Being Human

 

I parked the car and locked it. It wouldn’t go anywhere. At least I hoped so. We’d find out eventually. I got on my bike, barefoot, no helmet, and rode back down the road I had just come. The three kms that I thought it was going to be turned into four and a half, down the black top winding through the quiet bush of the national park. Back to the river, where I had left my daughter, with our kayak and all our gear, ready to set out on a mission we had concocted. I chained the bike to a tree by the river, half-hidden behind some bushes, we put on our life jackets, and pushed our boat out onto the mighty Esk River, pearl in the crown of Bundjalung National Park. It’s the only coastal river in the whole of New South Wales that lies entirely inside a national park, and it’s a protected wilderness area. No access other than by your own efforts: on foot, by mountainbike, or by boat.

   We were going to be using a bit of all of that. I looked down at our kayak as we paddled out onto the still black water, tinted with tea-tree leaching out of the paperbarks lining the banks. We had everything we needed to spend a few days out bush: tent, sleeping bags, food, water, hats, raincoats. All piled up and tied down in between the two of us, as we glided quietly through the water. The mighty Esk River doesn’t see a lot of traffic. No one ever comes down here. A place where you can’t drive into is too much like hard work for most people. Therefore it was perfectly suited to our purposes. Quiet, remote, inaccessible. Peaceful. Away from the hustle and bustle of madcap society and civilisation, racing towards its own extinction a hundred miles an hour, with people falling over their feet in their manic rush to spend money on things they don’t need, can’t use and don’t even like.

   Within five minutes we were around the first bend of the river, leaving the bridge over the black top behind us and out of sight, and all visual connection with the organised world of people disappeared from our radar and horizon. The Esk stretched out dark, still and unfathomable in front of us, the bow of our boat ploughing through its murky water, cutting v-lines dissipating on either side into decreasing ripples, closing behind us.

   No one remembers what the Aboriginal name of the river was; it had died with the last speaker of the language, swept away by the onslaught of colonial violence, greed and disease. Instead the watercourse had been endowed with a name from European prehistory. The Esk derives its name from a river in the mountains in Wales, and varieties of the word are found here and there across Celtic Western Europe. There is a river called the Exe just east of Cornwall, running through the moors down to the sea separating Cornwall from Brittany. It is a curious example of how the meaning of a word can change over time due to associations. Although the word ‘esk’ no longer exists in either Welsh or its sister languages, persisting only as a rivername, it has a cognate, that is a word derived from the same origin, in Irish and Gaelic, where the word ‘uisce’ means ‘water’. It has famously been Anglicised as ‘whiskey’, a term derived from the original Gaelic name of the drink, ‘uisce beatha’, meaning ‘water of life’. It is not a big stretch of the imagination to draw a connection between a word for water and a river name. It could plausibly be argued that naming a river for what it’s made of, i.e. water, is not an expression of great creative imagination, and is potentially only outdone in the stakes for most boring and unimaginative hydronym by the river Avon in England, famous worldwide for having a town on it called Stratford, where Shakespeare was born. The world ‘avon’ is Welsh for ‘river’. Clearly people in the olden days liked to call a cat a cat. However, in an interesting twist, the word ‘esk’ actually originally meant ‘fish’ in the old Celtic language of Western Europe, and, somehow, through who knows what bizarre linguistic semantic twists, the meaning was transferred from the animal to the medium it lives in. Go figure.

   The Esk River, therefore, was The Fish River, in Old Celtic.

   We hadn’t come to fish, though. We had come to feel the country through our toes and fingers, as we moved across it. My daughter had turned nineteen not long ago, had finished high school, and was on the cusp of spreading her wings, leaving the nest and soaring away onto her own independent life, hopefully without too many crashes at high altitude. So we had decided to undertake a journey into the wild, as a way of wrapping up her childhood, and as a sort of a gateway venture into the wide world. The world can be a scary and daunting place, and stopping, taking stock, and drawing a deep breath before heading out into it is not a bad thing to do. Also, the process of engaging in challenging outdoor activities, when done the right way, can strengthen such personal qualities as courage, confidence and resilience, all of which she was going to need to be able to steer her course through the shallows, whirlpools, rapids and swamps of life.

   We cruised upstream on the Esk, taking our time. It’s not a demanding river. Although it’s a perennial watercourse with a healthy amount of fresh water running into a much bigger river further south it doesn’t have a great deal of current, and it moves languidly up and down with the tidal push from the ocean, feeding into it through the channels of the bigger river. At its furthest point it’s never more than three kms from the ocean, as the crow flies, and we could hear the roar of the Pacific as a faint murmur in the background most of the time. Depending on the time of year the water can be perfectly drinkable right from where the Esk joins the bigger river, all the way up to its upper reaches. On previous trips here I had drunken the river water all the way.

   I dipped my hand into the soft, warm water, cupped a handful of it and brought it to my mouth, drinking a big gulp of it.

   ‘Pfffoooaaarrgghh.’ I spat it back out again.

   ‘Salty?’ my daughter turned and asked, with one eyebrow raised in the sarcastic way only mastered by teenagers firmly rooted in the conviction that they know everything, that no one else knows anything, and, furthermore, that anyone over the age of twenty-two is a useless geriatric who should be euthanised for the greater good of mankind.

