Aqaba!
Who could blame them? Dunes are the promise of a beach after all, and those blokes had endured an unusually long stretch of them. Never mind the dressing gowns, lads, hop in!
six
The dinghy skims across the glass of a lagoon one long weekend Saturday in the early autumn. My two cousins sit up in the bow, my Dad behind them obscured by cane craypots, while I sit at the transom seat by my uncle who steers the outboard. I am nine years old and consumed by the sight of the reef running so lucidly beneath me. I trail my hand in the water and a little rooster tail lifts behind it.
Out at the Hole in the Wall we idle about, looking for a likely bit of reef, and then the pots and all their rope tumble out into the green hole, leaving a train of bubbles to mark their descent. The floats snug up on the surface and we curve away lighter. The sky is calm as the sea, as unblemished and endless. At the shore, the flat little town has an army of white dunes advancing on it and the island seems to have broken its moorings and come free of the land just this minute because it tilts and bobs at the edge of my vision.
Suddenly the boat swerves and the pitch of the motor rises. I lurch into the gunwale and scramble for a grip and look up to see a great glossy wave bearing down on us. It trundles along silently, lumping the dappled reef in its path, and we begin the long drymouthed climb up its face and launch free into the air at the crest, hanging in a gale of nervous laughter for a second, before crashing down into the trough and the veil of spray behind. But there is another one coming; there will always be another one coming. The aluminium hull vibrates. My uncle swears and steers full throttle. This wave is feathering, getting ready to break, and we tear up its dizzy front and blast sickeningly out the other side into the path of something much bigger. There is shouting and contradictory pointing of fingers. The prop cavitates, trying to get a grip on the sea. The wave blots out the sky, its lip falling already, like a detonated factory wall, and we turn hopelessly to run before it, to beat it to deeper, safer water. I feel the foam at my back and see the long horrendous downhill run before us as the wave gathers us up and propels us on.
‘Hangin’ five!’ yells my jaunty cousin in the bow.
Then it’s just bubbles; silence and a corona of bubbles that billows blue about my head. I gaze about dreamily until I understand. I am underneath the upturned boat with thirty kilogram line floating around my legs and I am drowning. My head butts against the seats. Out in front of me my fingernails are pearly and beautiful. From under the gunwale comes an arm. I watch it with grave disinterest and the fat glossy bubbles part before my rushing face.
I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like the desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly. Never turn your back on the sea, my father told me when we fished the rocks at Parry Beach or Greenough or Gull Rock. I never go to sea, fishing wide for jewfish or pelagics, without that frisson of concern that makes my fingertips electric for a few moments every day. I often fish alone so I’m conscious of how vulnerable I am, what a speck I am out there. I am not superstitious but some days I just don’t press my luck.
Out on my own one autumn, with a busted finger and no gaff, I worried a sixteen kilo jewfish to the surface on eight kilo tackle. After half an hour it lay exhausted on its side ten metres out from the boat. I tickled it toward me with forensic care, saw the frayed and savaged trace and reached for its gills. I hesitated a moment and looked seaward, out of reflex, then heaved it over the side, almost tipping myself out, and headed for home without delay. It was almost too good to claim without retribution; I went back with an open throttle.
The ocean is the supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared. Suddenly, from a mirror-smooth sea, a pod of randy humpbacks starts leaping and crashing around you. Out in the channel you feel the cold grip of cramp as you swim for shore. Climbing up a slick granite slope with your fins in your hand and the dive weights slung over your shoulder you hear the terrible surge of the freak swell behind you. Beyond the flags and the laughing families, with the city spiking behind them, you labour in the rip, feeling your calm, your cool, ebb away.
Australians do not go to ‘the seaside’ the way the English do. We go to the beach with a mixture of gusto and apprehension, for our sea is something to be reckoned with. We are reared on stories of shark attacks, broken necks from dumpings in the surf, and the spectre of melanoma. I suspect we go because of these warnings, at times, and not simply despite them. The sea is one rare wild card left in the homogenous suburban life. Deep down we still see ourselves as goers. Being last out of the water after the shark siren, taking the biggest wave of the set, coming home with the meanest sunburn, right to the bikini line – these are still badges of honour.
There are times when the size of the ocean and its overwhelming ambivalence become dispiriting. You look up from the sink of dishes and your mild, happy thoughts and glance at the sea, sometimes, to have your mind go suddenly, unpleasantly blank. Whatever you were thinking just doesn’t stack up against the sight of that restless expanse out there. It’s like the soundless television, the windbent tree, the campfire, in that it draws you away, divides your attention. At certain moments it’s like a memory you are trying to avoid. You stand there, hands dripping suds, looking for whatever it was your eye sought at first glance, but there’s nothing there. Just the chafing movement and the big blue stare coming right back at you.
When I think of sleep or coma or fever or death, the ocean comes to mind. Is what we look out at from our retirement deckchairs and our corporate rooms-with-a-view the prospect of unconsciousness, rest, annihilation? Are we longing for release or anxious about being taken? Or are we stuck somewhere between? Would we be more comfortable at the sight of roads, fences, buildings, billboards, cultivated paddocks? A glance up at signs of our terrible success does not divide us so from our train of thought. For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It’s just as ready to claim as it is to offer.
Twenty years after my experience out on the reef under the capsized boat, I came to live in that same flat little town. A glutton for punishment, I suppose.
One summer my youngest son, who didn’t swim yet, played in the coral lagoon behind the island while the rest of us lay on the hot sand watching the sea lions. He saw a nudibranch float by, tiny, crimson and purple, just wallowing as they do, in the current. Nearby, hanging off its anchor over the edge of the reef, was the boat. The toddler’s sunbleached head bobbed and turned, following the nudibranch toward the big hole in the reef. Before the edge of the deep, he stopped, as taught, but behind him a new current yawed the boat on its anchor. I looked up to see the leg of the outboard shunting him silently and irrepressibly toward the edge. By the time I got to him he was over the dropoff, pedalling in freefall, his blonde hair just in reach. In the sunniest family moment, a silent change; death waiting.
The same summer a deckhand found a friend of ours floating face down in the bay. A fortnight before this he had told me he ‘swam like a stone’.
To complete my ragged little life circle . . . One summer in the nineties I was heading out with my neighbour, Charlie Youngs, with a boatful of pots in a choppy sea when a lumpy, windblown wave reared up before us. We ground into it and out the other side to confront the inevitable follower, which broke just as we reached it and took me and the windscreen with it. I saw that same haze of bubbles, heard that same sudden quiet and then I popped up in time for the third wave to come down on my head and send me bouncing across the reef.
When I finally surfaced and got my bearings, I saw Charlie out beyond the surf, madly bombing pots off left and right to save the boat. He was shindeep in water and, miraculously, the outboard still ran. The boat was half submerged and the sea was running against the bare barrier of the reef just behind it. For a while I swam in my tee-shirt
and shorts till the shirt began to drag on me, so I shrugged out of it, dodging breakers as I did, and balled it up in my fist to swim on. After a couple of minutes of one-handed swimming I thought about the value of the shirt, which cost me one pound on London’s Oxford Street some time ago, and hadn’t been much of a bargain at that. The pain of my cuts and bruises came upon me. My coccyx burned and throbbed where I had clipped the cowling of the outboard – narrowly spared the horror of the prop. I threw that damn shirt as far as I could and struck out through the surf to the wallowing boat.
That night I dreamed and sweated. I was under a boat in blue bubbles there was no God-like hand to haul me free.
seven
On a stifling Sunday morning in the church on the hill I fidget in my pew, eleven years old in my Sunday best, and listen again to the story of Moses. Moses, whose first cradle was a tiny boat in the bullrushes, who led the Hebrews out of bondage and defied the armies of the Pharaoh. Moses, for whom God peeled back the Sea of Reeds to let the slaves cross in safety.
The voice drones on into the years in the Wilderness, but I stay there in the Sea of Reeds; I can’t get past that part. The sea folds back to make a path. I imagine those great, quivering walls of water either side of me, the overwhelming smell of brine and iodine. I know, at age eleven, that I would be the Hebrew who wouldn’t make it across to the other side. The others would bolt and slide and splash across to dry land, but I, forever the beachcomber, would stoop down and go foraging. Think of the wonderful things hidden from view since the beginning of time: the strange, pressure-flattened creatures that never see daylight, shells, shocked worms and slugs, wreckage from ships and lost cities. The parapets of water are shaking above me, poised and heavier than whole countries, and there I am turning things over, rubbing the silt off them and holding them to the light while the Egyptian horsemen come thundering. And behind me, good old Dad stuffing his pockets with fish, unable to help himself and muttering about the Depression.
A blowfly butts against the wall. The sermon goes on without me, and through the windows comes the hot-bread breeze that heads for the sea just out of view.
Perhaps I go beachcombing simply to keep the sea in view. Where I live, if I don’t see the ocean every day, even if it’s just the eight a.m. ritual of rolling by the jetty for a minute where everyone in this town seems to gather before work to see the state of things, then I become restless and anxious. I have the same feeling if I don’t have a book to read, or when I haven’t worked for several days in a row. In the city, I’m the kind of driver who goes the long way in order to cop a look at the beach, just a peek between Norfolk pines, past the spine of a built-up hill. Each sighting fuels me for the next. I just never get tired of looking at the sea. I don’t quite know what it means to be constantly looking outward. I am not restless to travel or longing for the Europe of my ancestors. I feel part of the land I live on, but I still stare out at the blinding field. And so do others, from every jetty, headland and carpark along the coast.
Beachcombing combines this obsession with the habit of scavenging. A long bare beach, like the sea itself, is capable of many surprises. The unexpected is what I’m after when I go trudging along the firm white sand with not a building or human in sight. True, I’m after solitude as well, and enough sameness to give me the peace to think or maybe sing without feeling self-conscious. But it’s the possibility of finding something strange that keeps me walking.
I collect floats, rope, seaboots, the usual jetsam from fishermen who still treat the sea as their marine dispose-all. I pick up the murderous six-pack loops, the plastic straps, the crap that washes up season after season. This year I came upon a TV washed up inside Fence Reef. It looked like an exhibit in one of those Emperor’s-new-clothes art shows. Even the dog looked doubtful about it.
Driftwood in bizarre shapes finds it way atop high buttresses of weed thrown up after storms, parts of foreign-looking trees, packing cases with Cyrillic script or Japanese characters. Whole fields of blue-bottles lie stranded, bursting underfoot like little landmines. Sponges, great limbs of coral, sea cucumbers. The wind and the huge Leeuwin current drive many creatures out of their way: one year a vast hatch of baby loggerhead turtles from the Kimberley, another year a leopard seal, exhausted and dangerously cranky after his extraordinary swim from Antarctica.
From a distance every found object is merely a black mark on the sand, and half the pleasure of beachcombing lies in wondering, anticipating the find. What you expect to be a message in a bottle is the half-buried carcass of a sea lion. What you thought was a bleached branch is a whalebone. What you thought was a stingray is that bloody tee-shirt you threw away trying to save yourself last week.
Everything you find looks ancient and mysterious. Things brought home from the sea and its margins become emblems, talismans to the beachcomber. Beach shacks are full of this stuff; it’s a kind of kitsch beyond taste. The crossed whalebones over the door, the abalone shells and bleached corals, like dead fingers and brains, on dressers and bookshelves. Smooth stones, pieces of glass, dried seahorses, the skeletons of boxfish and jaws of small sharks. You can only sneer at it if you’ve never felt that sense of bounty, of excitement, stooping to pick up something that breaks the bareness of the beach, the loneliness of the morning, like a small gift.
My wife sees me coming and rolls her eyes. My trouble is, I keep everything. A critic once called me a ‘literalist’, which delighted me. For, despite his faulty spelling, he got me right; I am a ‘littoralist’, someone who picks over things at the edges.
Yet however comforting and peaceful beachcombing is, it ends up, like the sea, as disturbing as it is reassuring. In dark moments I believe that walking on a beach at low tide is to be looking for death, or at least anticipating it. You will only find the dead, the spilled and the cast-off. Things torn free of their life or their place. It can be a melancholy business coming upon the dead pilot whale, the plaintive single oar, the shell that signifies both death and homelessness. The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, for everything he finds is a sign of trouble.
The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people’s lives with grim fascination.
The poet John Blight, in A Beachcomber’s Diary, writes:
I am ever seeking the quieter beaches. Do not believe, in Australia, there are miles where at dawn you will not see the ’prints – not on the East Coast, leastwise. Here reaches of sand are scarred from daybreak, the tiles of footprints are laid down, the dents made by feet in the sand are there; so stale to me, such beaches seem no longer virgin to we few – we people who do not want to meet each other, ever.
In the west, with so much coastline and so few people, it is a simple matter to find these beaches if you leave the city. There are still places to be alone and have the mariner’s sensation of being merely a speck. West coasts tend to be wild coasts, final coasts to be settled, lonelier places for being last. In Australia the east coast is the pretty side, the Establishment side, the civilized side. It tends to be well watered and blessed with safe anchorages. It is hilly and offers views. It is the social coast, the sensible coast, at times the glamour coast. As in Ireland and America, our west is seen as something of a new frontier, remote and open.
Our west coast is mostly a flat and barren affair, blasted by trade winds, vegetated with scrub and heath, drifting with dunes. It doesn’t lend itself to the picturesque and its squat little towns with their fish-deco architecture barely rise above sea level. These towns, many hundreds of kilometres apart, are the domains of the temporary dwelling: the asbestos shack, the transportable, the gimcrack kit home. The tallest things in these places are the Norfolk Island pines, from whose pencil tips you take your mark at sea or from the desert. The landscape and the merciless weather, the irregular water, never gave white people a sense of the long term; settlers never held out much hope for the future, so they built shacks and sheds until the crays
, the whales, the pearl shell, the scallops ran out. The only beautiful towns on the west coast are ghost towns, the pearling ruins of Cossack in the far north and the flood-ravaged hamlet at Greenough. With their handsome stone buildings and charming churches, these seem to have been an early warning against optimism and the chimera of permanence.
West coasters live in the teeth of the wind. Distance, waterlessness, relentless weather have made them taciturn. If you do meet them on that virginal beach John Blight speaks of, they won’t detain you long. Fishing makes them secretive; they fear greenies, people from the government, visitors with a rod and reel. Their humour is black. ‘You’ve never been crook till you’ve thrown up a turd’, they’ll tell you with a grin as you heave over the side of their boat.
They wear clothes all year that others only wear on holiday. Their faces are crusty with cancers and they give little away with their smiling faraway stares. They are not romantic people and this is not a romantic coast. They feel forgotten, neglected, put upon, and yet proud to be far away, on the edge. But in truth, they are less different than they imagine.
With my mind fixed on the beach since childhood, I am one of them; a mutant version perhaps, but touched enough by what E.J. Banfield called ‘those inherent instincts of savagedom – joy and patience in the chase, the longing for excitement and surprise, the crude selfishness, the delight in getting something for nothing.’