The Lantern Moon Over the Magaliesburg
Snot en trane
I had no business being there. Nearly sixty years on the clock, and a body that sometimes creaks like the old floorboards of the dusty farmhouse on Oakvilla farm, and yet there I was on the evening of the December full moon, clicking into my pedals outside Biden, ready for the full-moon social ride with Cal and Eddy. The three of us. No pressure. Just the quiet promise of a night ride in the Magaliesburg and whatever the world felt like giving us.
I warmed up alone on the tar from Biden to Avianto. The road was still warm from the day’s sun, and as I rolled through the stone gates I saw it: another wedding in the chapel and guests milling in the garden. White draping, candles, a bride in a dress that caught the last of the sunset. Exactly like ours, twenty-six years earlier, almost to the day. I stopped pedalling and reflected, watching the couple take their photographs under the same trees. Snot en trane. It was the same grief hallucination that you hear in that awesome Irish ballad, Molly Malone. I mounted eddy, wiped my face with the back of my hand, and rode on before anyone noticed the old fart blubbering at the side of the tar.
The Cradle Loop started properly after that. Tar met singing wheels, gradient kicked up, and the young guns in the bunch started cranking like tomorrow was cancelled. I told myself I’d just sit in, take it steady, survive. But something stubborn woke up in my legs. I stayed on the wheels. Up the drags, through the sweeping corners, over the rolls—I matched them. Cal looked across at one point and just shook his head, grinning. I was screaming at Eddy for one last hurrah. I felt ridiculously alive.
And then the moon came.
It crested the ridge behind us like someone had hung a lantern the size of a small planet in the sky. Not rose—crested. One moment the horizon was dark, the next it was on fire with this huge, low, impossible gold-white disc. This was no ordinary full moon. This was the Cold Moon, the last supermoon of the year, and it had lined up perfectly with a major lunar standstill—the same rare wobble in the moon’s orbit that made the ancient builders align Stonehenge the way they did. Once every couple of decades the moon swings to its most extreme northerly and southerly points. When that extreme coincides with perigee (the moon’s closest approach to Earth), you get something that is generational and won’t in all probability be seen again by me.
It looked close enough to touch. The craters were sharp, the glow almost harsh, yet soft at the edges like candlelight. It threw our shadows ahead of us on the road, long and black and dancing. The bush around us was whispering in worship. Every leaf, every blade of grass, every thorn tree stood out in perfect silhouette. We rode in silence for a long stretch, because what do you say when the sky is doing something that feels older than language?
Eventually the road spat us out back at the finish. Someone had fired up the pizza oven. We sat on hay bales, legs wrecked, hands wrapped around cold beers, eating wood-fired pizzas that were properly rural—charred crusts, fresh rocket, goat’s cheese, figs from the tree overhead. Crunchy, smoky, perfect.
Another old fella wandered over, helmet in hand, smiling. Kevin. Turned out he’s quite the fan of eddy. He was one of those I dropped when the eddy testosterone triggered. He sat with us a while, recounting the exact moment the moon cleared the hills—“I promise you, my boet, I nearly rode off the tar”. He told us he’ll be back next month to try and hang onto our wheels again. I believed him.
That night will stay burned behind my eyes for whatever years I have left. The wedding that made me cry, the legs that refused to quit, riding under a moon that felt like it had come specifically to show off for us. And Kevin’s quiet promise in the firelight: “See you again when we go cranking the Magaliesburg.”
Ja. We’ll be there.