by Matt J. Pike
The plan was to head for Henley Beach, with a couple of slight detours – one to the Brickworks Markets just west of the city, then the Coles at Findon, just over halfway to our goal of the beach. I use the term beach as historical habit. Then we’d camp down for the night (hopefully fish for dinner) and track west along the coast for a kilometre or two in the morning, scouting as many potential fishing and stable sea access points as we could find. After lunch we’d head home via Mile End, where there were a couple more potential shops, and make our return with some good intell and, hopefully, some good food.
We’ve packed enough supplies for a few days in case something happens to us, or Phoenix, along the way and we have to leg-it home. We definitely have to think about worst-case scenarios out there; we are going seriously off grid – no way to get in touch with anyone if things go pear-shaped.
It’s hard to mentally prep for as well. This was absolute uncharted territory in every sense. Chances are we’d be the first humans to cover this terrain since rock night. That thought alone is really daunting – at one level this place was a giant tomb housing the memories and remains of hundreds of thousands of people.
We also knew we’d be devoid of landmarks to navigate by. The tsunami was huge as it passed over those lands and anything standing above the flat grey/brown ash wasteland would be a bonus. The closest experience I had had, which I shared with Ye-jun, Kelly and Nate, was the time I tried to leave Adelaide via the hills. While that wasn’t tsunami damaged area, it was blastwave affected and caked in over a metre of ash for good measure. It was just a lunaresque nothingness. Potentially similar conditions awaited. It changes everything about how you find your way – no visible roads, lights or signs, no landmarks, none of the signals your mind is wired to navigate by.
It was great to have a little insight to share with the others, but it also helped shape my thinking about what lay ahead. We made a map of the lands using a couple of street directories and some sticky tape. We had a compass to guide us and also had a bunch of flag markers made up. We had about 100 yellow ones, which we’d use to breadcrumb our trail and estimate our distance, and 25 red ones, which we’d use to mark points of interest for future treks.
The feeling as we headed off was amazing. Now, Ye-jun, Kelly and I have done more runs in Phoenix that I could count during the last few months, but this was different. It was all the camaraderie we shared on a normal city food raid, multiplied by the scale and mission goals of the new adventure. Roll in the added dynamic of Nate’s excitement, given he’d hardly driven in Phoenix, let alone left the oval much, and the vibe was complete. Just buzzing.
We took off from the back side of the oval and crossed the golf course until we met up with the River Torrens in the west parklands. The river has reclaimed some presence through the ash as it followed west – it was a nice sight. Our pace was slow, but for a reason. Phoenix was about two and a half metres long and we used her length to estimate distance. While I steered and Nate held the compass, Ye-Jun and Kelly counted the Phoenix lengths travelled. While they both varied in their estimates slightly, it wasn’t much, and when they collectively decided they were at 80, we’d plant a flag – eighty represented 200m. We had 100 flags, which gave us 20km of breadcrumbs in the ash, enough for the trip to the beach and back. The flags themselves stuck out of the ash on their poles by a good half a metre, enough to stay visible for a long time.
The weird thing is, even with the weather conditions as good as they were, you had to really squint to see the second last flag as you planted the next one in. In truth, you (I) probably couldn’t see it and were just making it up. The point is, even in this weather, this ‘as good as it gets’ summer weather, on a cracking day (relatively) visibility is barely 400m.
So, while the breadcrumbs we were laying were great in a semi-practical way for the mission at hand, they also served another purpose. It wasn’t until we cleared the last of the dead and somewhat regenerating trees of the parklands that we realised how good a purpose that was. As soon as the coast became clear, so to speak, as soon as we had left the city proper and sat in Phoenix looking over the first (well, less than) 400m of suburbia that lay beyond, we realised exactly what we’d somewhat suspected.
The west was a wasteland. Utterly flattened. And we were sitting in the best spot to judge – west edge of the parklands, looking over what should have been the Coca-Cola factory, the brewery, the Channel 7 building, the Entertainment Centre – just about the tallest structures between the city and the coast. There was nothing, except for a few pieces of structural steel jutting out where the Entertainment Centre used to be, which looked like a creepy set of giant broken robot fingers reaching out from the ash. That aside, just a sea of grey/brown moguls and piles of ash.
I just pulled Phoenix to a stop for a minute or two and everyone sat and took the entire scene in. You could tell everyone was multiplying that damage out in their own mind, over the many kilometres north and south from that point, and the 10 kilometres west. Sure, for me, it looked like the wasteland beyond the hills, but this wasn’t beyond the hills, this was suburbia – miles and miles of suburbia. It was mums and dads and kids and... well, it was all too much.
No one spoke; no one could. I gave it as much time as seemed appropriate, then asked Ye-Jun and Kelly if they remembered the count. They nodded, I powered up Phoenix again and we moved on.
Still, creepy robot hand gave us a landmark beyond our flags – and an important one. It was the gateway to the west but it was also marking out the intersection at the top of Port Rd, which gave us a safe access point to cross the river and head to our first destination – the Brickworks Markets, pretty much due west from where we were.
Beyond the intersection, the river became more of a creek and it was barely showing itself above the ash surface. Definitely a potential hazard we stayed aware of.
Which brings me to the other ingenious part of the breadcrumbs. We had our map, we had our compass and we had the wasteland of the west we feared. One landmark, or is that handmark, no roads visible, no longer a visible river and no way of knowing where we were heading. Now, we could’ve just hovered westish until the ash became sea, found what we were looking for, prodded some rods in the water, found fish or not, then headed back. But, if back was one degree off from where we’d come, which in itself was one or two degrees off from where we intended, well, with visibility as it was we may well have missed the city on our return. And if our calculations were further off still, we could’ve ended up anywhere.
I mean, we would’ve found our way back from wherever, but you just can’t take risks like that. Besides, this wasn’t just about finding the shore, we had a goal along the way, and no chance in hell would we isolate the Brickwork Markets – our first stop – from the endless sameness around it, without breadcrumb distance markers, maps and a compass.
So, according to the map, we were 900m from the Brickworks, which was 22 degrees south of due west. So, point the compass, take it slowly, count the distance, drop the flags… within a few minutes we were there.
Along the way, nothing but ash and, every now and then, the occasional remnant of unknown building frame that stood in defiance. It was eerie.
When we did arrive, it was a case of good news and bad news, like most things in this world. The good news – we had another landmark, which confirmed we were at the Brickworks, which also confirmed our navigation system worked. The main feature of the markets was a giant brick chimney stack that must’ve stood 30-40m tall back in the day. What we were greeted by was a stump of the stack that stood head height above the ash surface.
Around the stumpy stack was nothing but moguls of ash. Now, in there somewhere might be some food. Maybe.
We were only at the start of our journey out west, but the sense of ferocity with which the tsunami waters deluged this part of the city is written all over every inch of the landscape. The water was fast, powerful and utterly destructive.
We all headed out on foot to
investigate the area, but it really wasn’t a potential food-finding mission at that point. It was just confirmation that all hell broke loose on this part of the world on a massive scale. The remains of whatever food there may have been, and the buildings they were housed in, could be buried beneath us, but could also be hundreds of metres, or even kilometres, from here, hiding under an unmarked mogul of ash.
There were no entry points to investigate further and no risks worth taking that would tell us more. We had a landmark, we had confirmation our navigation system worked… and that’s all the win we would have at the Brickworks. It just wasn’t worth our time and energy to explore further, and hopefully, we never get to a spot where we need to come back here with shovels and desperate hope.
Next stop was the Findon Shopping Centre 3km west, angling back 19 degrees to the north. I’m sure there’s a proper way to denote the direction, but so far we have a system that is working, so we’ll stay with it for now.
Well, when I say it works, there was no way of confirmation that we’d arrived at the Findon shops even with our calculations. In fact, not only did we not encounter any more recognisable landmarks, we barely saw any building debris as we headed further west. Just ash.
We parked Phoenix for a minute, but didn’t even bother getting out before deciding to move on.
From Findon it was just over 3km west, 23 degrees south to Henley Beach. The seemingly endless sea of ash in various shapes and patterns became harder to look at with each flag drop – a covering to the pulverised suburbia beneath. Totally eerie. We were cocooned in this bubble of visibility with a radius of about 400m in each direction. The same colour in every direction you looked, except up, but the sky was still dull and sickly. Oh, and the two yellow flags still visible in our wake.
We had no idea what we could be heading into. What would the sea look like, or the coast? All we knew was that, at some point, the front edge of this bubble would give way to something else, and whatever that something else looked like, it would involve water. So, despite the only hint of colour and interest in the landscape – the yellow flags – appearing behind Phoenix, it was all eyes ahead.
Given our painfully slow navigating approach, that part of the trip seemed to last forever. We didn’t even talk much, we all just waited – like it wasn’t eerie enough already!
Then, right as Ye-Jun made the call another flag was due, I spotted it. Sweet, sweet water!
Well, sweet is probably pretty far from a literal observation. I already knew it would taste anything but, and it had chameleoned (totally a word) its colour palette from the landscape and sky. It looked heavy and dead, but that didn’t matter in the moment. We could see the coast. Seeing the movement, seeing a totally new environment after months and months of nothing but ash, well, that alone was worth the journey west.
Not long after we had glimpsed it on the not-too-distant horizon, we started to smell it. Now, your nose can play tricks on you post-rock. You become somewhat immune to the general stank of the ash that’s constantly everywhere. Your mind just takes that segment of your smell sense and ignores its input after a while. With that in mind, this smelled to me and the others like pure 100 per cent ocean scent.
Surely it was a sign – it definitely had our anticipation at redline maximum. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I wanted to know something that bad.
After all our worst-case scenario theories about what we were going to confront near the shore – an infinity of ash merging slowly to sea water, an endless bog of floating debris, dangerous and difficult access points etc – we found the most beautiful surprise of all.
