The Ladder on the Roof and the Boys Who Forgot to Complain

The two years I do not talk about much

I am forty-six. For most of the last twenty of those years I have lived in Kempton Park, near enough to the airport that you stop hearing the planes after a while, the way you stop hearing your own worries until they get very loud. The last two years got very loud. Without going into all of it, there was a retrenchment I did not see coming, a marriage that thinned out slowly and then quickly, and a stretch of months where the most adventurous thing I did was drive to the same Spar for the same bread and stand in the same queue thinking about nothing.

My two boys, Sipho and Werner, were fifteen and seventeen through all of it. They are not really my two boys in the neat way that phrase suggests. Werner is my son by blood and Sipho came to us at eight when his mother, my late wife's sister, could no longer manage, and somewhere in the years after that the word "nephew" quietly fell away and never came back. They are brothers now in the way that matters, which is that they argue about the aux cable and defend each other to teachers.

By last winter the three of us had become good at sharing a house and bad at sharing a life. Everyone in their own room. Everyone on their own screen. I would make supper and we would eat it in a silence that was not angry, just empty, and then everyone would drift off again. I do not think I noticed how far we had drifted until I saw a photo of us from four years back, all sunburnt at Hartbeespoort, laughing at something I can no longer remember, and I felt like I was looking at another family.

A decision made at a braai I did not want to attend

The idea did not come from me. It came from my brother-in-law Deon at a braai in Benoni where I had gone mostly so nobody would phone to ask why I had not gone. Deon has one of those overlanding setups, the kind with the drawers in the back and the awning that unfolds, and he was going on about a trip he had taken to the Cederberg. I was half listening, holding a beer I did not want, when he said something that lodged in me.

"You do not need all my kit, man," he said. "You have a bakkie. Put a place to sleep on top of it and go. The kids will moan for the first hour and then they will never shut up about it."

I drove home turning it over. I have a fifteen-year-old double cab, high mileage, a few dents that tell honest stories. The thought of it carrying us somewhere, of it being useful again the way I wanted to be useful again, would not leave me alone. That week, when I should have been sleeping, I fell down the usual late-night hole of reading and comparing, the way you do, ending up on a page about Roof Top Tents for Cars and reading the whole thing twice at half past midnight. I did not tell the boys. I was not sure I would go through with it, and I did not want to see the look on their faces if I backed out.

Bolting a bedroom onto a bakkie

I did go through with it. What arrived was heavier and more serious than the pictures made it look, a folded slab of canvas and frame that took me and a neighbour to lift. Mounting it onto the roof bars of the double cab took most of a Saturday, two trips to the hardware shop for the right size spanner, and a level of swearing I am not proud of within earshot of the boys.

Werner wandered out halfway through, arms folded, doing the thing where he pretends he is only mildly curious.

"What is it," he said. Not really a question.

"It is where you are sleeping in three weeks," I said.

He did not answer, but he did not go back inside either. He held the ladder end while I fed the last bolt through, and Sipho came out too, and for about an hour the three of us stood in the driveway working out how the thing opened and closed, the two of them reading the little booklet out loud in silly voices. I am not going to overstate it. It was one hour. But it was the first hour in a long time that we had all been pointed at the same thing.

The Karoo takes its time

We left on a Friday afternoon in June for the long haul down the N1, which is a mistake I would happily make again. The Karoo does not rush you. The land goes flat and enormous and the towns come far apart, Colesberg, Richmond, that particular Karoo light in the late afternoon that turns everything the colour of weak tea. The boys were on their phones until the signal died somewhere past Three Sisters, and then, having no choice, they looked out of the window, and then, slowly, they started talking. Real talking. Werner told me about a girl. Sipho told me he wants to study engineering, which I did not know.

We reached the little farm campsite outside Beaufort West at dusk, which is the worst possible time to be setting up a thing you have never set up in the wild. In the driveway at home it had gone smoothly. In the failing light, on uneven ground, with cold coming down fast the way it does in the Karoo in winter, I fumbled it badly. I could not find the catch. The ladder would not seat. I dropped the torch and the batteries rolled under the bakkie and Sipho had to lie in the dust to fetch them. I heard myself getting sharp and made myself stop.

And then Werner, of all of them the one who complains most, started laughing. Not at me exactly. At all of it. At the three of us in the dark wrestling a bed onto a roof in the middle of nowhere while a farm dog watched us with open contempt. And the laugh was so genuine that Sipho caught it and then I caught it, and somehow with all three of us laughing the catch found itself and the frame swung open and there it was, a canvas room floating above the bakkie with the whole Karoo sky coming out above it.

Stars, and a boy who went quiet

I have seen stars before. Everyone from Gauteng has driven far enough to see proper stars. But I had not lain on my back on the roof of my own bakkie with both my boys wedged in beside me, all three of us too wide to fit comfortably, complaining about elbows, going quiet one by one as the sky filled in. No town glow. The Milky Way like someone had dragged a thumb of chalk across the black. Sipho, who at fifteen has opinions about everything, said nothing at all for a long time and then said, softly, "It is so much." That was it. That was the whole review. It is so much.

We froze that night, honestly. I had underpacked the blankets. But we were the good kind of cold, the kind you laugh about, the three of us packed in like tinned fish for warmth.

The flat tyre and the coffee that fixed it

The trip nearly turned on the way to the Kgalagadi. Somewhere on the gravel approach, in the heat, we caught something sharp and the back left went down with a hiss you feel in your stomach when you are far from anywhere. Old me, the me of the last two years, would have taken that flat tyre as proof that I ruin things. But the boys were already out, already jacking, already arguing about the right way to loosen the nuts, and I stood back and let them, and I realised the trip had been quietly teaching them to handle a bad moment without waiting for me to fix it. We changed it in twenty minutes, filthy and pleased with ourselves.

It was somewhere in that stretch, having coffee on the tailgate while the shadows went long, that I properly understood what the thing on the roof had bought me. It was not the tent. It was the excuse. Reading later about other families and their Rooftop Tents, I saw the same story again and again, people using a bit of canvas as a reason to be somewhere together with nothing else to do. That was us now.

What the mornings gave back

The best part was never the night. It was the morning. I would wake before the boys, climb down the ladder while they slept on, and get the little gas burner going for coffee in the enormous quiet. Sunrise in the Kgalagadi comes up red and slow and the birds start and a jackal might trot past like it owns the road, which it does. I would stand there with a warm mug and my hands going pink in the cold and I would feel, for the first time in a long time, like a man who was exactly where he was supposed to be.

The boys would surface eventually, hair mad, blinking, and we would sit on the tailgate and drink coffee too strong for them and plan the day badly. We went back home changed. Not fixed, nothing is fixed in one trip, but pointed the right way. We have done four trips since, and I have become one of those insufferable men who reads about camping in the evenings and lingers over pages of Rooftop Tents For Sale the way other men look at boats they will never buy.

I do not talk much about the two rough years. But I will talk your ear off about the Karoo at dusk and a ladder on a roof and two teenagers who forgot, for a while, to complain.