#4: The Devil’s breath
Cat under a hot tin roof: Mouse is usually 3.5kg of split-the-atom charisma, but even she was floored by the heat.*
There’ve only been three times in the past year where I’ve thought I might have to throw in the towel on the Story Ark voyage.
Each time, because of fear.
Fear, brought on by heat.
Heat One: departure day
As if sailing away from everything safe and familiar wasn’t hard enough, departure day on 6 October 2024 was like heading directly into the Devil’s breath: half a day’s drive from Cape Town, its safe harbour disappearing beyond the distant curvature of the horizon. The van’s thermometer nearly broke its housing as we approached Clanwilliam, hitting 39°C.
Heat Two: foul vapours
Setting up camp two months later on the banks of the Gourtiz River in 38°C, followed by a week of wind storm that felt like it came straight from the belly of the beast: all acid reflux, bile, and foul vapours. I fled, with shattered tent poles and a mood approaching Chernobyl-level meltdown, and limped across the breadth of the country to find safe harbour in the Eastern Cape grasslands.
Heat Three: not-so-hot-day
Last Sunday, it happened again.
It wasn’t even that hot: 26°C, if the flaming red digits on the cab’s dashboard were anything to go by. But when I swung open the door of the — well, they called it a chalet but really it was just a Wendy house. In South Africa, a Wendy house isn’t the play house from the Peter Pan story. It’s what we call the permanent homes that aren’t quite informal shacks, but nothing as palatial as a bricks-n-mortar home. We also call them hokkies, as in a chicken coop.
I’d booked this chalet for a week-long research trip in south Durban, near where I hoped to spend time visiting families in the Dakota Beach informal settlement. The plan was to hear about life in Dakota and how they experience extreme events when they’re living in homes made from found materials like wooden boards or tin.
The people who’d agreed to meet have been part of a research effort that’s mapping how hot the inside of their homes are compared with outside conditions. Over the past summer, they’d had temperature-reading devices called i-buttons fitted a few centimetres beneath their roofs in order to record daily indoor temperatures. These homes are made of board, tin sheets, or, if they’re lucky, bricks and mortar.
Just before rolling into Durban — notorious not just for hot summers, but stiflingly humid ones — I’d scanned the first report coming out of their project collaboration with the local civil society organisation Project Empower.
One graph is a stop-you-in-your-tracks bit of data: temperature spikes inside the homes are easily 15°C hotter than the local Ballito weather station. Where the station registered 35°C outside, the i-buttons logged nearly 50°C inside the Dakota Beach homes.
Fifty degrees Celsius.
That’s enough to stop the strongest of hearts.
Hokkies, not play houses
My home for the week had looked quaintly rustic on the website. Given the price, I expected it to at least be habitable. And surely a proper structure with actual roof should be? I flung the windows wide, drew the thin curtains on the blazing-hot-side of the hokkie, and fired up the fan. But the sun’s energy, hitting the tin roof, seemed to be greater than the sum of the parts. The laws of thermodynamics inside Wendy house took care of the rest.
At first, the mood was one of bemusement.
Not great, but it’ll cool down soon, surely?
Four hours later, my heart was thundering like the great wildebeest migration, my head pounded like a funeral drum (channeling Roger Waters here), and my mood was blistering like I’d scalded my skin over an angry kettle. [Sometimes one has to break the rule about not mixing metaphors, sorry language nerds.]
There was no escape: outside = sun; inside = furnace. Lost the will to form complete sentences. Pen down. Dazed.
By lights-out, the bed was the epicentre of an unsafe universe that seemed desolate and inescapable.
Monday arrived with cooler air, but with a few light sprinkles of tears. We spent the morning moving from home to home, sitting on people’s neatly-made beds as they chatted about their lives in Dakota Beach, and spoke of the discomfort of a heatwave as if it’s a normal part of life.
By the time we wrapped up, my mood had become more throaty and thunderous.
Is this our collective future, I wondered? The life of the average person in an informal settlement, the ones that most of us turn away from because we don’t want to be confronted by this reality: is this what awaits all of us? The question is not so much that we’ll all end up in informal settlements — although climate migration is going to uproot many more of us than we currently realise, and we don’t know where we’ll land — but the heat, the heat, the inescapable blistering, brain-melting heat.
Hot as Hades
Part of the i-button work was for participants to record daily voice notes, giving a personal account of how they’d experienced conditions on any given day. Many described themselves as feeling tired, or were apologetic for being lazy on hot days, not realising that what they were describing is something far more serious: heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It can make us properly sick. It can even be lethal.
This is what’s tee-ed up for the next chapter of Story Ark. But behind the calculated storylines and edited photo essays is a turbulent week that’s left me on my knees.
I checked out of the tourist shack after one night. Once Monday’s work was done Mouse and I drifted around Durban in our little plumber’s van looking for somewhere to stay but my brain felt moribund. I couldn’t seem to trouble-shoot my mood or the predicament of having nowhere to drop anchor that night.
By mid-afternoon, I turned the good ship Story Ark inland, and made my way back to the bricks-n-mortar home we’d been squatting at for much of August.
I’ve been lucky. Through all these heat episodes we’ve had an escape hatch. The people I’m about to write about don’t.
Nothing quite like walking in another person’s shoes to build some empathy, even if it’s just for a few short steps.
Stay chill, and chilled.
Leonie
Itinerant reporter, captain of the good ship Story Ark, and travel companion to the irrepressible cat called Mouse.
*Mouse was in the care of loving cat-sitters at the Project Empower offices while I did the field work on Monday, and was safe from the heat.