Reviva Schermbrucker

When my son, Ben, picked up this sea bean on the beach at Arniston which is at the very tip of Africa, I knew as I stroked its intriguing smooth exterior, a perfect fit for the the palm of a human hand, that  I would have to find out more about it.

It’s been a hard nut to crack ( excuse the feeble crack)  but finally I can report that Ben’s sea bean is the drift seed of the Entada rheedii, a tropical climber that grows on river banks in Northern KwaZulu Natal and Mozambique. The pods can be longer than a metre and sometimes the beans wash up inside parts of the pod.  The leaves of the plant are traditionally smoked to encourage vivid dreams, hence it is called the African dream herb.

All the vivid dreaming one could do hardly measure up with a sea trip of three thousand miles! I’ve tried my hand at a rhyming poem based on what I imagine it might have experienced en route.  

The Sea Bean’s Story

On a beach at the bottom tip of Africa, where a rough sea swells

Amongst fans, screws and mussel ears – a common spread of shells

A big brown seed case lies half buried in the sand.

What it is doing there, it’s hard to understand

There is not a plant or tree in sight

that could produce a bean as big and bright.

(only vygies creeping on the dunes all around

they do not care a sour fig about our find).

I pick up the sea bean and ask it where it comes from, coax it to speak

And even though it has no lips or mouth, I hear a faint exotic word, “ Mozambique!”

“In that faraway land on the banks of a fast river, my mother tree grows

And from her trails a myriad long pods in which her babies sleep in tidy rows

It is in this place with my brothers and sisters on either side of me

That a grew from a dot to this large brown bean that you see

Like every mother ours hung on tight, did not let her family go

But there came a big rain that hammered her and oh! Oh! Oh!

We felt the ties that held us to our mother grow tauter and tauter

and then they broke, and we were thrown into the water

Frightened and quaking in our beds, on our roof a drumming rain,

we heard our mother call to us one last time , her voice hiding her pain

‘Bye- bye my darling beans, live happy beaningful lives and be good’

And we were gone from her, crying out that we would, we would.

In our long pod canoe we hurtled along the angry swollen river

We shook in fear knowing our craft was just a thin wooden sliver

And sure enough as river emptied into sea, so hard did we roll and pitch

the entire pod snapped in half and our canoe we had to ditch.

Surprise, surprise, our mother had thought of everything and saw to it that we could float

And provided us with an inboard bubble of air and a tough waterproof coat

So we bobbed along together chatting on the moving surface of the sea

And for the first time the wide world of sky and water opened up for us to see.

But not for long, because soon we drifted in different directions

Each alone to make our own connections

It was awfully lonely to be forced apart

I found myself suffering from a heavy heart

But then I noticed other fellow travellers, curious creatures

Many with the most outlandish features.

Under the water were fish with noses and sharks with smiles,

Millions of eyes winking from reefs stretching for miles

Crabs with crusty limbs

and dolphins who entertained with acrobatic swims,

Great big helmet-wearing turtles paddled by

and schools of silver fish that seemed to fly

Bumping into other sea drift lifted the spirit

A coconut on its way to an island there to seed itself in it.

A holey bit of pumice from a distant volcano spewed

Its bubbly, playful nature lightened the mood

Ships sailed past carrying fishermen and sailors

But mostly it was huge vessels laden with containers

And just as things seemed as if they could not get more entrancing,

A tuna jumped out from the depths and swallowed me whole in passing.

I proved to be indigestible in this grumbling, tumbling location

And gave the tuna a terrible case of constipation.

Days later, after great exertions, I was expelled

From the grim, smelly place where I was held.

We parted company , a mutual agreement to take a hike

What a relief for fish and bean alike.

Time passed slowly, day following night

as I drifted south, the coast of Africa on my right

Borne along on a soothing warm current on which I could rest

I rounded the continent and headed out west

Happy to continue forever on my travels on the sea

A finger of land protruding from Africa caught me

And rolled me through kelp forests and jagged rocks

My tough skin oblivious to the knocks,

And safely beached me here in this foreign place

Where a sea purse, in fact it’s a shark’s egg case,

though its stringy parts are peculiar and reek

reminded me of my missing family in Mozambique.

Perhaps my brothers and sisters have found better soils

After their adventurous sea-faring toils

For we cannot settle where there is no rich soft mud

Put our roots down, grow up towards the sky and bud.

I am not sure if this is a beaningful life, lying here on the sand

I think I prefer something a bit more grand.”

That was the end of the sea bean’s tale, I fear

No more did it say even when I held its lovely smooth shape to my ear

I washed it till the salty crust on its skin was gone

And polished and polished it till it shone

I thought up of words that rhymed with bean

Such as scene and green and mean and queen

and kept it on my writing table

Until in 2004 when I was able

On a trip of 2 thousand miles long

Crossing borders, right and wrong

To plant it on a river bank , up a creek

In its home, in Mozambique.