Solo

I swing into the carpark in the dark of the night. It’s five am, and I’m not expecting to see anyone here today. Some of my mates are having a sleep-in after a fantastic surf yesterday, some of them are overseas, and others are otherwise engaged. To my surprise there’s cars everywhere, but the wrong kind. These aren’t surfer’s cars, loaded up to the eyeballs with roof racks, boardbags, laundry baskets, towels, wetsuits and sex toys. Instead they appear non-descript, suspiciously clean and positively of the wrong dimensions to hold surfboards of any description. Puzzled I park and get out for a stickybeak. There’s a campervan parked halfway across three carparks with written on it in pretend graffiti spray-paint the humorous lines “in alcohols defense I’ve done some really stupid shit sober”. It’s very funny, and would even be better if they’d actually put the apostrophe in it where it belongs.

It’s a tell-tale sign raising immediate suspicions, and these are confirmed within seconds as, on my way to the waterline for an assessment of the surf conditions, I pass several groups of people dressed for night clubs. They’re even wearing shoes, a dead-set sign of The Domesticated Human, and a sight most unusual here on the shoreline where the ocean meets the land. A few of the humans are sprawled over miscellaneous fences and barriers around the picnic area, in various poses indicating, by sheer force of body language alone, that five hours ago the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol seemed undeniably like the right thing to do, and right now, towards the end of a long and painful night, the ultimate result is coming home to roost. Fancy that. There’s red glowing ambers of cigarettes being sucked on as I walk past. I mentally tick them off as, sooner or later, due to receive the Darwin Award for Natural Selection Through Self Destruction. It’s hard to think of a more stupid thing to do, except possibly smashing a schooner glass and stabbing it into your own face, although usually that doesn’t involve giving someone else large amounts of money for the privilege of doing so.

Across the carpark there’s a fire burning on the ground between two cars, orange and red flickering tongues dancing between the dark looming shadows of the cars. The smell of burning eucalypt drifts into my nostrils. There’s few things in this world that smell better, and I smile appreciatively. Somewhere in the background, seemingly from the other side of the rainforest-covered hill hemming in the east side of the carpark, comes the low and muted but unmistakable sound of doof-doof. I frown. I hadn’t expected any of this. Normally this place at this time of the night is the epicentre of deafening peace and quiet, and usually as we walk down to the waterline we can hear and feel the land breathe in and out, rhythmically pulsating in tune with the ebb and flow of the salt water lapping at its edge. Not so today. So I follow the sound of the music, and it seems to grow stronger as I get closer to the shoreline. There are more shapes on the beach, staggering around in characteristically alcohol- and drug-induced idiocy, and there’s another fire off to one corner of the beach, with a couple of shady shapes getting up to interesting and nefarious manoeuvres in the dark. I notice a couple of abandoned stubbies lying arond in strategically annoying places, waiting to be stepped on by innocent and unsuspecting bystanders. That, unfortunately, is usually the ultimate outcome of these things: broken glass and shit everywhere.

I shrug. The doof party doesn’t bother me. I don’t care. Each to their own. I’m here for the surf, and one look at the water tells me all I need to know: there’s a wave out there, and it’s waiting for me and me alone.

So I turn around and make my way back up to my car, cover myself in wetsuit material, grab my board, strap on my legrope and walk down. I can smell the water, mixed with the scent of burning eucalypt, and the rush of the waves is calling to my blood. Salt water in my veins. For I come from the Salt Water People. And right now I’m going back to it.

The stars are bright, white, silvery and shiny overhead in the black night sky as I pass by the group of humans currently in a midway state between blind drunk and brutally hungover. This time, unlike the first time, they notice me, and they exclaim in pissed amazement.

‘Oy, there’s a bloke going for a surf over there!’

‘No way! Hey, you’re crazy man!’

‘Yeah mate’, I reply, and walk on.

A girl joins in, shrieking in an exaggeratedly high pitched voice emulating all the brainless American TV shows and stupid movies that she’s spent her entire life watching, thinking it makes her sound interesting.

‘Oh maa Gaawd, what are you doing! You’re like insane! And there isn’t even any full moon!’

That is certainly true. No moon at all, just darkness, punctuated by the orange tips of their smokes.

‘Oh maa Gaawd! What about the sharks!!’

I can clearly and distinctly hear the double exclamation mark. I look at her as I pass. She’s clutching a bottle of some sort of expensive poison, and is almost doubled over, clutching her gut. I predict a technicolour yawn coming up, a nice bit of artistic pavement pizza, within the foreseeable future.

‘There’s no sharks’, I say, and vanish into the darkness.

