The Brotherhood of Madmen

The moon had come around again, and so we answered the call.

   Big, bright, silver and round it sat high in the sky as we walked down the boat ramp to our beach. In addition to the attraction of surfing by moonlight, the eerie stillness of the night, the blanket of stars spread out high and icey above us, the quiet murmuring and rushing of the black water, there is also a very real and pragmatic consideration that comes into it. During the daytime, that is, realistically, anytime after seven, or sometimes six thirty, or, on a really bad day, six in the morning, our home break gets crowded out something shocking.

   We have the great good fortune of living on a world class surf wave. Swell will come rolling in from around the corner, any direction accept west, and it’ll peel off at the sharp rocks of the headland and form into an immaculate wave that can often run in a straight unbroken line for up to seven hundred metres, offering glorious Vertical Walls Of Pleasure to the lucky surfer. The rush of sliding up and down on those ramparts of moving heaving water is heady and addictive, releasing overdoses of adrenaline and dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphin into our brains and our bloodstreams, providing massive highs and feelings of elation, euphoria and triumph. There are not many things like it. It’s very much like having sex: you’re desperate to have it, then you get it and you’re over the moon, then you’re happy for a little while and then, inevitably and urgently, you need to have it again. It’s powerful and undeniable, unrefusable: it’s the call of the wild, the urge to be human, to meet with the unfettered elements of the outside world and engage with them. It’s primeval and obsessive, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

   Unfortunately the whole world is all too painfully aware of the world-class quality of Our Wave, and people line up in never-ending ever-increasing throngs to get themselves a piece of the action, a part of the pie, a taste of the sublime. So the only way to get an uncrowded wave is to surf in the dark. By the light of the moon if there is one, by the light of the stars if the moon is away on other business, and, sometimes, by the light of nothing at all, if all else fails. We’ve been doing this for a long time now, and I swear that, by now, we can see in the dark. Where normal and relatively sane people see nothing but inscrutable darkness, black water and black sky, filled, moreover, with a multitude of imaginary and real sea-monsters out for a bit of human for breakfast, we distinguish shadows from other shadows, can read tell-tale signs of water movement imperceptible to other people, take our bearing from the stars above, rise and fall with the movement of the water underneath us, and generally delude ourselves into thinking we are coping just fine with not being able to see a bloody thing. It’s all in the mind.

   So with the moon high above we ventured out. We walked out into the dark water, boards under our arms, and pushed off into the current.  Reading the movement of the water, its refraction of rocks, and its roiling with the currents we found our way to what we thought was a good spot, turned around and sat on our boards. Waves rose up alarmingly big and powerful behind us, and we paddled hard, aimed for what we thought was the right direction and place in time, and, when we felt the lift of the water, in a heartbeat flash we jumped up, dropped down into black holes and rode away. With the moon sitting on the other side of the bay it shone its light out towards us, and it lay and glistened on top of the water like a silvery magic carpet, and as the wave walled up and offered verticality to bounce up and down from, the moonlight sparkled and rippled like frozen diamonds against anthracite, illuminating every board-length of our progress down the line. I leaned forward and pushed down with my front foot, gaining speed, then I windmilled my arms around like I had been taught by our mate Full On. She's a genuine world champion, holder of a land speed world record, and a bloody good surfer, so she's well worth listening to. Shifting my weight and my centre of gravity around, creating momentum, I skidded high up on that rising mountain of water, swinging around just in time and sliding back down again at increased speed. This is what we call Vertical Walls Of Pleasure. A rock-solid sheet of water, half a metre above my head and growing and towering endlessly.

   Sometimes I forget everything I’m doing, forget all the moves and turns and balances and tricks of the trade that I have been painstakingly trying to learn and master for the last four years and more, and instead stop dead on my board, freeze, and gaze into the eyes of the wave. When it curls up right next to you and becomes a living thing that can be either benevolent and blissful or dangerous and violent, it takes on a life of its own, and it is mesmerising. The never-ending ever-shifting display of bubbling, swirling, boiling and scattering water is hypnotic, and I can lean over towards it and caress it like a lover, oblivious to everything else in the world. My aquatic, marine girlfriend. Who, at times, can smell very fishy indeed. And, like her human counterpart away back there in the dryness of the real world, can go from sweetheart to bitch in under one second with no notice or apparent reason or justification. The sea rules.