   ‘Salty,’ I admitted.

   ‘No, really. Well done. Who would have thought.’ She smirked.

   ‘Thanks’.

   We paddled onwards, companionably. We talked of our trip, of where we were going, of life in general. The banks, lined with melaleucas, casuarinas, eucalypts, corymbias and lophostemons, all broadly and generally referred to as ‘gumtrees’, came closer as the river narrowed and as we ventured deeper into its bowels. Cormorants, ducks and herons watched us from tree branches, craning their necks at us and sussing us out. We nodded politely at them. They nodded back, and didn’t fly away. This is how it works. If you behave respectfully, placidly, calmly, animals won’t get a fright and run away from you. A sea eagle passed overhead, his mighty wings spread out, his white-feathered belly beaming down at us, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. Their eyesight is legendary and proverbial, allowing them to spot mouse-sized creatures moving on the ground from a hundred metres up in the air. We looked at him. He looked back, and flew on. We hoped he didn’t consider us edible prey. An eagle can make a serious mess out of you, if they feel like it. I’ve seen wedge-tail eagles attack six-month old calves out bush and rip them to pieces.

   Little by little the features of the river banks took on familiar shapes, and eventually, after twelve km up the river, we pulled into what we call ‘river camp’. It’s a clearing in the forest near a bend in the river, not far from where it dissolves into rivulets and creeks, where we have camped several times before, although we’d never approached it by boat, having made the overland trek on those occasions. There was the tree we used to jump out of into the water, there was the carcass of a long-dead tree, half-submerged for long years now, where we used to hang out and bask in the sun on our swimming bouts. A home coming. A revisitation of an old haunt.

   We pulled up by the bank, unloaded all our gear, carried it up the bank to our camping spot, and skulldragged the kayak up the steep bank. Set up camp quickly, anticipating nightfall, and got a fire going.

   Fires are illegal there, as they are in most places. We didn’t mind. We knew how to make user-friendly fires. Out at camp a fire provides warmth, heat for cooking, and a focus for social interaction. A fire is social cement. Without a fire to sit around, gaze into and snuggle up to you’d go to bed as soon as the sun is down and you’ve had your dinner. A fire keeps the company alive, engaged and together. So we dug a hole in the soil with a stick, scooped it out with our hands, and burned fallen branches from the trees around us. No harm done, no great impact caused. No problem. We relaxed companionably around the fire, talked about all sorts of things, admired the stars in the night sky and crashed out. The first day had been easy, the following one would be a lot more challenging.

   We packed everything up in the morning, filled in the firepit we’d dug and covered it over with the soil we’d excavated out of it. It blended seamlessly into the ground around it, and within a week you’d never be able to tell there had once been a fire there. No problem.

 

The more significant problem, or rather challenge, was how to transport our kayak the five kms overland through bushland to the start of the next river. To this end we had carried a set of wheels with us, strapped to the back of the kayak, and these we now proceeded to fit underneath the boat. The plan was to load all our gear onto it, and pull the whole thing behind us to where we needed to get to.

   It was, as far as plans go, a good plan. Well thought out, properly researched, comprehensively organised with acute eye for detail. Heavy backpacks in the kayak, us two pulling it from the front effortlessly, smiling under the sun, laughing all the way to the bank of the next river.

   It worked really well for about the first two minutes.

   At minute three the wheels started squealing like an elephant seal with his left testicle caught between two icefloes in Antarctica. We looked at each other and grimaced. That squeal was going to be the soundtrack of the rest of the day. We made a joke about it and soldiered on. Up the incline leading away from the camp, out of the shelter and shade of the tall trees, growing close to the water and drawing life-supplying moisture from the river through their long roots, and away onto the coastal flat where, too far from the river, the big majestic gums gave way to the low scrub country referred to as Wallum. Wallum is an Aboriginal word for a particular species of banksia (Banksia aemula) and it has been extended to the whole the coastal environment there: sandy, dry soils, low in nutrients, supporting only low, scrubby plants, typically lots of banksias, scraggly paperbarks, prickly and spikey hakeas, low rows and hedges of leptospernum, also known as tea-tree, calistemons (bottlebrushes), acacias (wattles) and sedges and grasses. It is renowned for burning like a cracker, and periodic devastation by bushfire is part of its lifecycle. I used to fight wallum fires when I was a ranger, and of particular concern were the cones of the banksias, known as ‘banksia bombs’. They would smoulder very quietly and unobtrusively, minding their own business and keeping a low proile, keeping their heads down and staying out of trouble, by all appearances perfectly well behaved, and they would wait until we had finished doing our rounds of hosing down anything that looked like it could start burning again, and then just when we had turned our backs and were ready to call it a day they would explode in a shower of sparks that would, with a willing wind, fly miles away, and start the whole bloody thing back up again.

   Personally I really like wallum country. I am from The Salt Water People, and in this environment I can taste the sea in the air, find the imprint of the coast on every plant and in every leaf, and feel the sand under my feet shift with the rise and fall of the tides.

   ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.’

