That’s nothing, I tell him. You wouldn’t believe the monstrous sweep of tides when the earth was young. And away I go on an explanation which has to be told in careful steps, but it’s worth it to get to some boggling concepts.
When the world began, I lecture, the moon was closer and the earth rotated faster, which sent the waters of the oceans tearing backwards and forwards in tides of unimaginable reach and ferocity. Gradually the moon receded, ironically because of the tides themselves. Their movement takes energy out of the earth, slowing its rotation, and that energy goes into the moon’s orbit, making it bigger. So, as the moon travels around us, it’s gradually getting further away, and as the moon becomes more distant, the tidal effect on the earth is lessened.
The moon won’t keep going and going though, because it’s estimated that in about 50 billion years the moon and the earth will go into tidal lock, having reached a state where effects equal out. But well before that could ever happen, in just a measly 2.3 billion years, the sun’s radiation will evaporate the oceans. There’ll be no more tides then. And probably not much of anything else.
That’s what you get if you follow the tides to their scientific end—fried.
But, Rog and I agree, chances are high we’ll fry ourselves long before the cosmos gets around to doing it for us.
•
As we talk we check the baits on the crab lines and continue to fish with our rods. And then I notice something. It’s about 10 metres away and backlit in the afternoon sun, so I can’t make it out well, but it looks like a floating beer can. I’m thinking we should go and scoop it up. And then it sinks. Strange. Then it bobs up again—
‘Rog! A turtle, a turtle’s head!’
And so it is. The blunt, block head sinks and rises once more, as if it needs to take another look at us to be sure of something, then it sinks for the last time. Off it swims, the wider, brown-yellow shape of its shell discernible under the water for a moment until it disappears.
If I had not seen a turtle swimming in the bay a couple of years ago I would never have identified this rare visitor in the difficult light.
Having just contemplated the end of the world, we are immensely cheered by the turtle’s appearance. Not yet, not yet, it seems to say. Yet the preciousness of its presence is chastening.
•
The afternoon is passing; I put away my rod and begin cleaning our catch while Rog fishes on. He mentions a boyhood excursion to Fort Denison, the little island in the middle of Sydney Harbour, topped with the familiar pepper pot of its Martello tower. I had been there myself only a few days before, because it houses something I wouldn’t mind having in my own home—a tide room. Which is why Rog brought it up, of course.
His visit is news to me, but I can easily picture him trudging around in his cubs’ uniform with the slightly baffled look on his face that was his usual expression until our parents finally twigged that he couldn’t see properly and got him glasses.
Nothing much about the tide room could have changed in the many years between our visits. Extending out into the harbour off the western side of the tower, it is much as you would like it to be. It has sandstone walls, arrow-slit windows and a seaweed smell. But there the romance ends. It’s empty, except for a few bits of junky-looking equipment arranged close to a hole in the floor, which is covered by a scratched piece of perspex. Though a spotlight blasts on it, you cannot see the water down there. Nor can you hear it gurgle or slop as you’d wish. A long dipstick is stashed at the end of the room, and though it would be nice to feed it into the hole and do a little measuring of one’s own, this is obviously not allowed.
Predictions for tides all along the New South Wales coast are made based on the measurements taken here. This is literally ground zero for New South Wales tides, and has been since 1857, when a benchmark was cut into the outer wall of the tower. Tides are recorded as so many millimetres above or below a zero. But the zero is arbitrary. It’s just a mark at an accessible point that can be easily observed. As a sign of human agency and ingenuity it’s so basic it’s inspiring; a scratched statement of will towards the understanding of something immense.
But like so many marks and places in Australia, there are underlying, under-told stories. Before it was used as a gaol by the colonists and razed for a fort, the island was a natural jewel in the harbour. Rising out of the deep water, it was a tall, interesting knob of grey rock, dotted with twisted trees and shrubs. It was an important place for Eora women, those first fishers of Sydney Harbour, who must have possessed a whole other rich bank of knowledge about tides, and the creatures who swam in their rising and falling.
At the tide room, measurements are now taken electronically and read remotely, but alongside the new device are two old machines still in working order. One uses a system where a float is attached by a rod to a pen, which is poised over a turning drum loaded with chart paper. With the spidery finger of the pen, the tide draws itself.
I think some clever artist should make an artwork employing the same principle. Let the stretching sea paint itself, or make music. I’d like to hear the harmonic dictation of tides.
•
It’s still pleasant and sunny in this last gilded hour of the afternoon, but we’ve been on the water in our little boat for many hours and the making tide has now delivered enough water for us to go home.
I pick up a crab line to reel it in but it’s heavy with something on it, something much bigger than a crab. Maybe a flattie. Rog gets the landing net ready but soon we can see the form of something we probably won’t want in the boat. It’s like a stingray, but neither of us has seen one of this type before. It’s about 45 centimetres long with two flat lobes of fins beside a short tail. The orange colour of its skin is strange, and the texture rubbery, like an old wetsuit—not the usual sandpaper of a ray. I manage to flip it over and hold it against the gunwale of the boat, exposing its white underbelly and crescent mouth. Luckily the hook comes out easily and the fish slips back into the water, vanishing quickly.
