The greatness of the sea

The innocent ripples of the edge of the ocean. From here, it just gets deeper off into the horizon.

I have spent a lot of time by the ocean in the past year. Sometimes I am on a beach and often on a beach on an island, but as I sit here now, I am on a breach looking at an island. And I ponder: what is it that makes us like islands so much? I mean, although I am contentedly sitting here with all my camping gear and my four-wheel drive on a lovely beach, why do I feel the almost overwhelming urge to swim over? Am I trying to get away from being away? To be on an island is to be self-sufficient and also it is to escape from the world.

It is to have an existence where your world is very small. As if by some magic alchemy, the water creates a barrier over which the problems, stresses and distractions of the rest of the world cannot pass.

I stared at the sea yesterday when the tide was out. Here, the slope is so gradual that at low tide, the water is nearly half a kilometer out from high tide. Out nearly at the farthest boundary of my world was a lone pair of tire tracks that seemed to disappear into the calm waters. It gave me a crazy thought: what if I drove down into the water and kept driving until my car got stuck and then watched the waves come in and take it, washing the sand from under it as it slowly sank into unrecoverability. The thought made me shudder.

Driving the Camel on the beach on Fraser Island. We must use a tide chart to avoid the high water taking our car!

The sea draws me and terrifies me. I have floated on it with a snorkel in my mouth and a mask on my face and look at the pretty fish and coral. I have strapped tanks of precious air to my back and gone down a tiny fraction of the sea’s depth. I have waited for it to recede to collect worn pieces of glass and I have driven on the beach soon to be reclaimed by the water.
But I am not under any false illusions: if I were put out into the sea without any of my life-giving pieces of technology, I would not last very long. None of us would.

So maybe there is a connection between the sea’s ability to mute problems by passing over it. Maybe the petty fears of the day-to-day can not begin to compete with the total power of the deep water for humans. And over it we pass, cleansed by it’s magic.

And the sea will reclaim all. This wreck on the beach at Fraser Island, Australia was once a luxury steamer.

My 15 minutes in the sun

Averaging the sun exposure by spending an hour upside down.

When I was a kid and fifteen minutes felt like the day-after-never from now, I was pretty spotty in my sunscreen usage. It’s not that my parents or I were particularly negligent, but almost no one thought that the warming rays of the sun were anything but bliss. We would go to the ocean on vacation and it was nearly a foregone conclusion that everyone would end up with a nice, toasty sunburn with the peeling skin to be a much awaited conclusion to the suffering.
Now, just open any womens’ (or, increasingly, mens’) magazine and you might be forgiven for thinking that ‘sun damage’ is the world’s worst problem since nuclear weapon proliferation. There is SPF 70 chapstick, an unexaggerated five types of sunscreen appropriate to wear at any given moment, and probably even sun-blocking underarm deodorant. Slip, slop, slap became obsess, obsess, obsess and now I am afraid to be at the beach!

Our friends hunt for 6 foot long sandworms with these discarded shark carcasses. But, safety first! Remember to wear your long pants, long sleeves, wide brim hats or balaclavas and half gloves!

This brings me to my main point. I don’t know what to do at the ocean anymore. I am in Australia, a country with what seems like ten miles of beach per citizen, and so this dilemma is not exactly a trivial matter. A day’s group discussions might be titled something like: “do we eat breakfast at our beachside campsite now, or after surfing?”

Seriously, I am at the beach a lot. The other day I decided that since I have been living on the beach for so many months, I can’t properly say ‘I am from the US’ for now. Like a haiku that defined a life in it’s simple essence, I would have to say: I am from the beach, I skip the tides. I watch to sea, I eat the sand.

But this little slice of zen goes nowhere in addressing how often reapplications of ULTRA DEFENCE WATEPROOF SPF 40 sunblock should occur. And just how paranoid should I be about the risks to an unprotected arm experiencing withering blasts of UVB radiation while walking to the toilet?

In short: What do we do at the beach now?

Among other things, we sometimes use beach junk to erect shade structures.

We arrive at the beach and instead of bouncing from the seat and running headlong into the pounding surf with just my boardshorts, I have to consider, plan and pack mainly keeping in mind the sun. Is there a free tree to go under for shade, or do I need to bring an umbrella? Do I need waterproof sunscreen, or do I use the cheaper stuff that comes off in the water? And should I put that sunblock on here and further delay the beckoning beach, or be exposed unprotected for ten minutes to the sun, god forbid.

I want to go body boarding, but I have to think, ‘has it been at least fifteen minutes since I put on my sunblock yet?’ And if I do go into the water, how long should I stay in until I scamper back to the shade to re-apply? After all, everyone knows that waterproof sunblock never is, right?

Only YOU can prevent forehead wrinkles. Paula is maximizing the sun-protective benefits of these UV-blocking sunglasses.

The Lemur Accord

One of the members of the "Star Earth Sanctuary" and her teepee.

“Yeah, just google the Lima Accords. Yeah, L-I-M-A, like the city. It was in, oh, I reckon, the seventies that all the big countries got together and decided that Japan was gonna make the cars, Australia was gonna do tourism and mining, China was gonna do the industry, and all that. America, too, but I can’t remember what they were gonna do…” the man trailed off. I had been listening to him talk about various hippie conspiracy theories for about half an hour now.

He does not have dreadlocks, but he is playing a guitar with scraggly ponytail and a short, geometrically inspired beard. Behind him, an odd mixture of stoners and uptight family vacationers from the coast coexist in a free municipal swimming pool. It seems that access to a place to swim is a universal human right in Australia. I am in Nimbin, Australia’s answer to Humboldt County, California enjoying a picnic by the pool with my friends and anyone else who shows up to the picnic table.

His friend, Frank, reminds me physically of my own good friend, Frank. I first saw him in the park and swimming pool and I thought he was perhaps a county authority making sure the tourism wasn’t getting too out of hand. He had on unironic camouflage pants and had a rare short hairstyle, almost a crew cut that one doesn’t usually encounter in a drum circle. Even his mood and mannerisms remind me of Colorado Frank as he is considerate of other people, doesn’t interrupt or spout on when you aren’t listening anymore like most others in attendance. I tell him of the resemblance and say that my friend Frank was a navy pilot when Australian Frank and the hippie go nuts. It turns out Aussie Frank was the youngest pilot in Australia when he was a kid, can you dig it?

That's right, we ended up staying with this crew and putting up a back porch with them.

Ten minutes go by and I overhear a younger hippie girl talking to Paula. She is midway through recounting a similar New World Order scheme to Paula that I have just heard from the hippie when, and I shit you not, I hear her say “…yeah, it’s called the Lemur Accords, like the animal. L-E-M-U-R, and it was, gee musta been around the time of.. aww, which one was it… I think maybe Abraham Lincoln when they all got together and decided they were going to…”
A long, rare, silent moment passes and finally she points to my jerry can and says, “is that creek water?”

I stare blankly, not knowing what to answer.

“Because if it is tap water, I can’t drink it and I would really like a drink right now.”

I tell here that it is, in fact tap water and she wanders off under a tree.