The Chasm

I looked over the edge and time stood still. The salt water froze over, my blood coagulated in my veins, and a hazy veil drew over the world. The clock stopped between two ticks.

Below me lay nothing, a gaping chasm of emptiness, an inscrutinable ravine of darkness, in which no features could be made out. I balanced on the knife-edge high above it, in perfect equilibrium, at the exact halfway point between the See and the Saw.

We had drifted here as refugees, more or less. Cast adrift at sea on a frail and unreliable vessel, chasing an elusive goal. There was three of us on this day. There was Chief Switchfoot, he of the enviable and admirable ambipodious ability to surf goofy footed or natural footed. There was also The Grinner, currently doing service as Chief Switchfoot’s Son-Outlaw, i.e. his daughter’s boyfriend. Whenever he gets on a wave there’s a massive grin that cracks open his face from ear to ear, sheer joy at being able to ride a wave beaming off him. And of course there was me, Baboon, with the only thing beaming off me two oversize pink arsecheeks hanging out of the rips in my brand new wetsuit, courtesy of a few sharp rocks I encountered not long before.

We were refugees because, after having ventured out bright and early and having staked our claim on our home break, we had found ourselves forced to look for greener pastures when the thronging, pushing, shoving and cutting-throats crowds came along, tripping over their own feet in their hurry to backstab everyone else and snatch as many waves as possible in the shortest time imaginable. It’s a suitable if depressing metaphor for modern life, and all of humanity’s history, which can be summarised, in a nutshell, or a seashell, as “Me First And Fuck You”.

So when our system of maintaining order and ensuring that everyone takes their turn and has a turn, when it is their turn, broke down, as it always inevitably does under sheer pressure of excess numbers, we had grudgingly relinquished The Point, where the waves break in perfect harmony and roll and stretch out languorously over the shallow waters of the bay, and we had devolved to Plan B.

Sneaking away unseen we sidled sideways, inconspicuously-like, and floated unseen and unheard towards one of our secret wave spots. Only about a hundred metres or so out from the madness of the point lay a reef of seagrass over a sandy bank. Although it was only made up of sand, notoriously shifty and prone to breaking its promises and upping sticks at no notice, because it was held together by seagrass it was remarkably stable, and had been there for as long as I had been familiar with the waters of our bay. I had often been snorkeling there, and when I used to work as a seakayak guide we always used to bring the tour there for a first stop, because it is prime turtle habitat. The resident Green Turtles feed on the seagrass, and so it was always a safe bet that there could be turtles to be found here. This was handy, because it allowed the tour managers, who were keen on hanging onto the money they had been handed by their customers, to insist that wildlife had been spotted on the tour and that therefore, regrettably, I’m sure you understand, the If You See Nothing Money Back Guarantee would not apply, thank you very much, now fuck off and make way for the next mob of unsuspecting overseas punters to be roped in, chewed up and spat out denuded of their cash. Such is the way of the tourist trade. Once when I worked in a resort overseas, I witnessed how a pub, when finding itself popular with a huge crowd, first started charging a door fee, then double that door fee, and then raised the prices of their drinks three times in the space of an hour. Pull ‘Em In, Rip ‘Em Off, Kick ‘Em Out, thanks for coming, next.

Turtles are amazing animals. They go through a baffling metamorphosis in their lifecycle. They’re born on land, in a hole in the sand of a beach, incubated and hatched by the warmth of the sun imbued in the sand. They break out of their shells and crawl out to the water’s edge. Straightaway it’s carnage, as birds of prey and seagulls swoop and browse on them to their heart’s content. Out of fifty eggs no more than thirty hatchlings will make it to the water, if that. Then, once in the water, if they can survive top-order predating fish and mammal species long enough to grow, they will spend their childhood and adolescence out wide in deep water, living on nothing but fish. But after they’re fully grown they will come in to the shallow warm waters close to shore, and feed on nothing but seagrass for the rest of their lives, with the odd bit of jellyfish and, if they’re really lucky, a few plastic bags from the supermarket. Eventually, if they survive the plastic bags for long enough, and if they’re girls, they will return to the very beach where they were hatched, and lay their own eggs in the same sand where they were incubated. Marine scientists think that they manage to find that spot, sometimes after years of travelling far and wide through the oceans of the world, by using the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, and by memorising the exact magnetic signature of a given stretch of coast line. That’s a mean trick for something that, like a Green Turtle, has a head and brain the size of a tennis ball.

We called the reef Turtle Reef. We stayed up for untold nights beating our brains to try to come up with that one.

The reef functioned according to its own set of rules. It didn’t take any shit from anyone, and only worked when it felt like it. The tide, the current, the swell direction, they all mingled and mixed together like secret ingredients in a bubbling magic cauldron of salt water, and when the stars aligned, the moon eclipsed and Pluto crashed into Uranus, it could occasionally throw up a wave of epic proportions.

It was doing so on this day.

Maddeningly hard to pin down, it would rear up its foamy head now here, then there, then across overthere fifty metres away. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it, and it was anyone’s guess if and where it was going to stand up and break, so it was near impossible to plan for a ride. You just had to be in the right place at the right time.

The Grinner got lucky first. One minute he was floating sedately around on his board, enjoying the sunrise, the next minute a wall of water rose up behind him and threatened to smash him to atom-sized particles. He kept his cool, and somehow managed to land it perfectly, and I watched him as he zoomed away a hundred miles an hour with the world’s biggest grin across his face, only slightly marred by the growing and spreading brown patch at the back of his boardshorts. We cheered him on and shouted and yelled appreciatively, supportively and jealously. It was a cracker.

