I worked on a contract basis: forty people on a truck and I prune your farm. “I know how to prune apricots, peaches, plums-you name it. “I am a farmer without a farm,” Snyders, a voluble man with brown skin and a bald head, declared one afternoon, looking at his garden. On a half acre behind his house, a seventy-year-old retiree named Gawie Snyders grows pumpkins, onions, green beans, lettuces, grapes, stone fruit, and roses.
There are a handful of flourishing vineyards in the vicinity, but even small plots teem with growth.
The sun is so strong that, when clouds go by, the sky turns not gray but almost white. Summers are long, winters are mild, and the soil is fertile: fences along the dusty roads crawl with hot-pink Zimbabwe creeper and orange Cape honeysuckle. Consequently, McGregor has a sleepy, almost otherworldly feel.
When the road was cleared and paved, in the nineteen-twenties, the plan was to keep going through the mountains toward Cape Town, but that project, like many other public works that followed, was abandoned before completion. There is a good paved road that runs into McGregor, a pastoral village at the foot of South Africa’s Riviersonderend Mountains, but it stops at the edge of town. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
