in which the fish rides the rip

I noticed the Frangipani when I was stuck in traffic in the middle of Manly. Clouds of it, the pink one, rather than the white.
I wasn't entirely thrilled to be studying it so closely, since for goodness sake, it was Saturday and this is Manly, what’s with all the traffic? Of course I had just remembered the Boy needed his new school blazer from the tailor, which was about to close.
I jumped from the car and ran barefoot through the traffic like a crazy woman, the road already molten on what was shaping up to be the hottest day of the year. As I waited on the kerb, blazer in hand, a man riding a unicycle wobbled past me.





Hot westerlies began to stir: the sea looked glazed. Returning home along the beachfront, I realised every Surf club in the universe was competing at the carnival at Manly. I read the tents as I passed: Dixon Park, Bronte, Umina, Swansea-Belmont, Whale Beach, Cronulla, on and on they go. I am treated to more viewings of Frangipani as I wait for a surf boat from Palm Beach to back out across the road, the flowering clumps are so prolific on the trees. Must have been the early summer rain, I have never noticed such a blooming. It’s beautiful. I try to think of the latin suffix for much flowers: abundiflora?
I leave the blazer on the back seat when I pull up at home: just looking at it is beginning to cause the first inklings of heatstroke.





Looking out to the horizon before flinging myself in, I feel just a bit sorry for the sea.  Always a battle to be had, and a hot westerly wind is quite some opponent. The sea is dark green, and oily smooth, with tightly curled waves and huge plumes of spray. The sea fighting to break over the force of the wind.
I line myself up at the rip: it’s a handy way to reach the deep end of the ocean. I stand deliberately, so the lifeguards see me and don’t rush over and shoo me over to the flags. I put on my little hat and goggles, and throw myself into the rush.


This is my rip. Right there, underneath the words saying "The Rip", where there are no waves breaking, the dark bit. It's my beach, my dark current, my little bit of sea, right there, on that there book cover.




see?
(ok, dead low tide in midsummer looks a little different to high tide in winter...and there were too many freaking cars in the way)

The sea, silent and preoccupied with maintaining some sense of equilibrium, deposits me way out in the dark green, almost past the spray which billows like a fountain for meters after each wave.
There are hundreds of surfers, like spangles on the edge of a cake. I swim along past them, looking at their dangly legs. At one point the sea lifts me to the summit of a high wave and I am suspended above them all: they are all facing up. I continue along the edge of them.

The sea is curiously layered: at the bottom it is icy jade, cold and strange.
Nearer to the surface it is merely cold, but in patches there are warm pools. These are the colour of old glass.
I swim by a bunch of girl surfers in bikinis. They all look beautiful, but are concentrating very hard, looking at the horizon for bumps of swell.


When I am alone I turn a somersault, a trick. Start on your back: draw a perfect circle backward, head first, and finish in the same position. Don't bend your knees.

The sandy floor is way below, even at the bottom of the circle. There is a name for this trick, but I have long forgotten both it and the degree of difficulty given it by some long forgotten institution of water-tricks.

I do another one of those. Because I feel like it.


After about a mile, I become aware of a strange sensation.
 I Breathe bilaterally, alternating each side for a breath. When I breathe on  the beach side, my face is blasted with air so hot, that in the space of one breath it is almost snap-dried. Breathing on the left, my face is cool. Face down, cold again.
The wind is so hot, blowing all the way from the outback, yet so fragrant, like coconut, like..
frangipani.





Every hot breath is so full of the aroma, the coconut-pink scent of Frangipani that its almost delirium. I'm dipping my head in and out of dark green ice and into hot pink frangipani clouds. The smell of all those raucously blooming bouquets are carried on the diabolical wind, all the way out here, where the sight of land rocks in and out of view.






I swim to the far headland rising up and above the ocean: the waves are smaller here, and I cruise in and around before turning back to head back to my own headland. I sing to myself a bit, and daydream about standing around in the National Gallery in London. What it might be like if it suddenly filled with seawater and I swam around to see the paintings. The greenish tinge which might be given to all those marble fleshed nudes.

I could swim a circle around any Titian I cared to.

I look again at the hundreds of people all clustered at the edges of the sea: everyone is so happy,  so pleased to be in my sea, so pleased at these pluming waves and the offshore breeze, which the sea is doing its best not to be flattened by. All of them, happy and floating and smiling into the blue air, rocking up and down.

It’s just over a mile back now, my hands are dipping into the colder layer, my face blown in the same frangipani rhythym: hot, dark, pink breaths. I reach the south end again and take my place at the outer reaches of the rip.

For a bit of resistance training, a pathetic attempt to elevate my heart rate, I usually swim back through this rip. It’s quite hard, and I am aware that there are a lot of people here today to whom this act might set a bad example, but I like the challenge.
Given that it’s a bit wild, I take off my little hat and goggles, since the sea rather likes to remove them for me at this point and not give them back. So despite the potential for the sea to capture me in a headlock, or seize me by the hair, I decide that I wish to bare my head and I tuck my things safely away. I look around me and begin to swim, head down. Long strokes, fingers apart.


Above the roar of the sea, I hear a noise but I’m a long way out, and it sounds tinny and strange. Fragmented shouting over a loudspeaker, then the siren. I look towards shore and see the little surf club, tiny and far. I watch the boardriders all take off on the next wave.
It's the shark alarm.

Bugger.



I’m not scared of sharks.
Even if I am alone, way out the back, at the back end of the rip, where I can't catch a wave like everybody else.
Even if the sea grabs all my hair and stuffs it into my mouth.

But unfortunately, my body will take control and shut my brain off if I don't react. 


I look up again: now there are masses of people lining the shore, and each and every one of them is watching me come in. It is a very strange thing to see, and I am sure they are all watching to see the red cloud appear in the foam and my bitten off limbs flying into the air.
I sprint the rest of the way,  damned if I’m going to have them send the boat out for me. 

I walk up the wet sand and wonder aloud to the clubbie holding the loudspeaker if she just set the alarm off just to frighten me.
Pfft, says the one next to her. As if you’d be scared.

The lifeguards head out to sea in the boat, to drive off the shark. There was a very big one not too far away a few weeks ago, but I imagine this sighting was just one of the local whaler sharks, who, if they intend stalking you, will ensure that they remain unseen. People continue to stand in clumps on the shore, gazing anxiously out to sea, blow dried by the hot wind, suspended between the heat and the shark, deciding.


I head up the hill, and look down at the rip: I am not the only fish in this sea, off the rock shelf the kids are screaming and playing in the backwash: shooting skyward. The sea is playing with them: 
It looks like ballet.  

The whole world smells like frangipani.
It’s the hottest day of the year.