Bryan Di Salvatore and Joe the swagman, between Coober Pedy and Alice Springs, Australia, 1979
SIX
THE LUCKY COUNTRY
Australia, 1978–79
SOMEONE SENT US A COPY OF OUTSIDE MAGAZINE WITH AN ARTICLE by an old professor of mine. It was about a lost weekend of skiing and carousing in Montana. I remembered the weekend, though differently. I was surprised that anybody would be interested in our grad school revels. Maybe my grasp of American amusement was weakening with distance. The article mentioned that I was now “living the unexamined life in Australia.” Except for the Australia part, that was news to me.
Bryan and I had landed in a beach town called Kirra, in Queensland, near the New South Wales border. We were the proud owners of a 1964 Falcon station wagon, bought near Brisbane for three hundred dollars, and had car-camped and surfed up and down the east coast, from Sydney to Noosa. It was dazzling to be back in the West, with all its comforts and conveniences, and to be surfing known spots—there were even road signs, SURFING BEACH. It was great to have wheels. Food and gas were cheap. Still, we were nearly broke. And so we rented, with our last funds, a moldy bungalow at the back of a ramshackle complex misnamed the Bonnie View Flats. Most of our neighbors were unemployed Thursday Islanders—Melanesians, from the Torres Strait, up near Papua New Guinea—and some of them possibly had views. We didn’t. But the beach was just across the road, and we had not chosen Kirra randomly. The place had a legendary wave. And the southern summer was starting up and, with it, we hoped, northeast cyclone swells.
Bryan got a job as a chef in a Mexican restaurant in Coolangatta, the next town south. He told the owners he was half-Mexican, but fumbled it when they asked his name. He said McKnight when he meant to say Rodriguez. He didn’t have a valid work visa under any name. They hired him anyway. I found a couple of backbreaking jobs, including ditchdigging, which deserves its reputation as the worst sort of donkey work, for cash paid daily. Then I got hired as a pot washer in a restaurant at the Twin Towns Services Club, a big casino just over the New South Wales border, fifteen minutes’ walk from our place. I told them my name was Fitzpatrick. The manager said that as a condition of employment I had to shave my beard, and so I did. When Bryan came home that night, he took one look at me and shrieked. He looked genuinely distressed. He said it looked like half my face had been burned off. I was pale where the beard had been, dark brown everywhere else.
There, there, I said, it’ll grow back.
I blew my first wages on surfboards. Kirra is on the Gold Coast, a surfing center, and there were cheap used boards everywhere. I bought two, including a 6'3" Hot Buttered squashtail that turned on a dime and, when necessary, went outlandishly fast. It was a sports car of a surfboard, and a nice change after months of riding my sturdy travel board. Bryan also got new, much smaller boards. The year-round neighborhood spot was called Duranbah. It was a wide-open beachbreak immediately north of the Tweed River mouth, very near my casino job. Duranbah always seemed to have waves. They were often sloppy, but there were gems scattered among the mush. On my twenty-sixth birthday, I got a sweet barrel on a shining right and came out dry.
The pointbreaks—Kirra, Greenmount, Snapper Rocks, and Burleigh Heads, the spots that put the Gold Coast on the world surfing map—would light up after Christmas, people said. They would start breaking, in fact, on Boxing Day, December 26, we were assured by a nonsurfing neighbor. We laughed at the not-likely specificity but looked forward to the waves.
In the meantime, I was falling hard for Australia. The country had never interested me. From a distance, it always seemed terminally bland. Up close, though, it was a nation of wisenheimers, smart-mouthed diggers with no respect for authority. The other pot washers at the casino, for instance—they called us dixie bashers—were a weirdly proud crew. In a big restaurant kitchen, we were at the bottom of the job ladder, below the dishwashers, who were all women. We peeled potatoes (which we called idahos), handled the garbage, did the nastiest scrubbing, and hosed down the greasy floors with hot water at the end of the night. And yet we made an excellent wage (I could save more than half my earnings) and, as employees, we had entree to the casino’s private members’ bar, which was on the top floor of the building. We would troop up there after work, tired and ripe, and throw back pints among what passed for high rollers on the Gold Coast. Once or twice, my coworkers spotted the owner of the casino in there. They called him a rich bastard and he, properly chagrined to be rich, bought the next shout.
I had never seen the dignity of labor upheld so doughtily, not even on the railroad. Australia was easily the most democratic country I had encountered. People called it the Lucky Country. This epithet was coined by a social critic, Donald Horne, whose 1964 book of that title decried the mediocrity of Australia’s political and business culture, arguing, “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” But the phrase had lost its meaning over time, and it had been widely adopted as a sunny national motto. That was fine with me.
The usual class markers from other places seemed wonderfully scrambled. Billy McCarthy, one of my fellow dixie bashers, was hale, well-spoken, forty, married with a couple of kids. I quizzed him one night over beers and learned that he had been a professional saxophonist in Sydney, with a day job as a foreman in a perfume factory. He had followed his parents to the Gold Coast, where he went into business with a friend mowing lawns and washing windows, growing bonsai plants to sell at flea markets, potting palms to sell on consignment at shops. He was still working as a nurseryman but needed the steady restaurant wage. He played golf, often with musicians up from Sydney to play the casino’s nightclub or other local venues. If Billy felt embarrassed to be working as a kitchen hand, I could not detect it. He was hardworking, cheerful, politically conservative, usually whistling some corny tune, always ready with a quip. Effortlessly, he made me feel welcome. Once, as I was coming into work, I heard him call out, “There he is, the man they couldn’t shoot, root, or electrocute.”
The head chef, meanwhile, called me “Fitzie,” to which I always failed, suspiciously, to respond. The chef was the boss in the kitchen. When I once gave him shit about a garishly decorated fish being sent out, he glowered at me and said, “Don’t come the raw prawn with me, cobber.” I couldn’t tell if I had gone too far. But McCarthy and the other dixie bashers got a kick out of the exchange. They took to calling me Raw Prawn.
