MAY THE FORDS BE WITH US
“IT takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent fritters.” The pay-off line from Motel Hell, a low-rent horror film from 1980 that was, astonishingly, ranked number one in US cinemas for an entire weekend, was on a continuous playback loop in my head.
In case you missed this cinematic gaffe, Farmer Vincent ran a motel in the middle of nowhere. His famous smoked meat drew visitors from far and wide. As it turns out, the smoked meat was actually human visitors which Farmer Vincent had planted in his garden to ‘ripen’, only the heads, covered in bags, above ground. Finally, he would turn the tongue-less hominids into, well, smoked meat.
And here I am, in the middle of the Karoo, my Ford Ranger 2.0 Turbo XLT parked in front of a deserted, spooky old house, nibbling on a piece of biltong. Behind a nearby fence there are strange objects, planted in the vegetation-deprived soil. Like graves, but also not like graves. There was more than a bit of familiarity with Motel Hell here.
The Karoo does this kind of thing to you: it sends your thoughts down a different, unexpected path. Not always rationally, maybe, but all the fresh air, blue
