The Grid Squares That Taught Me to Sleep Where the Birds Wake Up

Columns of numbers, then columns of birds

For thirty-one years I balanced other people's books in an office on Du Toitspan Road. I was good at it in the quiet way bookkeepers are good at things. When I retired, my husband Gerrit joked that I would start auditing the garden. He was not entirely wrong.

Gerrit died in the winter of my second year of retirement. A heart attack in the queue at the bank, of all places, which he would have found funny if it had happened to someone else. After the funeral the house became very loud with nothing. I could hear the fridge. I could hear the clock in the passage that he wound every Sunday, until I forgot to wind it.

A woman from church, Anna-Marie, took me out to the Kamfers Dam one Saturday to look at the flamingos. She had a pair of binoculars and a phone with an app on it, and she was typing in everything she saw. "It is called atlasing," she told me. "You choose a pentad, you record every species you find in it, and the data goes into the national bird map."

A pentad, she explained, is a grid square of five minutes of latitude by five minutes of longitude. The whole country is cut into them. Some, near the cities, have been visited hundreds of times. Others, out in the Northern Cape, have never been visited at all. On the map they show up as blank, uncounted squares.

I am a bookkeeper. You show me a ledger with empty columns and something in me sits up straight.

The problem of the two hour drive

The rules are simple and strict, which I liked. A full protocol card needs at least two hours of birding inside the pentad, and you record species in the order you find them. So the morning matters. Birds are loudest and busiest in the first hour after sunrise. Arrive at ten and you get a quiet veld.

My problem was geography. The blank squares I wanted were the ones nobody else wanted, out past Prieska, up towards Kakamas, down long gravel roads off the R357 where the nearest guesthouse was ninety kilometres away. I would sleep in a town, set my alarm for half past three, drive in the dark with kudu staring at me from the verges, and still arrive with the sun already well up and the chorus finished.

I tried sleeping in the cab of Gerrit's old Hilux double cab. Once. I woke at two with a crick in my neck that lasted a week and a black-backed jackal sniffing at the tyre, and I decided I was too old to curl up across a gear lever. A ground tent was the next idea, but I am not a woman who enjoys a scorpion in her shoe, and the ground out there is all stones and thorn.

A conversation at a Postmasburg petrol station

The answer came from a stranger. I was filling up in Postmasburg when a young couple pulled in with a tent folded on the roof of their car, a hard shell like a flat suitcase. I asked them, because at fifty-eight you stop being embarrassed to ask strangers things, what on earth that was. The young man showed me how it opened.

That night in my guesthouse I lay awake doing research instead of sleeping. I read about Rooftop Tents and roof racks and load ratings, and I made a column in my notebook for weight, a column for price, and a column titled "Can I open it alone?" That last column decided everything. I am five foot two.

It took me three months to decide, which is quick for me. My son in Bloemfontein thought I had lost my mind. "Ma, you are going to sleep on the roof of a bakkie in the middle of nowhere?"

The first night on the roof

The first time I used it properly was a pentad near Vanwyksvlei, a square that had never had a single full card submitted. I arrived at about four in the afternoon, parked on a stretch of hard ground beside a farm track with permission from the farmer. I opened the tent, climbed the ladder with my flask and my notebook, and sat in the doorway while the light went pink and then went out.

I did not sleep much. Not from fear, but because there was too much to listen to. A spotted eagle-owl calling somewhere behind me. The wind moving through the driedoring. I lay there with my heart going and thought, this is the most alive I have felt since the bank.

At ten past five the first bird started. A rufous-eared warbler, I think, though in the dark it was only a thin bright trill. I unzipped the flap, sat with my binoculars and my phone, and started the card while I was still in my sleeping bag. I recorded forty-one species in that pentad before nine o'clock, and twenty of them in the first half hour. I have never been so pleased with a column of figures in my life.

What I tell the women at church

I have done thirty-eight blank pentads now. My name is on the map in places I could not have found on a road atlas three years ago.

Some of the women at church ask me about the tent, because a widow on a roof is the sort of thing people talk about. One of them, Lettie, wanted to do the same with her grandson in the Kgalagadi. I told her honestly that the best thing is to look at Roof Top Tents for Cars that suit what she actually drives, and check that her roof can take it, because a small hatchback is not a Hilux. I told her to practise opening it in her own driveway first, the way I did.

I told her the other thing too, which nobody told me. That the tent is not really the point. The point is being where you need to be when the thing you love begins. For me that is the dawn. For Lettie it is a twelve-year-old boy who will not be twelve for long.

The ledger balances, more or less

I still wind Gerrit's clock on Sundays now. I started again the week after Vanwyksvlei. I finally had mornings worth keeping time for.

Last month a young man from the bird club in Upington messaged me. He had seen my cards on the atlas and wanted to know how I managed to get such early lists in such remote squares. I sent him a photo of the Hilux parked under a camel thorn with the tent open, and he wrote back three exclamation marks. A week later he sent me a link to Rooftop Tents For Sale with a question mark, asking whether I thought a student could save up for one. I told him to start a separate savings column and not touch it. Bookkeeper's advice. It is the only kind I have.

There are still hundreds of blank squares on the Northern Cape map. I have a printout of them on my fridge, with the ones I have done shaded in pencil. Some evenings I study it like a trial balance. Gerrit would laugh. I keep his side of the mattress free, mostly out of habit, partly for the flask and the field guide.