The last of the ash led to a downward slope – 10 metres, maybe more. At the bottom of that slope – beach. Actual beach! Sand; golden sand. We roared and cheered and hugged in the middle of our bubble. It was just an uncontrolled outpouring of emotion. Man, I emotioned so hard I cried, I really did. It’s not often you get to be in a moment in life that you absolutely know you’ll remember ’til your last breath. This was that moment.
At some point, Nate jumped out of Phoenix to go and get the fishing gear. Ye-Jun followed seconds later but made a beeline for the slope and started his descent. Kelly and I looked at each other and followed straight after him. Nate soon dropped the idea of getting his gear and chased after us.
The slope itself was a three-layered cake of what’s happened to our world. The first layer – ash – no surprise there. It poured into the second layer, a cross section of rubble and remains that had probably been pushed miles inland before being dragged back to its final resting place, metres from being claimed by the sea. You couldn’t even make much out, just general layers of broken building stuff, mostly. The third layer was the dunes that eased onto the beach. Three tiers – one from a life before, one from a life after, all separated by a messy reminder of the moment all life changed forever.
I don’t think anyone missed the symbolism as they made their descent. I sure didn’t.
But it was Ye-Jun, who was first to make his way to the beach, who noted the biggest symbolism of all.
“Mother Nature’s fighting back,” he said, as picked up two handfuls of sand and let the granules flow through his fingers. Then he laughed to the skies.
Me and the others were soon doing the same thing. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to capture the sensation of having that gritty sand run over my hands – not in words. It was perfection.
When you have spent every day for as long as you dare to remember looking at, dealing with, cleaning, avoiding, moving and cursing ash – to see and feel an entirely different environment is, well, everything.
I didn’t even like sand that much pre-rock – it was annoying, required a shower every time you interacted with it and found its way into crevasses of your body that no polite substance should.
But this was perfection.
And while perfection was running through my fingers, I couldn’t help but think on Ye-Jun’s words and how right they were. Mother Nature was fighting back. That rock, and its aftermath, had just about taken everything from this world that made it tick – weather patterns, the sun, most of the warmth – but it didn’t take the moon. The moon powered the tides and those tides had been faithfully doing their thing, and over time it cleaned up the beach.
Just like the colour was back at the oval, colour had returned to the beach. I knew at that moment, if we could join forces, we could do anything.
It wasn’t long before the light surf called us to our real destination. Shoes were removed, pants rolled up to the knees and in we went.
First the negative – it was so, so cold. Just nasty, turn your feet blue, cold. I would like to say it didn’t matter, given the experience and circumstances, but I am clearly softer than I want to be, because it was nasty.
Softness and cold aside, it was more amazing than the sand. Standing in that water, looking out to a view that did not contain one skerrick of ash, hearing the waves pour onto the beach, and smelling that sea salt smell... wow!
And that smell just went straight up my nose, engaging parts of my brain that hadn’t been touched in months and bringing back feelings and memories of so many beach moments growing up – playing cricket with Jason, Mum and Dad as a kid, hanging with the boys in the summer leading up to rock night, talking to girls, getting sunburnt in all those spots you missed with sunscreen on your back because you refused to let your friends help with the application. All of them just came back to me in a series of crystal clear moments of beautiful sadness.
Until Kelly splashed me. I returned the favour then chased her after she screamed and ran. Never scream and run – worst move ever. Soon Ye-jun and Nate joined in and the four of us became saturated, frozen, laughing messes.
After stupidly and needlessly exhausting ourselves for a few minutes... and potentially scaring away whatever fish there were or weren’t beneath us, we decided it was time to get down to business. We made the trip back up to Phoenix, dried off and changed clothes and g
rabbed the fishing gear.
Once down at beach level again, we decided to explore up and down the shore a few hundred metres either way to see what we could before committing to a spot to throw in the line. It was Nate’s call, and given Nate couldn’t explain exactly what he was looking for until he’d seen it, and given the rest of us had no idea about fishing, we just went ahead with the plan.
And thankfully we did. We’d only walked north for about three minutes when another landmark came into view. Two lines of broken pylons, well, the seven that still remained, extending back from the beach out to sea. It was, just had to be, Henley Beach jetty.
I screamed a whoo-hooo as loud as my lungs would let me then we all just started running towards it. Not only was it another landmark, but a sign that our navigating system had got us to within about 300m of our target destination, all the way from the Brickworks, with a zigzag detour via Findon! Not bad with a compass, some flags and 400m visibility.
To complete the awesome, Nate declared it our fishing spot.
It took a few minutes to set everything up. The buzz of win after win in the minutes leading up to that spot started to change into a nervous anticipation. We didn’t really talk about it, just followed Nate’s lead in getting the gear out and ready, but each of us knew the results of this moment would profoundly change our future. The difference between finding a new and plentiful food source and, well, not, were too extreme to fully contemplate, so instead we focused on the little things – listening to Nate’s guidance as we set up each rod’s rig, as well as the crab nets.
We had bones and gizzards from a duck carcass to bait the crab net, and Nate had made a couple of mixtures for the fishing bait from a couple of tins of tuna and some random scraps he could find. I wondered what was going through his mind at that moment. Sure we were all in the same boat on this one, but he had put his hand up as an expert and now, this was his moment.