   The wheels howled their agony through the branches of the banksias. We ignored it, and rounded a bend in the track. As the track swung around a corner leading up onto a slight rise it caused a sideways incline in the lay of the land, and, with a groan of glee and delight, the trolley slowly, in slow motion and with a smug expression of deep satisfaction on its face, tilted sideways and fell over, spilling all our carefull arranged equipment on to the red sand.

   We stood, beheld the carnage and scratched our heads. Re-fitted the wheels, re-stacked everything, got going again. Twenty metres further down same thing. Crash. We scratched our heads a bit more. We only had five km to go, but at this rate it was going to take two weeks. I laid down under the kayak-and-wheels contraption for closer inspection of our problem, and noticed with concern that the hull of the boat was caving in alarmingly under the pressure of the wheels and, presumably, the load on top. That wasn’t good news. We had great and ambitious plans for this thing. It was made of solid plastic, most valuable and admirable product of western civilisation, to wit the thousands of seabirds and turtles who choke and die on it every year. It was strong but old, had seen considerable action as a work vessel on the wildlife spotting kayak tours that I used to work on as a guide, and had a few patch-up scars to show for it. I didn’t like the notion of it splitting, filling up with water and sinking without notice at the worst possible moment, further down the metaphorical as well as physical track. We’d have to make amends. So we resolved to shoulder our backpacks, the one thing we had been strenuously trying to avoid the whole time, thereby relieving the kayak from its load, and having shifted the wheels to the strongest part of the boat, we set off again.

   We grabbed one side of the front handle each and heaved away. Heave away haul away. Up the long sloping hill, in and out of the shade of stunted paperbarks. The sun rose high into the sky and warmed up the land around us. We drank water sparingly, having only a limited supply, that had gotten a bit lower than I had planned the previous evening when one of our bottles had landed roughly on the ground, popped its lid and spilt its contents on the ground. I had cooked my dinner with river water, which had been fine. Just the right amount of salt to make it tasty. That far upstream the water of the river had been almost drinkable.

   We slogged on, going in short bursts, counting our steps, first twenty at a time, rest; then fifty, rest; then a hundred, two hundred, followed by a short rest. We settled into a rhythm, bent our backs to the task, and ground onwards. By the end of the first kilometre my daughter’s fingers were raw, cut through from chafing against the handle at the bow of the kayak.

   At what we reckoned was the halfway point we stopped and had a break. My daughter went and sat in the shade of a banksia, and relaxed. Her and me had walked up and down that area heaps before in the past, we had covered it in our footsteps and roved over it extensively. Though we couldn’t see them we knew there were familiar landmarks in the country all around us: a billabong further south where we had been swimming, an ephemeral paperbark swamp behind the dunes that we had waded through, a spot a bit further over where we once had an extended lunch and social get-together with a four metre python that lives around there. Our memories lay embedded in the land around us. This was our country, part of it. I stood in the middle of the red sandy track, looked around me, at the bush around us, quietly buzzing away against the ever-present distant hum of the ocean in the background, the blue skies above us, the trees shimmering in the heat of day, and all of a sudden it hit me, a revelation, an epiphany that stole over me like the warm water of the river when you dive in it: I felt human. I took a deep breath of fresh air, smelling the grass and the trees around us, and felt a smile break through on my face. This is what it meant to be human. To be moving quietly on your own two feet through the bush. This is how our ancestors walked out of Africa and populated the world. Feet on the ground, feeling the earth breathe. Moving with a purpose, travelling with the family. people and country connected as one.

   I shared the feeling with my daughter. It was one of those special moments, rare occurrences in everyday humdrum life.

   I think it’s fair to say that she was far more concerned with her bleeding blistering hands and the cuts on her fingers, and had zero interest in my philosophical contemplations. Fair enough.

   We pushed on through, settling into a rhythm and working hard at it, and dragged our kayak on wheels all the way through to the start of the next river, determination growing stronger as habit formed and confidence at the ability to get the job done grew. That’s how it works.

   By the time we got to the next river it was well and truly time for a well-deserved break, so we sat and had lunch, leaned back in the shade and enjoyed a bit of quiet time. This next river was more of a creek. Similar to the Esk River it ran parallel to the ocean, but in the opposite direction, south to north this time. It was shorter and smaller than the river, and different in every possible aspect. We put the wheels on top of the boat again, slid it into the water, and paddled out into a water wonderland, an open expanse of still, motionless lagoon-like water, bordering on wetland, fringed by banksias and paperbarks, not a gumtree in sight. The banks were made of white sand, and lines of straggly low trees were interspersed with submerged beds of reeds, poking out of the water like silent sentinels, dividing the creek from the billabongs and almost-oxbows that split off the main channel at regular intervals.

   We veered left and right, in and out of channels, around low-lying marshy islands and islets. My daughter laid back and relaxed in the sun, and I paddled on. There was no hurry for this leg of the trip. Our companionship had taken on a deeper quality, and we had moved on to more serious themes in our conversation. We talked about life and love and relationships, and how they work and how they don’t work. I shared a few gruesome stories of some of my past relationships, pre her mother, characterised by convoluted circumstances, wildly irresponsible behaviour on my part, and the inevitable attendant relentless, abiding and enduring life-long hatred on the part of my eventual ex-girlfriends. A case-study of how not to do it.

