Saturday started out in very high style as we headed out of Stellenbosch to the famed Robertson vino festival: Wine on the River. Who was to know that a day which began in such a classy way would end with me sitting in the crime room at the Robertson station. Of course, to keep it tantalizing, the story of my run-in with the fuzz will have to wait until justice has been done (no pun intended) to Robertson and it's wines.
About an hour and a half from Stellenbosch, Robertson looks more like East Texas than Napa. As you drive north from Stellenbosch, the lush hills and mountains of the main wine region are replaced by the short shrubbery and flat plains of the Robertson environs. Driving through this rather prosaic, arid land, it is hard to imagine that great wines can be squeezed from the land, but looks can be deceiving! Sad to say that the tasting part of my day was less than stellar-- after a late birthday night, wine was about the last thing on my list-- but I did push through and taste some Robertson wines. Overall, what I liked most about the festival was the extremely relaxed vibe of the place.
Approaching the festival, the land is dominated by a series of white tents-- almost like a mirage of harems out of the flat lands. As you get closer, you realize that there are around 400 people with wine glasses strung around their necks and more wine than blood coursing through the veins. And yes, I am serious about the wine glass around the neck. The festival organizers, realizing that most people would be unable to hold their glass by the end of the day and deciding that the beer helmets weren't classy enough, rigged up these wineholders that you sling around your neck so that your glass of wine is never more than 2 feet from your mouth. It is amazing to see en masse-- the complete tourist managed to keep a camera, binoculars and the wine glass all in balance around their neck.
All of the snobbishness that is known to arise at
wine gatherings was thrown three sheets to the wind. There were tons of kids running around (with their wine glass bedecked parents in tow,) and the riverboat became the proverbial party boat with people standing on the upper deck, yelling to those lounging on the river shores to stand up to do the "WAVE." Sadly, they didn't get much of a reaction because it is kind of hard to make sudden movements with a wine glass around your neck-- something the festival committee clearly didn't consider... maybe wine helmets will win out after all.
Thus, having thoroughly enjoyed an afternoon on the river, I am brought to the crux of this entry-- the run-in with the Po Po. I had decided to take a mini snooze in the guest house while my German friend Ale went for a short spin in the rental car. About 5 minutes later, I'm phoned to say there has been an accident and that, though she is o.k., the front of the rental car has been smashed. We had been driving one of those tiny little Japanese cars they are so fond of in SA, and I found myself wondering what a smashed version would look like-- lilliputian to begin with, it was hard to imagine that the body of the car could truly compress into any smaller size. Turns out, I was wrong. These teeny cars not only feel flimsy, (a strong gust of wind can fly you across an open gorge,) they literally are a piece of sheet metal stretched over a tooth-pick car body. So, a small bump in one of these is like touching an oragami balloon, it just immediately crumples in on itself.
Needing to follow up this accident with a report, we were taken into the police station. Turns out the station is the happening place on a Saturday night, the waiting room was absolutely bustling. We were ushered into the back corner of the place to a room with a printed sign on the door which read: THE CRIME ROOM. Printed on your standard 8 1/2 x 11, the top half held the text in all caps while beneath there was this small picture showing two people cooperatively leaning over a desk. Clearly an inserted piece of clip-art from Microsoft word, complete with the overly granulated colors and the nearly faceless people, I found myself wondering which model of Microsoft Office came complete with pictures of a police bureau. Then, even better, I got to wondering if this picture, cleverly used to represent the complicit team work of crime-solving, was actually from the "Business" section of clip art and was currently in use by numerous Power Point presentations all over the country.
As we sat down with the officer, he began to take our information. A lovely man and very good at his job, he was still a bit confounded by the dual necessity of a license and a passport. Upon further questioning, we found out that in his 6 years at the Robertson police headquarters, he had never had to file a report on someone from overseas. It got you to thinking that perhaps we should offer to pose for mug-shots wrapped in our national flags, so that the policeman could forever remember the visit from their international renegades. And, to have a German and an American, check that a Texan, together at one go-- what better villains could you ask for?
Though I could go on and on about the fascinating intricacies of my experience at the station, (and if I ever do get around to writing a book about my time here I promise to dedicate a full chapter to the lovely men of the Robertson Police Department,) the most interesting and "South African" part of the whole excursion involved a bit of fingerprinting. As we sat there, waiting for the line of police officers curious about these foreigners to pass through, two young boys came in with one of the gentleman. They looked about 8 and 12 and were smiling with an almost giddy excitement to be in the CRIME ROOM. As a first action, the police officer put a gob of ink on a thin metal sheet and then handed the younger boy a small paint roller, like those you use to paint a bedroom. Excitedly, the boy took the paint roller in hand and began to spread out the ink on the metal sheet. Immediately Tom Sawyer popped into my head and I could see this little boy painting a whole fence with the roller, happy to do a job that was by now terribly mundane to the police officer. The child's mirth at the novelty of ink "painting" was quite cute, and I was totally convinced that this young boy was a police officer in training.
After the prints were taken, one of each of his 10 fingers (throughout which the boy's seeming enthusiasm never flagged,) the older boy took the roller and proceeded to also paint the piece of metal with ink. By this time I was absolutely convinced that I was watching a very cute bonding moment between two brothers and their policemen heros. I could imagine the same little boys going next saturday to the fire station and climbing up and down the fire trucks with the same excited anticipation with which they were currently taking their own fingerprints.
As sanguine hopes can sometimes cloud normal judgement and dramatic irony is a fantastically powerful tool, I am sure that you have all already realized that this was no normal saturday night youth outreach program at the local jailhouse. And you would be right. Turns out my budding community protectorates were actually a pair of incredibly effective criminals. They had been caught stealing, and we aren't talking cookie jars or bikes; these two young boys had broken into two separate houses and taken off with more than 30K worth of jewelry. Clearly shocked by this revelation, my first reaction was what the hell do these kids even buy with that amount of money. It's not as if they can jet off somewhere or buy fancy liquors, they shouldn't even be old enough to stay up past 9pm. And the strangest thing of it all is that the kids just seemed so damn happy to be there; they were joking around with all the cops the whole time as if this was a much anticipated saturday outing. And to think that these kids were going to have to spend a night in the jail...
For obvious reasons I was really bothered by all of this and still don't quite know how to process it. It is hard for me to imagine exactly what sort of home life would drive kids this age to do something like this. I just wanted to take a kid in each hand, tell them to apologize to the homeowners and the policemen, and walk with them to the nearest sweet shop to have a milk shake and a piece of cake. I just feel like if these kids were simply allowed to be kids....
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