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.