An Ocean Road

 The coast road was hacked out of the bush by returned soldiers. Using pickaxes and shovels they cut man’s clarity out of the dense fogs that sent ships to the sandy soil of the ocean. Lighthouses dotted the coast and eery rock formations rose out of the surf.  The road followed no track, just the circuitous route from the edge of one bay to the next. It was to be the epitome of the civilised scenic motor tour. Flies, flood and drought came and went, but the precipitous cliffs fell to the sea, again and again, blanketed by the dense rainforest with the mist over-hanging like a shroud. Those morning mists rendered the strong smell of the eucalyptus visible to the working men, and they knew they were home. Those men made small by war became once again great, as they stooped and stretched with the giants of the forest. The strong, round branches of the manna gum spread open confidently to their sky, like hands striving to contain the openness, their washed out greens pasted against the blue. The mountain ash stood like soldiers in silent file, still and giant in their vertiginous height, grey trunks wreathed in fog. And the myrtle beech were as gnarled and twisted as some deep, dark prehistoric secret that men see only to disturb their age old slumber. The loamy ground buoyed them up, and I imagined they rested on the ground littered with fern fronds, discarded leaves, and strips of bark, lying and listening to the call of the birds. The peeps of the honeyeaters, fantails in their looping flight, treecreepers, rosellas as streaks of colour, currawongs falling clumsily from branch to branch. The green, almost edible looking ground ferns sheltered tiger snakes and white-lipped snakes. It was a forest different from others, a forest of deep leaf litter, of fleshy-fruited plants and of very large trees. It was a great winding road that would send you on your way west if you wanted it. Where, now, once past the bustling summer villages bursting with swimmers, with their snorkels and thongs, with their buckets and boogie boards, most turned back to Melbourne where the lights always remained the same. For those who just came for the sun - the road could seem too long.For her, the road is neither long nor short - it just is. She is set up to face them, those so busy in their packed vehicles, the wind from their passing engines buffeting her soul about, blowing it wide open, until I can see her there and so small on that familiar road where we once were. The three of us in our Dad’s car. Our brother between us, his ringlets brushing our sun stained arms. Our singing, with our swinging brown summer legs making us giddy with ourselves and our eternal togetherness that cannot be recovered. 

Sequoia

Our brown car roared north up Highway 1, winding our way past gum trees and sheep until the 1 merged with the 101 and we were in redwood country. Straight into the midst of the California fog belt where during the summer the fog moved off the sea and on to the land. It hung above the black sand beaches like a white veil devouring the redwoods, as the trees in turn absorbed the fog and it dripped, dripped down from the foliage to the earth laden and made silent with the redwood needles. Sequoia sempervirens; the forever living, or the forever green. Unlike the Australian bush where noises sparkled, leaves shivered, birds swooped. In the redwood forest, the world was quiet, the branches reached up to the sunlight through the mist away from the unseeable, dark below. Up above at the sunlit crown, the needles were short and narrow and female, where the cone produced the flowers. While underneath, breathing the cool, dark air of the forest the needles were long and wide and male.  Reaching for the sunlight, turning the fog to water as they came into contact, majestic, immortal, physical manifestation of the vertical. We reach for the sun, turn our faces towards the sun, arms up in the silent forest, living above the ground.

