Promises

The moon was waxing as we leaned over the railing separating us from the swelling black tides of the Kowie River Mouth, and the twin piers rose out before us like slate coloured sentinels guarding the gates to the earth.

It was a summer alive with stars; those above competing with the lights of the fishing trawlers moored on the horizon, their powerful 3Kw beams scouring the wash to attract a kind of squid called Chokka, or to the locals; white gold. It is this rubbery seafood that is made into calamari, and the many trawlers out here fishing with hand lines and jigs would soon be exporting the squid en masse as far afield as Portugal and China. Chokka was the life blood, the staple commodity of many of the sea faring villages along the East Coast of South Africa. Our small port was no different.

Playfully, a briny mist freckled our faces and we leaned into it, wondering what the night’s calm conditions had brought our fishermen; and I remember rubbing my hands along those metal hand rails, the drops of saltwater that dewed them glittering in the half light. I’ll never forget the first time I watched those Chokka boats and felt that deep and abiding serenity; knowing that though winds and storms may buffet them, they would be back next year; and the next, doggedly panning for white gold through the jeweled night.

My home, in my memory, is an idyllic place.

And now it’s winter in the city, and the thin metal poles that hold the flickering streetlamps are encased in a thin skin of ice that burn your fingers if you hold on too long. It’s cold and dry, there is no water here and everything looks dead, but they assure me there is still green beneath the bark of that skeletal and flaking bough.

And I, in a shirt I starched with my own promises, stare at streetlamps. And I imagine the sound of the surging barrels rolling outward from the pier, and the lights on the far off vessels weaving like seated toddlers, their heads resting tenderly against the lips of heaven.