Self-sufficing solitude
‘I lie as I am in the light, content in my surroundings. Oh, to be in nature again! To feel the air and coolness on my skin, to hear the sounds of water and to breathe the oxygen-rich air! This is freedom: a beach and alone. “I was taught to feel—perhaps too much—the self-sufficing power of solitude,”: wrote Wordsworth. It is intoxicating.’
‘And I was taught to feel—perhaps too much—the self-sufficing power of solitude,’ wrote William Wordsworth. Photo: ©Matthew Smeal
The small beach is new to me, but I will be back. I have anchored here once before but it was summer then and crowded; today, on an overcast late autumnal day, I am alone, save for a small fishing boat some distance off. My own boat drifts languidly in the shallow water, its anchor buried in the sand part way up the narrow beach. I had first dragged my boat onto the sand, but I changed my mind with the falling tide, happy to ease it out rather than risk it being so high and dry that it will be quite an effort to get it back in the water later.
The westerly wind is blowing quite strong, but my little sanctuary faces southeast and is therefore protected. It is quiet here.
My first coffee is poured and waiting; brewed from the freshwater stream cascading over the rocks from above and collecting into a small pool in the sand, before running out in tiny rivulets to the estuary. We miss so much in our usual treated water from our taps. The sweetness and purity from what flows to me can be tasted in the coffee I now sip and in the eager handfuls I cupped to my mouth when filling my coffee pot.
The only sounds are those of water: the splash of water from the cascading spring and the lap of water in the falling tide. An occasional passing boat or plane overhead remind me that humanity is nearby, but the lengthy times in between are mine – mine to dream.
I lie as I am in the light, content in my surroundings. Oh, to be in nature again! To feel the air and coolness on my skin, to hear the sounds of water and to breathe the oxygen-rich air! This is freedom: a beach and alone. ‘And I was taught to feel—perhaps too much—the self-sufficing power of solitude,’* wrote William Wordsworth. It is intoxicating.
I saw a sea eagle on my way out. It was so near the start of my trip that I chose not to stop. I usually see sea eagles so to stop and watch so soon seemed frivolous. I saw it instead as a good omen for the end and the beach I am at tells me I was right – but my binoculars lay beside me at the ready.
The westerly wind has dropped off; but a growing rustle in the surrounding trees tells me it is swinging around to the south. The tide is dead low now and my boat still drifts easily in the shallows. I will have no trouble when I leave – but I don’t want to, I want to stay.
I am brewing another coffee now, more to feel the warmth from my Trangia hiking stove than from necessity, but perhaps too for an excuse to taste coffee made from the sweet stream water again. I have a few water bottles with me; I will fill one with this water and take it home.
A sea eagle flew by, as I knew one would. Perhaps drawn by the smell of coffee and the hint of warmth in the air. I was too slow with my binoculars but there was no real need: it was close. The eagle banked low and eased behind the small point. It was soon out of sight but returned moments later, a second one with it. Like me, the birds seem content. Their day is simple: to live and love, and to hunt when necessary. They just flew over again. I hope to see them once more before I go.
The fresh water intrigues me. I have filled a bottle and placed it in my tinnie. It makes me think of the joy and relief that sailors must have felt when coming ashore on a new land and finding a freshwater spring or stream to fill their empty or stale water casks. Graffiti on the small waterfall’s rockface reminds me of that time. It is not the paint of today, but the names of people and vessels carved carefully into the sandstone. The names are hard to read now, worn away from decades of running water, and any corresponding year is long gone. I know the area was a stopping point for whalers and merchantmen in the 1800s. It is romantic to think that I stand where they once did, thankful for the gift of clean water.
The wind is freshening again, and cold. The grey skies have remained that way and despite my pleasant surrounds, I know it will soon be time to leave. I may try for some fish—to replace what will be my dinner tonight, caught on a previous venture a few bays from here—but I will likely just go. I do hate to leave but I will be bashing into the wind and chop on the way home as it is. The sanctuary of this little cove sustains me, and my memories of today will take me through to next time.
* William Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude, second part, lines 76–77. Excerpt taken from The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, Penguin Books (2001), p281
It’s four o’clock somewhere
Lying in the sun and living deliberately. Thinking about life and death and a life of purpose. Part 2 of the Away Again series.
Part 2 of the Away Again series
Lone swimmer. Photo: ©Matthew Smeal
It’s nearly four o’clock. The wind is easing, the swell is weakening, and I am lying naked on a beach. Oh, how I love to lie naked on a beach! To feel the sun on every pore, the salt drying on my skin, my still-damp hair from yet another swim brushing my shoulders and offering a soothing respite to the warmth now enveloping my body.
There have been many dolphins this afternoon: small pods, cruising languidly across the bay, their casualness broken by sudden outbursts as they chance upon unsuspecting fish. A rush, a swirl, and a splash and within moments the surface returns to an eerie calm, the just-gone commotion soon forgotten but for an occasional dorsal fin piercing the surface to reveal the pod’s course as it continues on its way.
