Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  Although it is a terrifying experience, yachts can often survive a corkscrew. The yacht Ohra, which had left Réunion with me, managed to do so, and probably in an extension of this same storm now battering Dove.

  It is hard to remember what thoughts I had at the height of the storm. Some fear, yes, fear touching the edge of panic. But the instinct of survival is what takes over in the end. My survival depended on my keeping Dove’s stern to the sea and on keeping awake.

  I’d been awake for almost forty-eight hours, and now thunder and lightning increased the tension and the noise of the storm. It was fantastic. Brilliant flashes lit up the monster swells and filled the cabin with green light. Then the thunder roared above the noise of the sea. For the first time in my voyage I felt that Dove would not make another port. The seas were too big for her after all and I too tired to help her.

  My battery-powered tape recorder was soaked and the reels wouldn’t turn. So I turned the reels by hand to make one last recording. I said: I’ve just prayed to God, and I prayed long and hard to make the sea and wind calmer. I prayed, “God or whoever you are, please help me.”

  I remember thinking at this time of a story I’d heard in my childhood of Jesus calming a rough sea. I prayed with my arms locked round the tiller.

  That was the moment when the storm began to abate. The huge swells stopped coming at me. I went to sleep. When the sun woke me up next morning, October 14, the wind was down to fifteen knots. The sea was sparkling and gentle.

  I unfurled the main and genoa, took an LOP and reset my course for Durban.

  7

  Drumbeats and Bridal Suite

  WHAT TO EXPECT OF AFRICA? Hollywood had fixed images in my mind of tangled jungles and lions under the bed, of natives dancing around big iron pots, of rivers swarming with crocodiles and outpost mission stations manned by men in pith helmets.

  The first surprise was on October 21 when I reached Durban. I hadn’t expected a skyline like San Francisco’s. And anyone who has not been to Africa cannot understand that Africa has its own blood beat, a sort of rhythm that you can’t hear but feel.

  Beyond the modern high-rise cities where the paved roads lead to red dirt tracks and the huge vistas of the veld, the throb seems to come from deep inside the earth. In Africa you get the feeling that you are seeing the planet earth before man began to ravage nature.

  I was to spend nine months in South Africa and I was tempted to stay there until the sun bleached my bones. It was a fantastic time.

  I turned into Durban’s broad harbor and as I approached the basin of the Royal Natal Yacht Club a figure on the mole waved and shouted at me. I didn’t take any special notice until I heard my name. It was Mac McLaren, who had worked with me at the Darwin power station. Mac dived into the water and swam to Dove. When I had pulled him aboard he told me that he had been keeping a watch for Dove along with Patti. Between gulps of air he explained how soon after Patti had arrived she had read the newspaper story of Dove’s foundering. Patti, he said, was waiting for me on one of the ocean cruisers in the yacht basin.

  After I cleared customs, Mac took me to the yacht where Patti was and there, in the cabin, I held her in my arms again.

  Neither of us had ever spoken of marriage Life had seemed too uncertain to be tied by legal bonds. Both of us were cautious of marriage, anyway, for there were too many of our relatives and too many of our parents’ friends whose marriages had broken down. We knew married couples as compatible as a mongoose and a cobra. Then too, by the calendar if not by experience, we were very young.

  For both of us it was marvelous just to be together when we could. This was all we had asked for. A wedding and a starchy reception at a country club, a honeymoon car covered with confetti and rattling with tin cans could not pull us closer together than we were.

  But at our Durban reunion a new idea crossed my mind. I longed to give Patti a pledge that she meant much more to me than just being a sailor’s wife. I wanted to show her that I believed the day would come when we would not be torn apart by a fair wind and the need to make another port.

  We had only ten minutes together in the cabin before someone tapped on the door of the companionway. A staff writer of National Geographic came in and introduced himself. For the next week the writer and I were cooped up together as we worked on the manuscript and captions of my first feature for the magazine.

