Too Close to the Wind

by Richard Attree

  There’s plenty of space on Nine Mile Beach. We weren’t just at the end of the road, we were at the edge of the continent—next stop: Antarctica. We launched into that empty space like astronauts and soon we were weightless, escaping gravity as we floated high above the waves and carved vertical turns under translucent lips.

  The effects of the Plant began to kick in after about twenty minutes, but it took at least an hour before we were peaking. It’s difficult to be precise about timings, or to be objective about the events of that day, to be honest. All I can do is describe what I was experiencing, what I thought I saw, and then step back and tell you what might have really happened. I’ll give you my best shot at an objective account of an intensely subjective experience, as Huxley tried to do when describing his mescaline trip in ‘The Doors’.

  Taking a psychedelic substance is like taking a detour down a scenic route that isn’t on the map. Normal life is about using the motorway to get from A to B efficiently, but sometimes as you’re cruising along in fifth gear you catch a glimpse of an intriguing little lane snaking off into the hills and you find yourself wondering what is out of sight around the bend. That morning Robo and I had chosen to step off the well-trodden highway and take an excursion into the unknown.

  Unlike alcohol or cannabis, the Plant neither impaired nor enhanced our windsurfing, just allowed us to come at it from a different angle. I didn’t feel intoxicated, nor did it make me braver or more foolhardy, it was more like I was able to use parts of my brain that weren’t normally involved.

  Time jumps. The first indication that something unusual’s happening is when I find myself right in the pocket of a large wave, wondering how on earth I got there. Somehow I’ve managed to link a forward loop straight into a wave-ride. Objectively, I know this isn’t possible, but now isn’t the time to worry about it.

  I discover that I can use my appreciation of music to time my moves in a rhythmic dance that’s also a mathematical equation. I can draw lines on a wave that are both guided by visual aesthetic (how would this look if it was a drawing?) and determined by geometric rules (the sum of these angles should be one twenty degrees for a perfect shape). I can harness the creativity we use to write poetry to order spatial awareness—if I can choose the right words to describe spinning through a loop, then I can land the jump perfectly.

  Subjectively, this is how it all felt at the time. Objectively, we were probably both just going for our usual moves, but timing them differently and linking them in unusual ways.

  Time jumps. I see Robo way outside, suspended upside down above massive swells at the apex of a huge back loop, framed against a cloudless sky. A shutter clicks in my mind’s camera and I carry this image of him with me to this day. As he reaches the apex of his jump and I capture this memorable mental image, I gybe onto the same set of waves, turn back towards the beach, and ride a mast-high wall of water all the way to the inside.

  That wave-ride is as close to perfection as I’ve come. Turn after turn (I lose count), each one tighter, more vertical, more radical than the last. Athletes sometimes talk about being ‘in the zone’ or ‘feeling the flow’, and board-riders of all kinds (surfers, snowboarders, skateboarders) often say that when they’re performing at their best they’re ‘one with the board’, like it’s ‘part of their body’ ... but these are all inadequate descriptions of that wave in Esperance. I see all the possible lines I can draw, with absolute clarity, as if I’m watching myself ride the wave in a high definition slow-mo video, shot at hundreds of frames per second, with time to analyse each frame and choose my line.

  I finish the ride in a state of bliss and head back out expecting to find Robo riding in on an equally perfect wave. I’m preparing to let rip with an ecstatic shout when we cross, but there’s no sign of him. At first I think perhaps he’s seen a better peak further down the beach and gone exploring ... but as the minutes pass with no sign of his sail in the distance I begin to suspect something’s gone wrong.

  It takes a while longer before panic has me in its grip, and then I’m shouting his name, screaming it, shaking violently now. No! This can’t be happening! He can’t have just vanished. This can’t be real—it must be the drug fooling me somehow. Maybe he’s playing games with me. Yes, that’s it. He’s back on the beach, a tinny in his hand, having a laugh.

