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Outside Magazine, June 2004

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Technicolor Darkness (cont.)

STRANGE, THE MENTAL snapshots South Africa leaves with you. A donkey cart overtaken by a BMW. A Boer farmer spraying spittle and beer in a Karoo pub, shouting, "We used to live like kings! Now we live like princes!" The cloud-capped Drakensberg Mountains rising above the tin roofs of a township. And in the middle of it all, Ed February, a man standing at the center of the new South Africa, balanced between two worlds. Time will tell whether Ed returns to the MCSA. In the meantime, the rock remains unchanged.

My last climb is with one of Ed's oldest friends, an orthopedic surgeon named Charles Edelstein—or Snort, as friends call him, because of his sinus problem. Snort has known Ed since 1978, when he was a dirt-poor med student renting a flat in Jo'burg. He took Ed in, which doesn't sound like a big deal, except Snort is white, and it was illegal. We drive to Blouberg Massif, a 1,200-foot quartzite mesa near the borders with Botswana and Zimbabwe.

As we get closer to the mesa, the vegetation disappears, picked bare by goats and bony cattle. At the village of Blouberg,

Strange, the mental snapshots South Africa leaves with you. A donkey cart overtaken by a BMW. A Boer farmer spraying beer in a pub shouting, "we used to live like kings! Now we live like princes!"

a Tswana boy leads us to a kraal, a village compound, and into a parking spot seemingly reserved for us. A woman leans in the doorway of a mud hut, a cell phone dangling incongruously from her waist.

"You are Charles," she says languidly.

Snort has been climbing here for 25 years. He pays her to baby-sit the car, then, with the sun sinking, we saddle our packs and head uphill, hiking in the relative cool of the evening until, around midnight, we make camp in a cave.

At dawn, the rock is already griddle warm. Whenever I poke a cam into a crack, lizards scrabble up the wall. We climb all day, the hot air silent but for the jangle of cowbells.

The sun is sinking, throwing long shadows across the savannah, when Snort finally pulls himself over the top. I hear him shout, and I look up. He's standing on the cliff edge, yelling, arms raised and fists clenched:

"This is Africa!"

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