   There is a motley collection of nutcases who come together here to surf the dark night. Roundly denounced certifiably insane by all rationally minded other people who choose, wisely, to stay on shore until they can at least see their toes, we were called a Brotherhood Of Madmen by a friend of mine who came over for a visit and was taken aback at being dragged out into a mad sweep from hell in the armpit of the night by the pitiful light of a skinny moon, illuminating not so much what you could see as highlighting how much you couldn’t see.

   There’s a good collection of these madmen and madwomen. The collection is loose, and people come and go depending on demands of work, family and temporary fits of sanity, but there’s a solid core group of us who persist in the madness. Full On, mentioned before, is so called because she is utterly and certifiably insane. A mad and athletic surfer, she is famous for being able to get onto the tiniest wave on a toothpick of a shortboard, and rip the absolute shit out of it. Famously she came a cropper not long ago, stacked it, connected her head hard to her board and sliced her fingers open on her razor-sharp fins. She kept going, and eventually when she did get out of the water she had blood running down all over her face and hands, and walked down the beach leaving a trail of blood and fibreglass behind her, grinning madly like a woman possessed. We like it when she does that, freshly arriving punters keen for a wave take one look at her face and run away screaming for their mums. Less people in the water, more waves for us. Sometimes we all chip in and pay her to beat herself up and walk up and down the beach with blood squirting out of gaping holes in her head and reciting the Koran , scaring everyone away while we catch waves in peace and quiet. It works well like that.

   Then there’s The Cork, a man dedicated to catching waves in peace and quiet, who is so allergic to crowds that he has been known to turn up in the middle of the night, surf in absolute silence, and leave before the sun comes up. There’s also The Reefshark, master of the man-eating wave who has the unbelievable ability to tie one arm behind his back, wear a blindfold and face backwards on his board and still manage to catch each and every wave that comes his way by merely flapping his ears and wiggling his eyebrows, while us mere mortals flounder in fountains of inefficient labouring, heaving, panting and groaning, and getting nowhere fast. The Shredder is another one of our mates. He has the unbelievable ability to crawl right inside of the armpit of a wave, and, at the point where all normal thinking people would make their will, say the rosary and commit suicide under an avalanche of deadly water, would rise like King Neptune from the depths of Davey Jones’ locker and show himself so firmly planted on a wave and shredding and ploughing it so persuasively to pieces that it goes away thinking it’s a veggie patch and six months later gives birth to a healthy crop of potatoes. We have a dark brown suspicion that he is, in actual fact, descended from hobbits. He’s certainly got the hairy feet to show for it.

   We have The Snake Catcher, renowned and feared far and wide for his talent at sniffing out, pulling up, abusing, threatening with physical and moral violence and then group-hugging in tears any and all individual with even the slightest inclination to snake, drop in or otherwise jump the queue of the line-up. We have been told that the warrant will soon expire, and most posters offering a reward for his arrest, dead or alive, have by now been stripped from the walls, lamp posts and community boards of our town by the rain, wind and ice addicts who use them to roll joints with. There is Chief Switchfoot, who rides boards facing backwards, blindfolded and upside down, and does a mean mid-air full splits, albeit usually involuntarily and unintentionally. The Snow Leopard hides his hoar head inside of showers of whitewash, spray and blood, and often arrives at the surf so early in the morning that he gets there before he wakes up. The sight of him catching a wave in his pyjamas with his hot water bottle tucked inside his pants is not for the faint-hearted.

   While The Snow Leopard is elusive, extremely hard to encounter in the flesh, and only ever glimpsed lying face down facing the wrong way being spat out of a wave in a stream of white bubbles and terror, there is none so hard to see as The Space Shuttle. He has earned his name on account of his admirable and entertaining ability to stack it on waves in such a spectacular fashion that his board frequently takes off at right angles to the surface of the ocean, goes into orbit around earth, cuts three laps and lands back right next to him in the water half an hour later, regularly narrowly avoiding decapitating someone, most usually himself. The Space Shuttle is extremely hard to see in the dark. Often, on a cloudy dark night, all we can see of him is the whites of his eyes and his teeth. Luckily he’s a very merry fella and smiles a lot, otherwise we’d lose him. While he happens to favour wetsuits of the deepest darkest black neoprene, which doesn’t help, he also happens to be of African descent. When he stops smiling and blinks he vanishes like a ghost. It can be very unsettling, and he has on occasion been known to drag out into the surf long lengths of chain with him that he is fond of rattling while sounding out suitably horrifying ghostly keenings. No one is quite sure why.