  Patti had found a room in a small hotel two blocks behind the plush ones on the seafront. From there we discovered a side-street café with a fantastic atmosphere where a good meal with wine cost only a couple of dollars. Why pay for orchestras and waiters not worth their tips?

  On the day the magazine staffman returned to America, Patti and I strolled down one of Durban’s broad boulevards. As we passed a jeweler’s shop window a gold ring with a strange Oriental design caught my eye. I tugged at Patti’s arm.

  Her face was quite a study as I asked the jeweler to put the ring on the third finger of her left hand. It was a perfect fit.

  “There,” I said. “As soon as I saw it I knew it was made for you.”

  She held out her hand and looked at it a moment, then said, “It’s fantastic, Robin, but what’s it for?”

  “We’re engaged, of course! When do we get married?”

  She dropped her hand to her side and looked at me. “Now, Robin, don’t let’s be hasty.” She was laughing.

  But I was serious. The jeweler shifted from one foot to the other.

  “I just want you,” she said gravely, “and of course this absolutely lovely ring.”

  When we returned to the hotel the proprietress at once spotted the band on Patti’s finger. “Oh, what a pretty ring, Mrs. Graham,” she said breezily. “I was telling my husband you must have lost it.”

  “I didn’t own a ring until half an hour ago,” said Patti with the blandest smile.

  The proprietress sniffed, and not knowing where the conversation would take her, retreated behind her desk. But even in the guttural English of the Afrikaner I liked the sound of Patti being called Mrs. Graham. That night when we were in each other’s arms I whispered, “Now, Mrs. Graham, when shall we make it legal?”

  She tilted her head and kissed my chin. “I’ve always wondered if your intentions were strictly honorable.”

  “Very honorable,” I said, “and I’m quite serious.”

  “Are you? Or is it that you don’t like what the hotel proprietress is thinking and the looks they give me down at the yacht club?”

  “Forget them,” I said. “They’re jealous of the guy with a beautiful girl in a red bikini.”

  Patti was silent a moment, then asked, “How does the song go? Will you still love me when I’m sixty-four?”

  “And when you’re a hundred and four if you stay as trim as you are.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll chase you around the island before breakfast.”

  Again she was silent and then she whispered, “How big’s the island?”

  “That sounds like an acceptance of my proposal,” I replied.

  She didn’t laugh this time. She said, “You know it doesn’t have to be marriage, Robin. I wouldn’t want you ever to feel that you can’t leave me. I don’t want you ever to think that you owe me anything. I love you. That’s why I’m here. We’re happy. We’re young. Life is a long time. I hope it’s a long time and that as much as possible will be with you. Please don’t think that by giving me a piece of paper you’ll change what I feel for you. I can’t love you any more than I do now. I don’t think I can.”

  Next morning we went to the Durban magistrate’s court to get married. The official immediately asked my age. When I told him I was eighteen he said we would need the notarized consent of parents or guardian, as I was still a minor. This was a shock. I couldn’t understand why anyone should still be able to control me when I was half a world away from home. Patti returned to the yacht club and I went to the post office, where I wrote my parents an air letter and expla
ined I needed their consent to marry Patti.

  It was a lovely day and as I walked back to the yacht club I couldn’t think of any reason for waiting for my parents’ reply and all the legal stuff. I found Patti at the club and led her outside by the hand.

  “Where’re we going?” she asked.

  “You’ll find out,” I said.

  She continued to look puzzled but didn’t ask any more questions as I walked her along the beach. We found an empty spot in the sand and sat down in the sun.

  I said, “I’ve been doing a bit of thinking and I don’t see why we should wait for anyone’s consent to get married. We love each other. That’s enough. Besides, I hate what people are thinking about you.”

  “Do we have to worry what other people think?” said Patti.

  “Yes, we do,” I replied, “because it makes me mad.”

  I took the ring off her finger and as I put it on again I said, “Patti, I don’t know the words of the marriage ceremony. I just know that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. There now; from this day we are man and wife.”

