Most of the people I know can remember details of their childhood back to quite an early age.  They have in their minds rather distinct images of people and places from when they were three or four years old.  Compared to their vivid mental photographs, the images that I have of the people I knew and the places in which I lived during the first twelve years of my life are blurred.   They are more like misty, impressionistic paintings than realistic photographs.

This lack of clarity when I view my past through the lens of memory may have less to do with a failure to recall the details (in other respects, I have at least an average ability to do so) as it does with having physically left behind everything that was familiar to me in those first twelve years.  I was born near Cape Town, South Africa, and it was (except for a trip to the States when I was nine years old) the only world I knew until I and my American family left there permanently in 1949.  In the 56 years since then, I have never revisited the country or Cape Town, nor have I met or even spoken with one person outside of my immediate family whom I knew in those days.

The compass of my life was quite small during those years.  Although my parents traveled occasionally into the "interior" of South Africa, I and my older brother and sister did not go.  I knew only the Cape Peninsula, an area that spanned not more than about fifty miles, in any direction, from our home in a suburb of Cape Town.

It was – and no doubt still is – exquisitely beautiful.  After many years in the United States, I began to wonder whether my memories of the natural beauty of the Cape were illusions.  Then, my older brother went back for a visit, and, when he returned, I asked him, "Is it as beautiful as I remember?"  And he, who had traveled widely through some of the most scenic parts of the United States and Europe, said, "Richard, when we were driving around the Cape Peninsula, I had only one thought – 'Why did we ever leave this place?'"

Nowadays, I cherish every photograph I can get of the Cape.  Still, despite the vagueness of my memory, one picture remains in my mind, as clear and sharp as if I had seen it yesterday.  We were on the ship approaching Cape Town, after a six-month visit to the United States and three weeks at sea.  I was standing at the railing of the ship in the misty half-dark of predawn, scanning the horizon for the first sign of landfall.  As the sky lightened slightly, a shape very slowly emerged in the distance, at first so small and indistinct that I wasn't sure that it was really there.  We were headed east, and, somewhere behind the shape, the sun was beginning to rise.  As the mist dispersed and the sky brightened even more, the shape grew gradually larger until I could make out the distinctive contours of Table Mountain and, eventually, Devil's Peak.  Soon the panorama before me was that of a blue sky with wispy white clouds, the magnificent backdrop of the mountains illuminated from behind by the rising sun, with the red roofs of the city nestled at its base and the sea stretching out toward it like a giant blue-green welcome mat.  I was home.

To this day, I still get choked up when I recall that image.  It is not just the beauty of the scene itself and the emotions that it conjures up; it is the knowledge that, extending behind this majestic foreground is a 50-mile peninsula of extraordinary beauty.

To call the drive around the Cape Peninsula charming would be an understatement.  It is magnificent, and anyone who visits Cape Town without taking this drive would be missing the experience of a lifetime.  Even as a small boy, unimpressed by natural beauty and having seen more than my share of it (living, as I did, in the shadow of Table Mountain), I reveled in these trips.  We made many of them.  It helped, of course, that we invariably stopped in mid-afternoon at a teahouse for tea and scones (the latter to be covered with as much jam as I could get away with), but the real appeal was the scenery.

I cannot remember, much less describe, all of the specific sites.  Indeed, I now need a detailed map of the peninsula to locate all of them.  I do recall that, starting from our house, we would first take the "high road" that ran across the face of Table Mountain above the city and then travel down the peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean side.  About halfway down the Atlantic side , where the road is cut into the mountains, one spot still stands out in my mind.  It is Chapman (or Chapman's) Peak.*  We always stopped at Chapman's Peak because, though the road goes only part way up the mountainside, the view is spectacular, for not far away is Hout Bay, a semicircle of land attached to the peninsula and having its own panorama of beaches and a crescent of low mountains.

