“Come quick, Mum. Trevor’s getting sick on the deck.” The English Channel ferry was pitching with every wave, and the British schoolboys, dressed in shorts and beanies, were watching their pal christen the deck.

Now, 40 years later, I vividly recall the incident, one of the high points of my college graduation trip to Europe that summer. No, it hadn’t been the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower or even the Sistine Chapel catching my breath, but rather life’s diorama. In this case, it was Trevor’s fish-and-chips.

I hadn’t seen fellow-traveler Donald Cox again until last week. We found to our surprise that we had aged only a bit, hair speckled with gray and follicles growing out of our ears. Otherwise we were still trim, our abdomens rock-solid and our biceps throbbing with energy as we reached for the butter.

We were have a lumberjack’s breakfast at the Samoa Cookhouse last week, Cox and I, college buddies recalling our summer in the Old World, the first time either of us had heard the utterance of a foreign language. Every country had one, we learned.

Cox, also a journalist, had forgotten about poor Trevor, the kid with the turbulent tummy. But he remembered our late-night arrival at an East Berlin train station. We’d caught the train from Prague, Czechoslovakia and never thought of the consequences of superpowers that don’t get along. An East German guard handed us over to a West Berlin guard that night. “I’d forgotten all about that,” I said as I sipped my Samoa coffee.

It’s interesting how we all see life in different ways. Twenty witnesses at a fender-bender will have 20 accounts as to what happened. And the only one that matters is the one your insurance guy believes.

That’s what has always fascinated me about journalism, the prism of so many impressions.

Still, journalists follow an eerily similar path, as if pre-destined to do so. As I did, Cox became a feature writer with a passion for sports, and a disdain for swollen-headed athletes. Former San Francisco Giants star Will Clark used to throw towels at him. I’m lucky; Barry Bonds used to ignore me.

Mel Lavine, the former Eureka newspaper reporter who went on to work for NBC and CBS, has similar stories. He was in town to promote his book, “A Strange Breed of Folks.” I spent 20 years in Maine where he went to college and got his first newspaper job. I anchored the news at KVIQ and so did he. I idolized CBS reporter Charles Kuralt; Mel worked with him.

The strangest parallel involves the livestock of Coppini Ranch in Ferndale — and that’s no bull.

In 1976, the Bicentennial year, NBC dispatched reporters to the historic corners of the country to capture vignettes of the national spirit. They went to all the landmarks that make this country great. To capture its rural gentility, they chose Ferndale, and Berna, an elderly cow with udderly amazing output. How was she so productive, the reporter wanted to know? Sheer genius, said the Coppinis.

Twenty years later, another great writer would cast his shadow on the Coppini homestead. I was there to help promote the Fortuna Rodeo. Dressed in cowboy gear, I had promised to ride an old horse, the older the better.

The Coppinis had other plans, and I still feel their impact. They put me on a steer with no saddle, a belligerent bovine with a bad attitude. With a smack on its backside, the steer was off, its pale rider sailing off in about two seconds, hitting the ground with a painful thud. Contrary to cowboy custom, the good guy had gotten it in the end. Worse yet, the young videographer with me fretted all the way back to the station. “I hope the tape was rolling,” he said. For his sake, so did I.

In heaven, I hope, they’ll have a spot for bumbling videographers whose tape wasn’t rolling. They should also have a campfire for old journalists, sharing those tales of the Old West — no embellishments necessary.

These days, journalists get a bad rap. We’re either liars, traitors or secular progressives, and I’m not sure which is supposed to be the worst.

In truth, as Mel Lavine would agree, we are simply curious people who care deeply about what we do. We make a substandard living in a profession that flies by all too quickly. If we are lucky, as Mel and I are, we find newspapers willing to print our rants, otherwise relegated to a trucker’s coffee clatch or a paper shredder.

We cherish life’s simple processes, and every moment, as every breath, is a magical event. Everyone should be so lucky.

Dave Silverbrand is a local television personality and teaches journalism at the College of the Redwoods.