The Bride Was Getting Ready and My Car Was Dying on the N1

I Always Leave Two Hours Early

There is one rule I have kept for every wedding in nine years of photographing them. I leave two hours before I need to. Not one hour. Two. Because the one thing a photographer can never do is be late for the bride getting ready, those quiet, nervous, beautiful hours in a room full of hairspray and mothers, which you can never recreate afterwards.

So on the second Saturday of April, with a wedding at a farm venue outside Kroonstad and the bridal prep starting at eleven, I left my house in Centurion at seven thirty. Camera bodies charged. Lenses cleaned. Six batteries, four memory cards, the spare flash, the little sewing kit I carry because someone always splits a seam. A flask of coffee and a packet of Romany Creams on the passenger seat.

The bride was a girl called Karabo, a primary school teacher, and her groom was a quiet engineer called Ruan. I had met them three times, and I liked them in the way you sometimes just like a couple, because they kept looking at each other when the other one was talking.

The Noise Past Sasolburg

I crossed the Vaal at about eight forty and was making excellent time. Just past the Sasolburg turnoff, my car, a nine year old Polo with two hundred and sixty thousand kilometres on it, made a noise I had never heard before. A sort of grinding hiccup. Then the temperature needle, which I confess I do not look at very often, swung up into the red like it was trying to escape the dashboard.

I pulled onto the shoulder. Steam was coming out from under the bonnet. Trucks were passing so close that the whole car rocked every time one went by.

I sat there for a full minute with my hands on the steering wheel, not doing anything. My mind just went white. Then I looked at the clock. Eight fifty two. Bridal prep in two hours and eight minutes. And I was on the side of the N1 with forty kilometres of Free State between me and the farm.

The Phone Calls

I phoned my husband, Gerrit, first, which was not useful because he was in Durban for his brother's birthday. He said, very calmly, "Are you safe?" and I said yes, and he said "Get a tow sorted first. Then worry about the wedding." It was good advice and I resented it, because all I wanted to do was worry about the wedding.

I phoned my insurance. They took my details and said someone would be in touch within ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. I explained that I was a wedding photographer, as if that would make the woman on the phone understand the urgency. She was very nice and very unmoved.

So, with trucks roaring past and my hazard lights clicking, I typed tow truck near me into my phone with my thumbs shaking. I am not proud of how fast I scrolled. I phoned the first number that looked as though it was for real people in the area, explained where I was as best I could, which was something like "on the N1 southbound, past Sasolburg, near a blue sign and a dead cow," and a man with a calm voice said they could have someone with me in about thirty-five minutes.

The Second Problem

Then I phoned the second shooter I sometimes work with, a young guy named Mpho who lives in Vanderbijlpark, to ask whether he could possibly, by some miracle, be free. He was not. He was at his own cousin's wedding. But he said his cousin's wedding did not start until three and that he could drive out to me, collect me and my gear, and get me to Kroonstad before he had to be back.

I told him that was insane. He said, "It is, but you've covered for me twice."

So by nine fifteen the plan was this. The tow would take my car to a workshop. Mpho would collect me and the equipment from wherever I ended up. I would arrive at the farm, if everything went right, somewhere around eleven fifteen, which was late but not catastrophic.

I phoned Karabo's maid of honour, not Karabo, because you never phone the bride on the morning of her wedding with bad news. I said I was having car trouble and would be fifteen minutes late for prep, and asked her to please not let anyone put the dress on until I got there. She said she would sit on it if she had to.

The Man With the Flatbed

The tow truck arrived at nine twenty eight. The driver was an older man with grey in his beard who introduced himself as Oom Frikkie and immediately did three things I will never forget. He put out a warning triangle behind my car, which I had completely forgotten to do. He moved me to stand behind the barrier, away from the traffic. And he asked if I was all right, not about the car, about me.

I burst into tears. I am not someone who cries. I photograph other people crying. But standing on the side of the N1 in my nice black work trousers, with my camera bag clutched to my chest, I cried in front of a total stranger and he just waited, looking politely at the horizon, until I stopped.

Then he looked under the bonnet and said, "Water pump, probably. Maybe the head gasket. You did right to stop." He winched the Polo onto the flatbed with a calm efficiency that was almost soothing to watch, the way watching someone good at anything is soothing.

I had always thought of a breakdown truck as something grim, a thing that happens on the worst day. I suppose it is. But I had not thought about the people doing the work, and how much of their job is not really the car at all. It is standing next to a stranger on the worst morning of their month and making it a bit less awful.

A Lift to the Farm

Oom Frikkie offered to take me as far as the Engen at Kroonstad himself, since that was where he was taking the car anyway, to a workshop he knew nearby. So I climbed into the cab of the flatbed, with my cameras on my lap, and phoned Mpho to tell him to meet me at the Engen instead, cutting his drive almost in half.

During that drive, Oom Frikkie told me he had been driving tow trucks for twenty-two years, that he had pulled cars out of the Vaal River, out of mielie fields and once off the roof of a shop in Heilbron, which he refused to explain. He said the strangest thing he had ever carried was a hearse with nobody in it, and the saddest was the same week. He told me his daughter had got married in 2019 and that the photographer had been late. "But the photos were still beautiful," he said. "Nobody remembers the late."

Eleven Seventeen

Mpho got me to the farm at eleven seventeen. Karabo's maid of honour met me at the door and said the dress was still on its hanger. I walked into the room, and the light was coming through a window onto the dressing table, and Karabo's grandmother was buttoning her shoes, and I lifted my camera and the whole morning simply fell away.

I photographed the entire wedding. First look by the dam. The speeches in the old barn. The long, loud, wonderful dancing to Brenda Fassie at midnight. Nobody except the maid of honour ever knew.

The Polo Came Home on a Truck

It was the water pump, and also the head gasket. The car stayed at the workshop in Kroonstad for nine days. When it was ready, I arranged for it to come home by flatbed rather than drive it up myself, because I did not trust it yet, and the company that did those tow truck services brought it right to my gate in Centurion, which felt like the end of a strange pilgrimage.

I have since bought a newer car, because Gerrit pointed out that a wedding photographer probably should not drive a car older than most of her brides' relationships. But I kept one thing from that day. In the glovebox of the new car, next to the sewing kit, there is a card with the number for towing services written on it, and a reflective warning triangle, and a small note to myself in my own handwriting that says: Stand behind the barrier. Then cry. Then call Mpho.

When Karabo and Ruan's album was finished, I put a photograph of the empty dressing table, with the dress still on its hanger, as the very first image. They thought it was artistic. I have never told them why I love it so much.