   After a cruisy five km a long, wide and high white dune loomed up in front of us, heralding the end of the creek. We drifted right through to the very end of the water, then stepped into two inches of water, barricaded behind a broad sandbar. This creek only rarely opens up into the ocean. At particularly high tides the ocean will flow over the sandbank blocking its mouth and fill it up with seawater, maybe a couple of times a year. At other times an exceptionally significant weather event might cause the creek to swell, flood and break the bank, emptying itself into the sea. Most of the rest of the time, like now, it would run out against a dry bar of sand. Which event had happened most recently, fresh water flood or salt water tide ingress? This was a matter of some importance and urgency, as our water reserves were running decidedly low. I bent down, cupped water in my hand, and brought it to my mouth to check.

   ‘Heeeeeuuuuuuurrrraaaaaggggghhh!’.

   I spat the water back out again.

   ‘Salty?’ my daughter asked, without bothering to turn around.

   ‘Salty,’ I confirmed, wiping my mouth and spitting with conviction and feeling.

   ‘Well done.’

   ‘Thanks.’

   The wind was howling a gale from the south along the beach, as it had been for the last few days. This time we were going to camp on the beach, so we dug out each and every peg we could get our hands on, and strung up guylines, bolting our tent down into the fine white sand of the beach. It wasn’t going to blow away in a hurry. The ocean stretched out infinitely in front of us, like a salty watery desert, leading to the edge of the world. We looked at it apprehensively, and went for a walk to study its behaviour. It looked unruly, grumpy and aggressive. Might not not have slept well last night, or, possibly, had been in a fight with its girlfriend and been made to sleep on the couch. Mrs Ocean was renowned for being a hard-arsed bitch. There’s no reasoning with her.

   With plenty of time on our hands we settled down into camp life, preparing our customary fire pit, collecting firewood, getting dinner on. We found one poor old banksia that had taken living life on the edge one step too far, and had died in the process. Banksias like to live near the salt water, but not too much so. They feel comfortable and at home behind a row of dunes to shelter them from the impact of the neverending relentless salt wind and spray that blows up from the sea. This row of dunes, the first in a series of three or four, is covered in low-lying grasses, vines, succulents and shrubs, like goats-hoof vine, hairy spinifex and creeping coastal wattle. None of them stand higher than a foot and a half, and they act as the first outpost for the vegetation of the land, sending out shoots and creepers towards the salt water, stabilising the sand, anchoring sand drifts, providing habitat for ghost crabs who eat jetsam and flotsam, shit it out in the lee of the sand drifts created by the creepers, and thereby fertilise the otherwise sterile sand, preparing the way for the second generation of plants, like poor old Mr. Banksia there. But when the big storms come through, rip away the first line of dunes and expose the second line to the full frontal assault of the wind and spray, whatever grows on it dies, sooner or later. The banksias and casuarinas that grow in the second row get covered in salt, which burns their leaves until they can no longer photosynthesise, and they die.

   Leaving Mr Banksia's roots and trunk in the sand to stabilise the dune we took the branches he didn’t need anymore and burned them in our fire, lit into the face of a glorious sunset behind the dunes and the creek bank. With the fading daylight the stars came out and before we knew it we were covered in them, the Milky Way right overhead covering us like a blanket that stretched from one side of the universe to the other. The Southern Cross lay askew behind us, from where we had come. Orion stood proud and tall in front of us, bow fully drawn, belt around his waist, sword handle sticking out of the belt and tip of sword hanging down low near his feet, showing us the direction in which we had been travelling.

   We sat companionably under the stars and ate our dinner. Our water supply was now getting precariously low, so I wasn’t drinking very much at all, and I resolved to use the water of the creek to cook my dinner, like the night before. After all, I reasoned persuasively with myself, in the quiet space between my ears where the multiple voices chatter, bicker and rant and rave incessantly all day and all night, it’s no different from seasoning your food with salt, like a majority of people in the civilised world do every day three times a day. Salt is a necessity of life. A person who takes zero salt in their diet will die within three weeks, without one single time feeling a craving for salt. In the olden days, i.e. before refrigeration became widely accessible in the period between the two world wars of the twentieth century, salt was a vital factor in the preservation of food for long term storage. People of all stripes and descriptions settled their various parts of the world by carrying salted foods with them, most usually meat or fish. Therefore there was no reason at all why I couldn’t perfectly well cook my dinner with the creek water, which was really just unadulterated sea water.

   It was very salty.

   I resisted the temptation to give my daughter a taste of it. We didn’t have enough water left for her to rinse out her mouth enough to be able to survive eating it. It was, in truth, pretty shit.

   With all those stars spread out far and wide above us we sat companionably in the night, playing cards by torchlight, discussing the future, plans for life, the challenges of relationships with people, the intricacies of ecology, and the vagaries of ancient history, a thing that through some bizarre twist of neurological happenstance is as real and palpable to me as every-day life, with events that took place two thousand years ago as clear, real, relevant and important in my mind as yesterday’s breakfast. If not, in actual fact, more so, and decidedly less salty.