We arrived in the late Sunday afternoon, in time for the volleyball match. We drove up to Cassidy’s yurt to see if the boys were still there. As we rounded the final bend in the old chevy nova, a jeep came bouncing round the corner, Raleigh’s grin out of a window -all smiles. Backs were slapped, cheeks grazed. Our wheels cracked the dirt, the gravel spat beneath the tyres as the car twisted and turned to follow them deeper into the forest. Our seats were low in our old car as the evening fell outside and the trunks turned to the opaque yellow of just before dusk. Our car parked in the mud. Out of the redwoods came people of all ages, from all countries. The noise of a generator grumbled and a volleyball court was lit up by great white lights, reflecting on the sand. I slung the bota bag around my neck, the goat skin heavy against my hip while Jacob grabbed his black guitar case and a bottle of whiskey hidden beneath  the seat. The game was on. Jacob could always hide behind his guitar, and immediately began tuning up with Raleigh. My old navy duffel coat was worn at the elbows and helped me contain myself as sofas lay strewn about and I stretched out, my legs long in front and rolled cigarettes.The game began, people rotated on either team, people changing on and off. I knew what I didn’t want. Jacob loved games of any sort, and he wanted me to play. He felt I would enjoy it if only I would let myself, but I did not want to feel loose, out there, on the open court, alone amidst the others, comfortable with others. So sat listening and smoking, stretching and unstretching on our first night. There. Those interactions, those expectations. I saw my face pull into a grimace as I lunged for a ball and stayed where I was.We had the music. And they came to us. People from all times. Any time. To keep to our time was irrelevant. To remember what time we were was to be too clear, to be conscious of where we were. Clothes traced decades, music traced centuries, minds were anywhere, everywhere. To own that moment to our time was selfish, it was all time and all music, and all gypsies and all transients, all travelers, those who don’t step into what is expected, those who do want they want, go where they feel. And play where the music is. Mandolins, guitars, mouth organs, harmonicas, and sweet georgia brown.The drive home was drunk, Jack Daniels drunk, with the red wine and beer and spliff, the car’s shocks cracked and bounced as the road was lit up, part of our world for a moment as we sped past and then left an inky peace as our lights already bright on the next bend. The road rose and fell the car bottoming out, the dirt scraping the side.The road, dirt dusty, curved, seemingly going nowhere, just endlessly following a trail through the dark trees to some light somewhere, deeper and deeper. Sometimes a gate lining the road, no cars at all for at least the whole half an hour.Car bouncing, airborne at moments, but we and the car were invincible, drunk and warm, cigarettes glowing, somehow holding the road, catapulting forward, I didn’t even know who was driving. Gravity pulled us on.

California

Raleigh and I decided to go on a fast. I think we were partly inspired by the Californian vibe and I also had a book that I had bought years ago filled with fasts for each season, and it seemed now was an opportunity to do one. Just water, mixed with lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup for the energy. You could drink as much as you wanted. A water fast, a spring fast, the master cleanse. I was trimming weed, so it was easy work, easy to work on nothing, so it seemed well timed.We started on a Thursday and the day before Raleigh cut out coffee, bread, most things other than fruit and vegetables. I didn’t, continuing to do things with a halfhearted measure, perhaps in order to protect myself from failure, as ‘I didn’t really try’. I ate all things I normally would. Brushing off Raleigh’s worry of preparing my body for what it was about to undergo. I was young, I was strong.We had met Anne and Francois at one of those outdoor events they have up there, some kind of fundraiser, but with great food and live music. I don’t know who had begun the conversation, in the whirl of beer and cigarettes, as the night had gone on into a swirl of people and dancing, she had approached us, I think, with her bright blue dress that matched her piercing eyes, and Francois, the Frenchman, had been there too, quietly he had asked to roll one or two of my cigarettes. And she was so warm, and knew Cassidy, and we were drunk, so we fell into each other, they were growers of course, and they would have work for us in a few weeks.  So we drove up to Anne and Francois’ for a session of trimming on the Friday. Their house was a mixture of additions and plans, wooden frame and with the ubiquitous Northern Californian shingles. They had built it room by room, and had lain in bed in the early days, with the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls, the bed piled high with quilts, drinking whiskey and reading books. It perched above their gardens, California valleys falling away to the horizon. They had a great long, hardwood table as they all did up there, and the vegetable garden was beautifully landscaped, the marijuana intermingling with the tomatoes. Anne offered the use of her washing machine and her shower. Before all the hot water was gone, I jumped in the shower to try to scrub off some of the lines of dirt, and then the laundry could go on. The work was set up outside. A long table piled high with stems. In the bright sunlight. I had taken to wearing gloves, to prevent any contact high, and just to save myself from the inevitable stickiness that came from handling marijuana buds for long periods of time.The laundry finished, I padded on bare feet through the airy house. I pulled the clothes out of the machine, and walked out the front door to where the line was strung between two trees overlooking the valley. I piled up the washing, the darker clothes on the dirt. The washing was bright and white, clean and wet, it flapped as I pegged it up, and the sun beat down on my head. The wind blew all the colours clear and cool. A simple job, such a pleasure it gave me. I felt the fast had heightened my senses. I couldn’t hear the others talking, just see the valley falling away, and hear the snapping of the clothes. I realised how good I felt. Such happiness I felt at such a simple job.Jacob came around the side of the house, still laughing, ‘Anne’s cooked some lunch, want any?...He swung his arms around my shoulders as I bent to pick up the last of the wet clothes, and his arms slid off. I said nothing, just pointed to my glass bottle half full with the maple syrup mixture.‘Oh, I forgot.’‘I’ll just finish hanging this out and then I’ll be there.’I had started to feel a certain lightness that morning, my stomach was flat, and I felt very in control of my body and myself. I felt focussed. Tighter. I felt released from the unnecessary. Emotionally and physically. This was only the second day but I remembered what it was like to be in control of one’s body. To hear one’s body. To listen. He was still loose out there. And I was not jealous. I did not want what he had. Unusual feeling for me. Focussed on what was important. Tight reins. But I was holding them. I enjoyed the feeling of control I had. Saying no was difficult to obtain, but once done, then all fell into place. They all drove back in the truck and I walked. I walked slowly the dusty road as it trailed through the dark redwoods, and then doubled back on itself along a ridge in the sun. My soul was light. As the road slipped down, back into the shade, a deer startled me. She was walking on the road towards me, a small one, I tried to stop breathing, and waited, my feet in the dirt in the sun, the deer in the quiet shade, she looked and looked, and I tried to hold her there with me on the dappled road. Her gentle eyes, and my human ones, and we wondered for, it seemed long, a long time, before finally I moved, and she bounded into the padded forest. I didn’t want to get back to the mess, the music, the noise. It was easy to walk what was left of the road, slowly, in my own life, to hold back the rest.

