The Night the Groundsheet Won and I Finally Looked Up

The wet night that broke me

I am fifty two years old, and for most of my life I have believed that a proper night in the veld happens on the ground, with a thin foam mat, a sleeping bag that smells faintly of every fire it has ever sat next to, and a tent that you swear at while you peg it in the wind. I grew up like that. My father camped like that. When I was young I could sleep on gravel and wake up whistling. That was the deal I made with myself, and I was too proud to admit the deal had quietly expired.

The night it all fell apart was in the Cederberg, after a day of fishing that had not really been about fishing at all. My mate Wynand and I had gone up for the quiet, more than the fish. We took my old Hilux, the one with two hundred and something thousand kilometres on it and a bakkie bin that has carried everything from cement to a dead kudu. We found a spot near a stream, the rooibos country stretching away in that grey green way it does, the rocks going orange as the sun dropped behind them. It was beautiful. I want to be clear about that, because what happened next was not the fault of the place.

It rained. Not a soft romantic drizzle either, but a proper Cederberg dumping that came sideways and found every weakness in my old tent. By two in the morning the groundsheet was not a barrier anymore, it was a shallow dam. I could feel the cold pushing up through the foam and into my hip, then into my lower back, that same lower back that a physio in Paarl once described, kindly, as having the discs of a man ten years older. I lay there in the dark listening to Wynand snore like a diesel engine, and I did the thing I had refused to do for years. I admitted that I was miserable.

Getting up in the morning like an old dog

Morning did not help my case. When the light came I tried to stand and my body simply refused for a moment. I got up the way an old dog gets off a cold stoep, one part at a time, testing each joint before trusting it with weight. My back had locked somewhere in the night and it took a full mug of coffee and a slow walk to the stream before I could straighten properly. Wynand, who is a year older than me and built like a fence post, watched me over his tin cup and said nothing, which is how you know a friend really pities you.

I remember standing at that stream, boots in the cold water, and feeling something that was not quite anger and not quite sadness. It was the feeling of a door closing. I thought, this is it, this is where camping ends for me. From now on it is guesthouses and B and Bs and paying too much for a room with a kettle and a picture of a wine farm on the wall. I love the veld, but the veld had started to hurt, and I could not see a way around the ground itself. The ground was the problem. The ground was always going to be there, cold and hard and wet, waiting for my hip.

On the drive home, winding down Uitkyk Pass with the gravel ticking against the underbody, Wynand said the thing that changed everything. He said, why are you still sleeping on the floor like a laaitie. Put a tent on the roof, man. My cousin has one. You climb a ladder and you sleep up in the air on an actual mattress. I laughed at him. I said that sounded like something for soft people with new Land Cruisers and stickers of their family on the back window. He shrugged and let it go. But it had lodged in me, the way a small stone gets into your boot and you keep walking on it anyway.

Swallowing my pride at the kitchen table

For about two weeks I did nothing except think about it. Pride is a strange thing in a man my age. It tells you that changing how you do something is the same as admitting you are getting old, and admitting you are getting old feels like standing at the top of a slope you cannot climb back up. But my back kept reminding me who was actually in charge, and one wet Sunday I sat at the kitchen table with the laptop and started reading about Rooftop Tents like a man doing something slightly shameful.

I read for hours. I looked at how they fold out, how they mount onto a rack, how the ladder works, how people set them up on everything from little hatchbacks to bakkies far older than mine. I fell down a hole of forum posts written by South Africans arguing about Kgalagadi campsites and which passes you can and cannot do with a heavy load up top. My wife walked past twice, raised an eyebrow, and made me tea without saying a word, which in twenty six years of marriage I have learned means she approves but will not give me the satisfaction. Somewhere in all that reading, the shame drained out of it and plain curiosity took its place. I stopped seeing it as giving up and started seeing it as staying in the game.

I measured the old Hilux roof. I worked out the weight, the height it would add, whether the gravel roads I love would shake it loose. I read about mounting a proper rack, and I went and looked properly at Roof Top Tents for Cars so I could understand what fits an older bakkie and what does not. I am not a wealthy man and this was not a small decision, so I did it the way my father taught me to do everything, slowly and with a notebook. By the time I had made up my mind I had a page of figures and a quiet, growing excitement I had not felt about camping in a long time.

The first pass, sleeping in the air

The first real trip was up into the Karoo, out past Sutherland where the sky at night is so full of stars it looks fake. I took the long way, up a mountain pass I had always driven past because I told myself my back could not handle the camping at the top. The bakkie felt different with the weight up high, a little more sway on the corners, so I drove slower, and honestly driving slower up a Karoo pass in the late afternoon is no punishment at all. The Karoo does something to time. It stretches it. The kilometres go by in that endless khaki and grey, the koppies flat topped and patient, a single windpomp turning somewhere far off.

I found a flat spot near the top with a view that went on for what must have been eighty kilometres. And then came the moment I had been quietly nervous about. I unclipped the cover, unfolded the tent, dropped the ladder, and the whole thing was standing before the kettle had even boiled. No dam of a groundsheet. No wrestling poles in the wind. When it got dark I climbed up that ladder, which my back did not love but tolerated, and I lay down on a real mattress with my head near the height of the bakkie roof, and I felt the cold ground somewhere far below me and no longer any of my business.

I slept. That is the whole miracle of it. I slept the way I had not slept in the veld for years, and when I woke the Karoo was pink and enormous and my back was not locked. I climbed down slowly, made coffee, and stood there feeling something I had genuinely thought I had lost. It was not the tent that gave it back, not really. It was the stubbornness finally bending the right way, deciding that staying out here mattered more than proving I could still take the punishment. Wynand phoned me that week to gloat and I let him, because he was right. I have since spent an embarrassing number of evenings looking at Rooftop Tents For Sale and planning a Kgalagadi run for the spring, red dust and all. The ground and I have made our peace. I visit it now. I just do not sleep on it anymore.