During World War II, we often took American and British servicemen who stopped in Cape Town on the drive around the peninsula.  En route, we would entice one of them into bragging about how strong he was and how far he could throw a ball.  Then, when we stopped at Chapman's Peak, we would urge him to throw a rock into the ocean, which appeared to be only a few hundred yards below, so that we could see the splash.  He never could.  The position of the road and the contours of the mountainside are such that, no matter how hard one throws the rock, the point where it hits the ocean is not visible from above.

To digress for a moment, we sometimes went to the Atlantic side of the peninsula not to make the full circuit but to fish.  Spoiled by the warmer water on the Indian Ocean side, we rarely swam in the much colder Atlantic, but the natural rock jetties were ideal for fishing.  We would park off the road – perhaps beneath the gaze of the Twelve Apostles, a group of mountains directly behind Table Mountain – and trek over the rocks.  Once we found a likely spot, my parents would use deep-sea fishing rods to make long casts into the ocean.  (My father was especially bad at this, for he had the knack of jamming the reel and tangling his line.)  We rarely caught anything, though I, too, had a miniature rod (somewhere between the true deep-sea kind and a fresh-water rod), and once I caught a fish that resembled a colorful creature from prehistoric times.  (To my dismay, my mother declared it inedible and probably poisonous, so we threw it back.)

What I enjoyed more was going after crayfish.  I should explain that the South African crayfish is not the little, brown fresh-water critter known to Americans as a crawfish or crawdad but is more like an American lobster.  One could catch them beside the rock jetties and in deep pools eroded into the rocks.  We would fasten strings of bait known as "red bait" onto a line, lower it into the water, and, going by tugs on the line or an increase in weight, lure the crayfish toward the surface while it was preoccupied with eating.  Then, when we could, we would land it with a net.  It was a procedure similar to that used for catching blueclaw crabs at the Jersey shore.  Coupled with the sea air and the salt spray, it was exhilarating fun – though I thought less of it when I learned that the only right way to cook crayfish (like lobsters) is to drop them alive into boiling water.  I didn't like this idea very much, especially since I had the habit of naming the ones I caught.

Anyway, to return to the Cape Peninsula drive, we would continue down toward Cape Point, where we crossed over to the Indian Ocean side.  In the years that we lived there, I never went to Cape Point itself because the tip of the peninsula housed a naval base that was closed to the public.  Instead, we cut across a relatively flat area before the Point.  However, I did see Cape Point once or twice from the top of Table Mountain, which is accessible only by foot or cablecar.  It's an amazing sight because, from that altitude, a distinct line is etched in the ocean where the warm currents of the deep-blue Indian Ocean meet the cooler currents of the green-tinted Atlantic.  Cape Point is not, however, the southernmost tip of the continent, as it may appear on a two-dimensional map; that distinction belongs to Cape Agulhas, which is latitudinally further south.

On the Indian Ocean side of the peninsula, the road is much closer to sea level and is – or was in my time – dotted with picturesque fishing villages.   Now that I have been to Maine, I think of it as much like the rocky Maine coast, quaint and picturesque but not as dramatic as the Atlantic side.  At the inner reach of the Indian Ocean side, where the peninsula meets the Cape Flats, the strip of land that attaches the peninsula to the mainland, is a wide arc of white sand.  This is Muizenberg, the most popular beach on the Cape, ideal for bathing when, as is usual, the surf breaks gradually and far from land, or for surfing, when waves are higher and break closer in.  In my time, much to the dismay, of bathers, my older brother and sister and their friends used to "land surf" across the wide expanse of Muizenberg beach by attaching surfboards to the end of ropes tied to the back of motorcycles.

After passing through Muizenberg, we would drive back through the suburbs to home, perhaps a little weary but always with numerous mental images that we would never completely forget.  To this day, I compare every ocean vista I see to the sights of the Cape Peninsula and every mountain to its mountains.  They all come up lacking, for, if one word describes the Cape, it is incomparable.

*I now note, from my research, that a portion of the drive around the peninsula is called Chapman's Peak Drive and is a toll road; it has been closed periodically because of rock slides.

The white cumulus clouds that drift across Table Mountain are known as The Tablecloth.