The waves are breaking in front of me, and are waiting for no man. I push out onto the water and paddle, rising up and floating over the top of one, two, three breakers, welcoming the first shower spray of salt water as it hits me in the head, the best wake-up call in the world. Then I’m out. I sit up next to my favourite spot, a big rock where waves rise up and break beautifully, and take stock. The sky is black. Stars are all around, the Milky Way spread out like an upside down picnic blanket. The water, not surprisingly, is also black. But I’m used to this, and I can see in the dark. I can pick the giveaway deeper shadows inside of the shadows that announce the imminent arrival of a surfable wave, and I can feel the crucial lift of my tail that indicates the critical moment where immediate jumping up action is required in order to make the drop.

So I sit on my board, bobbing up and down peacefully by myself, and scrutinise the rolling to and fro of the water in front of me. Yesterday afternoon, evening and early night had been windy, with our enemy the Great North Wind blowing its devastating ill effect over our water, wreaking havoc and sowing chaos among previously clean and tidy sets of waves. It’s the reason why most of my habitual companions have chosen to snooze today: the north wind blows the surf to shit, and if it blows all night the surf in the morning is rubbish.

But there’s no wind at all now, and there hasn’t been for as long as I’ve been here. As a matter of fact it’s remarkably windstill, and the unusual lack of the slightest breath of wind helps to exacerbate my feeling of peacefulness and isolation. Although the doof party on shore is only a couple of hundred metres away, and I can smell the burning wood, mingled with a hint of kerosene, probably from lamps, or firetwirlers, or both, I feel completely separated from it, and in a good way. It’s a different world out there, utterly divorced from my private world out here, and it’s as if a veil descends between the two worlds, a thin membrane separating two realities. A transparent wall between, on the one side, the overly dressed-up out-of-place looking humans on shore, preoccupied with, presumably, alcohol, drugs, dancing and trying to make suitably powerful impressions on other humans so that these will feel compelled to have sex with them at some junction, and, on the other hand, myself out here all alone on the water, singlemindedly focussed only and exclusively on the movement of water and my position in relationship to it. It’s an uncomplicated worldview, beautiful in its simplicity. Catch a wave. Ride. Paddle back. Do it again.

I examine the state of the water. On the far side of my pet rock here the water is, indeed, stirred up and unruly, choppy and bouncey, with the short gaps and near-double-ups between waves that are characteristic of post-northerly surf. But on the inside, downstream from me, somehow the water smoothens itself out, cleans up and stretches out into clean lines of rideable peeling waves. So I sit on my perch, like an osprey on the branch of a horse-tail she-oak in the dunes, and watch for the right kind of movement. A small bump rises up, and bobs harmlessly beneath me. A slightly bigger hump sticks its head up, then lies back down again, passing from this world unseen and unheard. Then, a big black lump stands up, and keeps growing bigger and bigger as it speeds towards me, and so I spin around on my board, start paddling hard, lock eyes with the face of the wave that will come into existence any second now, and as it reaches me and lifts me up I jump to my feet, my motion aligning precisely and musically with the sine wave of the motion of the water, in sync and in time, and I land in a solid crouch, one foot forward one foot back, and I drop and slide into the open black mouth of the wave, shiny and sparkling in the darkness, and follow it with body and mind as it unfolds itself in front of and next to me. And I push forward to go faster, lean sideways to turn, bend in towards the wall of water and zoom along that rolling black mystery.

The wave peters out and I splash into the water. Got it. Made it. All I need for a successful surfing session is one wave. Everything else is icing on the cake.

So I clamber back onto my board, point the nose at the breakers coming my way and paddle back up again, back to roost at my spot by the rock. Home Rock, now there’s a suitable name for it.

I stay like that by myself, solitary, peaceful, quiet, silent. There’s no sound other than the rising, breaking and crashing of the waves. I don’t give a squeak, and allow myself to be wrapped up in a cloak of silence, engulfing the entire world and myself in it. And so, on my own, I catch wave after wave after wave, and I have an absolute ball.

Before too long the first signs of dawn are starting to come through, and as the earth turns back towards the sun the sky is filled with glorious streaks of pastel colours: pink, lilac, purple, light blue, watery pink, pale yellow, all infused with moisture and wetness. A sunrise typical of a wet season morning, announcing rain to come at some stage that day.

Eventually daylight chases away the darkness, and the sea casts off its mantle of uniform black and takes on its daytime sheen of green, white and a shade of dun and tan sand. Inevitably now people start to come out, and as a few of the usual crew come up to me they inform me that they’ve spent the last however long on top of the look-out watching me catch waves, and that they hadn’t bothered to come out at all if it wasn’t for that. We pass the time of day amiably and amicably, and then, as I see more people spew forth from out of the carpark clutching boards under their arms, I know it’s time for me to go. I don’t want to spoil and taint the exquisite solitary experience I have just had with becoming tangled up in the unfortunate hustle and hassle for waves that marks the daytime proceedings of our break, and so I take my leave, contented, satisfied, over the moon and happy as a pig in shit.

As I walk up the beach back towards the outside world the wet season sunrise fades to grey and it starts to rain, gently and soothingly.