I am young enough to be surprised when friends die, but old enough for it no longer to be that unusual.
So it was with both shock and resignation when I received an email from South Africa saying that one of my finest mates, John, was now in the place where fishermen no longer have to lie.
John, like me, was a reporter, but he was the only reporter I knew who loved fishing. We met while working in the Pietermaritzburg bureau of opposing publications and he offered me a room in the commune he was renting.
It wasn’t exactly fully furnished as the bed was an old door on bricks with a chunk of foam, but it was cheap and as a junior reporter, this left a little cash for other things, such as food and beer. And there was a party going on non-stop.
Once, after I had broken up with a girlfriend for the gazillionth time, he suggested we take a coastal drive from Durban to Cape Town, stopping and paddle-skiing when the mood took us and camping where we could.
It took us a week to reach Cape Town via the Wild Coast, Plett, Mossel Bay, Cape St Francis, J-Bay and some places I didn’t know were on the map. We arrived, hair streaked with salt, half-crazed from sun and beer and singing the only cassette the creaky tape in my bakkie could play (Downunder by Men at Work).
We were at the Pig ‘n Whistle when I got a call from my editor at Scope magazine to get back to Durban soonest as I was to lead a group of readers on a sailing holiday to the Caribbean. We drove back in 15 hours and I flew out to the British Virgin Islands a day or so later. I can tell you now – that trip with John was far, far better than anything a mere tropical paradise could throw at me.
A few years later we both ended up in Johannesburg; me as the news editor for the now defunct Sunday Star, and he as a freelancer writing for computer magazines and being paid more for one measly press release than I made in a week.
He was married by then to a great woman, but we would still meet up for regular fishing trips. These would be all night affairs on the banks of the Crocodile River where we hunted barbel and carp with slimy worms.
We would drink beers by the Coleman lamp, bugs hissing as they fried on the gas mantle, and talk about anything and everything. It kept me sane in soulless Jo’burg – and for that alone, I owe John an eternal debt.
I was in Zululand when we went on our last fishing safari. We didn’t know that it would be our last. I phoned him on the spur of the moment and said that if he got his butt on the plane we would be hunting tigerfish in Jozini that night and then hitting grunter and kob at St Lucia the next day.
I picked him up at Durban airport a few hours later. He got off the plane clutching his sole item of hand luggage – a tin pierced with holes and full of Kariba Reds, worms that for some bizarre reason he thought would be irresistible to tigers. I can still picture this as clear as yesterday. Can you imagine trying to get that through the X-Ray machines at airports today? Not to mention the look of horror on the faces of the passengers next to him.
It was a diamond of a trip. We laughed and we caught fish. At night we would laze by the camp fire, gazing at the sky lit like a celestial Guy Fawkes, arguing over where the Southern Cross and its two pointers, Alpha and Beta Centauri are. It was great to be alive.
I believe John is now up in that sky. Hopefully he will have settled the dispute over the Southern Cross once and for all.
I’ll ask him when I next see him.