   And then there’s me, the Baboon, so called because, after four years of valiantly attempting and failing, I still can’t surf for shit and have got the unfortunate style handicap of, while on a wave, proudly lifting up and waving in the air my most intelligent bodypart, that is my arse. We received word from our mates at NASA not long ago, that, apparently, in addition to the Great Barrier Reef, my Baboon Arse is the only other living thing that can be seen from space with the naked eye. It is the stuff of nightmares, and horror tales of The Baboon Arse are told by stressed-out sleep-deprived mothers around the world to terrorise their kids into going to bed and staying in them if they bloody well know what’s good for them.

   On this moonlit morning the wind was blowing cold and hard from the south. Next to me The Snake Catcher, who bravely and daringly insists on surfing in a blue singlet and speedoes all year round, was slowly and spectacularly turning an interesting shade of blue, while putting forth a merry tune by means of his rattling teeth. I shifted comfortably on my board. I got a new wetsuit at the start of winter, after years of making do with second hand and third rate equipment with all the insulating capacity and protective qualities of wet newspaper. This new wetsuit is about 20 mm thick and made of reinforced concrete with titanium rods through it in weird, unusual and embarrassing places. It takes about half an hour to get in it, and twice as long to get out, and once you’re in it’s impossible to kick a leg, raise an arm, scratch your nose or even breathe, and, as a matter of fact, if I ever have the misfortune of stacking it off a wave in water deeper than overhead I would sink straight to the bottom and drown. But it’s bloody warm. It’s like a cocoon, one of those things that butterflies crawl into to hibernate and then come out six months later as a cockroach. It is, in actual fact, a Baboon Cocoon. If any human woman would be foolish and ill-advised enough to wear it for a session they would give birth to a triplet of baby baboons nine months later.

   I observed The Snake Catcher’s nose was slowly growing an icicle, and his face was turning green, which was a definite improvement on his overall appearance. I trailed my hands through the water, soft, salty and warm, and lifted them up out of the water, admiring the balmy drops of salt water sliding off them in slow motion and snap-freezing before they hit the water again. I sighed contentedly.

   ‘Aaaaarggghh. Isn’t the water just beautiful?’

   ‘Nnnnnggggggghhhhhhh rattle rattle rattle,’ came the answer from between clenched and frozen-together teeth.

   Some people just can’t handle a bit of a breeze. I put my hands back into the water to defrost them again, then tugged at my collar to let a bit of steam out. It struck an albatross passing overhead and knocked it out of the air. It landed next to me, plucked, cooked and stuffed with garlic and onion. I tucked it into my wetsuit backpocket for breakfast later. The ocean just keeps on giving.

   Then a wave turned up unexpectedly against the backdrop of what could now justifiably be called the sunrise, with the sky taking on an overlay of hard orange with black and red edges, and I turned and paddled for it. I glanced back at the others to make sure no one else was going for it, but seeing as they were all now slowly disappearing under a gently settling blanket of snow and appeared to be frozen solid I figured it was a safe bet that no one else was going to make a move before they had defrosted in the rays of the coming sun, and I dropped into the wave.

   The Vertical Wall Of Pleasure rose up next to me, and as I stuck up my head to smile at the world in joy and triumph the wind hit me in the face and snatched away my breath. So I crouched down to reduce wind drag, pumped the board, flung my arms out, twisted and turned, and communed with The Wave to great mutual satisfaction and enjoyment, especially mine.

   As I paddled back up again the sun approached the rim of the horizon out in yonder distance, and the whole of the sky turned orange, the steely sharp orange of a dry season sunrise, when there’s zero humidity in the air and the colours are infused with blood and fire. And as I pulled up back next to my mates and looked sideways towards the sunrise and the rock face, something extraordinary happened.

