By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town - Bikers turned out in their hundreds on Sunday morning to pay tribute to the firefighters who put their lives on the line battling the devastating blazes that recently swept across the Cape Peninsula - and in particular those who gave their lives to save their fellow Capetonians.
The call went out from the Untamed motorcycle club late last week and from early morning riders from all over the Western Cape gathered at Ottery Hypermarket - first just a trickle, then a few small groups and finally a continuous roar of engines as the machines poured in.
The mass ride to the Deep South generated a remarkable sense of both occasion, marked both by the unusual decorum shown by the riders and the forbearance of other road users as the train of bikes rumbled through their suburbs, but it was only when the engines fell silent, with motorcycles parked mirror-to-mirror along several kilometres of Boyes Drive, that the scale of the devastation hit home among the riders.
ORDINARY PEOPLE DOING EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
Almost every one paused, looked up at the blackened mountainside, then over their shoulder at the houses just a few metres below the road - and visibly shivered.
It’s easy to say that many species of fynbos need mountain fires to clear the ground for fresh growth - or even to germinate - but it’s difficult to appreciate until you’ve seen it for yourself just how close we came to losing hundreds of homes, and dozens of lives, but for the actions of ordinary people doing extraordinary things under extraordinary circumstances.
As three Fire and Rescue vehicles drove slowly up Boyes Drive past the row of machines, each rider raised his helmet in tribute, while the cheers rang from crag to crag.
Typically of people who ‘get the job done’ it proved more difficult to persuade the crews to get down from their vehicles and walk the length of the crowd, accepting the thanks of the riders face to face, but the hugs and handshakes, the simply-expressed “Thank you, bro” raised goose-bumps on both sides, bringing a human scale to a momentous endeavour and keeping it, in the best sense of the word, real.