To the mountains

Enveloped by the Swartberg on the farm where her son was getting married, Juliana Coetzer realised how mountains and their healing energy have supported her throughout her life.

- DIEK GROBLER

The last sentence spoken in A River Runs Through It, the 1992 film based on the autobiographical novella of the same name by Norman Maclean, is a seminal line from a seminal text: "I am haunted by waters." The main character, Norman, means this metaphorically as he casts his line into the river where the trout swim. Water flows through all his memories - the good and the bad.

Mountains are like that for me.

I grew up in Springbok in the Northern Cape, where our house stood at the foot of a mountain. Well, to a child that rocky koppie was a mountain. A group of us kids from the neighbourhood would spend spring afternoons running along its paths among the Namaqualand daisies, and playing hide and seek behind boulders.

The neighbours' daughter and I walked home from school together, and when it had rained, we would head right past Tannie Koesie's house, up to the mountain. There, we would sit on our haunches and slide down flat slabs of rock, wet with rivulets of water. Many pairs of school shoes later, until deep into my high-school years, I still performed this ritual.

When my children were little, I took them to show them this place, but my legs would no longer fold like a pocket knife. There, sitting on a flat rock, I told them about the family farm, Goegab, and how my mother and her sisters would spread cooked quince paste on flat rocks. Once it was dry and sticky, they'd roll it up neatly, then Oupa would use his pocket knife to slice the rolls into thin strips. These were their sweets.