Finally, bodysurfing. It must be a decade since I have surfed, maybe since before moving to South Australia where terror of sharks somewhat put me off. That feeling, you know that feeling? Carried by water, gasping for green. You invite the water to take you. The water picks you up and takes you. Rushing with the thousand million bubbles carrying me along. Making myself lean and long like an arrow, like a board. Glances from the other surfers, that joy at the wet dark head surfacing from the spent wave, way up close to the shore. I can see why dolphins do it, I can see why people learn to ride boards. It’s been so long since I surfed I forgot to take a breath before the first wave and had to pull out of it in order to gasp for air. There is that ineffable serenity when the whole world is tilting and green.
Tag: surfing
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sun crema
Sunday. Drive down to the beach. Past all the worlds. Seaworld, Dreamworld, Movieworld. This tiny horseshoe strand was a favourite of mine. Now to get to it you have to round a dozen roundabouts: long miles of wilderness which now are smooth resorts. At the mouth of the bay a smooth cafe stands. It is full with people in smooth shoes and clothes. The irons have entered their souls. Only a few dozen are on the beach itself, or in the ocean, the water and sand rough on their skin. Years before, the beach would be full, the cafe empty. As we come down the hard-trod beach bridge with our feet scritching the yowling hot dry soft sand a girl comes up past us, body folded round her swimsuit the way a skin forms on sour yoghurt, smooth youth creased and jiggling like old age, her eyes down, her thumb ardently scrolling the smooth glassy surface of the palm-sized computer which gives her a mirror, I suppose, of who she is on this wildly sunny day on this hidden beach between the shaggy headlands and behind the smooth cafe. She has bought a lifetime season ticket to Phoneworld. She is never alone, but she’s always alone. Oblivious and knowing behind her the surf brings in its trays of crema.
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duck surfer
Watching an adolescent duck flying upstream and surfing down, flying up and surfing down, over and over on the fast-moving river. Finally he hauls himself out on a low-hanging branch and sits there, drying in the sun, quacking with satisfaction.
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a nighttime walk
It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.
A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.
