The Intricacies Of Oceanography

The wind had been howling northerly for weeks and weeks on end. It seemed like it would never stop, and we were growing desperate. It had started blowing more or less on cue towards the end of September, the end of our dry season here, and had launched itself with gusto into The Northerly Season. We knew that for the next three months or so the prevailing wind would be from the north, it’s the weather pattern here in our country. It usually starts to back off around mid-December or so, when the warm season starts, what other people elsewhere might refer to as Summer. The Northerly Season is more or less contiguous with The Build Up in my home of the Northern Territory, that time when the humidity in the air rises to 200 %, visitors from down south take off towards Antarctica with burning rubber and boot wide open, often accidentally forgetting their wives and kids on the footpath besides them, we eat mangoes five times a day, and divorces, murders and suicides increase dramatically and noticeably. It’s a kind of natural selection. Anyone who gets nervous and loses their temper at a bit of warmth gets weeded out. In the good old days before airconditioning the Territory used to bleed dry in The Build Up as all the Southerners bailed out back down to the cold.

For the past few years I have been living in what’s referred to as The Rainbow Region. No one knows exactly why it’s called that. The various theories proposed include 1) it rains a lot, so there’s a lot of rainbows; 2) it’s hippy heartland so there’s traditionally a lot of gay people; 3) it’s named after the creature of Aboriginal mythology, The Rainbow Serpent; and 4) and most likely, the first hippy people that came here in the late 1960s fried their brains on all those wonderful drugs to such an extent that they saw “beautiful rainbow colours” everywhere. It went a bit like this:

‘Hey man, look at those colours, man ...’

‘Where man? ..’

‘Oh wow man, that’s like, too far out man ...’

‘Oh yeah man, I dig it, that looks just like a ...’

‘Yeah man, it does, it looks just like ...’

[in unison]

‘... a rainbow, man!!!’

In actual fact they were looking through the window of a local butcher’s shop, advertising fresh lamb chops, “Come And Get Them While They’re Cold”, and “Beat Ball Busting Botulism! Buy Best Before!!”, but, somehow, the name caught on and now we’re stuck with it.

The northerly wind brings vast warm airstreams from the hot tropical north down to us, sucking them down the coast and sandblasting anyone and anything that dares come within cooee of a beach. Paradoxically however it also makes the ocean water colder: the going theory is that the continued relentless and unabating force of the wind blows the warm top layer of the water hell west and crooked, pushing it down to Antartica to help speed up global warming by inducing the calving off of a few major glaciers, and allows the frigid water from the nether regions of the sea to well up to the surface. A similar mechanism is involved in the infamous El Niño phenomenon, which, with a tentative cycle of seven years or so, dries out our country and lays waste to western South America with devastating floods.

In a normal season the trade winds will blow off the top layer of water off the South American coast and push it over across the Pacific towards us here in Australia, allowing the deep and nutrient rich and above all freezing cold waters of the Humbold current, freshly arrived from the South Polar region, to bubble up to the surface. This cold water, being nutrient rich, causes an increase in fish population and as such is a windfall for the fishing populations of Chile and Peru. The problems arise when, for some reason, the winds aren’t strong enough to blow the warm water across the ocean to us, the cold water can’t make it to the top (because cold water is denser than warm water, so it will always sit below it – think jumping into a farm dam or a still lake for a swim), the fish don’t get their expected massive influx of food, the fish numbers collapse, the fishermen and their families starve, and, to boot, because the warm water and the moisture-laden warm air that accompanies it don’t get blown to us, they get washed away by torrential rain. Meanwhile us mob overhere on this side of the ocean we get plunged into ever-increasing drought, devastation and bushfires.

Luckily we are governed by an outstanding team of astute politicians, who with great foresight and after careful, meticulous and conscientious consultation with the scientific community, have come up with a bulletproof and watertight plan to remedy this situation by implementing an ingenious failproof sytem of “thoughts and prayers” for rain, while continuing to multiply coal exports and give out 1000-year rights to as much free water as they can carry to Chinese mining companies while everything and everything else around us burns and dies of thirst. We are very fortunate indeed to be looked after by people with such stellar vision for the future, and they fully deserve every cent of the lavish wage they will continue to get paid for the rest of their lives at the expense of the tax payer after they have served a minimum of six minutes in public office.

