in which the fish swims in the forest

It is Spring.

In these parts the season is not measured by blooms or buds, but by the invisible forests and the different directions
From which the great entities cast their breath upon you.


There has been a usual spring tantrum, the sea is almost a metropolis of movement and business, lit by the white searchlight of a still-lowlying sun. The sea shows its olive underbelly in a wayward fashion, looks at me sideways and then tears more hair out. Great shakes, enormous moving walls carrying the contents of deep underground kelp forests.


In my rock pool it lies almost still, beautiful olive green, with the rippled sand showing through in patches of pale aqua.



Nobody else likes to swim in the kelp.
Makes them itchy, makes them twitch in fear. Things live in kelp.
Look out for all that weed, they say, but I just laugh.
I love seaweed and jump right into it, nostrils flaring with its eel-funk, that aroma so sharp it goes straight to the top of my skull and the depths of all my cavities, speckled and green.
I slither on in, watching the grand fronds wave like the Port Jackson Shark tails, everything rocking in unison, big columns of salty oxygen blasting down and sending up in a flurry. The sharp edges talk to me of scratching, they trace my cheeks and slither around my arms.


In my olivegreen wonderland today, I thought of things hidden in here, perhaps a Bronze Whaler shark, curving in and out. One time the sea sent me one of those along with the kelp on a huge roiling swell.
It couldn’t get back over with the waves that carried it in when the tide lowered.

On that day of high seas I had swum 30 laps or so, watching the kelp below and measuring the aqua patches in that half-lit state I reach after a half hour in my fish life.
I noticed Les O’Keefe there on the edge, putting on his cap. He asked me what I had done to my stroke, said my body rotation was different. My elbow height.

Sharp as a tack, Les O’Keefe. Doesn’t miss a thing.

I have in fact been to stroke correction, Les,
I told him.
In Canberra.

With Alexander Popov, Les. No less.
(And this was true, I had indeed had lesson from Popov and Gennady, which is a story in itself. Les noticed straight away.)

Ah, he said. 

I can tell.

Les represented Australia at the commonwealth games. He swam like a champ, even at 80 years of age. Last year at the winter swimming races, he appeared a little confused, lining up and standing indecisively on the edge, until all races were finished and he hadn’t yet swum. But that as to come, on this day he dived in smoothly and arced over the kelp at my side.

I finished another mile or so beside him.

I like the new stroke, he said,
as I slid out, seal wet and dripping. He turned to finish, and I ran up the hard sand of the beach to the headland and back, the water flying off me till I was wind-whipped and dry.

When I returned I was surprised to see
The Wildlife Ranger, and a crowd of hildren, one or two grownups, all peering into the rockpool.

Les continued to calmly swim, slap slap slap up and down gliding above the canopy of kelp.

there's a big shark in there,
everybody said, jumping up and down.
The ranger nodded.

Yep. Big Bronze Whaler, he said.

There is no shark in there, I said, 

I was in there not twenty minutes ago.
Ask Les, he’ll tell you.


Watch that patch of sand, the ranger said, so I did.

And as I looked at the pale clearing in the forest, a large shark shape passed across it, like someone had made
the shape of a shark out of the kelp shadows and breathed it into life.

It was circling the perimeter of the rockpool, calmly, with its dignity intact. Each ten minutes the patch of white sand dimmed as it glided across.
I had just swum two miles with a shark, possibly demented and enraged by incarceration.


I put my face at water level.

Les, there’s a huge shark in there with you.

He put his face up for a moment.
Did it bite you, when you were in here?

no.

Well, it wont bite me then. Anyway, I’ve only a little way to go.
And with that he swam off, the shark patrolling the seaweed beneath him.





I haven’t seen Les this winter.
Just the kelp reminded of him me as I swam, one part of my gaze sweeping the waving kelp, looking for a tail or the pale blunt muzzle of a shark, though I’d be certain to have met it before.
I wondered if, from his usual haunt there by the sea, some ghost ship had come by, and Les had gotten on board.


Without announcement, the shark nets are back, that insidious curtain of steel, unseen from above. I saw the telltale floats this morning, dotting the deeper water off the headland.
Waiting to catch things by the gills, those shining bangles. One day I will make sure they are all taken away forever, those nets.


So now I am back to the words, and the work in the world, this is not so far away, from ideas of the invisible revealed, and the subliminity of the sea, into which I slowly make my way.


Just today was a day of deep sap-speckled kelp fronds, their uptuned roots in the oblique spring sun and pale aqua light, and me filled with the stink of it,
swimming in the guise of a whaler shark, just like a shadow of it,

just for a moment,

just for a moment.