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The immaculately restored, jade coloured, VW Kombi rolled into the Noosa National Park car park. It was April 20, 2005, around about lunchtime and about four hours before low tide. As Adam slowly rolled around to his favourite parking spot, he recognised all the cars belonging to his friends, the hard core of the local surfing community. Even though the surf was pumping, the points were not so crowded as to make it uncomfortable, because it was a Wednesday. With the exception of the dawn patrols, weekdays were, as a rule, incarceration days for the ‘schoolies’ and ‘tradies’ who, when they were out, had the irritating habit of turning the points into dog-eat-dog, gladiator pits.
April was the middle of the surfing season. During that time of year, the southeasterly trades blew consistently offshore across the five surfing points that made up the peninsula that is Noosa Heads, the place where God Himself set His hand upon the Earth and transformed His five fingers into perfect surfing points. That time of year also brought powerful, even swells that were generated by large storms raging in the Coral Sea, directly to the northeast of Noosa.
After waxing up, Adam locked his van, hid the keys, picked up his nine-foot Tony Dragan and water bottle and began the long trek along a narrow foot trail into the National Park. He always felt like he stepped into another reality when he walked into the Park. He felt like he magically passed through some kind of invisible wormhole into another world where there were no houses, roads or cars to remind him of civilization.
All that was there were trees, rocks, beaches, waves and sky, and it seemed to him that this place hadn’t changed at all in the whole forty years since the first time he visited there on a holiday with his father. This place, this holy place, was sacred and it mysteriously, inexplicably, seemed timeless and eternal to him.
‘God just has to be a surfer,’ he occasionally thought to himself.
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As he walked along the track, Adam remembered that first visit with his dad, back in 1965. He remembered it now as the most joyous two weeks he ever spent with his father. It was one of those father and son trips, done in their metallic-blue, 1963 Holden
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Premier, their first car. He remembered his loving parents, who were gone now, and how the three of them migrated, in 1959, from post-war, communist Yugoslavia, with not much more than the contents of three suitcases to their names. Adam was eleven years old at the time.
Australia in the early sixties was young, free and far away from everywhere. Adam’s parents, like typical migrants, got stuck into work. A memory stood out of his dad coming home on a Friday evening with a hugely bulging wallet and a glowing grin on his face. He used to point his index finger at his wallet in his back pocket and declare, ‘They could shoot me here!’
Those were happy memories. They owned their first house within four years and bought the Premier that year as well. This was significant because their beloved car took them exploring, and exploring was adventure, and adventure, Adam always believed, was what life was all about.
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It was almost a kilometre walk to Teatree, the fourth finger of God’s hand out along the Noosa peninsula. The track meandered firstly along a cliff edge and then through a tea-tree forest before winding down into Teatree Bay.
The day was scorching hot and glaringly bright. Teatree Bay looked like a turquoise jewel glistening in the lush, South Pacific sunshine. He had seen this sight at least a thousand times before, and still, each time he saw it, it always felt like the first time.
His plan for the afternoon was to first surf the waves at Teatree, then later, when the tide was lower, he intended to walk further along the track, around Dolphin Point and into the fifth and outermost bay on the peninsula, named Granite Bay, the place where God placed His little finger.
Adam negotiated the round boulders and rocks, leading down to the beach, like a tightrope walker. He lay the Dragan down on the sand, sat down beside it and absorbed the sight of perfect, hollow lines breaking around Teatree Point. He marvelled at their beautiful form. Their surface was as smooth as glass. As they approached the shallow water, the light offshore breeze held them up momentarily, then, almost as in a celebration for having fulfilled the purpose of their long journey across the great, southern ocean, they pitched their curl way out in front of themselves and peeled off tubularly along the edge of the shallow, underwater shelf. As they broke, a plume of white spray blew back over the water behind them.
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4
Adam took a drink from his water bottle and thought how amazingly lucky he was just to be there. It had been five years since he retired from his profession and moved to Noosa. Five years of surfing some of the most perfect waves on the planet.
As he sat there by the shore, episodes from his life flashed through his mind. He remembered how different it was when he was a young man, way back in 1975. Back then he worked as a dentist, in the heart of Sydney. His dental surgery was situated on the tenth floor of an older building, named Culwulla Chambers. Although he was only very young, twenty-seven years old, he was already showing signs of achieving creditable success in his chosen profession. He treated politicians, actors, rock stars, judges, bank managers, business moguls and a menagerie of colourful people who all loved his approach to dentistry. They all looked forward to their visits. They knew that they would get impeccable dentistry, but it was the way it was delivered that really attracted them all. Part of it was the ambience of his surgery, 1950’s art deco, most classic, part was his choice of music, which always soothed the pain, part was his positive personality, which always lifted their spirits, and part was the Nitrous Oxide and his excellent technique of delivery.
He had bought the practice eighteen months before, quite impulsively. The previous owner suddenly, and unexpectedly, was forced to sell. The sale went through in a matter of days, for twelve thousand dollars, a bargain and well within the means of a young dentist just four months out of university.
One thing that stood out in his memory of that time was the ever-present smell of incense that permeated the whole building. He remembered how his curiosity got the better of him one day and how he followed his nose to the Adyar Bookshop, situated on the first floor, and how, mysteriously, like destiny, he bought what turned out to become the most cherished book in his life. It was a copy of The Bhagavad Gita, the Penguin publication, translated from the original Sanskrit by Juan Mascaro.
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Adam refocussed on the waves. He took one last drink from his water bottle and slid into the warm, tropical water. He loved paddling his surfboard, watching its nose cut through the glass, feeling the power of his arms propelling him along and looking through the crystal-clear water at the rocky bottom, at a school of fish or the occasional turtle or stingray.
