Johannes Arnold 'Basie' Vosloo - 24 May 1957 – 4 July 2021
The passing of a near-mythical figure in many South African fly-fishing and hunting circles by Tom Sutcliffe, July 2021
The Mission Issue 29 – Basie Vosloo Tribute
Basie & Carien at home in Birkhall
I was introduced to Basie Vosloo 25 years ago by Ed Herbst when we arrived one night for a protracted fishing stay on his farm Birkhall, the car immediately swamped by enormous dogs with barks that rattled the windowpanes. I was scared stiff until Basie arrived with a torch to see me in. It was an embarrassing but portentous moment. Ten days later I'd got used to the dogs – or they to me – and had grown fond of Basie.
My initial characterisation of Basie (in line with my narrow orthodoxy that farmers are generally rough and largely uninterested, or unversed, or both, in the affairs of the world), was way off. He had a gentle side, far-ranging intellectual horizons, as at home with the arts and literature (particularly the writings of Oscar Wilde), as he was grading wool or planting potatoes.
But he was still your typical farmer in so many ways: in his warmth of spirit and his generosity; in his love of the veld; in his industrial-grade self-belief in his farming skills; in his total delight in any piece of running water. And, not least, in his appearance; a big man, with legs off a billiard table, always in shorts and open-neck shirt, even when that high-mountain cold turned our breath to clouds of frozen vapour. But above all Basie had a presence; that opaque quality some people have of radiating a definable sense of their own space.
Life on Birkhall:
Basie became known to hosts of South African fly fishers, if not personally, then certainly by reputation, as a man who took any angler's visit to Birkhall seriously, when a day's fishing might easily end around his pub. Accounts of many anglers unsteady late-night departures in happy and assorted stages of incipient tailspin are now storied enough to be part of fly-fishing folklore. Looking over Birkhall
Basie and his mother, Patricia, in the shed at sheep-shearing time
There were days, countless over the years, when we just sat chatting on the Birkhall veranda, gazing across views along the tree-laced river valley, sometimes seeing in a sunrise with an early mug of coffee, or watching a mid-afternoon thunderstorm unfold its drama, or a sunset turning blue-shadowed mountains to flame-orange.
Ed Herbst, one of Basie's dearest friends, on Birkhall's veranda; with ubiquitous pipe and matches.
Sunrise over Birkhall
...the setting son turning blue-shadowed mountains flame-orange
From Hunting Trout…
We had a farm-style lunch the last day on Birkhall, a roast leg of home-grown mutton prepared by Carien. Later that afternoon a majestic storm played itself out in the Birkhall valley and pretty soon the Sterkspruit was too high and too discoloured to fish. In a way, I liked that. It’s easier leaving a place when you know the river is going to be out for a day or two anyway.'
'That evening on the Birkhall veranda, Basie grilled steaks as thick as roof rafters. He did them on a steel wok connected to a portable gas cylinder. The white-marbled meat was good in ways it’s hard to put your finger on, other than to say you can’t lose sight of the fact that it hadn’t come from a fridge in some city supermarket, but from a grass-fed animal slaughtered on the farm.'
Basie Birkhall veranda steaks
Basie was proud of Birkhall; proud of the way he and Carien farmed it, each with their own focus and energy and love, proud of its unmissable beauty.
Basie with anglers on Birkhall
From Yet More Sweet Days…
'I’ve got into a loose routine over the years on my visits to Birkhall. I’m up early, at about 6 a.m., pad into the kitchen, switch on the kettle, add a heaped teaspoon of coffee to one of the mugs that hang in the glass-fronted cupboard directly above the kettle. They are white mugs with big red polka dots on them. They have been in the kitchen since I can remember. I add farm milk, thick with cream, and a spoon of sugar. I sip the coffee and wait for Basie. Or else Basie has beaten me to it and he’s there sucking on his pipe in clouds of blue smoke, his wet hair combed flat. The dogs are let out and they bark at the fading moon or the rising sun, whatever. They just bark. We talk farming or fishing, and then eat breakfast; eggs and bacon and (homemade) Russian sausages, toast and marmalade, more coffee. Then Basie is gone, Carien leaves on one of her endless errands, and I am alone. I have a hundred choices where to go fishing. Or I might write up my diary or set up my vice to tie flies on the veranda... Life here is richly coated with choices, all strung across lazy days that drift slowly by like sail ships on a light breeze.'