  I race back to the beach. Throw my equipment in a heap. Run up the sand to the van. Look inside, panting like a dog. He’s not there.

  Now I’m howling like a dingo. No! This can’t be happening!

  I spend the rest of the day sailing geometric search patterns and roaming the beach. Time passes, but instead of flowing past like a river it jumps in discrete steps, like bad edits, or a film with missing footage. I’m losing the plot.

  Sometimes I glimpse a fleck of colour on the horizon … the sun glints, as if from a sail … and I think it’s him. I shout his name and watch the shout splinter into pieces, echoes spreading out over the water: Rob-bo-o-o-o … They bounce back at me in reverse: o-o-o-ob-boR …

  I’m disorientated, hallucinating, plagued by ever more horrific visions: flashbacks to the night I took the Plant with Nicole, and more disturbingly, to the dream I had while drifting around the Atlantic ...

  Time jumps. I’m surrounded by sharks with human features, Great Whites in grey suits, giant crayfish with enormous claws. A prehistoric bird with Alison’s face dives out of the sky and ferociously attacks my eyes.

  I fight off these monsters, knowing them to be products of my addled brain, but I can’t escape the awful reality of Robo’s disappearance. It gets worse as the effects of the Plant wear off and the hallucinations are replaced by overwhelming emotions: hopelessness, despair, guilt.

  I search all day, but eventually, exhausted, I realise he’s simply vanished, disappeared into that vast empty space, and he isn’t coming back.

  That night I sat on the desolate beach, my head in my hands, wondering what to do. As the traces of the Plant left my bloodstream and I came down from the trip, I was overcome with loss. Emotions overwhelmed me, as they had when Nicole vanished, and left no space for rational thought.

  Robo had disappeared from my life just when I’d repaired our bond. I loved him, my brother-in-arms, as I’d loved Nicole, my only other soulmate.

  R.I.P. brother. At least you died doing what you love.

  Love and loss—once again—two sides of the same coin?

  13

  The Bush Of Ghosts

  As the sun rose at the edge of the continent I walked the length of Nine Mile Beach looking for Robo’s equipment, or his body. I felt numb, drained. All the emotion had been sucked out of me, leaving me empty, and I’d accepted that emptiness. Now I understood the Master’s message: “let go of your ego completely”. Tragically, it had taken Robo’s death to show me what he meant.

  Perfect sets were still rolling in. Wave after wave peaked, then crashed onto the beach, unloading its energy spectacularly. People are like waves: energy on the move, in transit between birth and death. One second there’s energy, and the next it’s gone. The energy that was Robo had moved on, just as it does when a wave breaks, and I had accepted it.

  That beach is so vast, so empty, so primal. I felt like a ghost drifting through the dawn, lost in limbo, in transit again. I saw nobody and I never found Robo’s body. It was several days before it washed up down the coast and I was long gone by then.

  The most likely explanation is that his life ended shortly after I captured that mental image of him midway through a back loop, about half a mile out to sea. My guess is he’d become disoriented in mid-air and fell from the sky—like Icarus when his wings melted. He must have landed the loop all wrong, smashed his head on his board, knocked himself out and drowned. The rip current would have taken his body out to sea, just as it did when I broke my mast-foot off the coast of Tenerife.

  With hindsight, perhaps I could have saved him. If I’d been there next to him, instead of taking that wave back to the beach, I w
ould have seen it happen, watched him screw up the loop, witnessed him smash his head, lifted his unconscious body onto to his board, given him mouth-to-mouth ...

  With hindsight, April Fool’s Day had been another catalogue of errors. It was a mistake to combine the altered consciousness induced by the Plant with the adrenaline-high windsurfing naturally produces—a recipe for disaster, in fact. With hindsight, it was also a mistake to ignore Dr Langer’s warning about the dangers of taking too much of the stuff. But as the cliché goes: ‘hindsight is better than foresight’ and as someone else once said: ‘Before, you are wise. After, you are wise. In between, you are otherwise.’

