Shorelines (26 page)

The Storms River Wedding of the Year kicks off with a growl as the priest pitches up on a Harley Davidson at the
broekielace
pastel palace called The Tsitsikamma Inn. The whole village is agog. This is Cadillac Jack’s big day, and his young wife, Anne, waits at the makeshift altar, dressed like a 1950s American soda-fountain babe.

Soon, that well-known 1973 Mustang comes rumbling down the main road and out springs Elvis Presley. Or the closest thing to Elvis Presley you’ll find anywhere along the Garden Route today. Oh yes. Cadillac Jack du Rand (some simply call him “Jan”, but for the purposes of this fantasy his name is Cadillac Jack) has arrived in style. His own style, mixed up with a little bit of Las Vegas in the Time of the King. A white suit with bell-bottoms, sequins and a pointy collar. Sneakers to die for and one helluva rug swivelling jauntily on his balding noggin.

The wedding speech is a hoot. Almost every phrase is accompanied by a significant Elvis song. When Cadillac Jack turns to address his in-laws, the chosen number is ‘It’s Alright Mama’.

“Come in, come in,” Jan du Rand boomed as we entered his mansion through the big red doorway at the back. The first thing we saw was an enormous plasma screen TV – about the size of a six-seater table – attached to the wall. The King, surrounded by flunkies as he arrived somewhere in Hawaii for a performance, leered down from the screen with his Tupelo Mississippi Cajun sneer.

“I like Elvis a lot,” said Cadillac Jack in passing.

A number of other couples were outside at the
braai
, where a large selection of meats were sizzling. Jan took us around to the front garden, where he planned to keep 34 pairs of exotic water birds. Jules was about to give him some good advice in case a feathered foreigner flew in and got funky with some of his garden varieties, leaving behind a little ‘present’ of Type H5N1, a virulent strain of avian flu. I stopped her just in time. We were here for a party, and it was clear that nothing would dissuade Jan from buying his fancy front-lawn ducks.

Inside, Elvis was getting it on. Someone turned the volume right up. They were probably jiving self-consciously to the faint strains of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ over in Kurland by now.

“Here’s my gym,” said Jan, showing us a vast exercise room with Jacuzzi, sauna, weights, running machines and an inspirational set of Cadillac prints on the walls.

We sat down to an excellent repast of shoulder of lamb, rump kebabs and pork chops with salads and rosemary potatoes. Anne – who had once managed a guesthouse in England – was an excellent chef and a charming hostess. But she really wanted to murder us with her pudding.

“It’s healthy,” she laughed. “It’s only fruit.” Yeah right: brandied bananas, berries, ice cream and a generous drizzling of Belgian chocolate. After more than six, occasionally dodgy (in culinary terms) weeks on the road, we leapt on the feast. A chubby Elvis – never one to turn down something sweet – smirked at us approvingly from up there on the big screen.

We rolled back to the Woodcutter’s Cottage after dinner, full as two ticks on a hound dog’s bum.

“It’s over the top, but I like it,” I said to Jules and burped loudly into the Tsitsikamma night. “You know me and eccentrics. And then there’s Elvis. Any friend of Elvis is a friend of mine.” She had to agree with my sentiments, although she had arrived a little late in this world to appreciate the Presley era fully.

The next morning we met Emma Fisher, the main liaison person between the local township residents and Storms River Adventures. Emma was also the home-based care expert who worked on the frontline of health in the community. Emma’s ‘back story’ was a hard one. Her forest-ranger husband Petrus Ngcobo had burnt to death in an accident involving petrol many years before. She worked as a labourer for the national park, cleaning toilets for R18 a month. With Petrus’s regular compensation payout of R30, Emma had had less than R50 to support herself and six children each month.

“Then I was promoted to cleaning chalets,” she said, “and life got a little better. There were lots of leftovers from the visitors and this helped me to feed the kids.”

Both Emma and her next husband, Johannes Fisher, got diabetes. Johannes died at 51, leaving her a widow for the second time. But by now she had grown used to the presence of ill health and bad fortune. So she started looking after the people in the Storms River Township.

“I knew suffering. I could help other people now.”

As we drove into the township, Emma told us about the medicines they used to take in her younger days.

