I know the Eerste River path well — at running pace. On a good morning I go past the sculptures along it without slowing, eyes on the path, mind on my splits. I could have told you there was art there. I could not have told you what any of it was.
Then I tore the ATFL ligament in my ankle, the small one on the outside that takes the blame for so many rolled ankles. Running is off for a while. Walking, slowly and carefully, is on. So one spring morning, instead of sulking about the run I could not do, I went back to the same path on my own and walked it, with no watch to beat and nowhere to be.
A river with a story
I started at the Krige Street end, near Markotter, with a coffee from the container café. Standing on the bridge I remembered something I had read and never really thought about: on 8 November 1679 Simon van der Stel and his party camped on a little island in this river, in a valley of fine trees, and named the place after himself and the forest: Stel’s bosch. The river was simply the “Eerste” — the first river the Dutch came upon after leaving the Cape. I had been running over the town’s first chapter for years without once looking down.
One mile, six bridges
The Stellenbosch Art Mile runs for 1.6 kilometres from the pedestrian bridge at Krige Street to the Coetzenburg bridge, crossing the river six times. It is an outdoor gallery, free and open day and night, built by the town’s sculpture trust, the trail fund, the university and the municipality together, with a new exhibition each year. The one on show was called Reflect: Beyond the Surface, and its idea stayed with me all morning: that reflection is not only a mirror, but an act of attention.
Attention was exactly what my ankle had handed back to me. Ledelle Moe’s Exploded Geographies IV hangs in pieces of concrete and steel, and its shadows on the path move as the sun moves; I had run through those shadows a hundred times. A little further, Nina Kruger’s Shifting Shadows is made from eucalyptus gum nuts — thousands of them, each one drilled by hand — the kind of thing I kick aside on every trail in the Boland. Here they were, catching the light.
Then the playful ones. Speel Speel!, from John de Jager’s studio, is a game of noughts and crosses carved in serpentine stone and Paarl granite; I played a round against myself and, for once, nobody beat me. Dr Rose Namubiru Kirumira’s Serenity turns when you push it, carved from ficus, pine, yellowwood, cypress and Norfolk wood. And Strijdom van der Merwe, who has spent a lifetime making art from the land itself, called his piece Journey. For a runner who could not run, I smiled at that.
What the oaks are telling us
Not everything on the mile is light. A mural by Charlotte Moss and Anna van Pletsen, Amongst the Ghost Oaks, tells the story of the shot hole borer, a beetle that is killing the old oaks of the Eikestad — trees, one of the artists has said, that have stood for three or four hundred years. Nearby, Walter Oltmann’s wire sculpture Carapax (Borer) made me look twice at the small creatures we never notice. I learned more about the trees of my own town in ten minutes beside that mural than in years of running under them.
Words along the water
There is poetry on the path too: Fiona Moodie’s illustrations for Vetplantfeetjies, with words by Antjie Krog and Ingrid de Kok, and near the end a sculpture in wire and steel that spells out a line attributed to John Muir, beginning “In every walk with nature”. Walk, it says. Not run. By then I did not need it explained. I had been given far more than I came for.
What it cost me
Here is the part I keep coming back to. The walk cost me nothing. No ticket, no flight, no entry fee. The coffee at the start was the only thing I paid for. And yet I came home the way I come home from a good trip: rested, a little more awake, with new pictures in my head and things I wanted to tell someone about.
I would not have chosen the injury. But it slowed me down to the speed at which a place can actually be seen, and that is a gift I want to keep after the ankle has healed. This is the near journey I keep writing about on this site. Restoration asks that we be away in our minds, not necessarily far from home — and a familiar path, walked slowly, will take you away very quickly. I had been running past a gallery, a history lesson and a nature walk for years.
So here is my invitation, injured or not. Find the mile, the river or the street in your own town that you only ever pass at speed, on foot, on a bike or through a windscreen. Walk it slowly, once, on your own or with someone. You may find, as I did, that one of the richest journeys of the year starts a few minutes from your front door.
Dr Alten du PlessisFounder, TravelWell4Life · “Dr Flourish”