Local surfers were less welcoming. There were thousands of them. The ability level was high, the competition for waves acute. Like anywhere, each spot had its crew, its stars, its old lions. But there were full-blown clubs and cliques and family dynasties in every Gold Coast beach town—Coolangatta, Kirra, Burleigh. There were also hordes of tourists and day trippers, and Bryan and I would be assumed to belong to that low stratum of surf life until we could establish otherwise. The guys we began surfing with regularly were fellow expats—an Englishman we called Peter the Pom, a Balinese kid named Adi. Peter was a cook at the casino, a solid surfer, married to a local girl. They lived in a flat in Rainbow Bay, overlooking the wave at Snapper Rocks. Adi had also married a local girl. He was a talented surfer, working as a waiter, sending his wages home. One night I took Adi and his cousin, Chook, to a drive-in to see Car Wash. Chook had hair down to his waist and was the skinniest grown man I’d ever met—“chook” is Aussie slang for chicken. He and Adi got drunk on sparkling wine and laughed themselves sick at the movie, which they called Wash Car. They thought African Americans, whom they called Negroes, were the funniest people on earth.
The casino threw a fancy staff pre-Christmas party, giving me the chance to relive a painful part of high school that I had missed by being a hippie surfer who would sooner have gone to jail than to the prom. All the young women in the kitchen—waitresses, dishwashers, pastry chefs—were excited about the party. I could hear them giddily reviewing their dresses, dates, hairdos, the band, their after-party plans. I found that I very much wanted to go, perhaps even with a pretty waitress on my arm. But I didn’t own a long-sleeved shirt, let alone the tuxedo that I gathered was de rigueur. More to the point, it was clear that to these girls I didn’t exist. Their swains were all local bravos whom they had probably gone to high school with. I spent the night of the party in my tiny, grotty bungalow room trying to work on my novel. How I hated being a foreigner, always on the outside. The intensity of my shame and self-loathing was unsettling.
Sharon and I wrote letters, many, and hers were usually a comfort to get, but I could hardly tell her everything. She was undoubtedly being similarly discreet. The true parameters of my loneliness were mine to cope with.
• • •
BRYAN AND I WANTED TO WRITE an article for Tracks, a surf mag published in Sydney. Tracks was nothing like its glossy, clean-cut American cousins. It was a newsprint tabloid. Editorially, it was rude, witty, aggro. It actually seemed to be the main Aussie youth mag, like Rolling Stone in its U.S. heyday. Huge bundles of it appeared at the newsstands every two weeks. Our notion was to make fun of the domestication of surfing in Australia. Tracks and its readers already hated Americans. When being polite, they called us seppos, short for septic tanks, rhyming slang for Yanks. More commonly, we were just dickheads. We figured we could rile them. The editors invited us to have a go.
The target was almost too easy. Surfing was fully mainstreamed in Australia—all the clubs and contests and school teams and well-marked Surfing Beaches, complete with car parks and hot showers. I actually half liked the wholesome hoopla—and surfing’s mass appeal was, to be sure, the only reason a niche mag like Tracks could double as an all-purpose national youth paper—but culturally it was screamingly lame. Bryan and I had grown up in a Southern California where most beach towns, and beach cops, loathed and harassed surfers. My high school would have expelled us before they supported us. Surfers were bad boys, outlaws, rebels. We were, that is to say, cool. Surfing wasn’t some tamed, authority-approved “sport.” Bryan and I figured we could play up that stuff for Tracks.
The hard part was the writing. Neither of us had ever cowritten anything, and our assumption that we shared a sensibility proved wildly wrong. We agreed on the idea for the piece, but Bryan couldn’t stand my drafts, and I despised his. Why was I being so ordinary, so predictable? Why was he being so purple, so over the top? When was he going to grow up? Was I aspiring to mediocrity? I didn’t want my name on the self-admiring juvenilia he was producing. Etcetera. I got so mad I crumpled up the pages we were arguing over and threw the paper ball at him. He later said that he nearly punched me before storming out instead.
We had known each other for eight years at that point, and our flat, fierce disagreement over virtually every line of this ditty for Tracks made me wonder when our literary differences had become so pronounced. When we first met, in Lahaina, what drew us together was discovering we loved the same books. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to Bryan were, “What are you doing with that book?” He was crossing a post office parking lot with Ulysses in hand, and the familiar prongs of the big “U” on the Random House paperback cover had caught my eye. We stood there in the sun talking about Joyce, and then the Beats, for an hour or two—while Domenic waited impatiently in the shade—and it seemed inevitable that we would meet again. Of course, our tastes had never been exactly the same. I was the more dedicated Joyce fan—I later spent a year studying Finnegans Wake with Norman O. Brown, an exercise in masturbatory obscurantism that Bryan would never have undertaken—and he had an eye for genre fiction, including westerns, that I lacked. I liked Pynchon; Bryan thought his prose awful. And so on. But we were always turning each other on to new writers and, more often than not, finding the same virtues in their stuff. Bryan tended to be years ahead of the reading public—he was extolling Cormac McCarthy’s work long before most critics had heard of him—and I was glad to follow his leads. In Australia we were digging into Patrick White and Thomas Kenneally and turning up our noses at Colleen McCullough. So why did every sentence he wrote about Aussie surfing annoy me, and vice versa?
We were headed in different directions, clearly. I had started as a teenage lyric surrealist, language-drunk à la Dylan Thomas, and had been slowly trying to sober up. I was now more interested in transparency and accuracy, less enamored of showy originality. Bryan remained enchanted by the music of words—what he once called “the incredible foot-stomping joy of a well-turned phrase.” He loved pure captured dialect, cracked vernacular humor, vivid physicality, and a knockout metaphor, and he disliked nothing more than a lazy stock expression.