“We used the
perdepisboom
[horse-piss tree] for women’s problems,
hotnotskooi
[Hottentot’s bed] for colds and marijuana for asthma – taken as a tea, of course.”

But now the township was drinking itself to death, she said sorrowfully.

“Young girls are having babies just to get social grants. Others are getting drunk and having sex without condoms, exposing themselves and others to the HIV/AIDS virus. We call them ‘beautiful bombs’.”

Emma, Jules and I went off to hunt for one Paw Paw Scott, the man behind the famous Otter Trail, but Paw Paw was out fighting fires. So we went back to Storms River, where I had a long-overdue reunion hug with Fiona Green, Ashley Wentworth’s partner. Fiona, a slim, attractive woman with an unforgettably cute lisp (that’s how I remembered her from our woolly days at Rhodes University) was every bit as caring as Ashley in her attitudes to the poor living in their midst. And now that the village was threatened by fire once again, her first concern lay with the township people and their pets.

My concern lay with the Bloukrans Bungee Jump that awaited us the next morning. More than 200 metres of free fall at the end of a rubber line down into an infinite gorge? In my delicious decrepitude? Was I bloody crazy? Look, I’d done this kind of thing once before (Victoria Falls, circa 1996) and ended up singing rather high-pitched snatches of a Neil Young ditty all the way down to a point just above the Zambezi River. But I’d been desperate for another story angle on Victoria Falls, and the guys in the Explorer Bar the night before had laid all manner of bets, forcing my hand.

But this was another kind of animal. Twice as high, twice as scary. And, to crown it all, I was doing it completely sober this time.

So the dawn arrived and we wondered where the fires had gone. The first gusts of wind had rattled through town like an express train just before six o’clock, clearing the skies of smoke. The mountains were visible for the first time that week.

As we stood in the road outside the cottage, we felt another windy draft. This time it was hot, like a distant dragon’s breath. The much-feared berg winds had arrived. They would be fanning the embers like a giant set of bellows.

Before we left for our date with a bungee rope, we popped in to visit Ashley and Fiona at their offices. Anneline told us her husband Martin and his fire-fighting team had been out since long before sunrise. Cars were arriving and departing from the village at speed, leaving strands of rumour and garbled bits of information in their wake. The fire had jumped the highway at a number of places. The local clinic was open and ready to receive burn victims. Would the Plaatbos Forest, with its indigenous growth, be a good sanctuary?

Then the smoke descended on Storms River and the sky turned a dreadful apricot-sepia colour. Ashley had been planning to go into the plantations to cut down a pine for the staff Christmas tree.

“I suppose I’d better hurry and get one before they all burn down.”

A light drift of smoke ash began falling on the village. We called the bungee people and they said come on over, we’re ready for you. Jules, who had made sure to wear a special sports bra for the jump, was now worried about the flammable nylon content of her tracksuit pants.

“I’m sure they won’t let us dive into fire,” I said without any real conviction. Shit. Not only was I going to attempt the world’s highest bungee jump in my middle years, but there was now the added thrilling possibility of going down in flames as well.

We hit the N2 back towards Plett and the Bloukrans Bridge. Smoke rose ominously from both sides of the highway.

We reached the jump area and I nearly had a party all by myself, right there. The bungee staff came hurrying past, carrying equipment.

“No jumping today. So sorry. We’ve just received orders to evacuate.” They ran off in the direction of a clump of wooden huts right next to a pine forest. A Kiwi jump master called Devon came over and gave us (ironically) a ‘rain check’ on the jump.

“Now you’d better get going,” he said anxiously. “The fire is very close to the road.”

“Dodged that bullet,” I said to Jules as we turned back onto the N2 and headed for Storms River Village. Along the way, we saw road workers working the verges with their hedge-trimmers, completely oblivious to the approaching blaze because they wore earmuffs. We caught their attention and pointed at the smoky distance, but they just smiled, nodded and continued their trimming.

At the Boskor sawmill, a group of seven women flagged us down. They had been told to evacuate the sawmill premises, and were frantic about their children and homes on the other side of the Storms River Bridge.

“Hop on,” we said – and they needed no second invitation.

