Picture us then, with a wide shot of Danny Rae and yours true stranded in the jungle swamps of Louisiana – in a sweltering bayou hell. Now a close up on me, mired to my knees in sulphurous muck in a cyclorama designed by Edvard Munch, had he vacationed in the tropics more often. If I attempted a selfie of we two – well, the result would have been obscured by the humidity of my grip, indeed the phone would have slipped from my grasp and lost itself irretrievably in the metre of yellow-brown slime in which I was struggling to stay upright.

Say there’s a photo. Its casual observer, lounging nonchalantly on a suburban patio sipping an artisanal gin and generic tonic, could not help but assume that Danny and I had met at that precise time and location – he having been lowered gently from a helicopter after a shopping spree at Banana Republic, me having been chased through equatorial bog by crocodiles.

My safari gear was soaked right through with fever sweat – not my own, mind you, I don’t know where it came from – Danny, by contrast, had a thin band of dew along the top of his moustache and his tan pith helmet did a lot to pull his tailored look together. He slept in the hammock last night, otherwise that might have been me posing cool and composed. Plus my allergies were kicking into overdrive and everything was itchy everywhere. 

The gently dappled sunlight filtered through the overhead foliage, wait, correction: burned its way to the forest floor in hot laser bursts. Green was everywhere, in every hue and degree and would have been beautiful but for the biting, stinging and drilling insects availing themselves of my pale flesh. Did they cause the itchiness of my damp mortal coil or could there be a rash developing? 

Hours later, in the retreating late-afternoon light entering the canopy from a gentler angle, we found the other kind of a hammock, a slight ferny hill risen from the swamp, packed humus with moss growing on it and some young trees and thin bushes with red berries. 

Danny helped pull me up through hairy-limbed ferns to terra firma. On my hands and knees, I debated with myself whether to strip off my clothes or expire fully clothed, rancid, phlegmatic and eyes smarting with the salt of my brow. How did he keep his boots dry? 

He pulled a plastic baggie out of his rucksack and proffered a chunk of dry cheese down my way. “Help yourself to this, I’ve got a bottle of cabernet in the bag. You brought the corkscrew, didn’t you?”

“Of course not. It’s your job to carry the the damn thing.”

“Oh, right.” He dug deep into a pocket and extracted instead his travelling companion, a stubby Missouri meerschaum. He began stuffing its bowl with a foul-smelling shag he saved for occasions like this. “It’s a blend of Perique and Cavendish I have my tobacconist chop together.” he once explained, pointing the stem at me, “Provides me with an air of masculine poise, calms the nerves and repels mosquitoes like stink.”

I first met Dan Rae when he was just learning to smoke a pipe and I was just learning I had no idea how to be a university student. Back then, subsisting on student loans, renting a house with others, one entertained, mostly in one’s bedroom. Danny had a low framed bed, a small powerful stereo system and an antique floor lamp next to his grandfather’s over-stuffed deep maroon armchair. I loved that chair.

His bedroom window was wide and opened to the roof of the extension below. In the fair summer weather, day or night, we’d crawl out with a few pillows, stubby bottles of beer, books and nestle into the branches of the backyard maple.

It was a verdant, mosquito-infested summer in a northern paradise.

Danny was reading Plato and I was trying Gravity’s Rainbow for the third time. Oh, right, and he always brought out his guitar – a 1975 Gibson J45 – lovely tone. “Sweet Virginia” was our theme song that season, sung up in the maple tree along with others by Jerry Jeff Walker, Bob Dylan, Roger Miller –

Oh you cain’t roller skate in a buffalo herd

You cain’t roller skate in a buffalo herd

You can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd

But you can be happy if you’ve a mind to….

Danny took to smoking a pipe for a few reasons, the most obvious was to ward off the blood-lusty mosquitoes of that year, when the Ottawa Valley was beset with a new mutation of the insect thought to have come from the Orient. The female of the species had black chevrons on her abdomen and a frequency of whine that was close to a scream – flying stilettos, heat seekers, aiming themselves at every exposed patch of living human skin as soon as the sun promised to set. The males were appalled at this behaviour and were nowhere to be seen.

Some of what Danny said was through teeth clenched to the stem of his young pipe. Lost forever were countless dozens of his witticisms and mots bon because of clenched teeth. Clenched teeth, the bane of vocal communication but for a few terse quips from Clint Eastwood.

The last class I can remember was an introduction to journalism survey course taught by a Scottish pipe smoker who occasionally spoke through clenched teeth. It didn’t help his delivery. Fortunately, he spoke to audiences of some size, so he had to take the pipe out of his mouth to get the job done. Speaking of jobs, I worked a few days a week lunch through supper at the faculty bar, slingin’ frosties to the tenured and that day I had  slung several gallons to his table where the journalism faculty was celebrating a Wednesday. The lot of them were hammered when my shift ended. 

Just over an hour later I watched as he addressed the application of statistical data to news reporting through teeth clamped on the stem of his pipe. The professor was prone to tangents when sober and, even then, not easy to follow. My incomprehension was further compounded by his thick and heavily slurred Scottish brogue. I understood not a word.  I scanned the gallery of the hundred students assembled and could tell every single one of them knew that the professor’s performance this night was historic, an event for the annals of incomprehensibility. Expressions of astonishment mixed with a little bit of admiration, jaws hanging agape, smirks and whispers, the crowd was loving it.

The lecture hall held as many as two hundred max. Your typical Wednesday evening first year three hour journalism class might attract half a house, typically a quarter remaining after the break. Never, ever was the lecture hall at full capacity after the break but it was that night. People were sitting in the aisles. The professor had been spotted shuffling hard to the Faculty Club for a bracer and the crowd was eager to hear the results.. 

The professor did not disappoint. Part Two was an epic demonstration of oratory wherein he finished a total of  two and a half hours of speech without having uttered one syllable the audience could understand. The applause was deafening.

Later there was some debate that he was speaking in Gaelic. That may have been the only course I passed that year. I was not yet ready for university.

Danny picked up Jeff Beck’s new Wired album. “It’s too peaceful around here, you think?” He put the disc on the turntable. “Wait until you hear ‘Led Boots,’ it’ll knock your socks off.”

He was puffing clouds of smoke as he paused to relight his pipe then, realizing he was puffing clouds of smoke and didn’t need to relight his pipe, paused to relight his pipe. “Do be a sport (puff), go the the kitchen and get us a corkscrew. Let’s have at that cabernet.”