The Road in the Dam

Photograph by George Angus

With the water level so low after the drought we are now able to see landmarks usually submerged under the surface of Zaaihoekdam. One of that is the old road leading past our farm to Wakkerstroom. Before the dam was built years ago, it was a fairly straight and much shorter route leading into town. Now we have to drive much further all along the perimeter of the dam.

The old inhabitants of the area tell us about homesteads, a bridge and obviously the old road that apparently disappeared for good under water once the dam started filling up. Now, with the drought some of it make an appearance once again, amazingly intact after all those years in its wet coffin.

Every time I look at the old road, Rudyard Kipling’s poem comes to mind:

The Way through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods. 

Maybe, sitting on the edge of Zaaihoek at night and remaining very quiet, I’ll hear people travelling. But the sound will come from afar as from behind a veil.

There is a road in the dam.

George