Packing For Putsonderwater

Somewhere between Draghoender, Voelgeraas, Prieska and the blue horizons of Bushmanland, we came upon a roadsign pointing to Putsonderwater

Hardship Names

Putsonderwater is also part of the grand Afrikaans tradition of hardship names for towns and farms. The celebrated writer Etienne van Heerden says it best in his book Kikoejoe, when he lists “Soebatsfontein … Moordenaarskaroo … Allesverloor … Genadebrood … Wurgdroogte … Godverlaat … Moedverloor … Knersberg … Verneukpan … Putsonderwater … Genadeloosrand … Pynlikheid … Perdvreklaagte … Allesverby.”

You roll those words slowly around on your tongue, conjure up the images they speak of and it’s all flat, bleak and generally in dire need of 30mm of hard rain, a plate of koeksusters and a raucous mampoer party on the stoep.

Post-Apocalypso

So my wife Jules and I hooked a right to Putsonderwater on a sunny day at the back end of a three week road trip and, after rattling along on a dirt road that begged for the services of a padjapie and his scraper, we arrived at a sad little settlement beside a railroad track.

It looked like a scene from Neville Shute’s post-Apocalyptic On The Beach, where all manner of nuclear bomb has devastated the Northern Hemisphere.

As we picked our way through the waiting rooms to the back offices, I felt like an intruder. I was half-expecting a red-faced, black-suited ticket inspector (we used to call them ‘Clippies’) to come striding out from 20 years ago and shout at us. I remember even lowering the tone of my voice in case I disturbed a ghost passenger waiting for the night train to De Aar, as he sat on an outside bench discreetly sipping brandy from a silver hip flask. For the winter chill, of course, meneer.

I had never been inside a spoorweghuisie (railway house) before. I’d often driven past them and wandered how the railway folk lived. I’d heard tales from the footplate, so to speak, related by the retired steam locomotive drivers living in De Aar. They spoke of hunting springbok from the caboose, cooking three-egg breakfasts on the coal shovel (hopefully cleaned before used) and the vast spaces of the Karoo they chugged through on their journeys. And often they, too, spoke of Putsonderwater.

The Well “Without Water”

The back story of Putsonderwater as my guru, the classic travel writer Lawrence Green, relates it, goes back to the early 1880s and an old coloured man called David Ockhuis. He came to live at this spot and dug a well with his two sons, Hans and Gert. They found a good vein of water and were well set. But the problem lay in the streams of mostly-white trekboers who were moving all over South Africa during that unsettled era. In such a dry land, a water source would be a great attraction to nomads passing through. Ockhuis, not having a title to the land, was afraid that if everyone found out about the water, he would lose his farm.

So every time a trekboer arrived and asked about the well, he would say:

“Ja meneer, ek het ‘n put, maar dit is ‘n put sonder water.” (Yes, sir, I have a well, but it is a well without water.) So the place became Putzonderwater. In later years, the ‘z’ was dropped in favour of the modern spelling.

“I’ve got a video of the old days at the Putsonderwater Station,” said Ken Magson, the last station master of Putsonderwater, when I tracked him down to Cape Town.

“What? So it wasn’t a hardship posting?” I wanted to know.

Putsonderwater’s Greatest Fan

“Not at all. I was there for eight years and loved every minute of it,” he said. “I had a staff of more than two dozen and, by the time I left in 1988, we were voted the best railway station in the country and won the Lady Duncan Trophy. The gardens, you should have seen the gardens. They were great.”

“The winters were deliciously cold. The summers were dry and hot. I lived there with my wife and two sons, who went to boarding school in Marydale, about 36 km from Putsonderwater. Visitors used to come to Putsonderwater and remark on what an oasis it was. You didn’t laugh at Putsonderwater in my day.”

I wanted to know about the social life of Putsonderwater and asked about any “clubs” in the area. I was more than mildly surprised when Ken Magson said:

“Oh yes, we were good friends with all the farmers in the district. We used to hold Bible Study sessions in the waiting room…”