  We’d been fools to rush in where angels feared to tread. The ocean always punishes those who don’t respect her … but I felt no guilt. It had all been sucked out of me, leaving just egoless acceptance of these errors, and anyway: feeling guilty wouldn’t bring my brother-in-arms back.

  I tied my board to the van’s roof-rack and drove north. I was a ghost on the run again, but it was different this time. I was different. Robo’s death had changed me.

  We drove, my board and I, straight past Perth, the university, Alison, aiming for the horizon. Mile after mile of black tarmac splitting the red desert, hour after hour of bleak nothingness.

  Well, not quite. We made a brief detour into my town and drove slowly down the main street. As we passed the pub I caught a glimpse of my dad sitting outside with his mates, drinking sullenly. They didn’t see me. Nobody saw me—I was a ghost, after all.

  Then we rejoined the highway and didn’t leave it again until the Pinnacles. I had to stop somewhere—to gather my thoughts, to sleep, and it was a good place to do it.

  The Pinnacles are natural sculptures, formed millions of years ago from limestone, sitting in the desert like chess pieces in a game played by giants. The landscape is lunar, or perhaps Martian. It reminded me of the volcanic crater at the centre of Tenerife. As an outsider, I’m attracted to these desolate spaces and the solitude you can find in them.

  I arrived at dusk, after the tourists had left, and I felt at peace there. Losing Nicole, and then Robo, had ripped out my ego, guilt, my dependence on society and its rules, perhaps even my fear of death. I’d looked into the abyss and now I was beginning to understand how the Master and his group were trying to live.

  This ancient place reminded me of what I had to do next—find Mandu, the tribal elder. I’d done my best to put things right with my past and I’d moved on. “You will know when the time is right ...” he’d told me, “ ... and you will know where to find me then.”

  I left at dawn, before the tourists arrived. As the sun rose behind the Pinnacles it bathed everything in red light and cast eerie shadows on the desert floor. For a few perfect moments I watched emus, galahs and kangaroos wander around the weathered rock spires. Then I rejoined the highway and drove north, towards the horizon.

  When I stopped for fuel at a gas station with wi-fi I sent a message to Alison, explaining what had happened in Esperance, but omitting any reference to the Plant. It was simpler that way. All she needed to know was that Robo had died doing what he loved—a tragic accident, in powerful waves, at a notoriously remote beach-break. I told her that I loved him like a brother and I was devastated. Now I had to ‘go bush’ for a while and sort my head out.

  Fourteen hours later I arrived at the pub where we’d heard about Mandu’s tribal land. It was a quiet night and it looked like they’d be closing early. As before, I wasn’t exactly welcomed, but I bought a round for the few blackfellas in there and the landlord was happy for me to overnight in the car park. Luckily, I recognised one of the locals—the bloke who’d called me a “domino dingo”. He asked me what I was doing back there so late in the season:

  “You too late, mate. The Wind-Doctor been finished for a long time. We ain’t seen none of you surf-boys up here for weeks.”

  I told him I wasn’t there for windsurfing. I’d been thinking about what he’d said about the tribal lands up in the Purnululu national park—what was growing there, how the tribe needed to organise to stop the White Man grabbing their land, and how maybe I could help. Did he know where I could find Mandu?

  “No worries mate, I’ll point ya in the right direction. Them folk need all the help they can get or else their life up there is history.”

  He told me that Mandu’s tribe were Karjaganujaru people. Some of the time they were nomadic, but they had a base near some caves in the Bungle Bungle hills, or ‘Billingjal’ as the Karjaganujaru called them (meaning: ‘sand falling away’).

  He drew me a map on a beer mat. It looked a bit sketchy—a long way further north on the Great Northern Highway, then a series of tracks heading east with the crossroads marked by a big cactus or some roo bones, followed by a hike into the desert to some red rocks with caves ... that kind of thing. He wished me luck and advised me to stock up on water, food, and fuel or else as he put it: “You’ll end up a dead dingo out there!”