A hundred metres on, we were flagged down by fire officials and the women climbed out, chattering nervously. A luxury bus ahead of us did a U-turn. Other vehicles passed us. We glimpsed flames above the trees to our left, and then they vanished in a billow of thick smoke.

The firestorm arrived, flanking both sides of the highway, which had suddenly become our safety zone. We were parked behind a
bakkie
loaded with what looked like gas canisters. Behind us was a truck loaded with freshly-cut timber. We were not in great company right then. We felt an overwhelming urge to escape, by any means possible.

We decided to drive on into the smoke. The women jumped back onto the vehicle, with two on the back seat behind us.

“Get some pictures of the fire,” I urged Jules as we passed the crackling, angry wall of fire that seemed very keen to turn us into toast. The day turned into dark grey night. Like a desperate moth, I just followed the two orange hazard lights of the vehicle in front of us.

“Chris, I think we should turn back,” said Jules. But that option was no longer available and besides, I remembered the words of Cadillac Jack:

“Just keep moving. Just go forward.” Thanks Jack. You darling Elvis impersonator-type fellow, you.

The women on the back of our
bakkie
were whimpering and breathing heavily through their scarves. I was too busy concentrating on those flashing taillights ahead of me to be scared. That would come later, I knew.

Finally the smoke lightened from dark brown to tobacco to tan to grey and we pulled over at the turnoff to Storms River Village. The women coughed and climbed down. They thanked us and disappeared down the road to where their friends were waiting. As complete strangers, we had nearly shared a death that day.

The man driving the timber truck behind us also stopped. He came up and shook my hand.

“Wow. That was a serious risk we took,” he said, with a rasp in his voice. “I had to wet some toilet paper and hold it over my mouth to breathe. I just thanked God for your taillights all the way through.”

Storms River Village was in uproar. The road was alive with people, carrying their prized possessions to safety. Two Israeli backpackers begged us for a lift. Sure, we said. So we fetched their kit from their guesthouse and deposited them at the entrance of the Storms River Adventures office. Ashley would know what to do with them.

Anneline Wyatt drove up in her sedan, which was filled with two dogs, a hamster, an African Grey parrot called Gorgeous and a ring-necked parakeet called Sexy. Her pets were distinctly pissed off at having to share such a small space.

Fiona was whirling in and out of the township ferrying people and animals. She was covered in scratches from trying to free panicky township dogs from their chain posts. She said the township people were sprinkling their lawns and roofs with water, and burying their gas bottles in the ground. The supermarket did a roaring trade in comfort food. Then they told us that the park was now on fire. We heard that the village of Coldstream was burning, that children had gone missing. The nightmares were becoming real.

The hot berg wind suddenly swung around and turned icy. The prayed-for cold front had arrived. We scrabbled for jackets. Anneline’s cellphone rang. It was Martin. Could she prepare supper for 22 starving fire-fighters? No problem.

We decided to leave town for our next stop, Jeffreys Bay. But the N2 was closed, so we bet on the R102 via Humansdorp. Neither of us wanted to leave our new friends, but they were distracted and it looked as though there was nothing more here for us to do.

“Promise that if the R102 looks even vaguely dangerous, you’ll come right back here and stay with us,” warned Fiona. “We have a flat waiting for you.”

We had a small section of the N2 completely to ourselves. I was pleased to see that the Knight of the Order of the Shady Trees had taken his speed trap and buggered off to safer spots. I wished him well.

At the Tsitsikamma Lodge turnoff, we saw an ironic flood-warning sign, and then we were on the R102 in an area called
Kwaaibrand
(Angry Burn), which was a little more in keeping with the theme of the day, we thought.

Radio Algoa had fire updates every few minutes, begging people like us to stay off the roads. The air was still brown. We drove past farms where dairy cows stared dumbly at their burning piles of lucerne. We saw farm workers in the distance, vainly battling looming fires with wet sacks and more courage than I would ever muster. Large gum trees next to the road had caught fire at their base and would soon fall across the R102. The whole area was devastated.

Finally, we arrived at Jeffreys Bay where, out on the legendary Supertubes, the surfers played in the late-afternoon light like sea sprites. We sent SMSs to our friends to tell them we were safe, and fellow travel hack Geoff Dalglish replied: