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.

The Pindan

The ancients called it the sympathy of life. That everything; the individual, the universe, was interrelated and mutally attuned. So from Broome she walked the length of the eastern Indian, giddy with footprints, slept perched on red cliffs with the others. She saw those, the road tired gypsies who she felt were more Australian than herself, walking the longitudinal lines of the flat earth, those who had told stories to the truckers roaring through the endless night. She heard the talk of those there first, saw them pacing out their country. And felt herself settling back, deep into happiness. She was alone. She knew now what she was ready for, what she wanted more of, and as she was there, seeing for the first time, without the baggage of the others, even their love, she shook off the city.

While in a place far distant from thought or conception,  he left his friends sleeping on a beach, to play music in a bar for all those stuck in the purgatorial stupor that is the Panama Canal. For five days he played to the smugglers of all imaginable contraband, to the retired Floridian hopefuls, to those salt crusted sailors young and old, unable to stop the stream of wind or rum. On the sixth day, a Briton, the uncertain owner of a concrete schooner, offered him the first leg crewing to the Galapagos.

Striking out the distance from South Melbourne to St Kilda one evening, arm in arm with her mother,  she felt the wind from the Pacific and him blowing across with it. At a crossroads of themselves, across continents, across oceans, to one night in a pub. The door swung open and of all the lives floating through the ether, two spirits reached across a bar. 

Poem

Suspended by the salt beneath

The glassy mask falls and shifts

My feet astride the groaning teak

The wind doth blow and blow and blow. 

To be unfettered by the others

Yet gaze upon the gum’s soft colours

Allowing for freedom where I took

The first steps of a soul.

As we sail from fading coasts,

Small amidst the tossing troughs

Toughened in spaces, unburdened by shoes

Creating a hive amongst the blue.

Yet now I know the sharp twigs breaking,

Bark curling, twisting, flaking.

From the sandy, shadowed path and uphill past the tamarisk

To the place where they would sit. 

It has gone, my soles remember,

Where? The place that drew my mother,

To the glassy sea recovered.