Drawbridges

Then he was outside with my friend Noel, with his bandana on now and they were smoking a joint, passing it back and forth and he was in the tree, the old gum, spot lights shining up the long trunk, turning it silver, while I sat inside with the others and didn’t care about trees and people who climbed them. He told me he had sailed here. And later he told me that he had been waiting tables where the curious customers had chatted and asked and asked, staring up at him, trapping him with empty glasses in his hands.

- And what now, Jacob, now that college is finished?

And he had thought of a place far from Vermont, a place where the seasons did not cut up the years, a place and a way of movement so unlikely they would be forced to look down to their full plates when he passed.

- I am going to Australia. I am going to hitchhike to Australia, hitchhike boats.

They snorted.

- Impossible. Can’t be done. 

They swallowed their rich food, swilling their wine around their mouths.

But he knew it could be done. He had done it.  As a younger man hanging from a bridge one night near Calais, late one night with his mate Jason-the-drummer, after playing three bars, and giving up on the dancing Virginias, they had decided to walk out of town and camp. The moon, of course, was full. They shared their last joint as they waited for the draw bridge. And Jacob impatient, could see nothing they were waiting for, no vessels, until he clambered over the barricade and saw a bobbing white yacht, small, about 28 feet long.

-Oy. And in jest had thrown his thumb up. The man in the dark let his engine idle and called up.

- Where you goin’ mate?

- England!

- Got any drugs on yer?

And truthfully, they had not, no longer.

- You’ll have to stay awake.

John Johnson steered the yacht over, pulled over to a place where the boys could drop onto the deck as light footed as any ship cats, while his family slept beneath. He had left them by England’s white cliffs in the new morning and the boy had understood that his road was not limited to land. The answer Jacob had given to those diners in New England had become his impetus. Once articulated, it was no longer far from real, as those things we say become true.   

The First Swim

We swam in the brackish water of a lake at the end of our seventh day.  I was by the passenger window, my skin burning with the heat of the road. The water came in flashes of light between the scrub. We got out further than we wanted, and dived straight into the bush before tramping back about five hundred metres to make our camp. The day was ending and the smell of dry grass rose as our feet, hot in tight boots, squashed it down. We crossed the road away from the water. Clouds of insects flew as he laid out the fly and I snapped the poles together, working silently, thinking about our swim. We threw our packs into the tent and again we darted across the road, and burst out of the scrub into the bright opening of the sun on the lake. My skin was stiff with dirt and filthy from the road and I didn’t care about the still water. The water changed from pale yellow to pink, and he smiled at me with the water up to his wrists and I knew I wanted to remember. Later in our tent we heard someone’s radio out there in the darkness and he got up, and unzipped the fly, and stomped about with a torch. I stayed crouching in the tent, listening, as Paul Kelly came on the invisible radio.  And I was living then, and my decision to  leave, mixed with the man I had to chosen to leave with, all fell in notes around me in the Australian dark and I loved him.