I voted to abandon the article, or at least to have it carry only his byline. But Bryan was determined that it should have both of our names on it. So we dialed back his stuff to the point where I could agree to sign it. We used our real names, which was lucky, because the piece caused an unexpected stir. Peter the Pom, who knew us only by our fake work names, actually asked me if I had read it. Some local guys were seriously irritated, he said, by all the exuberant insults from these American wankers. Bryan and I quietly decided to deny authorship, if pressed. We had hoped to piss off readers. We did not want to get hounded off the Gold Coast. Tracks traditionally published wonderful abusive letters, and we got ours. I liked “I wouldn’t spit on you mongrels if you were on fire.” Bryan liked “May your earlobes turn to assholes and shit on your shoulders.”
• • •
I MET A WOMAN, SUE. She told me I was “as mad as a two-bob watch.” She meant it as a compliment. I liked her enormously. She was a big-mouthed, bosomy, bright-eyed mother of three. Her husband, a local rock musician and heroin addict, was in jail. We lived in fear of his release. Sue and her kids lived in a high-rise beach town called (talk about mainstreaming) Surfers Paradise. Sue was a bon vivant. She loved avant-garde music, art, comedy, Australian history, and all things Aboriginal. She knew lots of Gold Coast gossip—which cokehead surf star had shopped his mates to the cops, which cokehead surf star was rooting his sponsor’s wife. She also knew the beautiful, eucalyptus-forested highlands behind the coast, where cattle grazed and kangaroos bounded and scruffy back-to-the-landers lived in a cannabis-soaked version of the Aboriginal Dreamtime. We passed days up there when the surf was flat. Sue’s kids, who ranged in age from eight to fourteen, made me a great jokey collage, with cute koalas skeptically surveying the strutting of Gold Coast flaneurs. Then I got a midnight phone call. The husband had been released. Sue had received a heads-up, bundled the kids into her rattletrap car, and was already hundreds of miles from Surfers Paradise. “Off like a bride’s nightie,” she said. “Off like a bucket of shrimp on a hot day.” She sounded chipper, all things considered. They were en route to her mother’s place in Melbourne, more than a thousand miles away. She would catch me on the flip side. I should watch out for her husband.
Sue was not really an example of this, but a lot of Australian women seemed to be sick of Australian men. “Ockers,” as they were called—the name came from a popular TV show—drank too much beer, loved their mates and football first, and treated women shabbily. Whether this generalization was true or fair, I could not say, but Bryan and I, once we had been in Kirra long enough to make it clear to the natives that we were resident, began to feel like the innocent benefactors of a mass sexual disillusionment. Compared with your typical ocker, we were sensitive, modern guys. Gold Coast women had time for us. Even when we behaved caddishly, we seemed to be an improvement on the local brand. I missed Sue, and was happy to continue not meeting her husband, but my heartsick wallflower phase passed, thank God.
I got a new job, as a barman at the Queensland Hotel in Coolangatta, which was an old-fashioned pub during the week and a rock and roll club known as the Patch on weekend nights. (Sue and I saw Bo Diddley there.) I learned to pull pints of beer properly under the close supervision of a career barman named Peter. Peter told me that if I got anything wrong, the customer had the right to throw the beer (but not the glass) in my face and demand a repull. The list of punishable errors was long: too much head, too little head, flat beer, warm beer, too little beer, any hint of soap in the glass. This news had its intended effect: I pulled scared and carefully. Weekday nights were slow and easy. Friday and Saturday nights at the Patch, which was in a big, dark, barnlike building out behind the old pub, were madness, with screaming customers six deep at the bar, blasting punk rock, and ten thousand rum and Cokes. The summer tourist season was starting. After work, I would walk down the beach road back to Kirra, grateful for the silence, stopping at the top of the point where the great wave was said to break, peering into the sloshing blackness beyond the base of the jetty. All the Gold Coast waves we had surfed so far had been sweet, warm, soft, a little sloppy. People said Kirra, when it broke, was a rocket-fueled pointbreak with crazy, hammering power. That was hard to picture.
• • •
THE FIRST CYCLONE SWELL HIT, of course, right on Boxing Day. Kirra woke up. The hard-to-picture became the can’t-look-anywhere-else. But the wave was a strange, ungainly beast, nothing like a California pointbreak. Large amounts of sandy water were rushing around the end of the jetty, forming a torrent down the coast. It was overcast and glary that first morning, the ocean surface gray and brown and blinding silver. The sets looked smaller than they were, seeming to drift almost aimlessly onto the bar outside the jetty, then suddenly standing up taller and thicker than they should have, hiccuping, and finally unloading in a ferocious series of connectable sections, some of the waves going square with power—the lip threw out that far when it broke. It was hard to believe that this wave was breaking on a sand bottom. I had never seen anything like it. The crowd was bad at dawn and rapidly getting worse. We got amongst it, as the Aussies say.
I probably caught three waves that day. Nobody would give me an inch. The downcoast current turned the whole place into a paddling contest. Nobody spoke. The paddling was too grueling, and the least pause or inattention meant yardage lost. I was in good shape, but the top locals were in obscenely good shape, and this was what they lived for. Near the top, near the takeoff, the current got even stronger. As a set approached, you had to sprint upriver at a precise, not obvious angle, somehow putting just enough distance between yourself and the flailing, growling pack so that you were the one person in the pit as the water dredged off the bar, and then swerving and, with a last few hard strokes, catching the wave before it pitched. Then, assuming you stuck the takeoff, you had to surf it, speed-pumping like crazy on one of the fastest waves in the world. It was a lot like work. If you made a wave, though, it felt worth it. It felt worth anything. This, I thought, was a wave I could get serious about.