   We crawled into our cubby-hole tent, snuggled into the coccoons of our sleeping bags and dozed off happily and comfortably to the sound of the mad southerly wind howling around our ears, lifting up and flapping the fly every five minutes, as if to try to keep us awake. We needed a good night’s sleep.

   We had one more leg of our journey to go.

   By a stroke of great good luck it rained that night. I woke up when the rain drops fell on my face through the open fly, and shut the zipper, sealing the rain out.

   When I got up in the morning, an hour before daylight, I found the fly covered in thick beads of delicious fresh rainwater. I licked it off while my daughter was still fast sleep. I found my kayak paddle covered in rain too, and licked that off too. What a treat. Then, to top off the feast of unheard-of goodies, I found a huge puddle of rain had collected in our kayak overnight, so I got down on my knees, lowered my mouth to the water, and drank deeply from it. I smacked my lips with delight, and sighed with satisfaction. Just what I needed. I had been a bit dried out and salty overnight, and this put it just right. I saved half of the puddle for after breakfast, and went off to do my stretches on the beach. No matter the weather, the time or place, the first thing I do every morning is stretch for about twenty minutes. It is a deeply ingrained life habit, and I can’t live without it. So I lay down on the sand of the beach, with the low tide far out, looked up at the gazillion stars above me in the pitch black dark night, and stretched in the windstill pre-dawn.

   Well stretched out and warmed up for the day’s challenge I got up and went and investigated the state of the ocean. We had one more thing to do to complete our adventure. Over the last two days we had been consistently travelling north. From where we had put our kayak on the river we had paddled twelve km, from our river camp we had walked and dragged the kayak five km up a bush track, and at the end of that track we had put in at the creek and had paddled another five km, all in a northerly direction, heading towards Orion. The last thing we had left to do now was get on the ocean and paddle twenty km back down south, back to where we had started.

   It was the most important leg of the journey, the component upon which the whole success of our journey depended, the lynchpin of our enterprise. Without it we would have to turn around and retrace our steps. It was also the most unpredictable, risky and potentially dangerous part of our adventure. The ocean is wild, fickle and powerful, and is not to be mucked around with. On the river, if the boat sinks or something else goes badly wrong, you swim thirty meters to a tree on the bank. No biggie. Out on the ocean if anything goes wrong you’re fucked. You die.

   I had been watching the weather forecast like a hawk for the last three weeks, and had gambled, or, rather, cunningly and carefully calculated, everything on the fact that the predicted lull would eventuate. And it had. The wind had dropped off at exactly the right, and predicted, moment, to wit the windless, still pre-dawn morning under the stars. What we needed now was for the swell to have dropped off sufficiently for us to be able to break out through the surf, here on this wide open exposed beach, and get out onto the open ocean.

   The previous afternoon, while we were getting our camp ready, we had spotted two majestic sea eagles, planing above us on thermal draughts only they could perceive. I had taken it as a good sign, for no particular reason other than that I wanted to and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking.

   So now I stood by the edge of the ocean, looking out at the black water in front of me beneath the night sky, with my daughter asleep in the tent behind me, and I evaluated the situation. I could see water moving that way, I could see crests breaking there, I could see a current swirling away over there ... I nodded to myself. I could see a way. I figured we had a good chance of being able to get out. When I was a seakayak guide we would spent agonising time at the start of each day scrutinising the ocean in front of us, searching for ways to get the group of paying customers out onto the ocean, because, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to work and therefore wouldn’t be getting paid. It was important, and a compromise always had to be found between on the one hand getting inexperienced nervous punters out more or less in one piece, and, on the other hand, terrorising them so badly that they would scream in abject horror at the sight and impact of giant waves crashing down on them. In their perception. If you’re not used to it a shore break can seem pretty daunting. The hardest thing was getting them out through the breakers. Getting back into shore was technically harder, but if people weren’t up to navigating and riding the surf they could always just crash and burn, and we’d fish them out of the water like drowning dogs, wring them out and put them back on their feet. No problem, and, of course, by then they had already paid for the trip so it didn’t matter anymore. Such is the world of tourism business.

   I turned around and headed back to camp to wake up my daughter. The decision had been made.

   We had our breaky, packed up camp and hid all our camping equipment behind a banksia in the dunes, in the long grass where I used to live when I was a kid, under a tarp and chained up with a long chain and padlock. We would take only the bare necessities: first aid kit, emergency communications and what little water we had left over. We wore our raincoats over thermals and boardies, stuck our hats on our heads, and stuffed our lifejacket pockets with ready-to-hand snacks. For my daughter that meant an apple and muesli bars, for me an apple and a supply of home-made pemmican: a mix of dried kangaroo meat, dried Davidson Plum from the rainforests of the Northern Rivers, and ground macadamia nuts – an amazingly filling and nutritious concoction, and an indispensable staple of my diet.

   We grabbed our paddles, dragged our kayak over to the spot I had determined would give us our best shot at it, and stopped at the waterline. We looked at each other and nodded.

   ‘Are you good to go?’ I asked.

   ‘I am,’ she replied, steady, if a bit nervous.

   ‘Remember, paddle forwards if I say “paddle”, paddle backwards if I say “backwards”, and stop if I say “stop”.’

   ‘Orrite,’ she said. It wasn’t rocket science.