South West Corner

English Mick drove us across the desert in his van. He stopped at the Great Australian Bight, and we ran over the khaki scrub to the edge of the Bunda Cliffs, the wind from Antarctica beating us in the face. We were so small there, at the bottom of Australia, the great red land above us, hanging like a stretched out sail, the canvas pulled tight right down to the cliffs, where we stood with our toes hanging over the edge, and the waves like seals, darting and diving, spinning with the gummy sharks.  We stood and our eyes were blown dry, our lungs breathed it in, the sea, the sky, the desert, blew our physical away, blew us into souls, until just the shells were left, and we were whole again. Jacob told me, ‘I’ll never get tired of looking at you’ and I wondered what else he saw, as though there was nothing else to see, but I wanted him to see it. Time took us back into the metal van, where it was still, and the dust was waiting, and where we shook off the outside, turned the key and it all magically worked, and took us forward. It wasn’t hard to convince the motel in Eucla to hear him sing and we were spoiled with beds and beer while Mick slept in his van.Jacob’s energy drove us across the desert and we did it in two days, hitting Norseman on the third day. His narrow face behind the wheel of the Englishman’s van, the sky a dark grey towering over us as he steered us through the storms, dodging squalls like a sloop at sea, darting over the flat black road, the white line luminous, glowing in the electric light of the desert.  The red dust blew through the town and the front yards were laden with ochre coloured dirt. Jacob played the oldest hotel in town and a trucky offered him jaundiced coloured speed, but we slept early in a corner room, windows open to the sweeping verandah, a dark, old wardrobe against the walls. As the road turned to the south we said goodbye to Mick and the intensity of the desert’s burning orange turned to the green and blue of the south west corner of our map.

Acceptance

Later, I took him down the coast. I picked him up after work, and he ducked into my car, holding a pizza laden with artichokes. Every stop light turned yellow as we tore out of the city in my tin can car and he sat beside me in the dark. He pulled Coopers from a six-pack in the back, passing the full, cold bottles to me as I drove and once we could smell the fields, and the highway was just a road, he threw the bottles out the window. 

‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Briefly I was horrified.

‘What does it matter in the country? In the city it’s litter and here - it just is. It’s just sand. Sand baby, back to sand.‘  And it didn’t matter just then, I saw but the care had left me, and I was driving the engine through the night, and there was beer from the backseat, and I wouldn’t have held him to it.

We wrestled in the kitchen, at the end of the counter, our bones hitting the shiny wooden floor, and he said, ‘People always want to fight me’. And I did, I wanted it. I hit, arm over arm, pushing myself but feeling no pain. My tongue flicked along his row of teeth. Outside he bit and chewed his pizza, while I held my beer and carefully rolled a cigarette, I was so careful then, and later we sat on the edge of the verandah, suspended over the trees, my body folded into his, the garden deep and dark beneath us. 

I woke on the edge of the bed, with his arm thrown over my shoulder, and his leg over mine. I shook him off and left him sleeping in the long room at the end of the house. I went out the side door, and stopped to lie, just there, outside the door, on the rough grass. It was early and still. I pulled up my t-shirt and let the sun shine on my belly, and shut my eyes. The grass scratched my back, and I threw one arm over my head, and slept. In a while I got up and walked across the field to where my grandparent’s house had been. The field ended on a narrow ribbon of unpaved road, and I walked up the hill, above the sea, to the top, where it all became darker and the ground was littered with pine needles and the wind blew through the heavy trees there, and I could see the bay stretched out, the pier in the distance and the tide going out. I stood there in the windiest place, between the pines, and felt it blow all through me.

As I walked back down a girl came out of one of the houses hanging off the cliff, and I realised it was someone who had known me for a long time. 

‘Maryanne!’

‘Alex, hi.’ We were both blown about by the wind a little, her hair and mine in the air. 

