all you do

So, all you do is take pictures?

This mildly offensive question people asked us for years used to drive John quietly nuts. And the most memorable outburst of his frustration took place many moons ago in New Zealand. 

We spent a long mid-winter night in an unheated and unlit shepherds' hut, waiting for the punishing predawn hour when John had to get up, find his frozen boots in the dark and, hungry and cold, drive to meet Henk DeBroekert. Henk, a former air force pilot and a high country farmer, was about to look for his Merino sheep stranded in the fresh snow on the upper slopes of his station. And since we were working on our high country story for National Geographic magazine, we had to follow sheep farmers up the gorges and ridges of the Southern Alps, ride their sturdy horses bred to withstand glacial river currents, and generally try to stay alive.

John already learned from Henk this early morning slog was to take but a few hours and the men would walk fast, and I decided to attend to other matters. But the quest for the stranded woollies occupied all day and took the men across many exposed snow fields polished blue by gale force winds. Eventually they made their way down in the gathering dusk and Henk drove away, while John tried to return to our bone-freezing hut. He did not go far: a flat tire. Hungry, tired and cold, he managed to wrestle his spare on, but within a short distance got another flat: the sharp gravel of high country back roads was legendary for shredding rubber tires as if they were marshmallows. He had to walk.

"I will kill the next bastard who asks us if all we do is take pictures," were his first words after he came in. It was said calmly but had to be said.

Our flat tires meant we could not use our car, and next morning a shepherd who was going to town gave us a lift so we could have them fixed. Nursing a big hangover from the night before, he was nevertheless a chatty man. As soon as he learned what we were doing in this remote corner of the McKenzie Basin, he earnestly asked: "so all you do is take pictures?" We had to laugh, and since then it never bothered us.

And now, about 38 years later on the coast of Namibia we suddenly remembered this no longer irksome question. 

We arrived on a crescent gravel beach the night before, tired enough to turn in after many hours spent in the bright desert light and sharp whiffs of the sand-packed wind. The sea was just barely slapping the dark coastal rocks and lifting strands of kelp in a fluid motion of a breathing giant expanding his chest now and then. I perched on a low ridge and photographed the red sun sliding magnificently behind the wet fog bank. And John, who spotted flamingos patrolling the surf, stretched out on the sand and followed their slow to and fro progress parallel to the coast until no number of pixels could do them justice. 

The night came. We cooked and ate our supper, downloaded the day's pictures, looked at them with our eyes already gluing shut, made our narrow bed, and tried to follow another luminous fragment of Helen Macdonald's new book, "H Is For Hawk" read aloud by John. We slept.

And this morning our rented camper would not start. Its main battery was as flat as a pancake. How? Why? Never mind. Flat is flat. It means no juice. No spark. In Africa. On the coast. Miles from the nearest town.

I do not understand electricity and I fear it, so I was no help: if anything, I was a hindrance. What would I do? Wait until someone with a functioning battery and jump cables showed up. Relying on someone's help is not my usual mode of problem solving, but the only one that came to my mind. But -- will someone show up? And -- when? And will they have jump cables?

In the meantime John, who approaches electrical problems as if they were polite and harmless LEGO pieces, wanted to jump the defunct object from our auxiliary battery stored in the back and feeding our camper's inside lights. But we searched, and there were no jump cables anywhere. Trust John, I said to myself. Just -- for Pete's sake -- trust the man. Remember the time you lost your glasses in the Arctic river while crossing it on foot, fished them out, discovered one side piece was gone, and John carved for you a new one from a caribou antler using his Swiss Army knife and tied it to the frame with some dry sinew? And the time -- perhaps more pertinent to our predicament now -- when he rewired our entire house right after we bought it, because it had to be done? Trust him!

And he solved it. He removed the dead battery and brought the auxiliary unit from the back. And since the auxiliary was twice the size and would not fit, he tilted it sharply and wedged one of its corners into the small space vacated by the old battery until he could attach the PLUS terminal lead. Then -- in order to connect the short ground lead to the tilted auxiliary -- he spanned the distance with one of the tools he always carries, a simple pair of vise grips, and extended its length with the lug wrench, solid enough to do the job.

Then -- while holding the ends of both tools together to assure conductivity -- he said: " Get in and turn the engine on."  The engine roared back to life.  As we hit the gravel road, we remembered the question which used to drive John nuts. 

And all we still do is take pictures.

©Yva Momatiuk