A sea eagle came too: swirling, circling in unsteady arcs only twenty or so metres above the water. Its unsteadiness reminded me of two fledglings from a time before: young eagles desperate to improve, their inexperience contrasted by a larger adult that hung rocksteady in the heavy wind nearby. Is this one of those birds? Now a little older, its steadiness coming, its status growing? What a way to grow! To be left alone, to fend for yourself from an early age; to develop by instinct, by nature. Learn to fly. Learn to hunt. Learn to defend. But where is the other bird from that time? Did it not learn? Are the two birds now only one? Perhaps it is elsewhere, fishing further along the coast. It’s nicer to think that it is.
It is a stark reminder that nature is harsh. Maybe harsh is wrong, perhaps necessary is better. The only certainty to life is that it ends. ‘We must die,’ wrote Seneca. ‘Death is a law of nature; death is a contribution and an obligation required of mortals.’*
‘I did not wish to live what was not life.’
Henry David Thoreau
The sea eagle, like the dolphins, must eat fish or die; those fish must eat smaller fish or die. We too, must eat or die. Ecology, therefore, is a numbers game: an intricate balance of mathematical ratios as one population sustains another, which sustains yet another. But is it wrong to lose the emotion? To see life and death in such black and white numerical terms? I think not. If anything, I think it is healthier to accept what is finite and fickle. But I also think we should fill that stark canvas with as much love and colour as we can for the time given us.
‘I did not wish to live what was not life,’† wrote Henry David Thoreau on spending two years alone in the woods where he went to ‘live deliberately’. Our time here may be short, or it may be long, but let it not be dull! Let it be filled with purpose! Let it be deliberate!
* * *
The late afternoon warmth is reminiscent of winter’s apricity. The swell continues to drop, and the wind continues to ease, both loosening their grip on the day as the light too follows suit and begins its slow fade towards darkness. I will lie here for longer – an hour or so yet. If I’m lucky I will fall asleep to the faint sound of lapping waves, my entire body cocooned in a soft blanket of sunlight. How nice it would be to wake up naked and alone on a beach, veiled only in moonlight and a gentle sea breeze. I am reminded of Whitman, ‘To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds, as one with them.’¡ That would make me smile, as I would amble back along the dark, silent bush track to the roadside where I parked my motorbike.
* Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Dialogues and Essays Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press 2008 p247
† Thoreau, Henry David Walden Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press 1997 p83
¡ Whitman, Walt ‘Song of Joys’ The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics 2004 p211
Where does this love of the sea come from?
A creative look back on childhood memories of boats, bays, and marinas. An excerpt from a much larger work that I hope one day to have published.
Blueys Beach, NSW ©Matthew Smeal
…even then,
A child, I held unconscious intercourse
With the eternal beauty, drinking in
A pure organic pleasure from the lines
Of working mist, or from the level plain
Of waters covered by the steady clouds.
William Wordsworth
‘Images of a Mighty Mind’
Where does this love of the sea come from? It has been there since I was a boy, I know that for certain.
I remember fondly the time spent on my father’s boat—most weekends and holidays—my feet dangling from the bowsprit catching spray in my toes as my eyes remained fixed on the bow wave being pushed ahead of the hull. It was my happy place. I loved to stare at the water below until my father, having spotted me, or allowing me there for as long as he could bear, would call me back concerned that in my daydream I would slip and go straight through the twin screws propelling us forward.
So, I would retreat to the stern and sit on the marlin platform to watch the wake—the beautiful and perfectly formed peeling waves—and dream of surfing them for miles at a time. But Dad always said no when I asked if I could try, and he would soon call me back when he found I had simply replaced hanging off the bow with hanging off the stern. He never said anything, but I think he was secretly pleased that at least one of his three sons had an obvious love of the sea. It was where he seemed most happy.
Those nights on board—falling asleep to the sound of water lapping against the hull only inches from my slumbering ears, and the smell of salt and oxygen rich air filling my senses and my formative years—were joined by the days. While the adults on board would peel prawns and drink Blue Nun, I would swim, diving from the fly bridge to emulate the sea eagles circling above; swimming to empty beaches imagining I was a shipwrecked sailor or a pirate digging for treasure; I’d be fishing from a quiet rock or rowing off in the dinghy to explore the next cove and to be alone.
I am often surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that my life didn’t involve the sea more. Surfing, swimming, and lifesaving have become my coastal pursuits – and photographing – and perhaps that is enough. I did own a small sailboat once; and I did write and photograph for several sailing and boating magazines for a time; and I have worked in a ship chandlery on occasion to bolster the finances during lean freelance years – but when I consider the ocean and the pull it has on me, I am surprised that my career is not on the sea, or that I didn’t scrimp and save my way into a tired old yacht and embrace a sea vagabond life.
But I am in the ocean most days. I live in a beachside suburb, and I have my childhood memories of running around marinas and clambering over rocks and sand and swimming in little bays looking for crabs and catching yellowtail. The cries of a seagull and the slap of a halyard against a mast are my music; wooden jetty planks and coarse wet sand are my shoes; the smell of diesel and two-stroke afloat on a salt air breeze are my cologne. These will take me back to that boy in a boat in a bay, to the time at dawn watching the mist roll off the crystal surface, like the blanket I would have drawn from my tired body only moments before so I could sneak onto the deck and be in the morning.