Later, when we looked it up in my sea fishes book, we found out it was a numbfish. Initially the name made sense—as something to do with the rubbery skin. But as I read on, sharing the information with Rog, it soon became apparent the skin had nothing to do with it. The numbfish is capable of delivering an electric shock of more than 200 volts. That’s roughly the equivalent of house power. Fishermen have reported excruciating pain and temporary paralysis of limbs when shocked.
I wished I’d looked at it longer, even though I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was not to have paid a nasty price for the limited viewing I had.
Numbfish have large expandable mouths. They send a charge out into the water to shock their prey as it passes, then quickly eat it whole. Their usual diet is crabs, fish and worms, but small penguins and even rats have been found in their stomachs. Shocks from numbfish washed up on beaches have been known to travel through wet sand, and poking them with a wet stick is also ill advised. Another common name for the numbfish is the coffin ray.
We call it quits and I drop Rog off at the wharf so he can drive the car around to our home shore while I motor on to meet him there. It’s well past six o’clock. We’ve been out on the water in the little old Squid for over five hours. We’re thirsty, and stiff from sitting, but in all that time we weren’t bored for a minute. We load the outboard, the bathyscope and everything else into the car to transport it the short distance home. I tie the Squid off on a tree root at the bank and leave it to bob on the nearly high water.
•
When Rog leaves two days later, I sit at the table in the long verandah room of the holiday house, surrounded by my marine books. The house is quiet. The flurry of activity is over. All our talk, the science, the things we saw, bump like flotsam around me. I wait, letting everything sink and settle, to see if some plain things can be said as a result of our expedition.
We paid careful attention to the tidal changes in the estuary, and new parts of our place open
ed up to us as a consequence; we saw things that made us love it all the more. But overarching that, I think it’s the ‘action’ of nature which has struck me most forcefully, and as a fresh insight. Without favour and, mercifully, without prejudice, the elastic embrace of nature opens and closes around us all the time. In every locality, even in urban settings where nature struggles on, there’s a network of animation with its own rhythms happening right under our noses, to which we’re largely oblivious. Few of us rely on that kind of physical awareness anymore to get by on a practical level, but I count it as a lost competency and, further, an eroding factor in the quality of our lives.
Being more attuned to the rich functioning of my surroundings these past few days, I have felt as if I’ve been living properly in the world for the first time, and an integral part of that has been the human element we’ve brought to it—the family memories, facts, history, culture. It’s this layered knowledge, combined with alert attention, which gives the everyday places we inhabit their true dimensionality, which switches them on, turning them fully alive.
I think, for example, of Galileo’s moon and all I have learnt of it this past while. From now on, when I’m in the city taking the garbage out to the bins after dinner, I will pause for a moment to search for it in the night sky. I will remember the number of hours and minutes that make up a lunar day; or estimate the strength of its pull on the inlet and see, in my mind’s eye, the corresponding look of the evening shore; or I might imagine Aboriginal women paddling their nowies under its light, little fires burning brightly in the slim vessels; I will remember the moon as Milton’s great ornament and then my rivers of fish, adding a coffin ray to the list. I will look at the grey craters where man has stood and recall the martyr who first drew them.
All of this knowledge quickens the world for me and connects me to the others who share it. And I, in turn, am vivified.
This is belonging.
If we knew our planet’s stories as ours, if we twitched to its shifting and sighing, it would hurt us to do it harm.
•
To continue the process of mental sorting, I load the photos I took on our expedition onto my computer. Put them in a folder marked Low Tide 2016. Me clowning around in the kitchen at home with the bathyscope; Fort Denison and the tide room. Lots of shots of the seagrass meadow in the corner at Rileys: green straps curving over beneath the thin, butane reflection of sky. Rog—wearing a long-sleeved shirt and soft, old cotton trousers rolled up—sitting on the little seat in the bow of the boat, leaning over with the bathyscope. Then a sequence of him turning to me and reeling back with a roar of laughter so hearty it includes a clichéd slap on the knee. I don’t recall what was said. I wish I did. In the next frame he returns his attention to the bathyscope and the grasses. So much going on in a single minute, each of those frames 3.05 pm, 3.05 pm, 3.05 pm, 3.05 pm.
At 3.05 pm, a minute I don’t even remember, we could not be happier.
I play the sequence over and over. The luckiness of it, the transience of it. It’s mesmerising. In all the rest of our lives, if that was the happiest minute each of us lived, we could not reasonably be disappointed.
With a surge that in its own way is deep and tidal, emotion constricts my throat. There must come the day when only one of us remains to look at these pictures. If it is me, they will undo me.
I ring Rog up that evening and I tell him, ‘You wouldn’t believe what I’ve found out about those grasses.’
