The Orange Book

 

Total darkness surrounded me as I lay in bed on the farm, unable to see my hand in front of my face. I could hear a pin drop.

Half asleep, I wasn’t sure if I’d heard a faint rumble. The louder second rumble confirmed an approaching Highveld thunderstorm.

Lightning flashes started to illuminate the room. Each successive rumble reached me faster. As a boy, tucked in bed, I felt fear. As a teenager, it became enjoyment.

The gust front arrived, making the yard’s trees roar into action.

A bolt of lightning cracked outside, the sound hitting before the blinding flash, then echoing down the valley. I cowered deeper under the duvet. “Surely the tallest tree got struck with that one,” I thought.

A single, heavy raindrop struck the corrugated iron roof with a sharp metallic ping. A scattering of others quickly followed, building a rapid, erratic staccato. Within moments, the sky broke, unleashing a deafening deluge that pelted the metal in a relentless, roaring sheet of sound.

A bit later, the noise started to subside. Like the fading storm, I drifted back to sleep.

 

 

Years later, I wake after a night of heavy rain at my home. Descending the stairs, I try to estimate how much fell. From the kitchen window, I peer at the gauge eight metres away.

It’s mounted on a fence post, held in place by a plastic rim around its middle. The water level sits slightly above the rim. “More than an inch,” I muse.

I walk outside and take the measurement, like I’ve done so many times since I was a boy. 32 millimetres, to be precise.

The garden looks vibrant, the stream below gurgles, and the saturated soil gives way beneath my feet. I smile. Good rain is always welcome.

I make a mental note to enter the measurement in my rain spreadsheet.

 

 

As a farmer and private pilot, my father religiously watched the evening news weather forecast. In the pre-internet era, more detailed weather reports meant phoning the South African Weather Service.

But he also had his farmers’ weather folklore.

The moon was held in much the same regard for rain patterns as the tides. Some years good rain fell around first quarter, other years around full moon.

Some years never.

Spotting a snake slithering across the road was a sign of possible rain in the coming days.

The wind was more predictable. The predominant winds were from the northwest and west, often blowing a gale during fire season. Sustained northerly winds brought rain. Easterlies brought cold, overcast weather and drizzle. Southerlies brought bitter cold from fresh snowfall on the Drakensberg.

Spring on the Highveld sometimes brought severe hailstorms. Ominous black cumulonimbus clouds built from the southwest in the late afternoon, signalling an imminent crop wipeout.

What farmers really need are long-term forecasts. El Niño and La Niña predictions are the most likely signals of a future dry or wet season.

August and September were the farm’s hardest months as grazing and water dwindled. Early dry thunderstorms could ignite veld fires as the fire season peaked.

Droughts meant carting water to dry camps and rescuing livestock from mud in dry dams.

Late rains sometimes prolonged the dry period, delaying planting. Each successive day in October without rain would raise the anxious energy in the house. Harvests hung on precise, seasonal rains.

Snowfall followed by rain and wind was fatal for sheep.

Weather on the farm was more than conversation. It was livelihood.

 

 

As the last raindrops fell, I went outside. The storm lay to the northeast now, and a vibrant full rainbow arced across the sky.

I picked up the rain gauge and wiped the raindrops away, peering closely at the numbers. Increments of 1, from 0 to 10 mm. The 5 had long since been faded by the weather, and dirt inside obscured the bottom numbers. I counted backwards from 10 and stopped at 7.

I threw the water out of the gauge and ran inside to report to my father. “7 mm,” I relayed the disappointing news. “Mmm, it’s very welcome, but not nearly enough,” he said solemnly. He asked me to fetch the rain book.

I went to his study and pulled the orange A5 notebook from his top desk drawer. He opened it and added the data after the last entry. The logbook was nearly full, holding more than 15 years of rain data.

It always amused me when folk in town would say it rained when, in fact, it was a mere sprinkling. On the farm we’d call it “stof natmaak”.

For my father, less than 10 mm of rain was welcome, but ineffective. Between 10 and 25 mm was good, but would not make much difference to a drought. More than 25 mm was good rain, especially if it wasn’t so much that it flooded the crops. More than 100 mm would fill up dams and go a long way towards breaking a drought.

My father used to say that you’d be lucky to have four perfect seasons in forty years of farming.

 

 

The 2014–15 El Niño drought stands out as one of the worst droughts we ever had on the farm.

It was a disaster. It was the first time I could remember us losing livestock because there was simply no grazing left. All the small dams were empty, and crop farmers didn’t harvest. I distinctly remember visiting the farm at the worst of it and thinking that it looked like Armageddon.

The 2000 flood comes to mind too. I turned 21 that January, and nearly every river in the old Transvaal province was in flood. This event led to the South African Air Force rescuing trapped Mozambicans in the Limpopo basin.

Starting in the early summer months, the rain saturated the soil before unleashing its final salvo in the New Year. There wasn’t a passable dirt road. The dairy truck couldn’t reach the farm to collect the milk. All the creeks had swollen to become rivers, a few dams on the farm broke and the lands were no-go zones for tractors.

On a farm you never complain about rain, but that was one of the occasions where enough was enough.

 

 

Once, before I became a pilot, my father and I were flying home from Pretoria when we entered strange, hazy, foggy conditions.

Visibility diminished to less than 5 kilometres. He assessed the conditions and concluded it was passable, but drastically reduced our speed and made sure to keep visual contact with the ground. We slowly made our way to the farm.

I’m not sure, as a pilot, I would have had the confidence to press on in those conditions, but his 40-odd years of flying experience never made me doubt his judgement.

Later, when I became a pilot, it quickly dawned on me that weather was much harder to judge as pilot in command than as a passenger. Long cross-country flights could involve several weather patterns and maybe even fronts. Flight planning was critical.

I had spent hundreds of hours flying with my father. Inevitably you become accustomed to what’s normal and to what isn’t. I trusted his judgment and regarded flying with him as safe.

Bad decisions are taken when there is pressure to be somewhere. The saying ‘if you have time to spare, go by air’ rings true.

It’s imperative to always have an exit strategy.

Flying from Upington to Nelspruit, a cold front caused low overcast and icing conditions for the early section of the route.

After being stuck in Upington for three days due to this low-pressure system, I committed to the flight on the fourth morning. Get-there-home-itis was in play.

As my aircraft was not permitted to enter known icing conditions, I decided to depart low level and stay beneath the clouds. If I couldn’t find a way out, I’d return to Upington.

The first 10 minutes of the flight visibility was poor. We were squeezed between 800 ft cloud bases and rising terrain. I aimed for a small gap between two hills in the distance. It looked brighter on the other side. Once through it, the cloud bases gradually increased, and the tension released.

 

 

At some stage in the 2000s, my mother decided to clear their office of decades of accumulated paperwork.

Sometime later, after a rain shower, my father searched for the orange book. It wasn’t in the drawer. In fact, it was nowhere to be found. Consternation and accusations ensued!

After interrogating my mother and the gardener, a lead eventually took them to the farm’s landfill. It turned out the 40-year-old rain record was destined to be reduced to ash.  By divine intervention, the burning instruction hadn’t yet been carried out, and the book was saved.

 

 

Maybe my father worked with a plan. Maybe it was just a habit that he learned from his father.

I still measure the rain. I need to know how much. It’s in me.