Page 42 - Fourways Gardens August 2021

Humour

a hiKer’s guiDe to Bartering

B y Jam ES Clark E

I Thus I found myself with a hiking group It made me realise that had I indeed been
bumped into an old friend the other
day whom I had last seen years ago at
incarcerated in Siberia, I am the sort whose
near the Golden Gate walking in valleys
crisp with frost. We slept the first night in a
indomitable and enterprising spirit would
a formal dinner of the Johannesburg
Hiking Club. I had, at the time, just
had a book published - Survival in the spartan 10-bunk hut that reminded me of have enabled him to barter things and so
secretly build a turbo-assisted Snowmobile,
a Siberian forced labour camp - especially
Outdoors which had an ‘errata’ note glued in the frigid half-light of dawn with all the with power-steering and stereo, and escape
onto the title page to make sure it would balaclavaed heads sticking out of sleeping to St Tropez.
not fall out before the reader saw it. bags.
A problem when hiking is that one often
The errata had advised readers to ignore They had laughed at my old-fashioned meets up with Germans named Schultz,
my advice on page 45 which explained backpack saying it was not for grown-ups Wolfgang, Ingrid and Brunhilde. Not that
how to follow the compass point while and one of them said I was carrying far too I dislike Germans - quite the contrary. The
travelling north from South Africa. I much for a two-day hike. They persuaded problem is they hike with far too much
advised them to travel 20 degrees west of me to leave behind several items including enthusiasm.
true north whereas I had meant to write my monogrammed serviette ring, my
“travel 20 degrees east of true north”. CD player and a small generator. I was They stride ahead and then wait, patiently
A hiking party heading say, for central restricted to carrying minimum rations - six enough, for you to catch up sobbing for
Zimbabwe, would end up lost in the chicken drumsticks, six pork chops, a steak, breath and coughing blood. And they say,
Kalahari and having to eat each other, if potatoes, onions, chocolate, jelly babies, jovially, “Ha! You made it, ja?”
they followed my advice. nuts and raisins.
Then, refreshed as they are by schnapps
It was a memorable evening because Hikers generally share nothing because, as and crappenworst, they immediately stride
hikers are an educated and interesting somebody explained, “What if the person on expecting you to follow when all you
bunch and when formally dressed are often who was to have brought the drinks or can do is lie face down in the grass sniffling
indistinguishable from normal people. the fire-lighters doesn’t pitch? We rely on and groaning.
With a brilliant touch of originality, the nobody but ourselves.”
pre-prandial drinks were served against a (It was St Christopher, I think, who said,
background of recorded bushveld sounds. “Show me a man crying in the wilderness
and I will show you a hiker who’s forgotten
I recall a Free State hike in which I took the refreshments.”)
part just after I became my own boss after
years as a newspaperman. I was fretting In fact I really had forgotten to bring
because my spellcheck was down and I something serious in the way of anti-freeze
was writing a book with some long words. to drink around the campfire. But I soon
I needed a break so I said to my new boss, discovered that, among hikers, four squares
“I’ve worked for a whole week, Sir, and I of chocolate are worth one beverage. So are
now need to get away to self-actualise.” eight jelly babies. And after a tough walk
“Try the Free State,” he said. I find hikers crave things for which 4-year-
“You are too kind,” I said. olds throw tantrums in supermarkets.

Fourways Gardens • 40 • August 2021