We are, indeed, the lucky country. A bit like when you’re out on the town to pick up, and you get lucky and score a random root, only to wake up the next morning to find out that your “lucky dip” has left you, as a souvenir, with gonorrhea, syphilis and AIDS, and to boot you’re pregnant. And you’re a bloke.

Significantly, the phenomenon of this cycle of drought-here-floods-there is called, by the local people on the coast of South America, “El Niño”, meaning “the boy(child)”. And the reason for that is because it always happens around mid to late December, i.e. when the christians have their xmas and fawn over plastic effigies of babies stuck in troughs with hay, earwigs, cockroaches and centipedes, and sing inane ridiculous songs about it.

The northerlies we get here around the same time of year, ending usually around December, are linked to that phenomenon, somehow, I think. Certainly the method of removing all the warm water seems to be similar. In addition to cold water these winds also often bring big mobs of blue bottle jellyfish to our shores. These jellyfish are interesting creatures. They have no eyes, central nervous system or brain, and have no control over their movement, getting helplessly blown around by the wind and carried to random places by prevailing tides and currents, unable to steer their own course. They are, in other words, exactly like politicians.

Finally there was a lull in the neverending tyranny of the northerly, the wind swung around to the south and there was even some swell to go with it, so naturally we rushed out to make the most of it. On the morning of that day I had been running a bit late and turned up at our break after some of the others had already gotten there. I noticed with annoyance that some other bastard had parked in “my” spot. How dare they. We have a strict arrangement for our parking: there are three spots closest to the water, and they are perennially reserved for, from closest to the water to furthest, The Snake Catcher, The Baboon (myself) and Chief Switchfoot. Everything else down the line is up for grabs and we don’t care. While this is a public carpark open and accessible to the whole world we get away with this solely due to the insane hours of pre-dawn that we turn up at. It is not at all unusual for us to turn up in the pitch-black dark carpark and start puling boards out and wetsuits on, while carrying-on, strung-over and soon-to-be hung-over revellers of the night come crawling down a nearby walking track, bottles in hand, swaying dangerously and unfailingly enquiring about the track to the lighthouse, a famous tourist attraction here. We always take great care to dutifully point them in the wrong direction, and take inordinate pleasure in doing so. We have heard reports of unsuspecting tourists arriving miles and miles away inland on dead flat sugar cane farms after having followed our detailed instructions, wandering around dehydratedly in the sun, scratching their heads and checking the GPS on their phones, which were informing them they were actually in Vietnam.

I took note of the interloper’s car and cracked my knuckles menacingly, after having picked them up from the ground one by one. There would be dire consequences. Unless he was carrying four spare tyres he was going to regret it.

I paddled out in the dark and found my mates bobbing around on the water.

‘Ah, look who’s here. Good afternoon’, said the Snake Catcher.

‘Good to see you could make it after all. How was the sleep-in?’, smirked Chief switchfoot.

Right. That’s what you get for turning up at 4.40 am instead of 4.30 am.

There was another fella in the water too, another mate of ours, and upon seeing me he spake thusly:

‘Nggghh nggghhh hububbubbubbub’.

I recognised him as Mountain Man, so named because he lives on a mountain and looks like one. Similar to a lot of mountains, he was also bright white and frozen on top.

‘Ah goodday Mountain Man, how are you mate?’, I replied to his greeting in a friendly manner.

‘Hagggaaaaarrrrrccchh hagga hagga rreeeuuuuhhh’, he stammered through chattering teeth.

‘Ah, really?’, I answered, noticing he wasn’t wearing a wetsuit and sat there in his bare chest. There were small glaciers leaking down from his armpits. ‘What happened to your wetsuit?’

I had by this stage figured out that the car parked, sideways at that, across my spot belonged to him, and had, reluctantly and not without deep regret, shelved my nefarious plans for retribution and revenge. The Snake Catcher had been working with Mountain Man for the last few months on a building project, and Mountain Man, who normally shuns the water in the dark like most sane people do, had obviously felt tempted to come along out on the early pre-dawn shift for a change.

‘Jungha hungha hooohoo haaarrggh!’, Mountain Man exclaimed eloquently, while his breath escaped through the icicles hanging down from his mouth in little clouds of frozen vapour.

