The Night I Climbed a Ladder to Bed in the Middle of the Karoo

Starting over at the wrong age for it

I was fifty-one when my marriage ended, which everyone agrees is the wrong age to start over, though nobody can tell you the right one. For thirty years I had been half of something, and when that half fell away I discovered I did not actually know how to be alone, not the deep kind of alone where there is no one in the next room to call out to. The house was too quiet. My friends were kind but had their own lives. My grown son lived in another province and phoned on Sundays.

What I did have was a camera, and a very old affection for the open country, and a battered bakkie that my husband had not wanted in the divorce because it had too many kilometres on it. I had always loved photographing birds and animals, in an amateur, happy way, on the few trips we had ever taken. In the raw months after the split I found that the only hours I felt fully myself were the hours behind a lens, waiting for something wild to do something worth remembering.

So I made myself a promise that sounded ridiculous even as I made it. I was going to take myself, alone, into the Karoo and the dry country up towards the Kalahari, and I was going to photograph whatever I found, and I was going to learn to be alone out loud, under a sky with no neighbours in it.

The problem with being a woman alone in a tent

The first few trips I slept in a small ground tent, and I will tell you honestly, I barely slept at all. It was not the animals, mostly. It was the vulnerability of lying at ground level in the dark, a zip away from everything, listening to every sound the night makes and inventing a few extra. A woman alone learns a particular kind of alertness that men mostly do not have to carry, and that alertness does not switch off just because the view is beautiful. I would lie there rigid until the first grey light, then photograph beautifully, then be a wreck by afternoon from no sleep.

I nearly gave the whole idea up. I remember sitting at a campsite near Beaufort West, red eyed and furious with myself, thinking that maybe everyone was right and this was a foolish thing for a woman my age to be doing on her own.

It was an older couple at that campsite who changed everything. They were retired, endlessly cheerful, and they slept in one of those tents that folds out on top of the vehicle. The wife saw me eyeing it over my coffee and simply said, come, have a look. I climbed their ladder and sat in their little canvas room up in the air, and something in my chest unknotted. Up here, she said, the snakes and the scorpions and the nonsense all stay down there. Up here is yours.

Learning a whole new way to sleep outdoors

I came home from that trip and fell down a very deep hole of research, because that is what I do when an idea grips me. I had no idea there was a whole world of Rooftop Tents out there, in all shapes and systems, soft shells that fold out and hard shells that pop up, each with its devotees arguing happily on the forums at all hours. I read until my eyes ached. I learned words I had never needed before, about load ratings and mounting rails and whether my tired old bakkie could even carry the weight.

That last part worried me, because mine really is an old vehicle, and I did not want to spend money I did not have on something that would not even fit. I spent a long time specifically looking into Roof Top Tents for Cars and bakkies like mine, working out what my roof could actually take and what made sense for one not very strong woman to open and close on her own at the end of a long day. Because that was the real test. It had to be something I, alone, with my dodgy shoulder, could set up without a man and without a crisis.

The purchase I agonised over

I am not a woman who spends money lightly, especially not newly single money. I went back and forth for weeks. I looked at every option I could find, compared the Rooftop Tents For Sale across what felt like the entire internet, read reviews until I could recite them, and generally drove my patient sister up the wall asking her opinion on things she knew nothing about. In the end I chose a model that one person could open, that would sit on my existing roof rails, and that did not cost more than my pride could bear.

When it was finally fitted and the bakkie sat in my driveway with this strange new box on its roof, I felt a flutter of something I had not felt in a long time. Not happiness exactly. Capability. The sense of a woman assembling the tools of her own independence, one careful decision at a time.

The night everything changed

My first proper trip with it, I drove deep into the dry country, further than I had been brave enough to go before. I found a quiet campsite with almost no one else there, and as the light went gold and then red over the scrub, I set the tent up by myself, no drama, no crisis, just me and a ladder and a canvas room rising into the evening air.

I made my supper on a little gas burner. I sat out until the stars came, and the Karoo gives you stars like nowhere else, a whole roaring silent sky of them. And then, when I was ready, I climbed my own ladder to my own bed, up above the ground, and I zipped myself in.

And I slept. That is the whole miracle of it. I slept, deeply, for the first time on any of these trips. The old ground level fear simply was not there, up in the air with the sky right outside the canvas. Some time in the dark I half woke to the sound of something large moving through the camp, hooves and heavy breath, probably a gemsbok or an eland passing through, and instead of lying rigid with terror I just listened, warm and safe and above it all, and drifted off again. In the morning there were tracks right beside where I had parked, and I photographed them with my coffee going cold, grinning like a fool at nobody.

What I actually found out there

I have slept up on that roof across half the country now. I have photographed birds at waterholes at dawn, and a leopard once, just for a second, that no one believes me about because I was too stunned to lift the camera. I have met other solo travellers, more of us than you would think, women my age and older, out there learning the same lesson in canvas rooms above their vehicles.

The lesson, in case you were wondering, was never really about photography, and it was never really about the tent. It was that I had spent thirty years believing I could not do things alone, and it turned out that belief was just a story, and you can put a story down the same way you climb a ladder, one rung at a time. The thing that got me sleeping again was not courage arriving all at once. It was a practical decision about where to put my bed.

My son still worries. He phones on Sundays and asks where I am, and I tell him the name of some dry town he has never heard of, and I can hear him deciding not to say anything about a woman my age. But last Sunday he asked, a little shyly, whether I would take him with me sometime, and whether the tent was big enough for two. I told him it was. I did not tell him he would have to climb the ladder himself. Some lessons a mother keeps for later.