Deja Vu

Sometimes history can repeat itself, in a bizarre case of convergent evolution. On Friday night my partner Kiana had something to celebrate, so we went and had a few quiet drinks. A few quiet ones led to a few more that were far from quiet, and the next day I paddled out with a vicious hangover. No surprise there.

   As it so happened the cyclone swell had come in, finally, and the entire beach was wrapped in walls of water standing up to double-overhead high. A powerful sweep was running north to south, and huge amounts of sand had been skulldragged away into The Big Void, never to be seen again. Everywhere the earth was showing its bare bones poking up from underneath the left-over sand: rocks, ridges, ledges, stones, pebbles, shale everywhere where once the golden sand invited people to lay down and chill out.

   I paddled out into the surf and got smashed comprehensively around the brains. Mountains of water stood up in front of me and crashed down on my head. I took a solid pummelling, and was reminded of another time, at another beach.

   That time I had been sitting in a crowded line-up, dodging snakes and drop-ins left, right and centre. I had been hanging around wide with my friend Full-On, who is not given to being faint hearted. She habitually runs half-marathons before breakfast, has completed a 100 km ultra-marathon in the mountains, and is the holder of a genuine land-speed world record, set on a tiny little motorbike on a huge salt lake out the back of woop-woop. She’s no stranger to having a go. We had been waiting for an opening patiently, when the perfect opportunity presented itself, and I took off in a flash ...

   ... all around me would-be punters were paddling out, were being grabbed by the short and curlies by the sweep from hell, and were being shown the Scenic Route Up Shit Creek. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw them disappear, and, with quick glances over my shoulder, saw numbers of people crawl back out of the whitewash a good few hundred metres downstream. Several turned around and trudged back up the dunes, clearly having decided to leave it for another day.

   But not me. I gritted my teeth and paddled like a madman, determined to get out. The water was black underneath, roiling and boiling, swirling and whirling, disappearing in all directions without any rhyme or reason. The rip I was cunningly trying to ride out dissolved, and I rolled under my longboard in front of a face that appeared bent on disassembling me one atom at a time. Rolled back up again. Breathe, paddle. Breathe. Another one. Roll over. Breathe, paddle harder. Five breakers, ten, fifteen. A set. Another set. My right arm for a longboard that can be duckdived, possibly made of fairyfloss, spidersilk and wishful thinking. Eventually the set passed me by, and I spied open water in front of me. Black, skanky, filthy and frothing, but open. I redoubled my efforts, and struck out as hard as I could ...

   ... the wave opened up invitingly in front of me, luscious blue-green and white, displaying a beautiful, perfect wall that showed great promise, a valley of delight spreading its arms wide to welcome me into its embrace. I reached the critical point of no return, and jumped up – “Watch out!” Full-On screamed into my right ear. I jerked my head around to the left hand side, instinctively, the direction of the Point ...

   ... ten metres to go, five metres, almost there; three metres. The open water lay beckoning. Two blokes sat on their boards unmolested, just there, almost within reach, now two metres in front of me. I reached out with my left arm, stretching with all my might ...

   ... a shadow appeared from my left hand side. Someone had snaked me and pulled in around me, and was now barrelling straight at me, a hundred miles an hour. But not just AT me. UNDERNEATH me. They were at the bottom of the wave, just cranking their way into their bottom turn. In a split second, less than a split second, I realised that if I kept going I would land on top of them, and decapitate them, or, worse, ding their board ...

   ... the set hiccupped, crossed its eyes and did a brainfart. As an afterthought it spewed up its guts and, right there in front of me, threw up a huge, black, shining cliff of death. One second it was flat, the next there was a tower of razor-sharp obsidian with teeth and a shit attitude rising up above me. From out of nowhere. Too late to roll. With the conviction born of desperation, hopelessness, and solid and incurable stupidity, I pushed forward as hard as I could, to punch through it to the other side ...

   ... I dropped down like a sack of shit, wrapped my arms around my board, and wrenched it away, out of the trajectory of this hapless snake. He passed inches before me, oblivious, heedless, and very nearly headless, a second before the wall came crashing down on me and dragged me under ...

   ... the other side froze over and ceased to exist. The lip picked me up, lifted me skywards, for one infinitesimal heartbeat pointed me straight to the sky, and then spun me through the full 360 degrees of the compass. I flipped over backwards in the world’s worst somersault, and, seeing disaster finally looking me in the face, in a belated last-ditch attempt at self-preservation, wrapped my arms around my board, and took a deep breath ...

   ... I tumbled and twisted and whirled, disoriented, no idea where up or down was, the weight of the wave pushing me down, in a mad, blind world of bubbles and confusion ...

   ... the full weight of the cyclone swell pushed me down and held me under. I clutched my board for dear life, and kicked, kicked hard, knowing that the buoyancy of the board would drag me back up to the surface, sooner rather than later, and preferably sooner ...

   ... I stuck my head above the water, gasped and sucked in a deep breath of mostly dry air, a nice change. I looked around for my board ...

   ... I popped back out again with no breath left in me, rolled up, took a breath of salt water and started paddling again. Shrugged it off as best I could, gritted my teeth and pulled forwards, determined to get past this last set of breakers now. As I dragged my right hand past my board, my fingers suddenly felt something. Something strange and unusual. Something that I didn’t think I’d felt there before. Something, more to the point, that I was pretty sure had no business being there. I groped around underneath my board, suddenly getting concerned. My fingers closed around shards of fibreglass, peeling off and floating away. Exploring a bit more, they found a crack big enough for them to go in. Panicking now, my arm reached under my board. And found a rapidly widening crack, spreading along the bottom. More fibreglass came away in my hand.

   I looked ahead.

   Another breaker was rolling up its sleeves and preparing itself for an enjoyable little session of smash-the-surfer’s-head-in.

   I looked down.

   A crack ran the full width of my board, getting bigger by the second.

   I looked back.

   The shore loomed a depressingly long way away.

   Very soon, it would appear, I’d be out here without a buoyancy aid, surrounded, very briefly, by bits of disintegrated board.

   I spun around and paddled like a bastard, back to shore, catching any and all wave action I could, the two halves of the board wobbling independently of each other now ...

   ... there, bobbing innocuously up and down next to me, tethered safely by my trusty old legrope, was half my board. My jaw dropped. I lifted up my head and looked down the line. In the middle distance, a good one hundred metres downstream, the other half of my 9’6”floated off to unfettered freedom, potentially well on its way to stove some poor innocent bystander’s head in. I struck out and started swimming as fast as I could to retrieve it, trailing the other half of my board behind me, still attached to the legrope.

   ... I staggered out of the shallows, picked up the left-overs of my 9’1”, and tried to tuck it under my arm. It sagged like a wet towel.

   I laid it on the beach, where it quietly gave up the ghost.

   I shook the water out of my eyes and scratched my head, dumbfoundedly.

   Then I shook my head again, and noticed, to my surprise, that my hangover was gone.

   What a way to get rid of a hangover.

 

 













 

 

 

 

 

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