   ‘If you fall out or we capsize hold on to your paddle and wait for instructions.’

   ‘Orrite,’ she said again.

   ‘All right, let’s go.’

   We waded into the water till we were waist deep, the current and the tide tugging at our legs. Then we jumped in and paddled, carefully and with calculation. There is a time for going hard and smashing through, and there’s a time for cautious circumnavigating. We manoeuvred our kayak into the rip I had selected the previous afternoon and that morning, and followed its swirling eddylines, carefully, left a bit, right a bit, over a rolling unbreaking crest, using the water streaming back out to sea after hitting the beach, draining from the shallows back to the deep. We let the living water guide us, here a bit, there a bit, down the unlaid track back out to the ocean. Don’t fight the water, let the water carry you, go with the flow, literally. We rose up and over a few small rises, one, two, three, a fourth one. And then, crunch time. The dead zone, the cusp of the breakwater, there where the rolling swell first hits the hidden sand underneath the surface, and is forced to stand up in howling protest, rise up to its full length and glory, shining green walls of water collapsing overhead in rumbling waterfalls of tumbling white. One stood up in front of us, dangerously, towering high.

   ‘Stop!’ I yelled.

   We froze.

   Let the water rise up, and up, and up in front of us. Watched as it crested and broke, an avalanche of white froth bubbling towards us. Now!

   ‘PADDLE!’ I roared.

   This was the time for smashing through.

   ‘Paddle! Paddle hard! Keep paddling! Don’t stop!’

   She did. She did so magnificently. She stuck her paddle in the water and pulled on it as if her life depended on it, which it sort of did. We surged ahead, and met the rolling white foam head-on, in exactly the right spot, rose up and over it, the nose of the kayak pointing high forwards, but not too high, safely so, and we landed with a bounce on the other side, in green water.

   ‘Paddle! Don’t stop!’

   We could see the next wall of green water preparing itself for a rearing cavalcade, but our timing was immaculate. We rode straight onto it and over it, sliding down its backside before it broke, and coasted down the back of it, again into the flat green.

   ‘Paddle! Keep paddling!’

   Another one. Same thing, we glided onto it before it broke and landed safely on the other side. I scouted ahead, focussed, concentrating, on my game. No time for mucking around here and now.

   One more, smaller than the last one. A good sign. We crested it, and slid down easily. No problem. In front of us there were a few more rising lumps in the water that could potentially cause grief, if a freak set wave turned up that had a bit more push in it than the previous ones; we could still come undone. So we pushed through, looking ahead, looking left and right, rising and falling over decreasing mounds of swell, until, finally, we were well away from the breakers. We were out the back, and we had gotten through unscathed, in one piece. Fantastic. What a performance. First class.

   In order to avoid any potential mishaps I steered wide. Once you’re on the ocean all you have to do is lift and fall with the swell, ride it like a horse moving underneath you. Absorbing it like the bumps of snow on a mogul-strewn ski slope in the cold white mountains. So we left the crashing wild white breakers far to our right hand side, veered off to the sou’east, and set our course. At this stage the further we stayed away from land the better it would be for us. There are sandbanks and reefs in front of the shoreline, and waves can break on them given a bit of extra swell-momentum, and they are best given a wide berth, a nautical expression if ever there was one. I could see some off to the west, landwards now, and navigated well away from them. The wide open ocean would be our friend and companion for the rest of our journey.

   A light, mild bit of soft rain came down and drizzled on our raincoats and hats. We were snug as bugs in a rug, and finally, for the first time since we had arrived on the beach at the end of the creek the previous afternoon, I started to relax. A lot had depended on the successful negotiation of the beach break, and I had been singlemindedly focussed on it the whole time. Now, finally, here we were, and it was fantastic.

   Off to the east, the mighty wild and woolly Pacific, misnamed ‘The Peaceful’ by Magellan, the Portuguese sailor, after he first managed to scrape through the strait between Tierra Del Fuego and the tip of the South American mainland by the skin of his teeth, after days and weeks of battling winds, tides and currents. Compared to the hellish conditions at the Cape of Horn, which he had first tried to round, before discovering the strait between the island of Tierra Del Fuego, i.e. Fireland, and the mainland, a passage which is now named after him, anything would have seemed ‘pacific’, i.e. peaceful.

   Off to the west, the gently undulating land, the white line of beach and dunes, giving way to the paperbarks, banksias and wallum heathland that we had travelled through on our way here, glowing a soft subdued green in the low flat light beneath the grey rain clouds. And ahead of us. roughly sou’east, the distant indistinct shape of our destination, the headland of Shark Bay and Woody Head, hazy and fuzzy, shrouded in foggy cloud and rain. We would get there.

   My daughter stopped paddling and laid down, relaxing, feeling at ease.

   ‘Tell me a story’, she said.

   I took my eyes off the horizon, endlessly and ceaselessly scanning it for anything that could cause trouble, rogue breaking waves, reefs, wind, or black triangular fins, and looked at her, lying down in front of me, eyes shut, at ease on the lolling lullabye rocking motion of the sea.

   For once in my life I was stumped.