Her smile was bright, genuine. ‘Wow, we are actually here at the same time. How long are you up here for?’

‘Oh, just one more night.’

‘You should come over tonight.’

I hesitated, I don’t know why, I knew her. I thought of his loose limbs left on the bed, and our night together, surrounding me, crowding me, even when unconscious.. 

‘Aaahh, I’m with someone...’ I gestured back down towards the house. She could assume whatever she wanted.

‘So bring him’. 

I shook my end. Her face was curious now against the blue of the sea. The road began to slope down then, and my boots with it. 

‘No’. But I was wrong to protect him from them. 

Of course he was no different, no more elevated. That day on the windy road above the sea, I couldn’t see that, I saw him as indomitable and mine so I cut her off.

‘No Alex, I’ll see you soon.’

I crossed back over the field and stopped at a blackberry bush and picked until my hands were full.  I could see him outside the house, his white shirt undone, flapping. He was looking for me.

For the first time I saw a childish look of uncertainty play over his face. He had fallen asleep with a full bed and woken with it empty. He smiled at my figure coming up close to him now, his face creased with relief.

‘I was looking for you, why did you leave?’

‘I went for a walk.’ And I passed the berries, squashed now, into his hands.

Us and Them

Just inside South Australia we stood with the black line stretching to the heaving sea, and to the west where the sun goes down in a sinking, sunken mass of burning gold.

‘It is time for a wash, it is time for a stranger, for one of them’, he gestured at those soft souls spinning past on the tar burnt black and stiff, ‘for one of them to pick us up and take us in for a stay, for a wash and a feed’.

And I saw his long shape there by the long road, his hard straight body, on the hard straight road, his skin toughened by the sun like the track that takes us all on, and I spun around and saw the mountains and the hills, dotted by trees, soft and blurry, their shapes indistinct, and I saw the women there, out there, in the easy shapes of nature, in nature’s leaves, and twisted trunks, in the billowing gentle hills, in the peaked waves that pound the sand. And I saw her out there in all her glory, and all of man here, in him, and in the road man has built, and in the buildings they erect, reaching tall, and taller into the sky. And I realised that for them it must be created, and that women are already there, have always been there, and that we don’t need to force anything into the hard shapes of man.

And then there was Odette. O-dette. A soft round O, like the soft flesh of a woman where you sink in and travel further, further, the flesh that you emerge from and from where man spends his life trying to return. Odette stopped, and I was in the front seat, woman to woman, and he was in the back, his lean, long straight legs bent to fit in the cramped backseat, and he lay, lengthways, so he could sleep as he wished, while Odette and I exchanged words in the front, far, far from his sleeping eyes, half closed in his world of rest, while the women talked.

She sat, a blowsy blond, her blond hair tousled, and awry, her white nurse’s uniform creased yet clean and before long she asked, ‘'Do you want to rest a night? I know how it is, I travelled with my man from station to station.’

We set up our small green tent in her grassy yard and hung our clean washing on the Hill's Hoist. She sat with us at her plastic table, her husband laid up in bed, broken limbs from a drunken fall, and we were with her children as we ate a lamb roast with potatoes, and apricot pie and custard for dessert. We slept in our small safe home in her small divided yard, in the small divided streets and I had a second shower in the morning, but we didn’t leave then, we had to wait.  During the night a sea mist came in and covered the world with a thick salty dew and we couldn’t dry our washing.

My Watch

It is my watch. I am wedged in the cockpit between the end of the bench seat and the dash board of the boat. I can see the wind direction and our speed without getting up. I raise myself up every ten minutes to quickly sweep the ocean for lights, and then just to ease my conscience, every forty minutes I get up and stand on the stern, stretch out and sweep the silent darkness from horizon to horizon. The night sky and the dark expanse of water intermingle into a mass of complete unknown.  The only thing separating the two tonight are the stars. 

