut with a scraper before I was born. I was hauling a trailer of feed to the far camp, right in the thick of harvest, when I heard a knock that did not belong. It was a deep, wrong sound, like a man tapping the bottom of a drum from inside. Then came a smell of hot oil, and then a bang, and then the worst sound of all, which is no sound at all. The bakkie coasted to a stop and sat there ticking as she cooled, and I sat behind the wheel with my hands still on it, not wanting to believe what my ears had already told me.

I got out and lifted the bonnet the way you check on a sick animal, gently, hoping to be wrong. She had seized. Run dry somewhere I had not noticed, a slow leak I should have caught, and now the engine was one solid lump of metal that would never turn again. I walked the eight kilometres home in the heat with my hat in my hand, and I did the sums with every step. I could not afford a new vehicle. Not that year, not with the maize price where it was. And the season would not wait for me to save up. Harvest is a door that opens and closes on its own schedule, and it does not care about your troubles.

The rows of the stripping yard

My neighbour Petrus told me not to write her off. An engine is not the whole animal, he said. You do not shoot the horse because it broke a leg if the leg can be fixed. He pointed me toward a place two towns over, a proper stripping centre where they break down vehicles that have reached the end and sell off whatever still has life in it. I had driven past yards like that a thousand times without ever really seeing them. Fields of quiet cars sitting in rows, doors open like they were still breathing, waiting.

I went on a Tuesday. I spent the whole day there, and I am not exaggerating. The man at the front let me walk the Scrap Yard on my own once he saw I knew a little about what I was looking for and would not hurt myself. Row after row of vehicles, some crumpled from accidents, some just tired out the way I was starting to feel. I walked those rows the way I walk my lands in the early morning, slowly, looking, touching. There is a smell to a place like that. Old rubber and rust and spilled diesel baked into the ground. It is not an unpleasant smell to a man who has spent his life around machines. It smells like second chances.

I found three Hiluxes of my vintage. I stood in front of the first one for a long time before I understood I was not really looking at the truck. I was looking for a heart I could put in mine.

Learning to read a used engine

I did not know as much as I pretended to. Petrus had given me a short lesson at his kitchen table the night before, drawing on the back of a feed invoice, and now I was trying to remember it with grease already working its way under my fingernails.

The first thing, he said, is the oil. Pull the dipstick and look. If the oil is the colour of milky coffee, walk away, because water has been getting into places water should never be. If you can rub it between your fingers and feel grit, walk away. I checked, and I learned to tell the difference between honest dirt and the kind that means trouble.

The second thing is the turning. A good engine still turns freely by hand if you can get a spanner on the crankshaft. Mine at home would not move at all, that was the whole tragedy. On the second Hilux the crank came around smooth and even, no catching, no horrible grinding, and I felt something lift in my chest.

The third thing is the story of the vehicle around it. You look at the whole animal to judge the heart. A cab that was cared for, seats not too torn, a service book if you are lucky, these tell you the owner was the sort who checked his oil on the Klip road when he should have. The man running the yard talked me through the Engines for sale without any hurry, letting me take my time, answering when I asked and staying quiet when I was thinking. He did not push me toward the dearest one. He let the engine make its own case.

By late afternoon I had chosen. It was not the prettiest of them, but it turned true and the oil was clean and honest, and the price was something I could carry. Among all the used engines in that place, this was the one I trusted to get me through harvest and, God willing, a good few seasons after.

Grease, and the pride of keeping a thing alive

Petrus and I did the swap ourselves over three long days in my shed, with a chain hoist thrown over the rafter and a work light hanging from a fencing wire. My back told me every hour that I was no longer thirty. We dropped the seized lump out and it hit the concrete like a dead thing, and we lowered the new heart into the same bay where the old one had lived for thirty years.

When she started, she started rough, coughed twice, and then settled into that steady diesel mutter I have heard my whole life. I stood in the doorway of the shed with my hands black to the wrist and I will admit my eyes stung a little, and it was not the diesel.

I got the last of the harvest in with a week to spare. Every load I hauled up the Klip road after that, I listened to her run and felt a pride I cannot quite explain to a man who has only ever bought things new. There is something in keeping an old thing alive with your own hands. She is not worth much to anyone but me. To me she is worth everything, and she is breathing still.