Sitting on a Bike, a Dock, and a Past Life

I haven’t seen Luke, the youngest Budler brother, much over the last two years. We’ve gone down separate paths, traveled to different places, and built our own lives. Throughout it all, we've worked at staying connected through writing and I decided to send him a writing prompt to see how he's doing.

Go to the place that reminds you most of South Africa and write the story that comes to mind.

I did the same. We spent one hour sitting, reflecting. Here are the essays –

Nick

I left South Africa nearly six years ago, a hot-headed teenager uncertain about my future. It must have been around this time of year, but I don’t remember much by way of specifics. I graduated from high school in December, as the British school system dictates, waited tables at an Italian chain restaurant for a few months, and hurriedly left for Europe. I had a blue travel backpack, tattered and drained of its color from years of use, a folder with my essential paperwork, and all the money I’d saved up from late nights and bad tips.

The next day, halfway across the world, I sat on a bench outside Málaga Airport in Spain – blue backpack miraculously still in tow – and waited for my host family to pick me up. They were the owners of the villa where I was going to spend the next two months working and I’d never met them. I was scared to death sitting there alone. Nobody would lend me their cell phone; the payphone wouldn’t work. I resigned to wait, seated on a hard stone bench in the Spanish sunshine, until Alan came loping along, with his bushy white mustache and big smile to pick me up. I sighed with relief and walked over when he called out.

Today, I sit outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C. There’s no bench here, so I get comfortable perched on my bicycle across the street. I’m alone like in Málaga, but there are more cars than people here – it’s been raining most of the morning – and their tires kick up a spray from the wet asphalt. A few runners jog up the hill on the far side and down the hill on my side as the hour passes; there are no mustaches in sight.

Outside the embassy, which sits on Massachusetts Avenue in Embassy Row, Nelson Mandela stands proudly with his right arm raised to the sky. The ever-regal coat of arms – tusks, drum, protea, bird – is proudly carved into the glass on the front doors. Winston Churchill’s statue, right arm also raised, stands across the street from Mandela and the irony is almost comical.

Across that rain-slicked street, a short bed of roses, and an iron fence, is about as close to the southern tip of Africa as I can get right now in a flightless world. The embassy stands as a miniature version of the country I grew up in, now landlocked in the heart of the American capital. I picture the ambassador standing on the balcony out front, dark suit contrasted with the limestone of the chancery designed in the distinctive Cape Dutch style. I shift around on the hard seat of my bike.

Early morning before my twenty-first birthday back in 2017.

I’ve only been back to South Africa once, for my birthday when I turned twenty-one. I had been in D.C. then too. I didn’t expect to return to the capital after graduating and I spent the whole summer without coming to see Mandela, too focused on the new experiences I was having to think of my past.

After leaving South Africa, it had always felt like a different life, even just a memory of another life. I’ve often wondered where I would be now if I’d studied harder, spent less time chasing girls, and appreciated the beauty and history of the country more. Instead, I always thought about leaving.

When I visited the U.S. to look at colleges, the first place my grandparents took me to eat was Nick’s BBQ. Over messy ribs and a side of baked beans, I looked up at the TV to see Mandela had died. I can’t think of a more American situation to be in and while the country I’d left mourned the loss of their leader, I continued to see colleges and spend time with the American side of myself – preparing for my final exodus from the southernmost country in Africa.

It starts to mist on my notebook, and I move my bike under a nearby tree, giving me a better view of the building, which was built in 1949 after the delegation was raised to a formal embassy. My younger brother, Luke, left South Africa this year, 83 years after the construction of the embassy ended. He was the last Budler to leave, the rest of his brothers having migrated Stateside over the last few years to the Midwest and East Coast – the opposite of birds following good weather south.

I feel lucky to have the embassy, just one of many in D.C., as a physical reminder of that past life. I met a few South Africans, easily discernible by their accents, in the city before lockdown began; I don’t think Luke will have the same luck in Alabama, where he’s working and waiting to begin his college career in the States. He, unlike me, worked hard in high school, somehow maturely balancing the virtues and vices of coming of age in a liberal country instead of counting the days till his departure. He made a home there.

But wherever we are, at 'home' or abroad, Luke and I always seem to be given an Alan – someone who comes loping into our lives and raises us from whichever bench, dock, or tough place we find ourselves in. And I need them far more than Luke does, need them to keep me from sitting alone or sitting for too long.

As the rain picks up, Mandela’s gentle smile and raised fist prompt me to get moving, to face the day ahead as the hour ends. He doesn't have a mustache, but I see Alan's smile. It's enough. I put away my notebook, get back on my bike, and cycle home.

Luke

A slight pain twinged in my calf muscle as I made my way down the endless steps to the dock, each and every step perfectly aligned and equally distanced. The newly replaced wood had a shine to it – looking exactly, I imagined, like the owner wanted it to. Tall trees and shrubbery surrounded me, but just out of reach, as if I was caged in by the step railings. For just a moment, I had let the perfection of the man-made structure distract me from the beauty of the nature around me.

Luke's shot of the beach.

After finishing high school, I was the only one in my family still living in South Africa and I didn’t have the paperwork to stay any longer. So I’ve been in Alabama for just over two months now. This wasn’t the plan, but life has a funny way of ignoring the road you try to set out on. My grandparents have lived here in Alabama since the year I was born, 2001. This town is home to around 12,000 people – nothing close to the size of Cape Town. However, anywhere that family calls ‘home’, I can learn to call ‘home’ too.

Once at the bottom of the dock, I set up my chair, took out my notebook and pen and realized: I didn’t even feel like I was on the lake. The dock separated me entirely from the water, the water that brought life to this small town. I couldn’t even reach it with my toes. This is a metaphor for being distanced from life back home, I thought to myself. It seems like everything could be a metaphor for home right now.

To me, the South African beaches represent what I’ve left behind on my journey from Cape Town to the States, symbolizing more than just where the water met the land. They seemed to magnify everything around them: the sun was hotter, the water was colder and the people, the people were present. In my mind, I looked around me and saw a plethora of people, of different shapes, sizes and colors. I closed my eyes and just listened. I could hear multiple distinct accents floating out from underneath beach umbrellas. I reckoned that all of these different looking and sounding people came from within a thirty-minute drive to this beach. It didn’t make sense; it wasn’t like any other place I had been to. But it worked.

The beauty of South Africa was that it never did make any real sense to me. It delightfully left you to make your own sense of it all. That’s why so many different kinds of people could confidently call the same place ‘home’. It was never a competition. That moment, lying on the sand in my mind, that moment felt like it belonged to everyone. I took solace in the fact that the sun beating down on me as I wrote this was the same one burning my face on the beach that day. I stopped my running thoughts by drifting into an easy slumber.

Suddenly, my mind jerked back to the present. I awoke, took note of the small waves slapping the sides of the dock being created by the expensive looking boats that were gliding across the lake surface. The waves seemed to be trying to escape the lake. Each wave the same size, like the dock steps, I counted out an equal amount of time in between every one. Here, everything was making sense.

But just for a little while, I didn’t want it to. I wanted to make my own sense of life. I wanted to be able to call both places home: the dock in Alabama and the beach in South Africa, a duality of how my ‘homes’ are built on the waters.