...they just bark at the fading moon, or the rising sun, whatever...
Some years there was drought and I seemed to live through those with Basie, right down to the sorry day the Sterkspruit stopped flowing ...
'The rivers had perked up a bit but, despite the rain, it was still pretty dry.” Basie said the only thing still green on the farm was the indicator light on the dashboard of his The old F 100 truck.'
Basie and pointer Biggles, Archer at the back in the old F 100 adorned with Koki penned Adams dry flies (tied Catskill-style?.
Birkhall spring water
Birkhall has a garden pond fed by fresh spring water where Carien grows watercress and at times Basie grew out trout. We hooked countless fingerlings on wet flies in the Sterkspruit, kept them in laundry baskets immersed in knee-deep runs, later loaded them into buckets to stock the Birkhall lake below the house. Some went into the reservoir in the garden for 'the sheer joy of having a few trout nearby' Basie said. I once hooked a monster here on a dry fly with Ed, that I never landed.
Birkhall Lake
Reservoir at Birkhall
And the presence of fish and frogs and tadpoles meant kingfishers were common visitors. It's a lovely feature in their garden.
Basie and fly fishing...
When Ed and I first met Basie his approach to fly fishing was a little downstream of high culture, but over years he moved from stripping Buggers on heavy rigs to dry flies on light rods and gradually acquired an appreciation of small stream fishing with all the obsessive oddities and minimalist refinements Ed and I obsessed over almost exclusively from the day we first met him.
But on the rare occasions I fished with Basie, mainly on the Sterkspruit or the Bokspruit at Gateshead, he was always only part-fly-fisher-part-farmer, never totally able to surrender to the day without half an eye on the farm. So, you might look up from a run and find him high up some bank straightening a fence post or counting ewes in a paddock.
Basie on the Birkhall Sterk
Of all the rivers in the district, and there are many, Basie loved the Sterkspruit beyond all, not for its strong fish alone but for its winding beauty, its endlessly interlinked tapestries of runs, riffles, braids and pools that are so characteristic of this stream's anatomy no matter where you step into it.
Sterkspruit river landscape
The gorge water on Birkhall as it borders Branksome
The Sterkspruit above…
…and below the Lindesfarne Bridge
Basie and Gateshead...
Basie and Carien at Gateshead cottage
Basie also loved their high mountain farm Gateshead, a place where the essence of life is dressed in its loveliest simplifications. He was proud of its remoteness, at the very end of a road that crossed bridges of cold water straight off mountains; the clear, clean air; the timeless Victorian pastiche cottage, prettily latticed veranda fronted by privet hedges and flanked by fruit trees over a century-old...
On the way up to Gateshead, from Yet More Sweet Days...
' The flow of water spilling under the bridge made the steady, softly sibilant, sucking sounds of a stream in good flow. We stepped out of the truck and could smell the water and the leaves, a compressed mix of cold freshness, wet loam, and mulch, the air so saturated with a fragrance that made you want to breathe in deeply. Above the bridge was a long pool of clear, thigh-deep water; below it the stream ran white and rough. A trout weaved in the pool above, at first not easy to see but later so obvious it seemed strange we hadn’t spotted it straight off...'
'The cottage sat on the lower slopes of the Gateshead Mountain facing a narrow, steep-sided sweep of hills and falling river...'
Basie just loved to gaze across the hills from the Gateshead veranda
Nights on Gateshead were good, cold, starlit, around a campfire, crate of beer, watching shadows lengthen, lapsing under jewelled night skies into assorted philosophies until the cold of dying embers or the fast-aggregating heap of empty bottles saw us off...
Formal dinner on Gateshead: Phil Hills, Luke Rossler, Basie, and self.
Horses...
Days out with Basie on horses were glorious but too rare, he always the master of these animals, often on Apla his headstrong black steed that everyone else was too scared to ride.