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Half way out to the point, he paused and stopped his paddle. There was no one near him. He sat up and took a long, absorbing look at his surroundings. He was in the middle of a sheltered, crescent-shaped bay. To the east was the headland, which projected out to the point. The headland was covered with a variety of lush, subtropical vegetation, including Eucalyptus gum trees, Tea trees and Pandanus palms. The shoreline changed from a rugged rocky point to a line of smoothly-rounded boulders extending all the way back to the little picturesque beach at the southern end of the bay. All that was visible were things created by nature.
He perceived that he was looking at his universe expressing herself for him. She was gushing love, embracing him, sometimes like a mother, sometimes like a lover. She was always embracing him and it seemed to him that she couldn’t find enough ways to express her love to him. Teatree Bay was one of her jewels. It was a place where she secretly made love to him and filled him with ecstasy and wonder.
Out on the point, he sat up on his board adjacent to the half dozen, or so, other surfers in the line-up. Eventually, a clean five-foot swell came his way. He turned and casually paddled into the rising wall of water that was now lifting him skyward. He rose to his feet in rhythm with the wave and eyed down the steep wall in front of him. He let the Dragan gain speed by dropping to the bottom of the now hollowing wave. The wave began to pitch over as he banked hard off the bottom and began, with speed now, to point his board down the hollow line of morphing vertical liquid. He crouched slightly, aiming as high up the wall as he could, as the wave began to completely turn itself outside in. He was in perfect trim, with his longboard planing frictionlessly on top of the fluid curve, as the clean curl pitched over his head. Instinctively, just at this most intense and critical moment, he relaxed and adopted a stylish stance of total resignation to fate as he allowed himself to be completely covered by the tube.
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It was a Saturday morning, in the winter of ‘77. Adam sat alone in his dental surgery.
The front door of the surgery was locked. He was sitting on his operator’s stool, facing the back wall, with his eyes focussed on a dot that he had drawn there a couple of years before. He was sitting there, unmoving, frozen like a statue. Beside him, lying open on top of a small bench, was his beloved Bhagavad Gita. In his left hand was a rubber mask, which was used to administer Nitrous Oxide. He was holding the mask over his nose in such a
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way so that if he should fall into unconsciousness his left arm would drop down taking the mask with it. That would cause him to wake up again.
He had found the ideal settings of the machine over many months of experimentation. He found his best natural, total flow rate of gasses to be six litres per minute. This allowed him to practise deep, rhythmical yoga breathing and stay in harmony with the machine. He found the best combination of gasses to be 2.5 litres per minute of Oxygen and 3.5 litres per minute of Nitrous Oxide, with the air vent in the mask completely closed. These levels, which he found to be most efficient for his purpose, were not what he considered high, but amazingly, they were the levels that produced the most powerful effect.
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First, he remembered seeing a single point. Then it began to be surrounded by a white circle of light. The circle of light then began to approach him, turning into a tube of white light at the end of which was the dot on the wall onto which he was focussed. It was like looking through the inside of an open-ended fluorescent tube. Gradually he felt himself begin to accelerate towards the dot, down the tube of white light. He kept accelerating, faster and faster, scarier and scarier. But he was not going to move. That was his discipline, to remain perfectly still no matter what happened. He felt like he was being accelerated to infinite velocity, flying through the tube of light towards the dot, which didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Gradually, as he kept accelerating faster and faster, he emerged from the tube of light and found himself suspended way out in deepest space.
His first awareness was that he now had spherical vision. He saw everything, in all directions. He saw that there was nothing near him, although trillions upon trillions of shining, white stars surrounded him. Gradually the white tube, out of which he emerged, began to morph into what appeared to him like a wave, a huge wave. As all this was occurring, he felt an understanding about what was happening to him, and this had the effect of calming him. The mammoth wave rose up behind him. It was as tall as a ten-storey building. He stood there as the gigantic wave formed itself behind him and then pitched over into a colossal cosmic tube. In front of him, a wall of water, hundreds of feet high, stretched out into infinity. As the wall approached him, it curved out over his head, forming itself into the most perfect barrel that imagination could possibly create. And as he stood there, motionless, racing along, perfectly slotted in his cosmic tube, he heard a howl of joy emanate from someplace deep within him, aaawooooo, and the last thing he
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remembered was that he beckoned with his right arm behind him, making upward motions, thinking in his mind, ‘make it bigger, make it bigger’.
That morning, a young dentist, who loved to surf, found out that his universe had no limits, and that she had no limits in how many ways she could communicate with him and in how many ways she could express her love to him.
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After chasing him frantically for fifty yards with its barrel, the Teatree wave relented momentarily. Adam came flying out of the tube like a shell out of a cannon.
Completely composed, he aimed his surfboard, skittering and chattering across the surface of the water, out and up to the top of the shoulder of the wave, then, using some of the excess speed he had generated, he banked back into a long, carving, roundhouse cutback, sending out a huge plume of spray. This allowed the wave to catch up to him again. He transitioned smoothly into a powerful bottom turn then lined up his board down the vertical face and waited for the now accelerating barrel to cover him up again.
Deep inside the spinning vortex, he crouched motionless with his eyes fixed on his trajectory, and as time stopped and became eternity, he rode that cosmic tube once again.
He was there where she wanted him. He was there in the place she made for him.
There, where she focussed her energy for him and shaped herself into his body, the Earth, the headland, the bay and the wave, all just for him, all just for this moment, which she then turned into eternity, just for him.
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After surfing Teatree for about an hour, Adam glided into the beach, picked up his water bottle from its spot amongst the roots of a Pandanus palm and headed off along the track towards Dolphin Point and the larger surf of Granite Bay.
…….
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