‘Ah, really? You thought it was gonna be warm?’

‘Huuuungggh!’

‘So you didn’t think you’d need a wetsuit?’

‘Heeeuuurrreeeeugh!’

‘Yeah, that northerly brings out the cold water, ey. Don’t you hate that’, I said, snugly from inside of my wetsuit that was built out of reinforced concrete lined with Siberian Tiger Pubic Hair, the warmest thing known to humanity.

‘Nggangaa vovvoovvo djuh djuh djhu ffffffuckin ‘ell’, he croaked though teeth solidly frozen together and coated in a fine layer of ice.

‘Yeah mate, you’re not wrong there’, I commiserated with him. I felt a whole lot more betterer about him having stolen my parking spot already.

Before long waves turned up and I was too busy catching waves to be able to torment Mountain Man any longer. The northerly not only brings out cold water and blue bottle jellyfish that can potentially kill people who are allergic to their stings, it also makes the water really messy. Our bay is pointing north, so any wind coming in from that direction pushes the surf over flat on its face and knocks seven shades of shite out of it. It also pushes the lines of swell closer together, and disrupts the straight running of clean wave lines with fractures, close-outs, standing waves, whirlpools, bumps, moguls and drunken mermaids that float around in the water trying to comb the seaweed out of their hair and hurling inventive and creative abuse of an explicitly sexual nature at anyone who happens to crash into them or surf over the top of them. They’re cranky creatures and are best avoided.

I got on a wave from reasonably far out to sea, and skirted close-ish to the rocks, ready to curve my way around them and carry on in the more sheltered middle of the bay. I drew about parallel with the last rock, an outcrop known as Spastics, because usually that’s where the crowd of would-be wave-catchers went ballistic and frequently wiled away the long hours on the water by clawing each others’ eyes out, pulling each others’ hair, and biting other people’s ears. And that was just the blokes. The women were far worse. And don’t mention the bloody elves. The only well-behaved people there were the dwarves, and that was mostly because, as a man, they turned out in chainmail and carrying hammers and axes on their surfboards, besides which they couldn’t actually swim, due to a cultural taboo on any activity involving water, including drinking it and having showers. So they usually ended up on the bottom pretty quickly and either drowned or buggered off with the shits.

As I prepared to round The Cape Of Spastics and crouched low in my distinctive Baboon Stance, legs wide, head down and arse up, knuckles dragging through the water in great style, frequently bumping unsuspecting people in the line-up on the head and handing out mild concussions like a pedophile handing out lollies at a Wiggles concert, something bizarre happened. At the exact moment when I was expecting to zoom past the last rock my board went ‘wobblywoop’, it dipped down and then back up again, reared up like the bareback bronc at the rodeo back home, and bucked me off like a stockhorse that’s decided it’s just about had a gutfull of all this running around after cows with some arsehole sitting on its back digging spurs into its sides and shouting at it, and it’s seen a bit of grass overthere and see if you’re gonna keep it from eating exactly as much of it as it wants. I went flying “wheeeeee”, and landed nicely and gently face-first on three sharp jagged rocks carefully selected for that purpose.

I swore at length with heartfelt feeling and great imagination, paying particular attention to various human bodyparts and functions, and including a warm and reverent reference to various religions and their practices and deities. What the hell had just happened there? Whatever it was, I hadn’t seen it coming.

I paddled back up again, waited patiently and respectfully for my turn, and jumped on a cracker when my turn did come around. I zoomed past the cliffs on my left hand side, zipped past the grove of mushroom rocks that had spontaneously grown there a little while ago, zapped over the heads of a few random stragglers there, and, when I arrived at Spastics Rock, confidently leaned into a right turn to shoot down the line.

And got bucked off again. The exact same way.

I stuck my head out, shook the water out of my eyes and fished a green tree frog out of my left ear. What was going on? This was bizarre.

Intrigued as well as piqued, pissed off and frustrated now I paddled back up to my good old take-off spot again, and waited for my next opportunity. Jumped up when it presented itself, and raced off down the line. And sure enough, the exact same thing happened again, for the third time. This was turning into a joke.