After The Grinner’s monster wave there was a lull, so the three of us lined up and bobbed up and down contentedly, laying low and keeping a low profile, so the crowds wouldn’t come over and spoil our secret hide-out.

Until, out of the corner of my eye, I caught something moving. A smattering of white rose up, heaving, boiling, stomping, reaching up to the sky. Behind me Chief Switchfoot was roaring something unintelligible in the Secret Language Of Bubble And Squeak that can only have been an exhortation to start paddling like a demon. I whipped my head around, to the left, to the right. Looked over my shoulder. There, behind me, a freight train of raging green and white came charging at me. I threw myself flat on my board and started dragging my arms through the water at superhuman speed and with zero or less efficiency. In the last few split seconds before the momentum of the wave would catch up with me I glanced to my left, and was just in time to see The Grinner, with arms pumping furiously, hair flying, and shirt being torn to shreds under the g-force of the on-rushing water, go majestically, gracefully, stylefully and irretrievably over the falls, down into the darkest hole mankind has ever laid eyes on, and disappear under a ton of foam. I had zero time to spare to hope that he could actually swim, and preferably hold his breath for ten minutes, because in the next heartbeat the wave was upon me, I breached the edge, and teetered in that empty no-man’s space where dreams are made, legends are forged and pants are shat.

Every other time I have found myself in a position like that I have instinctively looked down into the chasm, shrunk back in abject horror, and involuntarily twitched and lifted up my head. The lifting up of the head causes the most minute shift in balance, the smallest barely perceptible change of centre of gravity, and inevitably has caused me to slide off the back of the wave and miss it.

I have been trying to improve my take-off technique for months now. I have focussed on trying to feel the way the water moves and swirls underneath my board, providing buoyancy and lift, and, taking the advice of a mate who’s been at this game since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, I have worked on leaping up as soon as I become aware of the tiniest discernible change in aqua dynamics. This has resulted mostly in my drifting slowly, peacefully and wearing the befuddled and puzzled expression of a stunned mullet on my face, off the backside of a hundred waves on account of having jumped up too early, but, in the big scheme of things, has also allowed me to get a few eventually. The other thing I have been working on is a piece of advice kindly handed down from lofty heights of long experience by The Racer, who stands on his board as if he is competing in a downhill telemark ski-race, and who is also sometimes referred to as The Crocodile, due to the peculiar and idiosyncratic but clearly highly effective way he moves his arms when he paddles manically for a wave. The movement closely resembles that of a crocodile dragging its guts through the sand on its way in or our of the water and onto a breakfast of Fresh Human. Regardless of what it looks like, it obviously works very well. He doesn’t miss many. Waves, that is, not Fresh Humans For Breakfast, unless there’s one or two things he’s not telling us. The advice I received of The Racer was to keep my chin down low on the board as I move into the critical position of the take-off, so as not to disturb the delicate balance, that fine line between a successful drop and an ignominious slide down the back with all the dynamism and energy of a wet paper bag in the rain.

And so there I was. Time was standing still.

I was frozen in mid-breach on the crest of the wave, and looked down. That was the first mistake straightaway. Not long ago I was reading an account written by a serious big-wave surfer, and he described how, on particularly critical waves, massive huge monstrous slabs of water that will kill you and eat you, he prefers not to look into the hole he drops into, and instead he narrows his focus to the patch of slope that lies directly in front of him. It helps him to keep his cool, concentrate, keep his shit together and survive. Taking in the broad expanse of boiling towering water rattles him too much, and messes with his head. So he stares fixedly in front of himself, grinds his teeth and gets on with it.

I can see the point in doing that, and I imagine it would have been a great idea to practice that particular approach on this wave here. And I probably should have. But it’s the unfortunate story of my life that I never do what I should have done, and so instead I opened my eyes wide and stared into The Void. In that infinitesimally microscopic moment between two heartbeats I looked into the great gaping black featureless chasm opening up beneath me, and I saw ... nothing. No wall. No wave. No curve. No water.

I realised afterwards, when my brain reversed back out out of the reptilian mode it had defaulted itself into and returned to something resembling rational primate thought, if not actual Baboon Thought, that the lip of the wave must have been hanging over the slope and hiding it from view. But in that moment I wasn’t analysing anything. I was only capable of one thought, and it didn’t come from anywhere near my brain, but instead from a vague, indescribable and unmentionable area somewhere between the clenched sphincter and the churning gut.

“go”

And so I went. I put my chin down hard on my board, bent my head down as low as possible, hopped up with the lift of my tail, and dropped into a hole I couldn’t see the bottom of.

I fell for the mindlessly unending eternity of all of a split second, and landed, on my feet, on my board, in the yawning cavernous hungry belly of the beast, and went shooting forwards like an ape with a firecracker up his arse and a bad case of haemorrhoids. Behind me I was dimly aware of a waterfall of white foam of epic proportions, but I ignored it. I bent down over my board and made the most of it, snuggled and huddled into the curve of the wave and flew onwards towards momentary immortality.

When it finished and I dived headlong into the ocean and stuck my head back out again, triumphantly, I saw Chief Switchfoot and The Grinner half way across the bay behind me, bobbing up and down on the white foam and hooting, hollering and waving. Against all expectation I had, apparently, made it.

Triumph and pride burned madly and hotly inside my ridiculously swollen chest. What a wave.

When I got back to the others, they kindly informed me that my monster wave had been, in actual fact, about knee high.

I guess you just had to be there.