Show Me The Place: Essays

HEDLEY TWIDLE

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

The troubles came, I saved what I could save

A thread of light, a particle, a wave

Leonard Cohen, ‘Show Me the Place’

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

Contents

Title page

Motto

Offshore

To spite his face

The transformation workshop

A line of light

The utopia project

The lonely planet

Otro mundo

Monsoon raag

Five by three

Notes and sources

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Author

Imprint page

Offshore

Thirty-six is no longer young, promising or even emerging. It’s one year too late to join the Youth League and twenty years too late to start surfing, especially in the wild, cold waters at the southern tip of Africa.

All that lost time weighs on us, Alex and me. We watch teenagers or outright children paddle onto some heaving Atlantic swell, make the drop, carve some shapes along the moving, blue-green wall then kick out like it was the easiest thing in the world.

‘Poets,’ he would say, beard in hand, as we watched from a car park in the depths of winter, when the swells come in. ‘There are poets among us.’

Alex and I both have beards that are beginning to go silver, but I’m average height and skinny while he is tall and rangy, muscular. We are both only children, sort of, both loners who like having someone to play with, now and then. We both have odd surnames that nobody can spell or pronounce.

After sessions that had gone more than usually badly – when we had fluffed a take-off in front of Coach, or our boards had gone vaulting over the white water, or (worst of all) we had pretended to paddle and miss a wave when in fact we were too chicken to take it – Alex could be less philosophical:

‘All those years, doing what? Jerking off in the suburbs. When I could’ve been at Long Beach in fifteen minutes.’

His new cold-water hood made him look somehow Nordic. Hooded, bearded, grizzled: he looked, I guess, better than he was. Out in the back line he seemed to get the kind of respect I never do. He looked like the kind of Kommetjie big wave surfer who might get towed onto a moving hillside of ocean out by Dungeons, then keep it monosyllabic in the post-sesh debrief: ‘It’s a team effort out there, I rely on my guys.’

But the fact is we were struggling to deal with a dirty two-foot shorebreak off the Milnerton lighthouse carpark, where the water tasted of phosphates and Alex had at one point emerged trailing a nappy from his leash. And this gap was getting to him, to us: the gap between our surfing aspirations and abilities. Between the utter sublimity of what we were seeing – up close at the Gat or the Hoek; online in YouTube clips from Portugal, Ireland, Bali, the endlessly spooling barrels of Namibia’s Skeleton Bay – and the prolonged humbling that the middle-aged kook (beginner) must endure.

When we were younger, Alex did a school exchange and as a result still holds the Scottish under-16 record for high jump. Many of us remember how he would sail over that bar in a state of grace. That strange, floating, corkscrewing motion – I didn’t have the vaguest notion of how it might or could feel in the body: it was literally unimaginable. He played club football in Cape Town for many years with great focus, forbidding anyone he knew to come and watch him. He venerates the one-time midfielder Zinedine Zidane and in fact looks a bit like him: craggy and intense. His mother has dementia, as mine once did: something we have discussed far out to sea in a world of grey glass and mist, or in a howling offshore that whips our words away as soon as they are spoken. The only memory that his mother has left of me is school sports days, when all those who didn’t qualify for anything else were placed in a 1 500-metre race at the end of the day, a sort of hold-all charity event.

‘And I remember how he used to wa-a-a-a-a-a-ve when he went past!’ This is what she would say, and he liked to bring it out. ‘With a big grin on his face, so happy! W-a-a-a-a-a-ving to the crowd.’

My only claim to sporting prowess was a brief period when my tennis was good enough, or infuriating enough, to earn me the nickname ‘The Wall’. And this difference between Alex and me – not just in athletic ability, but also sporting philosophy – has played out in various ways during our surf career to date. He wants grandeur, the Romantic sublime, feats of perfection and beauty. He has known them in his youth, and so expects them, hopes for them again. Any success for me would come, if at all, via attrition and doggedness. But mostly it was undiluted humiliation out there: being whistled off a wave by a seven-year-old, or chucking your board and diving for the bottom as the next set rumbles in near the Koeberg nuclear plant, on a day when no one else is in the water and your car window’s already been smashed, when you start hyperventilating to get enough air into your system ahead of what you know is coming: the underwater somersaults of a long, glorious Atlantic hold-down.

