The Rainbow on the Water Under My Slipway

Thirty Years on the Same Patch of Lagoon

I have fixed boat engines on the edge of the Knysna lagoon since I was twenty-two. My workshop is a corrugated iron shed with a concrete slipway that runs down into the water, a workbench my father built out of old yellowwood planks, and a radio that only gets one station properly. I can strip an outboard with my eyes closed. I have done it, more or less, at two in the morning with a torch in my teeth before a fishing charter.

What I had never done, in thirty years, was look properly at the ground under my own feet.

You stop seeing a place when you are in it every day. The oil stains on the slipway were just the colour of the slipway. The bucket of rags in the corner was just where the rags went. The old ice cream tub under the leaking gearbox of whichever boat was on the trestles was just part of the furniture.

The Woman in the Yellow Kayak

It was a still morning in late winter, the kind where the lagoon goes flat as a mirror and you can hear a fish jump from a hundred metres away. I was drinking coffee on an upturned crate when a woman in a yellow kayak paddled right up to the bottom of my slipway and pointed at the water.

"Is that yours?" she asked.

There was a sheen on the surface, spreading out from the edge of the concrete. On a flat morning like that it caught the light and made a rainbow, purple and green and gold, about the size of a double bed. I had probably seen that rainbow a hundred times without thinking about it. Now a stranger was pointing at it from a kayak and I felt my face go hot.

I said something defensive. Something about it being a working harbour and boats leaking everywhere. She did not argue. She just said she had been watching the Knysna seahorses with a group of volunteers for six years, and that they lived in the eelgrass about eighty metres from where she was sitting, and then she paddled away.

I sat there with my coffee going cold. I knew about the seahorses. Everybody here knows about the seahorses. I just had never connected them to the ice cream tub.

Following the Diesel

That afternoon I did something I had never done. I walked around my own workshop like an inspector.

The ice cream tub under the trestles was half full and had a crack down one side. Whatever dripped into it was finding its way out of the bottom and onto the concrete, and every time it rained, the concrete rinsed itself down the slipway and into the lagoon. The drum of used oil by the back door had a tap that wept. My jerry cans of diesel sat straight on the floor. When I topped up an engine on the slipway, I did it the way my father taught me, by eye, and if a bit went over, a rag dealt with it, and the rag went in the bucket, and the bucket got emptied into the general bin.

None of it was dramatic. That was the point. It was thirty years of small drips, every one of them too small to matter.

My Daughter and Her Laptop

My daughter Lindiwe works in Cape Town for a company that makes medical equipment. When she came home for a long weekend in August, I told her about the kayak woman, expecting her to laugh. She did not laugh. She got out her laptop at the kitchen table and asked me to describe exactly what was on the floor of the shed.

She knows about this stuff from her work, where there is a whole person whose job is to worry about chemicals. She explained it to me the way I explain a carburettor to a customer, slowly and without making me feel stupid. You catch the drip before it hits the floor. You keep something on hand for when the big spill happens, because one day it will. You think about your eyes, because battery acid and two-stroke mix do not care how experienced you are.

That last one landed. Eleven years ago I had a battery split on me while I was lifting it out of a bilge. A splash went across my cheek and just missed my left eye. I spent about four minutes with my face under the garden tap, swearing, and then went back to work. I had never told my wife. I told Lindiwe that night, and she put her hand over her mouth.

The Order I Nearly Did Not Place

We sat together and she showed me what was actually available. I had assumed this kind of thing was for oil refineries and mines, not one man and a shed. It turns out there are Drip Trays that are just the right size to slide under an outboard on a stand, with sides high enough that the oil cannot creep over the edge. She found the page while I was still arguing that an ice cream tub was basically the same thing.

I balked at the cost of the whole lot together. Money in a small marine workshop is seasonal, and August is not the season. Lindiwe made me a list in order of what mattered most, and we did it in stages. The trays first. Then a proper stand for the drums. Then the rest, after the December charters had paid for themselves.

It felt like a lot of fuss. I want to be honest about that. Part of me thought I was being silly, buying equipment because a woman in a yellow kayak had embarrassed me.

The Morning It Mattered

In March, a customer's skipper brought in a twin-engine ski boat with a fuel line that had perished. I was working on it on the slipway when the old line split completely and diesel started coming out much faster than I could deal with by hand. In the old days I would have thrown rags at it and hoped.

This time there was a kit hanging on a hook by the door, a big yellow bag that Lindiwe had insisted on, one of the Spill Kits we had picked out together at the kitchen table. I had laughed when it arrived because it looked like something from a hazmat film. I tore it open, laid the long sausage booms along the bottom edge of the slipway so nothing could run down to the water, and put the absorbent pads on the puddle. It took maybe five minutes. Then I sat on my crate for a while, shaking a little, looking at the lagoon. It was clean. Completely clean.

I phoned Lindiwe and told her, and she said, "See?" in exactly the voice her mother uses.

What I Put by the Workbench

The last thing I bought was the one I resisted the most, because it reminded me of that battery eleven years ago. We have no running water near the back bench, only a tap at the front of the shed. Lindiwe pointed out that four minutes of fumbling towards a garden tap is a very long four minutes when something is burning your eye.

So now there is a little station on the wall beside the battery shelf. I looked at a few Eye Wash Stations before I chose, and in the end picked the simplest one, because I know myself and anything complicated would end up covered in grease and ignored. I have not needed it yet. I check it every Monday, the same way I check the fire extinguisher, and every Monday I feel slightly foolish and slightly relieved.

The Kayak, Again

The woman in the yellow kayak came back past the slipway in October. I was outside, so I waved, and she paddled over. I did not know what to say, so I said thank you. She looked confused for a second and then she remembered.

She looked at the water at the bottom of the slipway for a long time. There was nothing on it. Just the lagoon, and a few mullet, and the reflection of my shed.

She told me the volunteers had counted more seahorses in the eelgrass that season than the year before. She said it was probably nothing to do with me, that there were a hundred reasons, and I said I knew that. But I went back inside feeling something I had not felt about my work in a long time. Not pride exactly. More like being a good neighbour to something I could not see.

I am fifty-two. My father ran this shed before me and probably dripped oil into the same lagoon for thirty years before I took over. I do not blame him. Nobody told him, and nobody told me, until a stranger in a yellow kayak pointed at a rainbow and asked a simple question.

I still use the old ice cream tub. It holds screws now.