It didn’t have the open-ocean size or broad-faced beauty of a Honolua Bay. It was a far more compact, ropier wave. The first hundred yards had an amphitheater feel, with spectators lining the jetty at the point, the guardrail along the coast road, a steep green bluff that rose behind the road, and even sometimes a parking lot in front of the Kirra Hotel, a large plain pub tucked under the bluff. Beyond that it was open beach, and when the swell was big and the angle was right, a ride could run on for another two hundred yards, unobserved, an empty, ecstatic racetrack. It wasn’t a mechanical wave. It had flaws, variety, slow patches, close-outs. Concussion wavelets off the jetty or the inside bar often ran back out to sea, marring the third or fourth waves of a set. But the cleaner waves had a quality of compression that was, sometimes literally, stunning. The heaviest waves actually seemed to get shorter, they gathered so much force as they began to detonate across the main bar, a shallow stretch known as the Butter Box section. Even with a sand bottom and a makable-looking wave, it was a deeply intimidating section. You had to come into it fast but stay low on the face, be ready to duck when the thick lip threw horizontally, and then somehow stay over your board through an ungodly acceleration. The Butter Box section gave new meaning to the old surf imprecation, “Pull in!” There was only one way to make it—through the barrel, pulling in.
I had surfed my share of frontside tubes, from that reliable inside section at Lahaina Harbor Mouth to a slabby mutant wave in Santa Cruz called Stockton Avenue, where I snapped boards in half on three-foot days and was lucky not to get hurt on the shallow rock reef. But Stockton was a short, freaky wave—a one-trick pony. Kirra was just as hollow, and it was a pointbreak. It was as long as Rincon or Honolua, and hollower than either one. And the bottom, again, was sand, not coral or cobblestone—an unprecedented setup, in my experience, at a great pointbreak. The sand was not especially soft, I learned. I hit it so hard once, in the Butter Box, that I came up with a concussion, unable to say what country I was in. Another time, also in the Butter Box, and not on a big wave, I got my leash wrapped so tightly around my midsection that I could not breathe. On yet another occasion, same section, my leash tore through my rail and ripped half the tail off my favorite board. So the sand was a blessing, certainly, but the violence of the wave remained—inseparable, as always, from its fierce appeal. That steel thread.
The pecking order at Kirra was disconcertingly long, and the guys on top tended to be national and world champions. Michael Peterson, a two-time Australian champ, ruled the lineup when we started surfing there. He was a dark, brooding, brawny character, with a thick mustache and a crazy look in his eye. He took any wave he wanted, and he surfed like a demon, with a wide power stance and savage hacks. One morning, I noticed him staring at me. We were near the takeoff spot, and I was paddling hard, as always, trying to beat the pack to the next set wave, but Peterson stopped paddling. “Bobby!” he cried. I shook my head no and kept going. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. “You’re not Bobby? You look exactly like my mate who’s in jail! I thought they’d let him out. Bobby!” After that incident, I often found Peterson staring at me in the water. We became nodding acquaintances, even though I spooked him, and I felt the pecking order ease around me when other guys noticed me and the legendary Peterson exchanging little g’days. I was happy to take the break. Like everybody else, I just wanted more waves.
Paul Stacey, a Kirra local, heading into the Butter Box, Kirra
Bryan and I had the advantage of living about as close to Kirra as it was possible to live—unless you lived at the Kirra Hotel, which had no rooms. I checked the jetty every night on my walk home from work, and if there was any hint of a swell, we would hit it before first light. It turned out to be a great surf season, one of the best in memory, people said, with at least one solid swell virtually every week in January and February. One cyclone, Kerry, smashed through the Solomon Islands and then seemed to drift around the Coral Sea for weeks, pumping out powerful northeast swell. Our early-morning go-outs were often fruitful, yielding fresh waves with, for an hour or two, relatively few people. There was a regular predawn crew, not all of them especially hot surfers. There was a gawky, friendly, bearded guy who rode a big-wave gun, hardly turning at all, and who always yelled, as he jumped to his feet and set his line, “I got a lady doctor.” I happened to know the next line in that song: “She cure da pain for free.” She did.
• • •
KIRRA, BEING A CROWDED, famous right, was not Bryan’s kind of wave. He surfed it faithfully, and managed to find the seams in the mob, the uncrowded early sessions, the inflection points in the series of sandbars where he could get his waves, but he was not committed to the dogfight in the same way I was, or to chasing the grail that on great days was made incarnate over and over in the vortex of the Butter Box (which we took to calling simply the wild section). He seemed to like Australia as much as I did—the incorrigible cheekiness of Aussies, the amazing wages, the rich slang, the sunshine, the girls. But he wasn’t writing, which was worrying. He had finished, on Guam, a novel set in a small town in the Idaho panhandle. It was terrific, I thought, even better than his Bildungsroman about his surf buddies in high school. He had sent it off to an agent in New York. This was the kind of grown-up follow-through I had never dared. (I now had two novels sitting in a drawer, read only by friends.) The manuscript hadn’t yet found a publisher. Bryan wasn’t discouraged by the delay, he said, but he seemed to have entered a fallow phase.
He read insatiably—fiction, biographies—sitting in an old wicker chair that he propped by the front door of our bungalow. I found, in a junk shop in Coolangatta, a tall stack of old New Yorkers selling for a penny apiece, bought a few hundred, and gave them to him for Christmas. He put the pile on one side of his chair and started methodically working his way through them. They became an hourglass of our time in Kirra—a hundred mags down, two hundred to go. Meanwhile, I was banging out chapters of my railroad novel, having finally found a story line. We shared an ancient typewriter, donated to us by Sue. Bryan typed long, droll letters to friends back home about our adventures in Oz, some of them nonfictional. Occasionally he read out passages that he thought would amuse me. One that stuck in my mind, but did not amuse, described the two of us as a physically improbable pair of traveling surfers. He was too fat, he wrote, and I was too skinny. It was true that I was skinny, and that he was a bit plump, but my vanity recoiled at this expanded self-deprecation. My reaction was odd, partly because I had always tried to ease tensions with Bryan—and I had done this even more with Domenic—by compulsively making myself the butt of jokes and stories. But my body, apparently, was off-limits for mockery, at least in any way that suggested weakness or, God forbid, unmanliness. Bryan had a better attitude. He gave his students no choice except Clint Eastwood, whom he did not remotely resemble. This shtick was, of course, part of his ladykilling charm.
Speaking of bodies, the Gold Coast was an open-air object lesson in how I was destroying mine through surfing. Looking around at Australians who spent a lot of time in tropical sun for which they were genetically unprepared—most were of Northern European ancestry—I could see my own sorry medical future. Every other surfer, even teenagers, seemed to have pterygia—sun-caused cataracts—clouding their blue eyes. The scabby ears and purple noses and scarily mottled arms of the middle-aged were fair warning: basal-cell carcinoma (if not squamous-cell, if not melanoma) ahead. I already had pterygia myself, in both eyes. Not that I took any preventive measures, or that surfing in colder places was necessarily any less damaging. My years in the freezing ocean in Santa Cruz had given me exostoses—bony growths in the ear canal, known as “surfer’s ear”—which were now constantly trapping seawater, causing painful infections, and would eventually require three operations. Then there was the usual run of surf injuries: scrapes, gashes, reef rashes, a broken nose, torn ankle cartilage. I had no interest in any of this at the time. All I wanted from my body was for it to paddle faster and surf better.
• • •
I DID BECOME, AT KIRRA, a paddling machine. My arms basically stopped getting tired. Getting to know the downcoast current helped. It was constant, but it had vagaries, weak spots, eddies—sometimes, at different tides, even deep slow troughs slightly outside—and its patterns changed with the swell size and direction and the movement of the sand. There were relatively few guys exploiting those vagaries, and we got to know each other. We competed so hard, trying to make each stroke count, that we rarely spoke, but a rough wave-sharing arrangement emerged nonetheless, out of some combination of necessity and respect. I began to get more waves. And I began to learn what to do with them.
It was the opposite of surfing Tavarua, in most ways. That was an empty, immaculate coral-reef left, breaking in Edenic abundance. This was an ultra-crowded, sand-bottom right in the Aussie Miami Beach. And yet both were long, demanding, superlative waves that required fast, fine edgework and rewarded close study. The key to surfing Kirra was entering the wild section at full speed, surfing close to the face—pulling in—and then, if you got inside, staying calm in the barrel, having faith that it just might spit you out. It usually didn’t, but I had waves that teased me two, even three times, with the daylight hole speeding ahead, outrunning me, and then pausing and miraculously rewinding back toward me, the spilling lip seemingly twisting like the iris of a camera lens opening until I was almost out of the hole, and then reversing and doing it again, receding in beautiful hopelessness and returning in even more beautiful hope. These were the longest tube rides of my life.
Which raised the question of claiming. The best thing to do, by far, if you came flying out of a deep tube was nothing. Keep surfing. Act as if such things happened to you all the time. This was difficult, if not impossible. The emotional release of some little celebration was practically a physical necessity. Maybe not an obnoxious fist pump, or arms thrown up touchdown-style, but some acknowledgment that something rare and deeply thrilling had just happened. On one of the bigger days we got at Kirra, when the sets were swinging wide and breaking in slightly deeper, much bluer water than usual, I pulled into a tube that was oblong, not cavernous, and saw the ceiling ahead begin to shatter—to chandelier. I bowed my head, crouching low, expecting the ax, but held my line and squeaked through. As I came out, astonished, rising and trying to stay cool, I noticed Bryan among the paddlers going over the shoulder. I heard a few hoots, but nothing from him. Later, I asked him if he had seen the wave. He said he had. He said I had overclaimed it. I had come out with my hands raised in prayer, he said. Pretty lame. That wasn’t praying, I said. It was just a little thank-you. My hands had been clasped, not raised. I was mortified. Also angry. It was a childish thing to care about, but his disdain for my elation seemed mean. Still, I vowed never to claim again, no matter how great the wave.
Greatness is relative, of course. On that same big swell, perhaps that same afternoon, I was walking back after an extra-long ride that had carried me halfway to Bilinga, the next village north—carried me so far that paddling back seemed silly. I had decided to walk to Kirra and try to punch through up near the point. I was alone on the beach. The swell was peaking, the wind offshore, the waves now seemingly nonstop. Far outside, I saw a tiny surfer in red trunks pull into a big blue barrel, emerge, disappear, and emerge again. It was a guy I had never seen before, surfing at a speed I had rarely, if ever, seen before. He kept doing it—disappearing, emerging. He seemed to be riding in the wrong place on his board—too far forward—but somehow turning from there, making small adjustments that kept him in the barrel for ridiculous amounts of time. He kept going, and his stance, I could see as he got closer, was casual, almost defiant. He claimed none of the barrels he threaded. He was getting one of the best rides I had ever seen, and he was acting as if he deserved it. I actually couldn’t understand, technically, half of what he was doing. Nose turns inside the tube? It reminded me of the first time I saw a shortboard in action—Bob McTavish at Rincon. What I didn’t know was that this kid in red trunks was the newly crowned world champion, Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew. He was a local boy, just home from the international contest circuit. Physically slight but fearless in big waves and absurdly talented, he was the Mick Jagger of surfing, endlessly lauded in the mags for striking rock-star poses in heavy situations. He had grown up surfing Kirra, and the ride I saw was a master class in how it could be done, if you happened to be the best surfer in the world.
