The most powerful form of friendship one can be blessed with is that of a “fierce friend”, writes Murray Williams.
My phone rang.
“Hi, it’s Nico.”
Wow, it sure had been a long time.
We caught up a bit. Then he asked: “We are doing a Rooi Els-to-Strand paddle tomorrow. I am looking for a paddling partner. Keen?”
Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in the back of a double surf-ski, in the middle of False Bay, gliding down ocean swells. And I realised why Nico had called.
He had not needed a paddling partner. There were plenty of other paddlers.
No, he had called because he had wondered how I was. Perhaps he had even been concerned.
And he had known what he had to do: Get me back on the ocean, my place of healing.
My old friend Nico had just played the most powerful form of friendship one can be blessed with. He had been a “fierce friend”.
Isn’t it sad how often one sees friends failing, when they are needed most?
I have known the history of entire families to change, because friends were not “fierce” - when that was their precise moment in time.
My friend, Nico, had probably known I would listen when he called, because our friendship had been forged in some pretty wild terrain.
In 2008, four of us took to the ocean in what surf forecaster Steve Pike called a “25-year-storm”.
He wrote: “From a surfing, and a marine perspective, this was special. Grizzled waterman and surf media expert Paul Botha, said that at Kommetjie sets broke as far out as I have ever seen on phantom reefs I did not know existed after 45 years of surfing here’.”
“The swell last Sunday reached 58 feet with intervals of 15.8 seconds, relayed by the CSIR Waverider buoy six miles more off Slangkop in Kommetjie. That is the largest recorded wave since it was installed,” Pike wrote.
From Strand to Rooi Els, we rode this storm in 8m-swell, with a 45-knot north-westerly at our backs. And, as a team of four on the ocean, we watched each other's backs, until we were dumped ashore.
If I trusted Nico in that, I would trust him in any circumstance. When he called, I listened.
But being a “fierce friend” is not only about being that friend. It is about ourselves.
When a friend hoves into view, out of the blue, with some tough truths, it is all too easy to go on the defensive: “Who the hell are you?!”
But if we are smart, if we truly listen, what we will hear is the ultimate sound of loyalty.
The ultimate sound of care. And love.
Thanks for the call, my fierce friend.
* Williams’ “Shooting from the Lip” column appears in the Cape Argus every Monday.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus