Shelved

We left Karratha in the north west of WA in the late afternoon, heading down to find wild surf out bush. Clouds of red dust billowed behind us all the way down three hours of dirt road, and slowly drifted past us as we pulled up underneath a scraggly old tree by the side of the road. Surrounded by spinifex and red dirt, the wind-bent and stunted old gum was representative of this part of the country: dry as a bone and wind-blown out, perched hard between the Great Sandy Desert and the crystal blue Indian Ocean. Plants struggle for a toehold on life between the encroaching sand of the desert and the salty, life-killing spray of the ocean. There are places, plenty of them, where the sand carpet of the desert stops right at the edge of the dunes leading down to the beach. Sand into more sand, with a side serving of salt. Just the way we like it.

In other places the land rises up and towers precipitously above the water far below. We left our car behind in the care of the gnarly old gum, got our backpacks and surfboards out and started heading down a bush track leading over, along and down one of those mighty seacliffs, our sights set on that rarest of jewels under the sun: a secret surf break, unknown to anyone and impossible to find. You won’t find Seagrass Rock on any map, anywhere. No one has been here for many, many years, not since the original Yinidbarndi people were, in chronological order, shot, poisoned, rounded up, put in chains, used as slave labour, locked up in missions, and, eventually, set free to the lure of rum, junk food, metho-drinking, petrol-sniffing, diabetes, and death in custody. WA, like my home state the Northern Territory, was slow in catching up to the rest of the world in terms of what constituted acceptable human behaviour. Until the 1960s, a time well within our life time, and an era widely heralded for bringing on all-encompassing sweeping changes to fundamental attitudes all around the world about the rights of workers, women, the environment and native people in post-colonial societies such as ours, there were people in WA who held permits to shoot blackfellas on sight when “trespassing” on the permit holder’s “private property”. They were purchased for the grand sum of one pound.

As a result the country is empty of people. We can’t undo what happened in the past. We can, however, make the most of the present, and on this day that meant disappearing into the wild blue yonder in search of The Perfect Wave.

While the Wave might well, with a bit of luck, turn out to be Perfect, our timing certainly wasn’t, and so we found ourselves picking our way over the cliffs with loaded-up backpacks and with longboards under our arms in the fading light of the setting sun. It lingered on the horizon over the water, painting the sky the hard orange, red and yellow of the dry season, and then dropped off its perch and into the water quck-smart, with the ballistic leaden feet of a tropical sunset. Now you see me, now you don’t. Blink and it’s gone. Whoosh.

So we turned on our head torches and bent our backs over the ten kilometre bushwalk to our destination, heads down into the maddening south wind blowing a gale over the top of the cliffs. Down south in the gentile confines of the coffee shops, art galleries and useless antique shops of Freemantle the wind is referred to as “the doctor”, because it turns up regular as clockwork every afternoon to pay a house visit. Personally I’ve never seen a doctor visit a house other than one of Ill Repute to drink themselves stupid, and the wind we get up here is referred to as “the hemorrhoid”, because it’s a pain in the arse and it won’t go away.

The rocky track danced up and down in the beam of our head torches as we pushed into the Hemorrhoid Wind. It’s not an analogy you want to take too much further. The sunset left the night sky black with edges of frayed purple around the outside, and away to the east the first faint glimmer of the moon, which would be up reasonably soon. Up and over hills and cliffs, around hillocks and knolls, and through gullies and dips we walked, occasionally skirting clifftops and getting a clear if darkened view of the waves below, our abiding Goal In Life, the phenomenon that lends meaning, purpose and direction to our lives of salt water addicts.

Coming down one section of cliff in pitch-black darkness our torches were visible from a long way off, and within another half an hour we were greeted by one of our mates who had come up to meet us. Wisely he had gotten to our intended camp in daylight, and now had made his way over to lend a hand, or, as it turned out, to provide company on the winding path down the last cliff onto the wet sand, and onwards across the deserted night beach, the high tide coming in and lapping around our feet.

Our mate is widely known as The Snake Catcher, on account of something that happened to him many years ago. While travelling around India as a penniless shoestring-budget bum with hopes and aspirations of climbing big mountains in Nepal he had fallen asleep on a bench in a train station in New Delhi and had woken up a few hours later to find himself not only robbed of his backpack, passport and wallet but also of his hat, shoes and socks. He’s a solid sleeper. A big night out the night before might have had something to do with it. So, flat broke and with nothing on him but his Billabong shorts and Quicksilver t-shirt he found himself forced to find work on the streets of New Delhi. He ended up with an old snake-charming fakir, who took him under his wing and taught him the tricks of the trade, playing the Indian pipes to black mambas emerging from wicker baskets to wiggle their heads at unsuspecting passers-by in exchange for coins, bits of food, and, occasionally, sexual favours. Being however, as he was, completely devoid of any musical ability, the mambas repeatedly failed to be charmed in any discernible way, and, rather than dance the tourist dance in their baskets, found themselves jumping out of their baskets and bolting down the road as fast as they could slither, to get away from the atrocious noise. This in turn led any attendant tourists or other spectators on a different dance altogether, and frequently resulted in stampedes of hysterically screaming swarms of random people, while our mate bolted after the mambas to grab them by the scruff of their neck and skulldrag them back into their baskets. Hence his nickname. Inexplicably it’s not an episode of his working life that he puts on his resume. Don’t know why.

We staggered into our camp on a low rocky promontry jutting out into the sea, looking out over the waves we hoped to be riding the next morning. While I set up our tent and got a few things organised my partner, known as The Evil Woman on account of her sunny and cheerful disposition and loving, warm and accepting attitude towards all things that crawl, walk, slither, swim and fly, gave her full and undivided attention to the things that really matter in life. So she pulled out of her backpack the bottle of red she had been carrying over the cliffs in the pitchblack night for the last two hours, and sat down to business with the Snake Catcher’s partner, Blue Flame. A physicist by trade, training and vocation, she is employed in a laboratory involved in cutting-edge scientific research aimed at making the world a better place. She holds a unique position in the research team. Due to the funding cuts instigated by successive narrowminded governments with one eye on the development of private market enterprise and attendant funding cuts to public institutions, and with the other eye on the kickbacks and handouts they get from said enterprise, the CSIRO laboratory where she works can no longer afford to buy, maintain abd fuel up Bunsen burners. Blessed with an unusually volatile metabolism and intestinal mechanics Blue Flame spends her days at the laboratory eating garlic, brussels’ sprouts and baked beans, and farting pure methane into a tube whenever required. She is praised highly in the scientific community for her enduring contributions to the ongoing development of human knowledge and understanding, and has been nominated for the Nobel prize for Renewable Energy Development for the last three years running. As she is wont to describing it herself , “it’s a gas”.

The girls put themselves around the fire under the stars and got on with the serious business of winetasting. The Snake Catcher and myself however are pure teetotallers, partly due to a lifelong commitment to health and fitness, and partly, in my case, due to government restrictions on cruelty to animals, forbidding the sale of alcohol to baboons and other primates. So we sat with them, pursed our lips, tut-tutted disapprovingly, wagged our fingers beratingly, held forth at length on the dangers, pitfalls and health issues associated with the immoderate and arbitrary consumption of alcohol, and then drank all their wine. The Snake Catcher’s son, the Pocket Rocket Grommet, rolled his eyes at the atrocious behaviour and perfidy of useless adults, and went to bed.

The bright light of the morning found us paddling out into beautifully shaped waves peeling off a perfect pointbreak. The low and long promontory we were camped on stuck out into the ocean with a long tooth of remarkably flat rock, that bent with a long sweep into the bay the waves broke into. The result was that of a long, shelf-like slab of straight flat rock, offering the perfect obstacle for any swell coming that way to break off against and to continue reeling off in one long straight pearler of a wave, all the way to the sand of the bay a couple of hundred metres further back. A more perfect set-up for a surfable wave was hard to imagine, and in some ways it strongly resembled the reefs found offshore around Indonesia and some Pacific Islands: the breaking of the wave does not depend on the presence or absence of snadbanks, always subject to forming, shifting and disappearing at no notice, but instead hinges on the unwavering presence of the hard rock material under the water.

It’s what we had come here for.

We hugged the origin point of the wave closely, hard on the point of the flat shelf that stuck out, and waited for the swell to wash over it. As it did so, we snuck inside of the curling hole, paddled hard, pulled in and jumped up, and rode triumphantly along the edge of the rock shelf all the way to the sand. Fell off, turned around, went back for more. Blue Flame and The Evil Woman claimed the second section closer in to the beach, and the Snake Catcher, the Pocket Rocket and myself, The Baboon, sat hard out on the point near the rock.

We caught waves and rode in peace and quiet, leisurely, not in any hurry or under any pressure from crowds lying in waiting with backstabbing knives, eager to snatch and steal our waves. After an hour and a half of blissful surfing we floated up to the beach, crawled onto the sand like Darwinian amphibians opting for a tree change, and flaked out in the warm sand. We relaxed and passed the time of day with nonsense, gibberish and rubbish, dozed off, woke up. Had a bite to eat. Paddled out again. Life is a beach.

At the second session the tide had gone out, which opened up a new option further out: in the lead-up section of open water in front of the rock shelf a wide A-frame arose, beckoning us invitingly.

We didn’t leave it hanging.

The pull of the low tide made the water stand on end, and it rose up significantly higher above us than the pointbreak further in had previously. We sat and observed for a while, looking for the best way in. It’s one of those waves that can either break to the right into a right hander, or to the left into  a left hander. Occasionally it would chuck a hissy fit and turn into a straight hander.

It was my good fortune to score the first straight hander.

There’s no such thing.

A straight hander doesn’t break either left or right, it just stands up and smashes you in the head, turns you upside down and inside out, and drags you face forward over any exposed rock, razor sharp coral or burning coals it manages to find between you and the beach.

I tried to jump up and went careering into a beautiful backwards summersault I felt would have been well appreciated by the performers of the Cirque Du Soleil, and any other big-top circus travelling around the dusty tracks of WA and the Northern Territory. Hokey, daggy and amateurish they wouldn’t get a look-in down south, but up here, where we’re starved for any kind of entertainment, or, at least, used to be before the internet and smart phones changed the world, the day the circus came to town was an event we looked forward to all year.

My performance was well and truly up to their standard. I cartwheeled out of my summersault, got shoved under water by the waterfall, held down for what felt like decidely too long, and got spat out at the front of the straight hander.

And landed smack bang on top of the harsh reality of the rock shelf. I smashed down hard onto my right hand side and felt my arm go numb. I was vaguely aware of my hands and feet scrabbling for a toehold and getting cut up in the process, then had barely enough time to get a breath of air in before the next wave broke on top of me and renewed my intimate acquaintance with the exact nature, chronology and geological history of the rock shelf. Sedimentary, deposited in the Cambrian, uplifted in the Mesozoic, metamorphosed by something vulcanic into something twice as hard in the Cenozoic and shoved sideways into my face in the present continuous. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my longboard bouncing up and down on the rocks to my right, in about five centimetres of water. I tugged on my legrope to bring it closer, then felt along the rock face with my fingers and nails, looking for purchase. Another wave crashed over me and pushed me into a triple roll sideways, ricocheting off the shelf. I dug my fingers in, reached out and crawled sideways as fast as I could. Smash. Another breaker on my head. Crawling to the side, aiming for the edge of the shelf, feeling very much like a half-drowned Robinson Crusoe. Reached the shelf as another wave chose the top of my head to display its beauty and power to a generally uncaring and disinterested cruel world, then finally with a deep breath snagged between two breakers I slithered, slipped and slid head first off the side of the shelf into deeper water. Arms forward pulling myself through the water, and diving for deeper water. I could feel my board bounce once, twice, on the rock shelf, then follow me into the water, and I swam underwater as far as I could, to get away from the impact zone.

I stuck my head out, pulled my board underneath me and jumped on the first bit of whitewash that came my way, feeling very Darwinian, reptilian, amphibian and, potentially, well on the road to a dead end street in the eternal dance of natural selection.

Crawled out of the water for the second time that day, but feeling decidely less elated and pleased with myself, and perceiving positively more of a kinship with the dodo than with the trail blazing ancestor of the platypus.

It’s only a bit of bark. And bark can, given a bit of time, be replenished, and, eventually, grown back.

So I licked my wounds and cleaned up and bandaged up all my various cuts, scratches and grazes, stemmed the bloodflow and considered alternatives.

There was exploring to be done.

Enduring the ignominy of having to wear shoes to keep the cuts on my feet from filling with sand and miscellaneous potentially bacteria-laden dirt, I joined the others on a sticky-beak tour. We had never been this far into the middle of nowhere before. We were faced with a moral obligation to find out what lay around the corner. It was also generally deemed a reasonably commendable idea to momentarily suspend the flow of blood into the water, so the resident reef sharks, denizens of the Indian Ocean, could have a break from their current frenzy and go away for a quiet cup of tea somewhere else, preferably Madagascar.

Wild and wooly, the entire northwest coast lay in front of us. We crawled through a passageway through the seacliffs, found waterline hollowed-out caves, and met a dead whale on the beach.

As we commiserated with the whale on the subject of the transitory nature of life, the Pocket Rocket Grommet, happily beach combing away off to the side, returned to show us the treasure he had found.

There, holding in his hand, stretched out to at least twenty cm, was a seahorse. Resplendent, colourful, brilliant, dazzling, with a long pointy snout, a black line along his backridge, and shimmering shades of orange and pink all along his corally side, he lay peacefully in the hand of the Grommet. The sun flashed and winked and highlighted his breathtaking colours.

He looked happy. We hoped he had had a good life, and resolved to take him with us to keep him company.

He too had gotten shelved by the powers of the ocean, thrown up high above the tideline and unable to get back to the water in time. Unlike me, who got away with minor cuts, bruises, a sore arm and a sprained rib, his shelving had been permanent, and his journey was over.

A timely reminder.