‘Five years,’ said Alex, who had been googling, ‘Five years to get to a decent level. If—,’ and this was the kicker, ‘you surf every day.’

Coach believed there was still time for us. He grew up near Vic Bay, one of the most reliable point breaks in the country: endless afternoons of peeling rights. What one needed to learn, he said, was a consistent wave without too many changing variables. One needed the closest natural equivalent to Kelly Slater’s wave pool in California, recently constructed and consistently delivering identical, mud-coloured inland tubes in front of all the Budweiser stalls and corporate boxes. Working with chaos mathematicians, the ex-world champion had engineered the surf equivalent of cracking the human genome: truly we were living in the end times.

Coach’s build was compact and muscular. He had that mystical quantum of extra time afforded the athlete. When catching a wave (seemingly without paddling – he was always at the right peak at the right time) he would do a sort of mini cobra pose, a half-press-up, looking left and right before deciding whether to pop up. If yes, it was already done, and he was now moving along the face, describing thoughtful curves, his gaze far ahead and down the line.

Though ten years younger than us, Coach brought great emotional intelligence to bear in the role of surf mentor. Never too quick to praise nor to blame, he was a master of understatement (to Alex’s annoyance he would never specify how big a swell was in figures), and a paragon of back line etiquette. On his own time he mainly surfed the feral, kelpy breaks near Cape Point. Snorkelling once in those parts had been enough for me. As I dropped from a rock ledge down through water so planktonic and full of nutrients that it was almost soupy, I had a strong bodily sense that something was near, was aware of me.

Coach downplayed such dangers and said these breaks were the only places left where surfers had any manners. But for a year or so, right at the start, he graciously accompanied us to wherever the wind was offshore.

The on/offshore question is the fundamental binary of surfing; it determines everything. Onshore winds (blowing from sea to land) are pure evil: they mangle the swell, breaking ranks, knocking waves on the back of the head, spilling them over themselves into a grey-brown mush. Offshore winds (blowing from land to sea) are godly: they comb the swell into stately lines, with spray pluming behind, walls going green and barrels hollow.

Offshore winds ‘wreathe waves in glory’, writes William Finnegan in Barbarian Days: ‘They groom them, hold them up and prevent them from breaking for a crucial extra beat … On a good day, their sculptor’s blade, meticulous and invisible, seems to drench whole coastlines in grace.’ His epic memoir of a surfing life ranges from the warm-water tubes of Hawaii and Bali to the cold-water bombs of San Francisco and Madeira. And since the author spent some time teaching at a ‘Coloured’ school in Cape Town’s Grassy Park during the 1980s, the book even touches on Surfers’ Corner, the nursery at nearby Muizenberg. Vaguely embarrassed even to be thinking about waves at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Finnegan quickly dispenses with it as ‘a wide, shapeless beach break’ that he surfed when not too busy grading papers or planning lessons. It stung a little, seeing a patch of ocean where I’d spent so much time reduced to those four words.

Because Cape Town is at the head of a coastal peninsula, you can, in theory, always find a break where the wind is offshore. If the summer southeaster is turning False Bay into a foaming algal mess, it will be producing crystalline A-frames on the other side at Dunes. If the winter northwester has reduced Glen Beach to a disgusting slop of stormwater and sewage blowback, then Muizenberg might finally be coming into its own. Pulled over near the Shark Spotters booth uphill, you will see dark-blue lines queuing up from far out to sea.

There is, however, a problem with learning to surf in this city, or at least with advancing beyond beginner. Yes, there is the broad, sheltered, multidenominational church of Surfers’ Corner. Here, young and old, short-boarders and long-boarders, stand-up paddlers and surf tourists, can all have a grand old time getting in each other’s way and being very decent about it.

‘Too happy clappy,’ said Alex. ‘It’s like Sunday school out there’.

But as soon as you want to move out and up a step, there is no intermediate stage. The remaining options are the icy, bone-crunching breaks of the west coast, where waves are fast, steep, hollow and (like the local crews who dominate them) unforgiving.

‘The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast,’ writes Finnegan, ‘every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell – a longitudinal study, through season after season, is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired – truly understanding it – can take years. At very complex breaks, it’s a lifetime’s work.’