  It was as simple as that.

  Actually, when my parents later replied to my letter they refused me permission to marry. They talked about my completing the voyage and that there’d be time enough—that sort of thing. They believed they knew best what was right for me. I wrote back and told them Patti and I considered ourselves married anyway.

  When we walked back along the sand of Durban’s beach we felt marvelously happy. It was all so neat. We both knew our marriage would last as long as we lived. I said, “Okay, where do we go for our honeymoon?”

  That evening at the yacht club we had a sort of wedding party. Everyone else thought it was an engagement party, but that didn’t matter. Mac was there and some other people off the yachts, and it was fun. The next day we bought a well-used Japanese motorcycle, two saddlebags and a blue pup tent and then we set off at once to explore Africa—or at least the southern part of it.

  We traveled up the coast to Saint Lucia and turned north to Umfolosi Game Reserve in Zululand, the home of the rare white rhinoceros. At the ranger’s office inside the reserve we asked for a local map. The ranger was helpful and told us where the rhino were feeding.

  “But keep inside your car,” he warned. “Those rhinos can move when they think they’re threatened.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got a fairly reliable motorcycle.”

  The ranger stopped in his tracks. “Motorcycle? You’re not allowed in the reserve on a motorcycle. How did you get through the gates? No, never mind, just get out of the park as fast as you can—and good luck.”

  Since we had traveled half across the world, we decided that before leaving the park we’d do some exploring on our own. Patti had christened the motorcycle Elsa. She named it for the lioness in the film Born Free. With the two of us aboard, Elsa had difficulty making hills steeper than one-in-eight gradient. The trick, we learned, was to approach a hill at full throttle and if it wasn’t too long we usually made the top in the style of the little red engine.

  Ahead of us was a hill steep enough to test Elsa’s one small cylinder, but there was a chance to make the crest if I could persuade the machine to touch 45 mph on the downward gradient. Yelling to Patti over my shoulder to hold on to my belt, I turned over the hand-grip throttle as far as it would go. Elsa kicked up a cloud of red dust as we roared into the shallow valley. Just as we began the ascent a huge mud-gray shape as solid as a locomotive ambled out of the tall grass and right across our path.

  I had had my share of hazards at sea, but the prospect of hitting a white rhino broadside at three-quarters of a mile a minute looked as if it would top every story in my book.

  Patti told me later she had simply closed her eyes. I will swear that Elsa’s starboard handlebar cut a permanent groove in the armored butt of the enormous beast.

  We traveled another mile or two in awed silence and then I turned Elsa off the dirt road onto a grass track. We pitched our pup tent under a tree and after a dinner of fried boerewors (South African spiced sausage) we listened to the night sounds of wildebeests and leopards.

  Then we slept—but not for long. Patti nudged me awake and I knew at once why she was as coiled as a watch spring. Just outside our tent something very large was tearing up the shrubbery. Pretending courage I didn’t possess, I lifted the flap and shone my flashlight around. About ten yards away the light was reflected back from a single, unblinking red eye.

  I am sure there are strategies used by unarmed big game hunters when they see one red eye raised five feet off the ground and within a wino’s spitting distance. But as I had not read up on the travel books, I fell back on the suburban drill when the neighbor’s German shepherd approaches with bared fangs.

  “Shooo!” I hissed into the night.

  Nothing happened. Without much comfort I remembered that the eyes of a rhino are so placed that when it stands sideways only one eye can be seen. As Einstein said, some seconds last longer than others. At this moment the seconds were beating out at about fifteen to the minute. Then, with a rumble that we felt through our sleeping bag, the owner of the red eye took off into the night.

  At breakfast we were heavy-lidded, but felt some kinship with all those pioneers who have braved the perils of the Dark Continent.