  He drank up, turned to leave, and then paused.

  “By the way, where’s yer mate? The white bloke that was with ya last time?”

  “I left him down South, in Esperance.”

  “Shame. Y’could’ve done with ‘im in the Bungle Bungles. Ain’t nobody out there if it all goes pear-shaped.”

  “Yep” I agreed, “I’ll miss him.”

  The next morning I was on the road again as the sun rose. I was starting to enjoy these early starts. The highway was empty and the light was cool and soft before the ferociously harsh sun took over.

  I stopped at the next town (eighty kilometres up the road!), stocked up on provisions, and logged on to Facebook to find a series of increasingly hysterical messages from Alison. They culminated in threats to find me, have me arrested, send a hit man after me ...

  I sent her a brief reply saying I was about to ‘go bush’ and I didn’t know when I’d be able to connect again. I’d contact her when I rejoined civilisation. In the meantime, she should report Robo’s death to the police and tell them I was a missing person. It was up to her what she did after that.

  I rejoined the highway and resumed my epic journey up the western seaboard. It was late when I reached Spring Creek Track—the start of my off-road, off-grid adventure, so I parked-up and waited for it to get light again.

  At first light I turned off the highway and began to navigate the track. It was a stressful experience, even for a gung-ho explorer like myself. I was breaking all sorts of rules: the route was only supposed to be accessible by proper 4WD vehicles, and then only in the dry season—April to December. It was early April and I was attempting it in my decrepit old camper-van.

  It took all day, but somehow we made it up the track to a makeshift camp at the trailhead. Any further progress would have to be on foot, so I joined the few vehicles that were parked up there for the night.

  As usual, I was awake as the first rays of dawn were dancing over the desert. I locked my board in the van, wondering when I’d see her again, and packed a few things into a rucksack. For some reason I brought Nicole’s painting with me, rolled up in a piece of old sailcloth and strapped to my backpack. Perhaps I thought it might somehow protect me, but if I perished out in the desert at least it would be with a memento of a happier period in my life.

  I looked at my beermat map and set out on what I hoped was the correct path. Ahead of me were the Bungle Bungles—strange beehive-shaped towers made of sandstone, with orange and grey stripes caused by differences in the layers of rock. The combined effects of wind from the Tanami Desert and rainfall over millions of years have shaped the domes into a surreal, alien landscape. At its heart is the eroded remnant of an ancient meteorite crater. I was heading for some caves there.

  It took me two days to locate Mandu’s camp. Wandering around those primaeval hills was cathartic. I had no idea if I was following the right path, but I wasn’t worried. I loved tramping through the empty landscape without seeing a soul, a ghost in the ‘Bush of Ghosts’. At night t
he sky was a vast black dome studded with stars—the ultimate planetarium. The silence was total, and I was at peace.

  In the end, I stumbled across the camp by chance. Late in the afternoon on the second day I came round a corner above a canyon and there they were below me. The tribe was living in some caves around an oasis, in a remarkably picturesque setting. It looked like a brochure shot for a tropical paradise. There was a small lake, with palm trees growing around it and shacks constructed from the fronds. Sounds and smells drifted up to me: children, dogs, a didgeridoo, bongos, the aroma of meat smoked over a wood fire ... It was all rather reminiscent of Nicole’s pueblo in the Dominican jungle, and I felt at home already.

  Nobody seemed bothered as I wandered into the camp. Most of them smiled and a few even waved hello. I doubted they saw many visitors out there, so it was an extraordinarily warm welcome. A familiar old man loped out of one of the huts, moving with lithe agility, and greeted me:

  “G’day Nick. We’ve been expectin ya.”

  He smiled at my astonished expression—the same radiant smile that had lit up the library. It had been six months, and three thousand kilometres since our brief meeting, but here he was, in the middle of nowhere, treating me like an old mate who’d just stepped outside for a smoke.

  I shook his hand and returned his greeting:

  “G’day Mandu. You’re not an easy man to find. I hope the time is right?”