   In my home country of the Northern Territory there’s no surf. The water is flat, unmoving, and full of crocodiles and box jellyfish. But the country stretches out wide and welcoming like an endless gently rocking ocean of trees, and in places there are massive sandstone outcrops and high plateaus, such as the one that gives rise to the Katheryne River, and which is a continuation of the Arnhem Land Escarpment. This escarpment is a wall of dusty brown, red and orange sandstone that runs roughly south to north, and for a significant part, delineates the border between the Commonwealth of Australia and Properly Blackfella Country. On the other side of the escarpment there is blackfella rule and custom, and whitefellas are few and far between, and not generally very welcome. Roads are made of dust, and the wallabies, pigs, buffaloes, brolgas and bustards roam the bush and floodplains, lining the banks of rivers and billabongs covered in magpie geese and chockablock of killer crocodiles.

   Those sandstone walls and other scattered outcrops like it have been home to the Aboriginal people of Australia for tens of thousands of years, potentially as long as sixty thousand years. And wherever there’s an overhang or a rockshelter there’s cave paintings everywhere. Crawling into a cave entrance or sliding under a boulder you’ll find yourself faced with hundreds of pictures in red and yellow ochre: skeletal “x-ray” paintings of kangaroos and wallabies, emus and goannas, and of extinct animals such as the Thylacine, known as the Tasmanian Tiger because at the time of white settlement Tasmania was the only place where they still survived. There will be representations of mythological Dreamtime beings, and, everywhere, of the hands of the people that painted these images, eons ago. The Dreamtime is something that can never be properly understood by a whitefella such as myself, but its essence is that the earth, the Country, was created by ancestor beings a very long time ago. But, and this is the mind-blowing thing, in order for the earth, the country, to continue to be created all day every day, the Dreamtime needs to be related, told and sung in stories and songs, at the appropriate time and place, performed by the right people in the proper way, and that Dreamtime that happened long ago will happen right there and then as the story is told, not again, as a repetition or re-enactment of the original one, but at THE SAME TIME, simultaneously and parallel, neither before nor after but contiguous, continuous and ongoing. And this is what is unfathomable to the western mind, used to concepts of linear time, of reductionist science and of principles of utilitarianism and rationalism. Reconciling those two violently conflicting worldviews is the challenge of the Countrymen, of the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory. It is at least one root cause of a lot of their alienation and disorientation in the world of the whitefella, even now, in the 21^st century. Crucially, if the cycle of Dreamtime is disrupted, if the ever-present link between now and yesterday and tomorrow which is all here right now but also gone at the same time, if that link is broken, then the country gets sick and will die. And Aboriginal people in the Territory watch their country die all around them all day every day, and while they learn English and go to school and forget their language and their culture and drift in and out of shit jobs working for whitefellas it drives them nuts and breaks their heart and spirit.

   But in that moment, as I pulled back up next to my mates in the water, something very special happened. For once we were all facing backwards, with our backs to the waves, a pose usually only adopted by The Space Shuttle and myself, the others, being more experienced surfers, usually facing into the waves so they can actually see what’s happening, a notion which is understandable. But this time we all sat facing inland, away from the open ocean, four of us in a row, from The Snake Catcher, sitting closest to the rock face where the waves were breaking, to The Cork next to him, to The Reefshark next to the Cork, and to me just now sitting up next to The Reefshark. And just then, between The Snake Catcher and the cliff face, a dolphin appeared, slowly rising up out of the water, brandishing its grey fin at the world and rounding its back into a slow rollercoasting rise and plunge, mere metres away from The Snake Catcher. And in that split second, the coloured light of the sunrise fell onto the brown stone of the cliff face, and painted it in shades and hues of red and yellow ochre, and in a flash, in a blink of an eye, the silhouettes of my mates and the dolphin and myself were projected onto that rock wall like a cave painting of old, and were frozen in time and set in stone for all eternity, and became, for the space of a heartbeat, part of the Dreamtime story of our country. A snapshot in time, an instant happening, that happened, and will continue to be happening. A moment of old sea magic.

   Then the dolphin disappeared under the water, we moved and turned and talked and commented and laughed, and the moment was gone. But it was there, for one infinitesimally tiny fraction of a second, etched into the fabric of reality.

   These are the days of our lives.