I hold onto the mizzen mast and reach out with one hand into the wind. I have spent many days gazing out at the sea. There is no where else to look. The endless waves are an onslaught of blue hacking into my subconscious. They move as one mass until I try to focus, and they transform into a myriad of individual waves. I try to keep a steady eye on just one, and yet they march on incessantly, and I am left defenceless. Memories of my childhood swim up the surface like fish to a light, and I swing around to face the wind full in my chest. I hear the rhythm of the soft, small slapping waves sending me to sleep as lie in my grandparent’s home. The children in the green room, my parents in the blue, our sheets always damp with salt. The wind blows the feathered fingers of the pink tamarisk as I chase my sister, our childish brown feet pounding the dry path flat. The tiny strawberries stubbornly cling on the thin summer grass. The ferny foreshore streams with snakes, but we are faster and we race past the tall pampas grass, to the dark sand, sand piled high with stinking seaweed, over the smooth black mounds of stones, to the reef. And then I hear my sister telling me, as though she knew I would leave her, ‘This is how I will remember you, with your black hair streaming as you go up and into another wave.’

Tonight the waves are with us. The wind blows from the northwest. The sails are set. I feel the crests rising beneath us, the boat rising smoothly up and over them, and the spume gently, somehow quietly bubbles at their back, a silent, inky wave disappearing. There are no reflections of the stars. Yet I look out, out, out trying to see in the silky dark and suddenly remember myself at fifteen, one night in Melbourne when I woke and quietly walked through the house, to the damp grass and all that was outside. The night around was black with clarity, the stars bright. I felt my feet flat on the cold, metal table, the cool air wrapping around my legs. All alone in the secret, beautiful night, I wanted it to begin. 

I didn’t realize that once it began it would be impossible to return. Life has to change, even if you are not there to see it happen. And people too, even family, even if you cannot understand why they must. The life that had seemed so constant, now came to me in gusts as the wind blew us further out of reach.

We have only been out three days this cross, sailing west across the top of South America to Panama. The waves are full of themselves as they push us towards the canal. During the day the sea is a bright, painful blue, and the tops of the waves fly in white streaks, as we surf our way to making our longest days. But we could be anywhere, on any ocean, sailing to any port. The sea is always the sea. 

In motion

We had coexisted in both modes of transport, hitchhiking and the sailing. Spatially. On another lateral plane, the rest of the world, the people driving past you or the people on the plane above, the people in their busy, industrious fast lives. Neither side can comprehend. Although we can all forget. Our enormous capacity to forget. As women in childbirth, the pain soon dulls, and they have a beautiful bouncing baby on their knee and willingly go through the most horrific pain again and again and perhaps again.

On the boat, hours of watching the wind indicator, the three of us, eyes glued to it, as though a fire a tv, a candle. The eyes willing the trade winds to blow their gust of breath, all in one, blow us on. The glassiness of the ocean to dissipate, the small ruffles to begin, the troughs to form, the incessant rocking to cease. Yet it does occur, eventually, the wind comes up, the sails are hoisted, the boat cuts neatly through the water. The state of becalment is relegated, almost immediately, to the past. He bounces down the companion way to pour each a drink, vodka and warm juice in tall plastic glasses.

Speed. Slow. Sailing is slow. Arrival by natural means. A natural crossing of latitudes, of travelling between hemispheres. Living the journey. We could say ‘the wind blew us here’. We certainly had time to get acclimatised, our arrival expected. Unlike flying where one disembarks the plane after only a few hours to find themselves in an entirely new time. Unnatural. Learn to live slow, sail fast. To live each hour slowly, to fill it.

It could be the ultimate freedom. Fresh to the ditch, ready for immediate pick up, thumb hung out with what we hope is a cheerful yet determined manner...I throw out what I can, and he throws out whatever boyish dreams men latch onto. His guitar front and centre, people will stop because of that. We talk, people drop water off to us, we sing, throw stones....our thumb always out. A car stopping surprises us, now we have forgotten our actuality, the reverse lights on it is coming back, we run, but not too fast to scare them, throw our bags in and into the moving future. As the miles whisk us on, our time spent waiting is left, our weariness drops behind, and we wonder on. We are reliant upon the stranger, their kindness. Sailing reliant upon the wind. In a sense left up to the mercies of the gods, of the elements, of what is all around. Speed is not the goal, the goal is to move. As with the wind, to move forward..to be in motion. The dust at your feet, the bitumen beside, the hot metal as we pile in, the wind as we flood forward. to our next destination, in motion (vita in motu )a happy place to be, anticipation of the unknown.