It was time to sit back, take stock and have a think about things a bit. So I sat up on my board at about the halfway point, and had a good old sticky-beak around. It just so happened there was a bloke there that I had vaguely known for a fair while now, but I had somehow never gotten around to meeting him properly. I always thought of him as Easter Island, because he looked like one of those statues they used to build over there, and for which they cut down every single tree and destroyed the ecosystem of their entire island, so that in the end they were left with a barren, treeless island full of magnificent, imposing monumental statues, and no food and nothing to make boats out of to either fish or get out of there. They clearly had very precise ideas about where their priorities lay.

This bloke looked like the spitting image of one of those statues: he had the long, flapping ears with massive earlobes almost down to his shoulders. If you looked carefully you could see a pair of magpies that had made a nest in one of them. He also had the thick, fat lips associated with these statues, a big stubby nose to go with it, a massive square-looking bald head and a beergut that would have made a suitable drift-anchor for the Titanic. I resolved to take some time out from my busy wave-riddle-solving schedule and to meet him properly, finally.

‘Hey goodday mate, how are you. My name is Steve. What’s your name?’

He leaned over, causing a minor realignment of the axis of the earth and a wobble in the precarious equilibrium of its orbit around the sun, and shook my hand.

‘Mumble mumble mumble ... goodday, pleased to meet you. Hey, you’ve been falling off there too?’, he asked, pointing at the Black Spot near Spastics’Rock.

‘Yeah, that’s right, it’s got me stumped. Sorry, what did you say your name was?’ He had mumbled something right at the start of that sentence, and I hadn’t caught it.

‘Oh, sorry mate. My name is Easter’, he smiled.

No. Surely not. Impossible.

‘Sorry, what was that? I don’t think I got that right. What did you say your name was again?’ I said.

‘It’s Easter mate. My name is Easter, yeah’, and he grinned unselfconsciously.

‘You are kidding me. Really?’ I was stunned.

‘Yeah mate, yeah. It’s a bit of an unusual name, ey ...’

Well, you’re not wrong there. That doesn’t even begin to do it justice.

‘Yeah, you could say that again ... so where’d you get a name like that, if you don’t mind me asking?’ I couldn’t help myself. I was sure this poor bastard would get this all the time. Story of his life. Parents beware what you name your kids, they’ve got to live with it for preferably a long time.

‘Ah mate, you know, hippy parents, ey. You know what it’s like’, he offered.

‘Yeah, there’s a bit of that around, ey.’ Rainbow Region indeed.

‘So ....’ I was truly intrigued here. ‘... you got any bothers or sisters?’

‘Yeah mate, funny you should say that. I got a brother called Kangaroo and a sister called Thursday’, he nodded amicably.

Flabbergasted doesn’t come close to it.

I couldn’t help myself, I would never forgive myself if I didn’t ask the next question, and would have sleepless nights about it for the next six months at least.

‘So ...’, I drew the word out and hesitated a bit, then ploughed on, ‘sooo .... what’s your surname if you don’t mind me asking?’ I mentally chewed my fingernails and squeezed my eyes shut while crossing my fingers.

‘Yeah mate, no worries, all good. My surname is Island. The old parents were funny people, ey, hahahahaaa!’, he laughed. I choked desperately, bit my tongue in half, ground my teeth to a fine pulp in my mouth and managed to join in with what was hopefully not too rude and unacceptable a degree of enthusiasm, while heroically suppressing tears of hysterics in my eyes. Unbelievable. Reality is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make it up. No one would believe you if you told them.

I shot the breeze with Easter Island, brother to Mr Kangaroo Island and Mrs Thursday Island for a while, then paddled off to have another go at getting around Spastics’ without stacking it. It was dawning on me the longer the more that there was only one spastic out here and that was me.

My fourth run ended the exact same ignominious way. Head in the sand, board on the rocks, arse sticking out above the water, seagulls dive-bombing and attacking it. Those things will eat anything.

This time after extracting myself from the disaster zone I fetched up next to another bloke that we’ve gotten to know in recent times. He’s a real good fella, always turns up with a smile on his face, is cheerful and respectful, and is great company. We call him Shawn Of The Dead, after a comedy horror movie, because, well, he looks like a zombie. He’s got the unnerving habit of standing bolt upright on his longboard, feet side by side facing front-on, with both his hands held out stiffly in front of him, lurching style, while fixing a beady glazed-over stare on infinity and beyond. Shawn Of The Dead had experienced the same thing as me in the Pit Of Death near Spastics’: The Wobble Of Disgrace, inevitably terminating in The Stack Of Ruin. We discussed the issue.

