Like there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it.
Gaia project shut up and sit down full#
Another time, after Adi went out in a five-foot swell miles from any road, and he emerged a full half-hour after his friends, Meryl remembered catching him and saying something like: Be careful, son. She and her husband, Greg, Adi’s stepfather, would tell a story about a spear-fishing trip a few years back when Adi reappeared with a barracuda’s severed head on his spear tip, and a tale about a tug-of-war with a 300-pound tiger shark. Adi just burned too fast, too bright, she said. In time, he made a plan for his own death, walking Janik through the design of a Viking funeral pyre, which he wanted constructed to carry his ashes into the ocean, to be set alight by a flaming arrow fired from shore.Ĭabo Delgado hadn’t changed much since Adi and Janik had lived in Mozambique in the late 2000s: hundreds of miles of forest, beaches, and mud-hut villages, barely connected to the world or even the capital, Maputo.Īdi had long ago convinced his mother, Meryl Knox, that he wouldn’t come home one day. In his twenties, he used to laugh and tell Janik he was never going to hit 50. The one dark cloud on the Armstrong-Nel horizon was Adi’s unshakable belief that he was going to die young. The mad magic of it all only deepened with marriage in 2010, and the arrival of three riotously named children: a ten-year-old boy, Céu Rockefeller (the magnate’s surname was a favorite of Adi’s) a seven-year-old girl, Télès Cassis (after Adi’s favorite cocktail ingredient) and their three-year-old sister, Léore Le Morne (after a favorite mountain of Adi’s, in Mauritius). When he and Janik eventually settled in Durban, Adi’s idea of a steady career was to become a commercial diver, one of the world’s most dangerous professions. He’d waited on Mick Jagger in London, juggled flaming bottles in Montreal, and did a stint as a bare-chested, roller-skating distributor of sex-worker flyers in Brighton, on Britain’s south coast. If Adi always had a plan, it was also mostly wild. As a backpacker and Mandela-era South African, Adi saw race not as a barrier but an opportunity for discovery, and the couple’s 21 years together had been a whirlwind of different places: England, Scotland, Canada, Mozambique, South Africa. When Janik checked her phone later, a double tick indicated that her message had been received.īlond and slim, with a smile like summer, Adi was a 19-year-old bartender from Durban and Janik an 18-year-old waitress from Halifax, Nova Scotia, when the pair met in London in 2000. The sun would set in Palma in another 17 minutes. “I love you, I love you, I love you with all my heart ❤ ❤ ❤ ,” she wrote. Finally, on the way home, when she hadn’t heard from Adi in 27 hours, Janik found herself stuck in traffic, staring at a long line of cars trying to get home, and without really thinking, she pulled onto the shoulder and texted. She checked it when she woke up, and at breakfast, and on the school run, and all day at work at a travel agency. She kept her phone close that afternoon and into the evening, and by her bed that night. Plus, she was being forwarded messages from other contractors at the Amarula who had satellite phones, and they were saying that everyone was fine and busy working on a way out. She knew that the insurgents had knocked out Palma’s single cell tower, Wi-Fi was patchy, and Adi’s phone battery was low. When Adi stopped texting shortly afterward, Janik wasn’t unduly worried. “The choppers came and blew some shit up at 13:00. Around 1 P.M., Adi said that there was a new plan: “We might receive some private security at some point today.” Just after 2 P.M., he hinted that he might have good news soon.
At 8 A.M., he wrote that a few small helicopters were flying around the Amarula Lodge, where he was holed up with around 180 others, and “clearing some militants away.” At 11 A.M., he reported talk of a rescue in armored troop carriers belonging to an army battalion stationed 30 minutes away. “You have to promise me that you’ll come home safely,” she wrote.Īdi’s next messages indicated that he was trying to do as he was asked. Calmly, evenly, she told her husband to “stop fucking talking like that” or she would “freak the fuck out.” One of the things Janik loved about Adi was that he could always make a plan. She also wanted Adi to be there to love her in life, and to be able to tell the kids himself that he loved them every day. When Janik checked her phone an hour later, she lost it.īut Adi couldn’t stop. On March 25, 2021, a week before his 41st birthday, Adrian Nel woke at dawn on the floor of his hotel room in Palma, northern Mozambique, and, seized by a sudden premonition, texted his wife, Janik Armstrong, at their home in Durban, South Africa.
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