• • •
THE SUMMER TOURIST SEASON was winding down at the Patch. Bryan and I had saved enough money to push on. We were keen to take a big drive around Australia. Our car, however, was not. The water pump was on the blink, causing the car to overheat. Bryan found a spare pump in a junkyard. We installed it, quit our jobs, said our good-byes, and, in half an hour, moved out of the Bonnie View Flats. Bryan paused as he shut the door, and said, with studied casualness, “Let’s call it an era.” Ten miles down the road, the Falcon’s temperature gauge swung back to Hot. I stuck a piece of masking tape over the gauge, blocking out the bad news. Then I wrote on the tape, “She’ll be right.” It was the unofficial Australian national motto.
In Sydney we met up with Alias. Mick and Jane and their Fiji-born baby boy were moored in a quiet corner of the harbor, near Castlecrag. Graham and his girlfriend were off working. Over shrimp and beer, Mick described a moneymaking scheme they had cooked up. There were lots of rich yuppie surfers in Sydney, he said. The plan was to persuade a small group of them to pay thousands for a surf safari to Magic Island on Alias. They would not be told where they were going—only that it was “the world’s most perfect wave.” If the first trip was a success, the passengers would tell their wealthy friends, and the charter business would take off by word of mouth. The secret would be kept, basically. The trick would be to persuade the first group to cough up the brass and get on a plane to Nadi. Photos would be a big help. He and Graham had been too busy surfing Tavarua to get any decent photos. Did we by chance have any good ones?
Bryan and I mumbled that we too had been busy surfing, and had few photos, none of them good, which was true. It was also true that we had no wish to see this scheme succeed.
We headed south, surf-camping our way around southeast Australia to Melbourne, where we found Sue and her kids (her husband seemed to be firmly out of the picture now) living with Sue’s mother. They had a full house, so we stayed with Sue’s younger sister. She was a university student, living with a group of punk rockers in a burned-out squat in a bad part of town. By night, we drank and danced with the punks and watched old movies (Sergeant York) on a clapped-out black-and-white TV they had scavenged. By day, we went to a marathon international cricket match, Australia versus Pakistan, with Sue’s mother, eating cucumber sandwiches and sipping Pimm’s Cup. Bryan, in a moment of late-night why-not, let the punks shave his head. They wore his dark curls as adornment, hanging off their much-pierced ears, and he, after sobering up, announced ruefully that his new stage name was Sid Temperate.
We headed west, toward the Great Australian Bight, which has the world’s longest line of seacliffs, and the Nullarbor Plain, which is the world’s largest hunk of limestone. It was hot, bright, treeless, unpeopled. We drove through salt flats and sand dunes on dirt roads and camped at a remote, flyblown surf spot known as Cactus, where the water was cold and a deep Southern Ocean blue. There were two long lefts, one called Cactus, one called Castles, breaking off a rocky headland, and a heavy right a few hundred yards west called Caves. The swell was solid, day after day. Some days it was more than solid. The wind was hot, full of dust, and offshore, blowing out of the great central desert. Bryan rode the lefts. I was riding a new board now, a pale blue 6'9" rounded pintail that I had bought in Torquay, a beach town in Victoria. I had left my South Pacific board, not without regret, for sale on consignment at the shop where I found the pintail. I hoped the pintail, which was built in New Zealand, might work as my new all-around board. It was light and fast and on bigger days at Caves seemed able to handle a serious drop without sideslipping.
The other surfers at Cactus were a hardy mix of travelers and transplants. The transplants were all from other, more populated parts of Australia—blokes who knew a great, uncrowded wave when they saw it and didn’t mind living in the back of beyond. They surfed and scraped by on the dole, or fished, or found something to do in Penong, a truck stop up on the paved highway thirteen miles inland. Some lived in scrap-built shacks in the desert. These characters ruled the lineup, naturally, but it was still uncrowded, and we found them surprisingly generous with waves. Some could even be garrulous. One told me a cautionary tale featuring his mate, Moose, who one day found himself faded into a wipeout by a visiting camper. Moose came up smiling, but then paddled in, got in his truck, and drove several times back and forth over the tent of the offending visitor before returning to the lineup, still all smiles. I was careful not to drop in on Moose.
There was another local known as Madman. He had a crew cut and an unusual amount of energy, churning back and forth in search of the gnarliest takeoff spots in the broad, boil-filled expanse of heaving, eight-foot Caves. My informant said that Madman had once broken a leash on a big day out here, but, too rabid to go in and repair it, had kept surfing, simply clamping the broken cord in his teeth and holding on to his board that way. Then a bad wipeout tore the leash out of his mouth, along with his two front teeth. Madman later grinned at me, for no apparent reason, confirming that the teeth in question were gone.
Cactus, like the rest of the Nullarbor coast, is known for great white sharks—people called them white pointers. I met a guy in the water who said that he had been attacked by a white pointer five years before in the exact spot where we were sitting. He was a mild person—no Madman or Moose—and I was inclined to believe him. He said that the shark had really only bitten his board, but that he had been injured in the thrashing, sliced up mainly by the broken bits, the sharp fiberglass edges, of the board. It had happened in midwinter and his wetsuit, he said, had saved his life. Even so, he had needed 150 stitches and had been out of the water for eighteen months. He reckoned that lightning never struck in the same place twice, so he surfed here without fear now. Try as I might, after hearing his tale, I couldn’t feel the same karmic safety zone.
Cactus didn’t tempt me as a place to live, but it reminded me of other surf-exile scenes I had run across, in Hawaii and Oregon and Big Sur and rural southwest Victoria. People came for the waves and stayed. They learned the place, and found ways to survive. Some became, over time, members in good standing of the local community; others stayed on the margins. I had surfed a few spots, notably Honolua Bay, where the wave commanded such devotion that I could see renouncing all other ambition than to surf it, every time it broke, forever. There were other beauty spots with good, uncrowded waves, places where the living was cheap and, at a glance, looked easy. I might end up, I guessed, in one of those. Then there was Tavarua. Bryan and I still never spoke the name. It existed out of time. I never thought about going back to live in Fiji.