  We traveled north, skirting Swaziland—the Switzerland of Africa—and meandered through the lush low veld, discovering mountains of fantastic beauty, little African villages of thatched rondawels and places with romantic names—Bushbuck Ridge, Pilgrim’s Rest, Acornhoek, God’s Window, Phalaborwa, Tzaneen. When the sun set we pitched our tent, cooked a meal over an open fire and listened to the sounds of Africa—the howl of jackals, sometimes the beat of drums and, when on the edge of the two-hundred-mile fence of the famed Kruger National Park, the unforgettable roar of lion.

  For a few days we took aboard an interesting traveling companion—a chameleon about fourteen inches long. We christened him Clyde, and for many miles he sat perched on Elsa’s handlebars looking out at the countryside through prehistoric eyes. Clyde never recovered his composure after our only mishap. Elsa skidded on a patch of oil and Patti and I were thrown into a ditch with little more damage than a grazed knee and bruised elbow. When we had brushed ourselves down we found Clyde tiptoeing into the bush. Only his dignity had been hurt so we repositioned him on his perch. But from then on Clyde kept one eye anxiously on the road ahead and the other fixed accusingly on my face. Clyde’s leap from the mists of time to the age of the motorcycle was obviously too rapid for his pleasure.

  Marvelously content with our own company, we avoided big towns and rarely met up with people, black or white. But whoever we met we found friendly and hospitable. It seemed strange to us and sad that in a country condemned for its racial policies the individuals—the African, Afrikaner and English-speaking settler—should share in common a rare and charming hospitality. Several Afrikaner storekeepers and farmers loaded us with fruit and vegetables and refused to take payment. Africans along the roads greeted us with waves and pearly smiles.

  Sometimes we would leave Elsa at the roadside and trek barefooted into the veld to explore grottoes, vast plains, forest trails, all hauntingly beautiful. We would bathe under mountain cascades and stretch out in the sun, and occasionally be chased by a colony of baboons. At dawn we would stalk herds of grazing impala, the most graceful of the antelope. Then, alerted by our scent or the snapping of a twig, the whole herd would bound for the cover of the trees—a flash of sunlit fawn and white against the gray of mountain rocks or the lush green of the new grass and wild mimosa.

  We possessed no calendar, not even a watch between us. Time was measured by the angle of the sun and by nights filled with the perfume of exotic flowers, and always the inexplicable throb beating out the rhythm and the harmony of nature.

  At one campsite near Acornhoek we so loved the peace and beauty of the land, its warmth and color and great views, that we made inquirie
s about buying a stretch of the African veld. What, we asked ourselves, compelled us on? Here we could build a rondawel like the ones the Africans build, and plow soil eager to yield all the food we needed. Here we could cut ourselves off from the conformity and drudgery, the smog, smells and overcrowding of the society into which we had been born.

  But even as we weighed our arguments and measured out ten acres bordered by a creek, we knew that it was not yet the moment for our retreat. So we packed our saddlebags again, mounted Elsa and headed toward the coast.

  Back at Durban I gave Dove a close inspection and realized she was in worse shape than I had at first believed. The Malagasy storm had more than bruised her. Water had seeped into the points where the deck joined the hull. The wood sandwiched between the fiberglass panels had begun to rot. In her present state Dove would not again survive high seas or gale.

  For two months I worked on repairing the boat, and before sealing the decks to the hull I lifted out the cockpit and decked her over aft. The cockpit had served me little purpose and was generally filled with gear better stored below. In a heavy sea the cockpit had proved a danger. It was capable of scooping up half a ton of water.

  The job of fitting and fiberglassing was hard work and frustrating too, but I had a helpmate now in Patti, who fetched and carried timber, screws and resin and who cooled my temper with cold beer and soft answers.

  On March 8, Dove was ready for the sea again. Patti saw me leave the yacht basin and then she set off on Elsa for East London, 250 miles down the coast. If the wind was fair we would be together again in three days. But I’d traveled barely twenty miles before the wind quit altogether and I told my tape recorder:

  Good old weather reports! They promised a northeaster, but where is it? There’s a big hotel on the shore a couple of miles away and I’ve been looking at its windows for an hour.