Surftrip stories Not about riding waves... cant delete original one posted earlier...any litteratii out there?

Stormnight

(for *********)

'And you know she's half crazy but that's why you want to be there'
- Leonard Cohen

New Year comes but once a year, just for that moment. We all know that. We also know, for whatever reasons, that we are probably going to think of the future a little and try to let go something of the past. In a formal way, with much hullabulloo, frantically even... all together. That's the tradition. That's kind of what New Year's is for... accentuating how we operate, stuck between hope, nostalgia and regret, all wrapped in manic excitement. And so we celebrate and get drunk with friends and try to outrun the sadness of our own memories and loneliness and get all raucous to show that we don't really care but then the next morning our griefs will hide inside a hangover big enough to crush the world.

Still, some of us celebrate it quietly, without much fuss, knowing full well that life itself is pretty boring for the most part. Sure, we still privately remember something of the last year and secretly make a wish for the new one, but we don't dare to make the wish too big. We're too old for that now. I used to think when younger that it was pretty risky to wish for something too big. I used to wonder why some people died when they did, young or unexpectedly, and then I put two and two together. Maybe their wish had come true! Maybe they had wished for happiness, to be truly happy even if just for a moment, and then when it happened there was nowhere else for them to go. They peaked. And realising the futility of anything else after that moment they took off to heaven, or wherever the hell we are meant to go. No point in hanging around after that.

Anyway, I decided that New Year wasn't a big deal anymore, too fearful of big wishes I guess, and that I'd rather wake up with a small hope than a massive hangover. Don't get me wrong. I'm not afraid of dying, it's just that I wouldn't want to peak before my time as it were. And anyway, there are moments when you would welcome death with open arms, in that split-second flash when you know that time is just about to roll on and leave you and your joy behind... again. That's what happened, see. Another moment of fleeting bliss arrived and time rolled over it, just leaving me chasing a ghost in my mind, setting traps for it with words. Perhaps the happiness wasn't so great that I would die overloaded or maybe it was because I was aware that I was ready to die that the powers that be decided I was too cocky and therefore had to hang around with ghosts until the moment when I wasn't ready, wasn't prepared. Who knows? It's all conjecture anyway.

What I do know is that we'd spent the day sharing Salmon Hole and **** had caught "the" wave she had been hoping for. The sound of her one ecstatic hoot climbed up the headland and I knew that she'd be quite happy to die herself in that instant, if need be... of happiness. The fact that she hadn't died a couple of days earlier, for various serious reasons, reasons of consequence, meant that she too was supposed to stick around I guess. I'd already felt that the day before... that "ready to die in a moment" thing. I had paddled out at sunrise, first in for the new year at my favourite break, and had a precious 15 minutes to myself. Escorted by two dolphins to the lineup and feeling pretty special for just being awake and in the water at that moment, I dropped into one perfect little wave after another. I even started greeting each new arrival to the lineup from inside small sunlit barrels, all golden blue, arm thrown into the wave face and the presence of the lip folding in around me. I could go on about it. Needless to say, it was one of those moments of surfing perfection. In fact, I'd been feeling like I was in "the zone" for a couple of days, that is until I copped a set on the head out at Rockpools. That soon put the fear of god back into me. That soon wakes you up.

So **** was pretty happy. I was too. She went fishing that evening and found a hat that made her look like she was born at Daly's... like she'd just found herself at home. I set up camp. We swapped roles and giggled. She looked peaceful on her rock in the sea. Just me and Salmon Hole again, like all those times before, only there was ****. Some people are born for a kind of greatness and **** is one of them. Maybe not an acknowledged greatness, all lit up in big names and pretty lights, but a greatness of spirit, of freedom so profound yet so quiet that just being near this person will at times make you want to...? cry?... die?... in a moment? Perhaps.

We sat on the car right into the evening, watching a cloud chased moon. Everyone knows that there's a moment when words become obsolete but you talk anyway because otherwise the silence threatens to capsize you in a mad sea of anticipation. In fact, we sat there watching the weather build up over Eyre Peninsula on the other side of the horizon, faint yellow flashes slowly getting bigger and brighter. That anticipation of storms. The electrical charges dissipating into Spencer's Gulf that evening would eventually rock our little world to the point where stunned awe flipped into an hysteria of fear and laughing as we scampered off to lower ground before the tiny car and our fragile nakedness in such huge nature was reduced to a simple pile of ashes. Not that there was anything to fear from dying that night. Not by a long shot. It's just this was a moment not yet expended. A moment so large that it outran the night. It was a moment moulded by the curve of a hip and a waist and a breast so beautiful you no longer noticed yourself. A face so striking in its daytime determinations but unbelievably ethereal in its sleep, almost to the point where to recognise it you would have to call to mind the faces of Egyptian queens or ragged gypsy girls sleeping under trees. Hair so toussled, so deep and careless, almost oceanic, you didn't know whether you wanted to suffocate in it once and for all or breathe it in like a drug for the rest of time. Intoxicating scents of animal sweet warmth so thick and delicious you became blind in your greed.

Sure, the romantic or those of a poetic bent would liken the storm to a passion of the senses, overworking the metaphor. Who hasn't heard of that one before! Maybe even suggest that such hunger created the atmosphere, the intensity in the first place! On the pedestal of gods! But no, it was just coincidence... two intensities combining. Like when the surfer takes off on the wave. Two forces coming together, two different energies producing a single coordinated experience. The joy of synchronicity. Besides, we were not only protecting ourselves from the threat of extinction that night we were still privately protecting ourselves from each other... in our own styles. Lightning can fuse or it can disintegrate. It can illuminate, for one unsure second, eyes of questioning apprehension or blissful surrender. Soulful eyes.

Anyway, what matters is the moment... where the story started. The moment we want to live and the moment we could accept to die. The moment between past and future. We didn't die that new year night and we didn't want to, although I could have, believe you me, and without complaining too! Vaporised, whoosh, take me away. Instead, we both succumbed again, individually, to our own personal struggles with time and memory and the exquisitely human pains of hopes and desires. Uncertainties which are always life's constant. But no matter what, some moments linger on. That's why we keep living. As I walked towards camp the next morning I saw a naked woman washing herself, standing in the open under grey storm-torn skies. Wet body, head back, washing her skin. Just then, in that very instant, a man could not, not even in a thousand lifetimes, ask for anything more than that. To see, after a night of one long moment, this beautiful woman washing herself.

01/2004)