• • •
BUT I DID WONDER what I was doing with my life. We had been gone so long now that I felt unmoored from all possible explanations for this trip. It was certainly no longer a vacation. What was I vacationing from? I had wangled a one-year leave of absence from the railroad, which had run out while we were in Kirra. Officially resigning my job as a trainman, and my precious seniority date—June 8, 1974—had been unexpectedly difficult emotionally. I still believed I would never find another job so satisfying and well paid. But it was done. I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers, were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful, somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things—what had happened to that? Yes, I had felt compelled, almost required, to take a big surf trip. But did it really need to last this long?
Our plan was to go to Bali next. Great waves, dirt cheap. Sharon had written that she could probably meet us in Asia in a few months’ time. Maybe she knew what it was that I was supposed to be doing out here. But she didn’t surf. In fact, she was terrified of the ocean. Was “surfing” even what I was doing? I chased waves instinctively, got appropriately stoked when it was good, got thoroughly immersed in working out the puzzle of a new spot. Still, peak moments were, by definition, few and far between. Most sessions were unremarkable. What was consistent was a certain serenity that followed a rigorous session. It was physical, this postsurf mood, but it had a distinct emotionality too. Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy. After particularly intense tubes or wipeouts, I felt a charged and wild inclination to weep, which could last for hours. It was like the gamut of powerful feelings that can follow heartfelt sex.
On good days, I still thought I was doing the right thing. The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn’t feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road. And I generally liked being a stranger, an observer, often surprised. On the day we crossed from Victoria into South Australia, passing between tall rows of Norfolk pines, deep green under low clouds, we spotted a country racetrack, parked, slipped into the grandstand, and watched from the rail a terrific horse race, then watched the jockeys in their bright silks holding their saddles on the scales. Behind the racecourse pub, we found a rugby ball and started running old football pass patterns, throwing funky spirals and snagging them at full stretch while a group of barefoot kids hooted. Our Australian visas were running out and I, at least, would be sorry to leave.
Bryan and I had our own domesticity, of course, and it was often strained. Being friends as in writing letters was so much easier than being friends as in living together. We bickered and, every few months, fought bitterly. I resented the fact that it felt dangerous to do anything out of the ordinary, anything outside the rut of habit. One morning at Cactus, when the wind was sideshore and the waves poor, I rose early and took a walk along the waterline, westward. The limestone tidepools were shiny in the rising light. The ubiquitous outback flies were absent, perhaps because of the hour, perhaps because of the wind. I ended up walking a long way, and saw not a soul. By the time I made it back to camp, it was midmorning and Bryan was pissed. Where had I gone? He had cooked and eaten breakfast without me. My oatmeal was stiff and curdled. I didn’t feel like accounting for myself. I was munching an apple. He continued to grouse. I exploded. How dare he tell me when I could go where? Unfortunately, I spat a mouthful of half-chewed apple onto our tent, more or less deliberately. Bryan stalked away in disgust. Thankfully, he never mentioned the Apple Spat (or Spat Apple) again. It was almost as bad as a similar row we had in Western Samoa, when I shouted at him to never again tell me what to do, and he seriously considered, he later told me, pulling the plug on our South Pacific trip, which was then barely two weeks old.
• • •
WE SET OFF for the Never Never—the Northern Territory. Australians had been warning us not to try to cross the Center since we first started muttering about doing so, back on the Gold Coast. We should especially not try it in an unreliable car. “Bush rangers” lay in wait for unwary travelers. It was many days’ drive between way stations. That, we could see from the map, was an exaggeration, but we did buy a jerry can to carry extra gasoline, and a water bag, and a few extra hoses, and our car was undeniably unreliable. It overheated daily, and often wouldn’t start. We had taken to parking it only on inclines, however slight, for the jump starts it frequently needed. When we pulled into gas stations, radiator steaming and hissing, attendants usually wanted to check the temperature gauge. They’d stick their heads in the driver’s window. “She’ll be right” always got a laugh.
We headed northeast from Cactus on a dirt road so obscure that we saw just one vehicle—a cattle truck—in two hundred miles. The washboard road caused the car’s back window to rattle so hard that it fell down into the door. We tried to raise it and fix it in place, but no fix we attempted lasted more than ten minutes. We drove on, with white saltdust, and later red bulldust, pouring in through the open back window. We wrapped bandanas around mouths and noses, and were thankful we’d filled the “esky”—a cheap styrofoam cooler—with Crown Lager in Penong. Distances between outback towns are sometimes measured in “tinnies”—how many cans of beer it takes to traverse them. It was at least a dozen tinnies to the main road north, also dirt, which we met in a village called Kingoonya, where a tumbledown roadhouse offered the world’s most welcome steak burgers, served by Australia’s most beautiful waitress.
Even the main road through the Center was rough. We saw no pavement for six hundred miles. We did see an unnerving number of burned-out vehicles lying on their sides in the saltbush, and decided to heed much-heard advice that without a “roo bar”—a cowcatcher for kangaroos—driving at night was inviting disaster. We saw enough kangaroos by day, both in the road and bounding along in the desert. So we camped at night. A huge flock of galahs, pink-and-gray parrotlike birds, wheeled above us one morning while we struggled to jump-start the Falcon.
We picked up a swagman, Joe, who was marching along with a knapsack fifty miles from a building. Joe was tiny, as if shrunken by the sun, deeply wizened, not young, and I would not have called him jolly, but he talked volubly all day about boreholes, billabongs, and sheep stations he had worked on. And he methodically guzzled our beers. I asked him about the crazy flies. He said you never got used to them. Even the blackfellas didn’t get used to them, he said. Then he asked to be dropped at a faint track that ran off to the east. We filled his water bottle and gave him five dollars.
