Kwessiegat

Keeping chaos at bay

Ostrich grass, a coarse dune grass of the Namib Desert’s sand seas.

            At the eastern edge of the Namib Desert monsoonal summer rains from the Indian Ocean more or less drop their last moisture to sustain a peculiar grassland punctuated by millions of bare, circular patches, each bounded by a garland of taller grass.  The origin of these so-called fairy circles is a mystery that has, in recent years, piqued the curiosity of scientists, including ourselves.  Having been introduced to fairy circles on a safari, Vicki and I returned to the NamibRand Nature Reserve to prove that grass-harvesting termites produced the circles.  It took us three days to prove this wasn't so.

            The Reserve is aggregated from sixteen or so failed "farms" in this remote and arid part of Namibia, farms that were established with what seems like typical human blindness to the fact that deserts sometimes have years of abundance, but their normal condition is "drought."  For our stay, we rented the former farmhouse named "Kwessiegat", an Afrikaans word meaning doubtful borehole, no doubt because the borehole did not yield water until 350 meters down.  Like the fairy circles, the choice of location of Kwessiegat is a mystery, for it sits smack up against one of the world's largest sand seas, with deep red, shifting sand dunes rising over 100 meters high, wave after wave for over 100 km all the way to the cold Atlantic shore.  Stroll west from the back patio and in five minutes you are climbing the foot of the first wave of dunes, in ten you are in the first dip between dunes and in twenty minutes of climbing and slipping you have crested the first dune wave, the sand plains spreading east from Kwessiegat below, the stony jumble of the escarpment beyond.  In the fading red of sundown, it is an achingly beautiful view.  Clumps of stiff, coarse ostrich grass hold the dune sand in hillocks, surviving only if they can grow faster than the sand is piled over them. Some of the world's fastest-running beetles zoom over the loose sand, while others shaped like animated pennies swim in the dune slip-faces as though the sand were water.

View of Kwessiegat at sunup from a hot air balloon. Huge dunes begin just to the west and continue to the Atlantic Ocean about 100 km west.

Kwessiegat as seen from the first dune crest late in the day, ostrich grass in the foreground.

            But migrating sand and human habitations are not good combinations, and every day at Kwessiegat began and ended with The Sweeping of the Sand Ceremony.  The Dependable Daily Wind carried it through the tiniest crevices and cracks in the window casements, under the doors, between the wall and the roof, and deposited it in drifts on the floors, in the kitchen sink, on the windowsills and wherever else it found a quiet resting place. 

Typical daily sand deposits in the bathroom sink (left) and on the back veranda (right).

As the morning sun warmed the interior plateau lying out of sight over the escarpment, the west wind gained strength, piling sand on the back veranda, eddying around the house, and leaving a daily gift of sand on the front patio. It had been doing so long enough to bury the front patio in a meter-high dune that extended eastward directly from the back door.  A barefoot morning stroll on this dune offered a pleasant coolness to the feet while sipping a morning cup of coffee.

This dune has covered the front veranda on the eastern side of Kwessiegat. The wind added to it every day.

            Kwessiegat reminded us that much of life is maintenance, the Daily Sweeping Out of Sand, but this maintenance, this sweeping is what keeps chaos at bay and allows us to do the things we pretend (or believe) are more meaningful.  But seen this way, who is to say that sweeping sand is less meaningful?