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 Somewhere in a Camelthorn tree an invisible leopard watches and waits. The tree is in the Erongo Mountains a huge, cracked volcanic crater at the edge of the Namib desert in the South West corner of Africa. Still little visited, it is a vast circle of granite edges and slabs punctuated by rocky outcrops that, late in the day, take on fantastical shapes in the yellow light and shadows of sunset. Burnt figures rise above the flat dish of the crater; an old hag watches down, three huge stone elephants slumber in the gathering dusk. The crater is a wide plate of bush and scrub inhabited by one or two German Namibian farmers raising goats and growing vegetables and fruit. Tracks and river beds crisscross through the bushes, Baboons sit on the cliffs above, Buddha like, before sensing another moment and scurrying off. Black Eagles perch, waiting in considered silence. We have come to a place that contains as much unseen as seen. Things, thoughts and memories linger through the heat of the day; animals carefully watch as both the hunter and hunted. Incongruously smart, at one corner several kilometres, away is a safari lodge manicured and ready for the rich and slightly more adventurous. But here, out in the bush, is no tourist melee – for this day, in this busy emptiness we have discovered there are more ghosts than people.  In the camp, as we tend the fire, drink the beer and prepare the evening meal, the murmur of conversation is on the paintings long unseen that we have discovered amongst the rocks and slabs behind us. On the wall overhangs and caves around us, we had found red-ochre pictures of giraffe, kudu, men and women hunting and dancing in the echoes of time. They were paintings, not of abstract symbolism or a teaching manual for hunters as some have said, but postcards from the real and visceral trance-world that the Bushmen once danced themselves into. Haunted by what we had seen, with a new friend I had gone back into the hills in the remaining light, to a cave we had found and looked with new eyes upon our own lives.
For these memories, are the embers and shadows of a vanishing people, the Bushmen of Africa and this place was once the sanctuary in which they lived. Sometimes known as the San people, or the first people of Africa they had a culture and a way of life that lasted for millennia. Something so continuous and unchanging, I was told by my German Namibean friend Werner, that they had no need of history. But then a new people came to claim this land. People with gods and guns and horses. People who would could go to church on Sunday, eat a fine roast dinner and mount up to shoot, perfectly legally, Bushmen. Rifles, saddles, and supply lines were met with bewilderment and bows and arrows. In a few decades a way of life born in the dawn of human time was destroyed and the people dispersed and broken to live across Southern Africa on the edges of townships and society
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 From my earliest days I have loved the idea of the endless journey – a journey taken not for the plain dumb act of reaching a destination – but because journeying is in the end a way-to-be. And often, at the heart of this dreaming were the wide free spaces of the United States. As a kid I would watch cowboy films as much for the exotic sights of the canyon. the towering cactus, the grand holy emptiness as for any weary plot line. I remember listening Paul Simon singing about looking for America with Kathy on a Greyhound Bus. Whilst I should have been reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen and Mill On The Floss by George Eliot for my A levels I was reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac! Not surprisingly my results were abysmal. (Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory still sits by my bed at home for when I get restless.) And on leaving college my first sensible act was to get a one way ticket to Atlanta , board a Greyhound Bus there for the three day ride to LA riding through the Chuck Berry song of Texas, New Mexico, Tuscon, Phoenix, San Bernadino, Pamona to Hollywood. Riding the Road is my attempt to capture the spirit of this. (The Studebaker, the homemade dress and the blue-stemmed grass were visual gifts from a good friend) Scroll down to listen to the song Cactus photo (c) Dinny Pocock 2016  Riding on the Road (c) Steve Bonham 2016 In a Studebaker 61, that’s smells of oil and dust A beat up old convertible, whose soul is made of rust Rides Jenny and her lover, laughing as they’re chasing trains He’s got his foot down hard, Going like a hurricane Headed down the lonesome way, the road that never ends, Across the heart of America, That the spirit comprehends Is in the river and the old state line, the prairie, and the plain The highway of forgotten souls, who won’t come here again Along the road that never ends, The Road that never ends, (riding on) the road that never ends. From the stop a long way back, still lingers on his tongue, The bitter taste of coffee, as he’s humming a Bob Dylan song The country boy is picking out where the rebel soul begins Thinking that if it all came down it would not be a sin And behind the car the bluestem grass, is dancing in a haze Bending to the rhythm of, the passing of the days She remembers the man who told her once this moment’s all you’ve got There’s not much use in longing for the things that you have not Along the road, that never ends In her homemade dress, cotton flowers in the wind He says, babe you’re looking fine, and she’s turned to him and grinned He can’t help noticing that on the curve of her sweet breast And a drop of beer has trickled down to linger there at rest He's thinking they should stop sometime, as the shadows run to gold To make love under the shooting stars, before this land grows old There’s so little that encircles her, like it’s from this place she’s drawn It would be the sweetest thing to wake with her at dawn Along the road that never ends, The Road that never ends, (riding on) the road that never ends. Later under the tree of night, as the stars dance their pavanne Running from the eastern light in the trail of a caravan Somewhere in the lonely dark, a prairie dogs makes his move Is he just a punk on fire with something left to prove? Jimmy’s cursed, she sometimes feels, to keep looking for this grail There’s dollars in his old blue jeans, a freedom kind of frail As they flew across the universe like a bird that won’t be caught She’s thinking he might be the rocket man but she’s the astronaut Along the road that never ends, The Road that never ends, (riding on) the road that never ends
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Psychologist
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