We crossed into the Northern Territory. At a dust-choked hamlet called Ghan, I peeked inside a filthy board bag strapped to the car’s roof. My new pintail was in there. Shiny, pale blue, the board was a vision, so cool and sleek. It conjured another world, an unimaginable freshness. Our plan was to drive to Darwin, a town on the north coast, sell the car, and find a way to Indonesia from there.
Bryan had not finished reading his entire stack of New Yorkers before we left Kirra, and the fifty or so remaining had been stuffed under the front seat. We sometimes pulled them out and read from them aloud—short stories, poems, reviews, humor pieces, essays, long reported pieces. Many of these, one or both of us had read before, but hearing them in the outback was different. It was a test. How would the stuff hold up in the harsh, no-bullshit desert light? Some of it did fine. The writing was still strong, the stories still funny. But pretension and flab came up fluorescent in this merciless scan, and certain writers suddenly seemed like hothouse poseurs. They became unintentionally hilarious.
We were feeling pretty full of ourselves. This was like long road trips we had taken in the West back home, but with less pavement and more beer. Mailer’s A Fire on the Moon failed the outback test, which distressed me, since he was one of my heroes. It didn’t help that he was up against Patrick White’s Voss, an utterly convincing novel about a Prussian naturalist on a nineteenth-century expedition across the middle of Australia. We bantered and read and took potshots at wombats with cheap green plastic water pistols. I liked the way Bryan drove. He did it with a long-distance trucker’s posture, upright. On straightaways, he left one hand on his leg. He read with a similar relaxed, long-haul attentiveness. We rarely ran out of things to discuss. Mick and Jane had laughed at us on our way out of Sydney. We had driven in convoy with them down to Wollongong to look for waves. When we got there, they said that they had been watching us for an hour straight, both gesticulating, particularly me, nonstop. I had been developing, on that drive, an early version of a theory about Patrick White, having just read The Eye of the Storm. It had been the same on Alias, they said, the two of us constantly ear-bashing one another, privately amusing the Aussies.
On the north side of Alice Springs, we picked up two hitchhikers, Tess and Manja (pronounced mun-yuh). They were graduate students, they said, from Adelaide, going to a women’s conference in Darwin. They said they didn’t mind the deep bulldust drifts that now filled every corner of the Falcon. They put on bandanas, and we traveled with them for five days. Tess was a bantam lass, wearing a man’s plaid shirt. She was slight, pale, butch, incisive, with short dark hair and a wicked dry wit, which she deployed at the expense of the hearty, unsuspecting fellows whom we met at petrol stations and in the far-flung pubs where we hid from the midday heat, which was now too much for the struggling Falcon. Tess was relatively easy on Bryan and me and our water pistols, even after we insisted we were Vietnam vets, unrepentant but mentally damaged. “Poor boys,” she cooed. We said our surf scars were war wounds. “Blimey, that must have hurt. Buy us a pint.”
Manja was tall, soft-voiced, warm-eyed, slim. She laughed, or at least smiled indulgently, at all the right places. She was earnestly political, but wore it lightly, in the diffident Aussie way. At night, she and I would slip away and find a quiet place to lay our sleeping bags. She told me about her childhood. She had grown up on a farm on the Murray River. Hunters there used to shoot kangaroos and wallabies, she said, and if they found a little joey still alive in the pouch, they would give the baby to a farmkid as a pet. They were great pets—gentle, loyal, intelligent. She used to dress up her young wallaby in a hat and coat and the two of them would walk and hop, holding hands, to town.
• • •
OUR IDYLL WENT TO HELL in Darwin. Tess and Manja had a house to stay in, a feminist commune of some kind, no men allowed. Tess was happy to see the back of me. It seemed I had interrupted a preexisting idyll—something Manja had neglected to mention. Bryan and I stayed in a campground outside town. There wasn’t much to Darwin. It had been blown flat by a cyclone a few years before. Rebuilding was proceeding slowly. The town was allegedly on the coast, but all we could find was mud and scrub and poisonous-looking shallows. It was hot, flat, plug-ugly. There was an airport, though, with cheap weekly flights to Denpasar. We sold the car for two hundred dollars to a bunch of Yugoslavian bauxite miners. By some miracle, it started when they came to inspect it. We changed campgrounds, not certain that the miners fully grasped the meaning of “as is.”
I longed for Manja. We managed to rendezvous at an old hotel that had survived the cyclone. Suddenly, I didn’t want to leave Australia. It would be better, she said, if I went.
She was right. I turned up that night, uninvited, at the commune. Nobody answered the door. I let myself in. I could hear festive noise in the backyard. I got as far as the back door. On a concrete deck, under a bright porch light, Manja was getting a haircut. Most of her long blond locks were already on the ground. Tess was merrily clipping off the rest. Manja’s new crew cut was light brown, her head very round and vulnerable-looking, like a baby’s. Four or five women were applauding her transformation. She was grinning goofily, drinking a beer—a stubby of Toohey’s, I noticed, while a wave of despair rose in my throat. I must have made a noise. Manja screamed. Others bellowed. Scuffling and shoving and shouting occurred. I half thought Manja might leave with me. Instead, I left with the police.
Weeks later, in Bali, I got a letter from Manja. She apologized for calling the cops. They were fascists, and she hoped they had not abused me. They hadn’t. In fact, being good ockers, they had turned me loose with off-color oaths of gender solidarity. Her misadventure with me, Manja wrote, had only strengthened her resolve to have nothing more to do with men. I hadn’t respected her boundaries, which was so typical. I couldn’t argue with that. I still liked her, though. If she had written that she was coming to Indonesia, I would have met her plane.