A Silver Lining

They say that every cloud has got a silver lining. It’s one of these gems of folk-wisdom, like “good things come to those who wait”, “the grass is always greener on the other side”, and “better the devil you know”, all designed to make people grit their teeth, dig their heels in and put up with whatever shit situation they’re in instead of actually trying to do something about it.

   In this particular case the cloud was pretty toxic. It passed over the whole world, infected and wiped out people at an alarming rate, and forced economies to grind to a standstill. Borders closed, businesses shut down in the single biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and people lost their jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

   And I was one of those.

   I was making a living teaching surfing, among other things such as kayaking and rockclimbing. The official directives were handed down from above, no human contact was allowed between anyone anywhere, and the entire industry of surf coaching shut down overnight. It’s very hard to push kids and other beginners onto waves and teach them how to catch them if you’ve got to stay two metres away from them, are not allowed to touch them and need to hand-sanitise every time you tie on a legrope. So we retreated behind the safety of a computer screen, spent a bit of time writing risk assessments, emergency management procedures and lesson plans, and, broadly speaking, occupied ourselves by pushing virtual paper from one side of the desk to the other, and back again. Little by little we ran out of things to pretend to do, and eventually the work just evaporated and I was out of a job.

   This is not as bad a predicament as it might seem to be at first sight.

   What does an out-of-work surfer do with his time?

   It’s not a hard question. In the big scheme of Great Moral Dilemmas it doesn’t rate a footnote at the end of the index.

   The full moon beckoned, as it does every night, and so I paddled out into the ink black night. The sky was overcast, and the moon was nowhere to be seen. So, as is not unusual at all, we caught waves by braille. We stared into the night, and were completely and utterly incapable of distinguishing the end of the water from the beginning of the sky. Black on black. I squinted, sniffed the air like a snake contemplating taking your head off if you take one more step, turned blindly and paddled, and a wave rolled in underneath me, picked me up, dropped me into the pocket, and I rode away. I have no idea how. The closest I can come is saying that “you get used to it”, and you just learn to pick up on tiny little clues that you’re not even consciously aware of. Or it’s just pure arse luck.

   The sky turned from pitchblack to somber rain-laden grey, announcing the wet season, and the others all got out to go to work. Following their cue I got out, sat on the beach, had breakfast and, by way of going to work, fell asleep in the rain.

   When I woke up the sun was high in the sky, and I paddled back out again. This timeslot, broad daylight, is virtually unknown to us mob who surf the pre-dawn dark. Other people refer to us as cockroaches, on account of our scuttling away under cover as soon as the sun comes out. I pulled up at my usual take-off spot, and sat up, looking around in amazement. Overhead, blue skies, sunshine, the wet season clouds a distant memory now. And all around me not a soul. No-one out.

   I pinched myself, shook my head and slapped myself around the face a few times to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Our break gets a lot of traffic from holiday makers. It’s a great wave and a famous wave, and every bastard between Broome and Ceduna makes a yearly pilgrimage to come and snatch a bit of it. Not so now. Out there, in front of me, the surf rose up, broke against the rocks that give it form, shape and power, and charged at me. I realised that, for the first time ever, I had the entire place to myself, and could afford to pick and choose any wave I wanted to. I could barely take in the magnitude of the event, and without thinking I jumped on the first wave that turned up in front of me, and rode, gloriously solitarily, until it died off.

   Shaking my head with the unbelievable luck of it all,and grinning helplessly like a madman, I paddled back up again. As I paddled I had a bit of a better look around, and realised, finally, as three dolphins broke the water in front of me, leaped up and dived back down again to a chorus of gannets, terns and seagulls, that I was right in the middle of a massive bait ball. I frowned pensively. The downside of being out alone on the water is that, if anything happens, you are, well, out alone on the water. I looked around. The beach was deserted, the carpark empty, the waves unridden by anyone but me. I shrugged. So be it. You’ve got to take the good with the bad, and, in terms of good, it didn’t get any better than this. Paying a bit more attention to my surroundings now I noticed a big, broad streak of discolouration a little ways in front of me, drifting slowly in to shore. Intrigued I paddled over closer to it, and found myself surrounded by a swirling cloud of red and orange particles, drifting on the surface, slithering, slipping and sliding this way and that. I sat upright, and looked all around me: dolphins breaching, seabirds bomb-diving, white pilchards leaping out of the water in desperation, caught between a rock and a hard place, the jaws of the dolphins and the beaks of the birds; and all around, this quietly sloshing carpet of red and orange.

   And then realisation came to me.

   I had not seen the full moon that morning. But I had known it was there, informed by websites spouting meteorological data collected meticulously around the clock and around the country.

   The coral reefs a bit further offshore here though, had not had the luxury of websites telling them what time of year it was. But somehow, in reaction to some primeval impulse, guided by an unfathomable instinct, the living hard and soft coral making up the reefs had known with unshakeable conviction that it was the full moon, the last full moon of the year, the one closest to the summer solstice. And these tiny little animals, these polyps, without having eyes to discern light from dark, had known that it was time for them to spawn, and they had released their eggs and sperm in one giant collective million-headed orgasm, to allow it all to rise to the surface and be stirred around and together by the wind, the waves and the currents, so the eggs could get fertilised.

   A huge smile split my face in two, and I could feel myself grinning like an idiot, again. Here I was, in the privileged position of witnessing the interplay between the sea and the moon, the intricate endlessly entwined dance of life performed by the elements all around me, responding to each other and working together to ensure that life would continue to exist, as long as the the tides rose and fell and the moon shone. I felt honoured, proud, stoked, overcome with joy, and, well, I hate to say it, over the moon.

   They say every cloud has got its silver lining. This is mine.