The Morning My Knees Voted Against Me

The dawn I nearly quit

There is a particular sound a man in his early sixties makes when he tries to get up off a ground mattress at half past four in the morning. It is not a word. It is more of a low, negotiating groan, the sort of noise you might hear from a diesel bakkie that has been left out in the cold and would rather not start today. I made that sound in the Kruger, at Satara, on a July morning so crisp that the inside of the tent flap had gone stiff, and my wife Marina, who was already up and had the kettle whispering on the gas, did not even turn around. She just said, without any particular sympathy, "Take your time, Bruce."

Taking my time was not a choice. It was the only setting I had left.

I had been sleeping on the ground under canvas since I was a boy at Nagle Dam, and I had done it happily for five decades. But somewhere in my late fifties my back and my knees held a private meeting and decided, without consulting me, that the ground and I were no longer on speaking terms. The problem was never the night. Lying down was fine. The problem was the morning. Getting from flat on the floor to upright had become a three-stage operation involving a rolled onto the side, then a shove up onto all fours, then a long pause on the hands and knees while I waited to see whether my body would agree to the final part of the plan.

That morning at Satara, on all fours in the half dark, with a hip that had gone somewhere private and painful, I genuinely thought, this is it. This is the last one. I am too old for this, and I should sell the gear and take Marina to a nice lodge with a bed and a shower and a man who brings coffee.

I did not say any of that out loud. But she heard it anyway, because forty years of marriage means she can hear the things you do not say.

The argument in the kitchen

The argument, when we had it back home in Pietermaritzburg, was not the argument I expected.

I was ready to be brave and mournful. I had rehearsed a small speech about how a man must know when to hang up his boots, delivered with the tragic dignity of a Springbok captain retiring. I was going to be very gracious about giving up the thing I loved most in the world so that I would not slow her down.

Marina listened to about a third of it, put down her tea, and said, "So you want to stop camping because getting up off the floor is sore."

"It is not just sore," I said. "It is undignified."

"Bruce," she said, "you have never been dignified. You once got stuck in a camp chair at Mabuasehube and three Germans had to help. This is not about dignity. You just do not want to sleep on the floor anymore. So do not sleep on the floor."

I said something about how tents go on the ground, that is the nature of tents, that is where they have always gone, and she gave me the look. If you are married you know the look. It is the one that means you are being an idiot in a way that is almost charming but mostly just tiring.

Then she went and got the laptop.

The thing on the roof of the Terios

I should explain that I am not a man who takes to new equipment. I resisted GPS for years on the grounds that I had a map and a sense of direction, both of which had let me down repeatedly and neither of which I was willing to abandon. So when Marina started reading me things off the internet about tents that fold out on top of your vehicle, I was skeptical in the way I am skeptical about most things invented after 1994.

But she kept at it. She had gone looking, that evening, for the whole idea of Roof Top Tents for Cars, because a couple we knew from the caravan club had mentioned they had switched to one and never looked back. And the more she read the specifics out to me, the more one stubborn fact worked its way past my resistance. You do not get down onto the ground. You climb a ladder, you get in, you sleep up in the air, and in the morning you come down the ladder facing the rungs, hands and feet, like coming down out of a tree. No crawling. No three-stage negotiation with a hip. Just a ladder, which my knees, whatever else they had turned against, could still manage.

I was quiet for a while. Marina, who knows when to stop pushing, went to bed.

I sat there a bit longer, looking at pictures, thinking about all the mornings.

Learning to climb into bed at my age

We did not rush it. I am not going to pretend there was a dramatic moment where I was suddenly a new man. There was a fair amount of standing in the driveway in Pietermaritzburg swearing gently at straps, and a memorable first attempt at folding the thing away that took the two of us the better part of forty minutes and one genuinely unkind exchange about whose fault the twisted cover was. Neither of us was right. It is never anybody's fault with a folded cover. It is just canvas being canvas.

The ladder took getting used to. The first night I went up it far too carefully, like a man defusing something, and Marina stood at the bottom giving helpful commentary that I will not repeat here. But by the third night I was going up it without thinking, and here is the thing nobody had told me. Sleeping up there is different. You are off the cold ground, so the July chill does not seep up into your bones the way it always had. You are up in the sound of things. At Satara, the second time we went, I lay up there and listened to lions somewhere out past the fence doing that long groaning call they do, and I did not have to steel myself for the morning, because the morning no longer meant the floor.

I came down that ladder at first light, facing the rungs, slow and sure, and I stood on the ground next to the vehicle with coffee in my hand feeling something I had genuinely thought was gone. Not youth. I am not an idiot. Just the ordinary uncomplicated pleasure of being somewhere wild and being able to stay.

The Kgalagadi again, at our age

The real test was the Kgalagadi. We had always loved the Kgalagadi more than anywhere, those long red roads and the space that makes you feel pleasantly small, but it is far and it is rough and I had privately filed it under things we used to do. The distances between camps are not kind to a body that struggles in the mornings.

We went back the winter after Satara. Nossob, Mata Mata, the transfrontier roads with the oryx standing on the dunes like they were posing for a stamp. And every night the same simple mercy. Up the ladder, into bed, up in the air with the whole cold clean sky doing its business overhead. Every morning, down the ladder, no groaning, no negotiating, no three Germans required.

Marina caught me one evening at Mata Mata just standing next to the vehicle looking up at the folded-out tent with what she later described as a soppy expression. "You are looking at that thing like it is a grandchild," she said.

"It gave me back the Kgalagadi," I said.

She did not argue with that.

What I would say to the other stubborn old men

I have become, to my own considerable surprise, one of those people who talks about this. At the caravan club, at braais, to anyone roughly my age who mentions that their back is not what it was and they are thinking of packing it in. I never expected to be the man banging on about a change in equipment. I was the map-and-sense-of-direction man. But I have watched too many friends give up the bushveld for the wrong reason, which is not that they stopped loving it but that the getting up in the morning got humiliating and nobody told them there was another way to sleep.

I looked, once, purely out of curiosity, at what was out there in the way of Rooftop Tents For Sale, just to see how the whole business had grown since we jumped, and it turns out half the country has quietly worked out the same thing we did. Good. There are a lot of stubborn old backs in South Africa, and a lot of stubborn old men attached to them, and the bushveld is better with all of us still in it.

The thing I want to say, really, is that giving up the thing you love because your body has filed a complaint is a bigger decision than it looks, and you should not make it in the dark on your hands and knees at half past four in the morning. I nearly made it there. I nearly sold everything and booked the nice lodge and spent my sixties being brought coffee by a stranger, mourning a thing I could still have had.

What saved me was partly luck, partly a wife who does not let me be tragic when I am only being lazy, and partly the plain fact that Rooftop Tents exist and that a ladder, unlike a ground mattress, does not require you to crawl. That is all it was. A change in the height at which I sleep.

Marina and I are booked for Kruger again in June. Lower Sabie this time. My knees still hold their meetings without inviting me, and my back still has its opinions, and I still make the diesel-bakkie sound getting out of an ordinary chair. But I no longer make it in the morning under canvas, because in the morning under canvas I am up in the air, and all I have to do is come down the ladder, slowly, facing the rungs, into another day I very nearly talked myself out of.

Take your time, Bruce. I do now. And I am still out here.