‘I reckon I’ve got it sussed’, I said to Shawn Of The Dead as I pulled a pilchard out of my right nostril and generously and magnanimously returned it to the wide open ocean. It swam away manically while shouting “freeeeedooooom’ at the top of its gills. It was only then that I noticed it was wearing a tiny kilt, was covered in blue paint and had a dangerous looking tiny broadsword strapped to its dorsal fin. I frowned. Lucky I had gotten it out of my nose in time. I wouldn’t have liked to have gotten that sword stuck up my nose, that would have taken ages to get out.

‘Ah yeah’, replied Shawn, sitting on his board,’what do you think it is?’ When he first had turned up at our break a few months previously he had informed us that he had left his own break because it was getting too crowded there and there were too many shitfights in the water. We carefully enquired after his sanity, and about whether the expression “from the frying pan into the fire” meant anything to him. He said it didn’t. It figured.

‘I reckon’, I started, and knowingly tapped the side of my nose with my finger, almost poking my own eye out, ‘I reckon ... I reckon there’s an Anomaly there.’

‘Ah yeah?’ He was intrigued now and leaned forward a bit, eager to hear more. ‘An Anomaly, you say? In what way?’

‘Well, in a sort of, well, you know, anomalous sort of a way, you know?’, I suggested. It sounded very reasonable to me, if I say so myself.

‘Ah yes, the anomalous sort of anomaly, yes, I see. And how do you reckon that?’, he asked.

I was ready for that. It wasn’t for nothing that I had spent most of the last hour bashing my brains over this thing, watching the interaction of the water with the rocks, and the way the sea boiled in a cooking-pot sort of a way, to use a technical expression, the sort of jargon only ever used by highly trained and skilled professionals in the field of oceanography.

‘Well, I reckon there’s something under the water there, near the base of the rock, maybe a particular heap of sand, or a rock or something ...’

‘Yeah?’ He was clearly very impressed with my lucid exposition of the situation.

‘And it causes a wobble. A hump. Like ... a lump in the way the water circulates around, spins and moves ...’, I trailed off, losing steam a bit.

‘Right’, Shawn said, looking thoughtful. ‘So, you mean ... a hump with a lump? Or a lump with a hump?’

‘Yeah ... something like that’, I hazarded, getting a bit lost in the finer points of underwater topography, ‘and ... and ... it, uh, it causes a bump!’ I felt very proud of that one. Seemed very sensible to me.

‘So’, Shawn muttered, scratching his chin reflectively with a sound like road-block nails being buried deep into the tyres of a police car, ‘you’re saying there’s a bump from a lump with a hump?’

‘Yeah, that’s it!’, I exclaimed enthusiastically, ‘you’re smack bang right on the money there! I reckon that’s it. It’s like moguls in the snow, you know, so when you go over them you gotta absorb them with your knees.’ It all seemed crystal clear to me now. In my manifold vagrant and aimless wanderings around the country and across the face of the world I had accidentally ended up in a lot of ski resorts, and had spent a lot of time in the snow, one way or another, often eating it in the absence of anything else.

‘All right, now I know what to do. I’m gonna give it one more crack. Watch this!’ And with that I turned around and paddled back up to my erstwhile take-off point for one more last death-defying tangle with the menace that was Spastics’ and its companion The Bumpy

Water.

So I lined up one last time.

I sized up the wave coming towards me.

I paddled hard and jumped. Landed it perfectly.

Shot towards My Nemesis Of The Morning, Spastics’ Rock and it’s anomalous whirlpool.

Came flashing around the corner. Leaned hard into a right hand turn. Watched the movement of the brown, angry northerly water.

Picked the exact moment when it was going to buckle ....

Bent my knees just sooooo ...

And absorbed the shock of the bump from the lump with a hump with my knees, and before I knew it, sailed past that rock triumphantly, letting out a great big shout of joy, pumping at the air and yahooing like a maniac.

I rode that wave right into the beach, got out, caught the first bus up the mountain side to the university that sits there, and enrolled in a PhD in ocean-floor topography.

A brilliant career is awaiting me. Now, what have I done with my underpants?