Basie on Apla
The dogs...
Basie had a special love for Archer, an English pointer. Feathers, also an English pointer, was next in the line of Birkhall's canine hierarchy, then followed a later pointer, Thomas, that I collected for Basie as a puppy from a breeder in Johannesburg and drove down to Birkhall with him in my truck. Don't ask me about that trip. The dog arrived safely and ended up named after me. But Archer somehow lifted himself to near holiness among the many gun dogs in Basie's life, and he has since had a room named in his honour in the Branksome Country House, a lodge run by Basie's sister Rene on the next farm upstream of Birkhall. (By the way, there's also the Ed's Hopper room in that lodge. Ed held a very special place in the Vosloo's lives.)
Archer on a day out with me on the Bokspruit River
'That night we tied a few flies by gaslight .... When we finally turned in, the air was like frozen steel. I crawled under a heavy mountain of blankets and blew out the candle. Moments later Feathers started to inch her way onto my bed with deliberate and measured stealth, trembling paw by trembling paw, convinced I was unaware of her subterfuge. I let her sink onto the bed. She lay dead-still and eventually we fell asleep. In the morning she was curled up warmly at my feet and her son, Archer, still a puppy, was deep inside my duffel bag with only his nose showing.'
If the dogs sit out in the morning sun on Birkhall, they sleep inside at night around the warmth of the Aga stove.
A momentous visit with Basie to a lake under construction...
One morning we visited Basie's new lake above Birkhall. He was finishing the wall with heavy machinery. I left him in dust clouds and hiked up the thin feeder stream, a wisp of water no wider than a stride, and discovered in its meagre flows a brace of trout and a bunch of fingerlings. Basie said I was hallucinating, so we wandered back up the creek, found the evidence and I watched first Basie's astonishment and then I saw utter delight appear on his face. 'Thomas,' he said 'you have your uses.'
Finally completed. The new lake on Birkhall
Friendship…
To explain more aptly my privilege in knowing the Vosloos, here's what I wrote under the appreciations in Yet More Sweet Days:
'Those who stand out are Basie and Carien Vosloo of Birkhall, who are more part of my family than just good friends. ...Without them there would be no story to tell. '
A moment with a humorous side from Yet More Sweet Days...
'That night Basie said it was too cold to snow and I offered to light the fire in the lounge. He quickly said, ‘Don’t worry, leave it to me.’ I suspected this was a deep survival response that got embedded in his mind when I last lit the fire in his lounge one particularly cold evening on a previous trip. The wood was slightly damp and the flames just wouldn't take hold. Basie suggested I add a little ‘starter’, a turquoise-colored, high-octane inflammable gel. I poured a little gel onto blackened embers that I could have sworn were nowhere near still smouldering. Bad call. The bottle burst into flame in my hand, and I reflexively tossed it straight into the fireplace. There was a massive whooshing sound, and the entire chimney lit up in a blinding sheet of orange flame. For a few long moments, it looked like the Taliban had scored a direct hit on Basie’s lounge. No serious damage done, but Basie needed a stiff drink before he could speak. Around nine that night the colour finally came back into his face.'
On leaving Birkhall from Yet More Sweet Days ...
'That afternoon I packed my fishing gear and loaded my truck. I left the next morning later than planned because Basie insisted on cooking a grand breakfast. We ate in the kitchen, just the two of us...'
Final thoughts ...
It was as hard not to respect Basie as it is to fall upwards, his life lived in primary colours rather than in any anti-climatic shades of grey, even into the backwash of his cancer and then the pandemic. I called him often. He was always the same; no confected dressing up his dire situation; the same jovial human being; the same connectedness with family, friends, farming, hunting, fishing, the weather, especially rain, with the community, in fact just as he was from the first time we met one night in wobbling torchlight amid a bunch of baying dogs.
We are all of us lifted by our most cherished moments, not so?
Oh! I have slipped the surly bounds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-filled wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
John Gillespie Magee (1922-1941)
Rest in your well-earned peace my dear friend. I can imagine you quoting from your beloved Oscar Wilde, ‘You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit’.
Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray
On Apla