‘That’s so good,’ he says, approving of the impulse to study that subject too. ‘Because remember how that was our best? That was the thing we loved the best?’
It was.
If there is one thing I have discovered for sure from my low tide studies, it is that what is in plain sight is often the most mysterious and astonishing.
I put the phone down.
3.05 pm.
3.05 pm.
3.05 pm.
In those photos, in a garden of ribbon grass—at low tide—I am shocked to find out how much I love my brother.
•
A few weeks later it’s Roger’s birthday. In a large yellow envelope I send him a half-dried strand of ribbon weed, Posidonia australis, an identifying characteristic of which is its rounded tip, perfect, like a guitarist’s fingernail. Another thing I’d never noticed before.
On the back of the otherwise empty envelope, I write, This is your birthday card.
He’ll understand.
He’ll like it.
This marvel of ours.
Amateur Hour at the Broken Heart Welding Shop
I’ve always been attracted to stories of enthusiastic amateurs, self-taught eccentrics with an inexplicable keenness for a chosen field. What I didn’t realise until recently is that’s because I’m one. I don’t know why I’ve been so slow on the uptake, or what finally brought it home, but I readily admit to it now. Notwithstanding certain drawbacks built into the condition, my amateur rank is even a mild source of pride, because it’s long been my belief that there’s a niche usefulness in the barminess of amateur thinking which contributes to the enrichment of humankind. At the very least, its half-baked notions entertain and its hopefulness serves to encourage others. Though more often than not the amateur fails to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, by example they declare that to try and try again is a stimulating pleasure, and (almost) enough reward in itself. With the nobility of a peasant, the amateur persists.
My grandfather was a first-class amateur.
You wouldn’t think of amateurism as genetic, but now I’ve reassessed myself, nothing else explains the gentle brand of crackpotdom we share: I didn’t see him very often after I turned seven, and he died when I was twelve, so nurture can hardly be the cause.
While I am an amateur writer, my grandfather was an amateur engineer. Metalwork was his chief love, but he was versatile. At his eightieth birthday party he said in a speech (I have a typed copy of it, and in his short sentences his German accent is somehow embedded): ‘I am still making new ideas and tools. I am still not a millionaire. Well, who wants to be?’
Cheerfully he told his guests, ‘If anyone is dissatisfied I came into their life, don’t blame me, blame the man in the moon, who controlled my destiny.’
As a seventeen year old, running away for the second time in his short life, he tried to stow away on a ship bound for New York but forgot to factor in the tide. Missing his chance to sneak onboard, he eventually ended up in Australia two years later.
A certain amount of bungling is the hallmark of amateurs. By necessity they follow their own instincts, often with mixed consequences. But Pa’s amateurism was not voluntary like mine. It was forced on him by his father, who perversely refused to let him train as an engineer, even when there was easy means. While it may not have been much of a comfort to Pa, the recompense for having to scrape together his own knowledge was that he was never bound by professional orthodoxies, which might have cramped his thinking later. Can a thing be done? The amateur does not know, so proceeds anyway. This is a kind of freedom that once known is hard to trade. And after his miserable upbringing, freedom must have meant everything to Pa.
•
In the town of Niederlahnstein on the banks of the Rhine, the family ran a drapery business. As the eldest of eleven children, Pa was expected to help his mother in the shop before and after school, and often long into the night: the shop stayed open until 11 pm. Mornings and evenings he also looked after the harnessing and stabling of his father’s horse, kept for deliveries. Strict Catholics, they attended mass daily. Only at dusk on Sundays, after helping his father with unpacking goods and pricing, was he allowed out to play, running through the streets to find his mates who had been on the loose for hours.
On leaving school at fourteen, Pa pleaded with his father to let him become an engineer. He was sent to commercial school for a year instead to learn office and bookkeeping skills, which would be useful in future for the shop. He came top of the class. A job was found for
him as a clerk in a factory office, but he was always in trouble for never being at his desk. Fascinated by the machinery and manufacturing processes, he haunted the factory floor. When not at work he was still expected to continue his shop duties. Small wonder he decided to run away. With a friend, he slipped off to the railway station one Sunday when everyone else was in church. In Luxembourg, then Paris, Pa’s enterprising efforts to find a job came to nothing. In the City of Lights he was duped out of his belongings and the last of his money. After much privation, a charity helped him return home.
What to do with this wilful son? He implored his parents to let him work for an uncle who owned an engineering business. The perfect solution, you would think. Instead he was sent away to another uncle who was a baker. It’s a move that seems deliberately mean, intended purely as punishment. As a grown man Pa was quietly spoken and warm-natured, with an impish sense of humour, and would have been so as a boy. Why would a parent wish to break such a child, who should have been a source of pride?
At the bakery in a town 200 kilometres from home, Pa’s ten-hour day started just after midnight. He finished at lunchtime but before going to bed made the dough and rebuilt the fire in the oven for the next night’s baking. On Sunday mornings they only worked for four hours, but then there was church, after which he was required to follow his uncle into town to watch him play billiards.
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