My local break is Glen, just five minutes up and over the hill from the city apartment where I live. I have been conducting a longitudinal study of it for ten years now – first as bodysurfer, then surfer – but the results remain inconclusive. It is so fickle, changeable, powerful – by turns sucky, wedgy, peaky, slabby – and full of the city’s best surfers. During one session, I tried to duck-dive under a set and failed; or at least the wave somehow took and pushed me about fifty metres backwards, all of this underwater, like a cold relentless hand against my forehead, pushing me until I was almost back on the beach. I bobbed up near a local who was just beginning his paddle. ‘Fuck,’ he said, looking straight at me. Not ‘fuck you’ or ‘fucking hell,’ just ‘fuck’ – as if the disbelief, or maybe just the cold, was so intense that he couldn’t bring himself to go any further. Having witnessed this, Alex had to go back to shore and lean on his knees, he was laughing that hard.

Over beers afterwards, I was tempted to broach the issue of the ‘poo stance’: a derisive term for beginners who do a bent-kneed squat on the board, and which is more prominent (and hilarious) in a taller ‘poo man’ like Alex. With typical ambition, he would crouch down on a narrow, five-foot-something, high-performance board that I christened the Toothpick; whereas I (five ten) went for a seven-footer: longer boards are more buoyant and easier to paddle. But this kind of teasing was against the advice of Coach, who had said that the question of poo-manning was ‘a sensitive issue that needed to be delicately handled’.

Alex, not making as much sporting progress as he was used to, was trapped inside on a biggish day soon after. He stormed out of the ocean and began a six-month, anti-surfing sulk during which I was left to plough the choppy furrows of False Bay alone. There were tantalising moments that winter, glimpses of greater things: there always are. One day the ragged lines resolved into a long, grey wall that delivered me all the way from back line to shallows, a full minute’s worth it felt like, until I dived ecstatically off the board way out beyond the old pavilion.

But a surf session often proceeds according to the law of diminishing returns: as your arms tire out, you are less and less able to paddle onto waves, or under them. Sometimes I would reach a kind of disorientated fugue state out there in the grey wash cycle, towed along the coast by strange rips, far from shore, not knowing quite where I was or what I was hoping to achieve. Where were the outputs, the deliverables, the take-homes? What was there to show for this outrageous amount of time devoted to sitting on a seven-foot fibreglass raft while the world burned? You should have called it after that last decent ride; but you don’t, and then there is the ultimate humiliation of paddling back to shore. At certain points that winter, I remember being almost too exhausted to pull off my wetsuit. There I would be, towel round my knees in a car park near the railway line, freezing, thinking: What are you doing?

Alex was focusing on his job as the headmaster of a primary school in Philippi, one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city. He had been the founding teacher and was growing the school year by year: each January another intake of Grade Ones. I had gone out there a few times to give the kids ukulele lessons. Alex stalked around in his skinny jeans and long coat, six foot plus and mock serious amid all the kids who would mob his car when he arrived each day, shouting his unpronounceable name with delight. I put it to Principal that Muizenberg was actually very close, for an after-work session, I meant. But he spoke disdainfully about all the tourists clogging up the water now that summer was coming, and bent his head back over Singapore maths, saying maybe we could try Derdesteen, if traffic wasn’t too bad.

As I slowly improved, I also began trying out a bit of surf lingo and surf hauteur, which is full of mockery poked at beginners and complaints about crowds and tourists. But to disparage tourists while being a tourist, or traffic when you were traffic, or crowded breaks when you were part of the crowd – this was, Coach had once pronounced, ‘the way of the barbarian’.

The remark was not related to Finnegan’s book but somehow got tangled up in my reading of it. The title Barbarian Days comes from an epigraph by Edward St Aubyn: ‘He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page.’

Throughout his life, Finnegan chases some of the world’s greatest waves as antidote to his job as foreign correspondent and New Yorker staff writer: the sea as a respite from tinkering with sentences. But when he turns to writing about waves in late career (and becomes famous for it), he must reckon with a paradox at the heart of surf culture: that the search for the perfect, uncrowded wave inevitably contains (when photographed or written or bragged about) the seeds of its own downfall: surf tourism. As a young man, Finnegan is one of the first to surf a paradisal reef break on a remote island off Fiji. Towards the end of the book he returns to the place, now a surf lodge full of social media streams and spectator boats.