How I loved that stillness and the creeping morning light. How I loved the quietness, broken only by the gentle splash of a jumping mullet or a diving tern hunting an early breakfast. It was my time of peace and solitude; a time to watch the bay awaken to a new day, to listen to the rustle of animals in the surrounding bush and try to spot them among the steep sides of a ravine that would reach for the sky.
Away Again
I saw the sea eagle first, gliding low, searching for sleepy fish, riding the updraft from the small cliff face that rose above my chosen end of the beach.
Part 1 of the Away Again series
Above: My morning ritual: beach, sunrise, swim, coffee.
I saw the sea eagle first, gliding low, searching for sleepy fish, riding the updraft from the small cliff face that rose above my chosen end of the beach. Looking below the eagle I glanced a dolphin’s unmistakable dorsal fin, then another, and another; a small pod no doubt looking for the same fish as their circling friend. Between the two and several hundred metres further out was the blow of a humpback whale followed by the slap of its pectoral fins; moments later came a smaller blow and smaller fins – a mother and calf. It is my first morning, I had been on the beach for less than thirty seconds, and it made me smile.
I walked on in ever-shortening shadow, the sunlight racing towards me along the sand as the sun rose higher and edged around the cliff behind me. Two hippie van-life chicks sat high up on the beach, caught in a meditative morning yoga trance, wrapped in blankets, eyes closed, and facing the rising sun. They missed the sea eagle, dolphins, and whales, which is both ironic and a shame. I suspect they would have been into that.
I nestled into a favourite hollow—a spot I’d found on a previous trip—just above the waterline, where the rock face meets the sand. It is quiet and mostly out of sight. I set up my little camp—towel, coffee moka pot, billy, hand-carved wooden ‘kuksa’ cup, Trangia stove et al—and went for a swim, my second of this adventure: the first was had yesterday afternoon, soon after I arrived: a ritual cleansing after several hours on my motorbike, a baptism giving me entrée into the secret world that would become the next few days. The swim was fine: a morning saltwater bath really. Just enough to shake the sleep from my body, to dive under a few small waves, and bodysurf a few more, to feel the ocean around me and welcome the day.
My coffee is poured, and, like my van-life companions, I too am now facing the rising sun, listening to the gentle waves fall onto the sloping shore while feeling myself warming and drying by the minute.
The eagle has gone, and the dolphins have moved on, but the whales have eased in much closer now. They are ‘pec slapping’, the mother teaching her offspring some ocean rhythms, tapping out the family song on an ocean drumhead. The calf does a few beats then gets distracted and leaps, breaching as high as it can to tell mum that school is out and it’s time for recess. I was smart and brought my binoculars with me this time. They were a gift I’d asked for last year.
‘What would you like for your birthday?’
‘Binoculars.’
‘Seriously?’
My family thought it was a bit weird, like Dad has now entered into a birdwatching stage of life and will soon be looking at tweed jackets and walking sticks – which is partly true. But for those like me who enjoy sitting on beaches and scanning the horizon for signs of whale life and sea eagles, binoculars make perfect sense. Despite them taking up some much-prized room in my saddle bags, this morning has made me glad I brought them.
The humpbacks have nearly gone. I can still see them but they’re heading south so I am gazing increasingly into the sun as I swing my binoculars in an easterly arc from north to south as the whales round the point. The mother is getting in on the breaching act now too, offering a few leaps in a joyous spirit of ‘if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them’ playfulness. It is a long way to Antarctica and this mother and calf will leap and splash and play their way south, bonding as only a mother and child can.
I can faintly make out some sails through the binoculars. They are shrouded in the morning mist, simple shapes pressed deep into the background, impossible to see with the naked eye. The scene is reminiscent of a Turner painting, and one that makes me think of a ghost ship: sinister, hiding eerily behind the morning’s misty curtain, waiting to spring an attack while the whales play unsuspectingly nearby. Too many whales have played in full view of lurking ships. But these are different times, right?
Welcome!
Welcome to the Sojourner Creative Writing Blog! A blog for writers, readers, and lovers of nature.
Sojourner Creative Writing Blog
Above: On the road. Where all the good writing happens.
Welcome to my writing blog!
I have always loved the term ‘sojourner’ – someone who resides temporarily in a place. The word conjures up romantic imagery for me: the Western cowboy, the nomadic hunter, the solo sailor, the biker; someone who comes and goes, who never stays in a place for too long but is always on the move. But we are all sojourners: our time here on Earth is temporary.
The purpose of this blog is to capture some of that time through creative writing. I will share some smaller pieces, some longer, and I may even share some thoughts about the writing process as well.
Regardless of what this blog ends up being, I would love to engage with other writers and readers and lovers of nature.
So please follow along and let me know what you think!
Sincerely,
Matthew