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