Barbarian Days is wonderfully ambivalent about the world it describes. Finnegan doesn’t even seem sure if he likes surfers, or surf culture. Living and paddling out along San Francisco’s forbidding Ocean Beach, he is steadily writing about other things: finishing his books on 1980s Cape Town and travels with black reporters in Soweto, still feeling ‘mentally flayed’ by his time in the country. To write about surfing was something different, and closer to home: it risked losing the ‘sizable tract of unconsciousness’ near the centre of his life, the self-enclosed, non-verbal quality which means that most surf line-ups are quiet, with everyone cocooned in their own space and silence, not places for the loud or garrulous.

Stacked five deep in my local surf shop, Barbarian Days must be responsible for unleashing droves of bookish, middle-aged groms like me on the already crowded line-ups of the English-speaking world. And it is in the surf shop that such contradictions reach a particular intensity, since they are run by locals who are often kitting out kooks (from the Hawaiian kuk, meaning shit). The proprietor didn’t seem amped to be selling me a wetsuit, given that it might enable me to ruin his wave later that day at Llandudno.

‘Your arms are thin all the way up to the shoulders, so this one isn’t tight enough.’

I soon realised that it was a broad-based misanthropy though: nothing personal. When another customer walked in, they soon established they were both from Durban, where all you needed was boardies and at worst a rashie. The shop owner began a litany of complaints:

‘It’s shit in Cape Town. First it’s kak cold, then you have to drive everywhere, it’s always a mission. In summer it’s the wind, in winter it’s too big. I’ve got ear infections bru – three operations now. In Durbs you just stroll on over.’

‘But Glen?’ said the punter. ‘That’s nearby?’

‘It’s a kak wave. Those sandbars move around, then there’s all that churned up kelp, all those little bits. And the stream running in there – disgusting. All the shit they pump out there. No man, it’s a kak wave, literally.’

Drone footage shot by concerned ratepayers had shown plumes of raw sewage being released just off the city’s most expensive beaches, a few hundred metres away from the bungalow mansions and anchored party boats. According to a recent scientific study, Kalk Bay snoek were full of ibuprofen and Hout Bay anemones showed traces of antiretrovirals. High levels of anti-anxiety and heart meds in the urchins off Sea Point – just some of the many drugs that filtered daily through bladders and pipes and then out to sea. Every sea creature was full of caffeine, apparently, and probably cocaine too: what must that be like? And several of the desalination plants meant to rescue us from drought couldn’t run. On the Atlantic coast the water in the docks was too polluted; on the Indian ocean side the problem was algal blooms and red tides.

Despite knowing all this, I somehow still retained my idea of seawater as a healthy, bracing, salty tonic – right up until the session when Alex brushed his foot against a rock in Glen and walked out with an inflamed toe ‘so angry that it was squeaking’. Only swift medical action saved the digit, or even the foot. The staph infection required hospitalisation, and he was on crutches for a while.

After ‘Glen Toe’, he was more ready to dial things down a little, and we began leading surf outings for the kids from Philippi and Marcus Garvey. I was feeling good about this: taking kids to the ocean, suiting up, combining surfing with social outreach – what was not to like? And they were hugely excited as we guided them across the car park and into the hire shop. The man behind the counter looked up at me and said:

‘Your wetsuit’s on backwards.’

I ran out and back to the car to rip off this burning shirt of humiliation: how could it have happened, a wetsuit I had put on a hundred times before?

Alex wisely didn’t refer to this moment ever again, but he and the owner would exchange a knowing smile every time we arrived with the kids. Then we would wade out into the shallows with two or three shrieking, terrified, delighted children attached to us and try to stand them on a foam board, while also scanning obsessively to make sure that none of the others were being dragged out or under. Often we had to cut our sessions short because one of the assistant teachers would find us and say that people were throwing stones at Golden Arrow buses on Eisleben Road, or that tyres were burning near the school gate, and it looked like it might get worse, so we should go now. I half suspected they were just bored waiting on the shore, but we would then drag everyone out of the water and the wetsuits and back onto the bus. Then we might paddle out to the back line for our own session, and the quiet and self-enclosure would return. Thinking back to that melee with the kids in the white water – touch and go at times – I realised I had never been clutched so hard by anyone.

After the trials of summer – crowds, traffic, wind, days of flat seas – winter is here again. Monster storms detonate somewhere between Africa and Antarctica, aftershocks of swell hit the southern peninsula