   I have told her stories her entire life, from bedtime stories when she was a baby and little child right through to Lessons In Life And Boyfriends throughout her growing, painful, difficult teenage years. I am, I regret to say it, known far and wide for having verbal diarrhea and for possessing the remarkable if baffling, pointless and, potentially, annoying ability to talk under water. But now I had no words.

   I looked away from the sea, drew my mind away from navigation, safety and survival, and said:

   ‘I can’t think of anything.’

   Then, because my mouth was open and because it has a mind of its own, often being the only one of the two of us that actually has a mind at all, I kept talking, and a waterfall cascade typhoon of words rolled out, endlessly twisting, winding, rolling, tumbling, slipping, sliding and landing on its feet, a limitless flow of symphonic sounds, endowed and infused with bardic pleasure, surprise and delight at having the power and joy of speech. Not to mention verbosity.

   And so I talked. I talked about our country, about colonialism, about ancient history, about our shared ancestry, about politics and religion, and the pitfalls and evils inherent in both; and about ecology, and the interlacing web of life that involves all living things in some way, whether they work together in symbiosis or eat each other in predation. I dwelled on some of the heroes and zeroes of history, the creators and philosophers and the haters and destroyers; on the intricacies of linguistic development and the vagaries of cultural rise and decline. I talked, in short, the legs off a wooden chair.

   And so, as we floated along, paddling steadily onwards to the soundtrack of The History Of The World In One Great Big Endless Lesson, Complimentary With Headache And Deafness In One Ear Ever After, the rain ceased to fall gently on our heads, the clouds pulled away from the sky like curtains from a stage, the sun came out, the sky turned a bright blue, and the world became warm and pleasant and steeped in joy. It’s amazing what talking shit can do for the weather.

   We had kept far away from the land to avoid any swell-related mishap, and it was a wise move. Every now and then the swell rose up a bit bigger than before, and took on a decent size. In surfing terms, there were sets that approached overhead height. When you’re standing up on a surfboard, overhead is a nice, comfortable size, it gives you a good fast ride and you can look it squarely and honestly in the eye. When you’re sitting down on the surface of the ocean in a kayak, that same wave looks about ten times bigger, because it towers out above you three times taller than you are, sitting down, and my daughter informed me that it looked terrifying. The swell didn’t do us any harm, we calmly rose with the water and coasted down the other side, but it was worth staying well away from the coast for.

   So with the land on our right hand side, heading south, and the weather clearing up, our focal point, our destination of Shark Bay became clearer, more well defined, more distinct, more greener and lusher, and decidedly closer. Before very long the headland was looming ahead of us, and, keeping a line of breaking white water off to our right hand side, we cruised into the calm and protected waters of what I thought was Shark Bay. As the waters calmed, sheltered by reef and headland, we saw a green turtle floating around, bobbing on the surface of the sea, sticking its head out of the water to breathe one, two, three, five times in a row. We stopped paddling and floated along, carried by our momentum, noiselessly and quietly, keeping respectfully still, until we got to within two metres of it. Eventually it noticed us, eyeballed us with mild curiosity, blinked once or twice as if to say ‘what’s that weird long flat yellow animal with two heads in front of me, and should I eat it, fight it or fuck it?’, the eternal conundrum and existential question of all life forms on earth, then unhurriedly bent its neck and dived down below the surface, pulling its flippers slowly and majestically through the water. Not long afterwards we spotted another one, a bit further away, a dark pearly shell like a floating island. Bolstered by our previous encounter with the first turtle, languid, sanguine and unflappable, we waved at it enthusiastically. It bolted.

   We entered the bay, the water beautiful green-blue turquoise, aquazuli, glistening and sparkling in the sun, picture perfect, and, heading for the golden sand of the beach, rode a shorebreak wave of about five centimetres tall. And landed on the sand. We had made it.

   We were euphoric, ecstatic, overjoyed, and, significantly, dry. We had broken through the rough surf at the creek mouth and paddled 20 km on the ocean to this sheltered bay without even getting wet, discounting the minor rain that had fallen on our heads.

   We got out, stretched our legs, relaxed a bit, had a drink of our precariously tiny supply of precious water, and had a bit of a look around. And realised we were in the wrong bay. Turned out we had overshot Shark Bay and had landed in Woody head Lagoon. That explained the turtles, obviously living on the beds of seagrass thriving in the calm protected waters.

   It was a thing easily fixed and remedied. Studying our surrounds we realised that our actual destination, Shark Bay, lay behind the line of white breakers that we had passed on the seaward side, because the delineation between Shark Bay and the lagoon was a long, low flat shelf of rock, which provided perfectly sheltered conditions for the water behind it, but didn’t stick out of the water far enough to be spotted from the sea. Nothing but a minor setback. So we got back into our lifejackets, pushed our kayak back into the placid warm waters of the lagoon, and started paddling around, aiming for an area in between the point of the rock shelf and another reef a bit further over. There was a perfect passageway there leading into the bay, if only we could find it.

   Onwards we cruised, slowly, calmly and confidently. It wouldn’t take long, a minor detour. And one marked by an extraordinary appearance. Because right there in the water next to us, about one and a half metres to our right, so close we could almost touch it, swam a seasnake. About half way across the lagoon, in shallow water no more than a couple of metres deep, there was this snake, squiggling along gracefully through the water. It was about a metre long, maybe a bit less, and we could clearly see the long extended dorsal-like fin that ran along the back half of his back as well as the back half of his belly, zig-zagging, moving exactly like a snake moves on the ground, but, somehow, looking vertical and upright instead of horizontal and flat. And it was extraordinarily beautiful: its body was a bright, shiny yellow, and it had orangey-browny bandy patches at regular intervals all the way down its body, almost like a tiger. My daughter remarked that it looked like leopard patches. It moved through the water with effortless and lethal grace, a piece of very deadly poetry in motion. All Australian seasnakes are highly venomous. Don’t play with them.

   Now here’s the amazing bit. There are two species of seasnake that occur in the waters of Far North New South Wales. And it most definitely was not either of those two. In fact, what seemed to be the only fitting match was a seasnake called the short-nosed seasnake, Aipysurus apraefrontalis. Now the only problem with identifying it as such is that the shortnosed seasnake has only ever been found living around a small reef in the Timor Sea, south of Indonesia and halfway to the Western Australia north coast, but also has been thought to have been extinct since the year 2000. Until, that is, two snakes were photographed mating off Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia in 2013. That is, as the crow flies, 3,500 kms away, in another ocean. Surely, it can’t be true. It is mind boggling. And I am not a herpetologist and know nothing about seasnakes, but I swear it looked nothing at all like the ones that we are supposed to get around here, and, more to the point, was the spitting image of the Ningaloo one.

   So, who knows? Animals are amazing, and they get around. What if it really was that one? Imagine the journey, across the top of Australia, west to east, and then down the east coast. How could they possibly do that? And why? Or, the more likely story, am I as wrong as billy-o and can’t tell a seasnake from a woolly mammoth?

   Pushing out into the open ocean again we rounded the wall of breaking water separating us from our intended destination, carefully circumnavigated the rocky reef below the surface, found the passageway between the point and the off-shore reef, and paddled into the smooth, quiet waters of Shark Bay. Four, five lazy paddle strokes and we were on the shorebreak again, leaning back in slow motion to balance on the tiny five centimetre wave, and we finally landed on the sand of the end of our journey. Shark Bay, ominously and inappropriately named safe haven for weary seatravellers.

   This was it, finally. We had made it. We shrugged off our lifejackets and high fived and hugged each other. Rolled our shoulders back to stretch and ease out the strain from prolonged paddling, and, at long last, completely relaxed. The journey had been completed, and just there, on the other side of the curtain of trees screening the land from the sea and providing protection against its wild whims and fury, sat our car. Or at least we hoped it still did.

   We had reached the end of our adventure, had gone full circle. My daughter went off looking for a toilet. In the meantime I stripped down to nothing and dived into the sea, finally relaxing and rolling around in the warm water, eyes closed, face down, pure bliss.

   The car was still there. Lucky. We loaded up all our gear, then drove the long way around up and down and in and out of the national park to where the creek started. Following an idea of my daughter’s we whipped the boat off the roof, and paddled down the creek at lightning speed. My daughter moved with the confidence and ease born from having done the hard yards and having achieved the desired outcome, from long-practised and deeply ingrained custom. What had been a major operation and drama three days ago was now accomplished in the blink of an eye, chop chop bang. This is what being outdoors does for people.

   We raced down that creek, recovered our stored gear, loaded up and raced back up the creek to our car. It took half the time it had the first time around.

   The car ate red dirt and dust and spun away into the evening twilight. We reclined into the seats, put our feet up and concluded we needed hot chips to celebrate. A well-deserved treat.

   An hour later we were standing in front of the counter of the shop that, reputedly, sold the best chips in the entire town. The magnitude of this claim to fame was only slightly diminished by the fact that it was also the only shop in town that sold chips. The town had one street that ran south to north. My kind of town.

   The woman behind the chipped formica counter poured a great big heap of chips onto a sheet of paper. She was as wide as she was tall, had three chins, a bun and round glasses, and looked as if she lived exclusively on her shop’s fare. Having dumped the chips, her hands automatically moved to the condiments to her side, and at the same time she looked at us and said, with the matter-of-fact and disinterested tone of a well-trained and battle-hardened professional who knows full well what the answer will be:

   ‘What kind of salt do yous want?’

   The choices would be, presumably, table salt, chicken salt, and, at a stretch of the imagination, turkey powder, a much maligned and widely under-appreciated addition to our culinary artery-hardening inventiveness. It is unlikely that she had in mind Pink Himalayan Rock Salt, First Grade, With Free Bonus Birth Chart, For Sale To Wankers Only, and if anyone had asked for it she probably would have punched them in the face.

   My daughter and I looked at each other and grinned the grin of those in the know. I leaned forward over the counter, stuck my head out and said:

   ‘No salt at all thanks.’

   The woman’s hand, clutching a Dalek-shaped salt shaker, froze in mid-air before it could do any irreparable damage. She gaped at me in affronted disapproval, then shut her mouth and put the salt shaker down.

   ‘Sure. There you go,’ she said, looking down her nose and turning her back on us.

   ‘Thanks.’

   We picked up the salt-less chips and walked out.

   I’d had enough salt to last me for a while.