Jackson's Ephemera

I am remembering a big and wild day at Cosy Corner in Falcon, Western Australia. One of those late afternoons where the onshore drops off just a little, so while it’s not clean by any means, it’s also not blown to pieces. And the glare disappears as the sun goes down, so the Diamond Sea with its blinding, wind-ravaged sparkle gives way to a green and washy mass; lumpy walls marching into the shorebreak, their faces mussed up by foam and sand as they hit the shallow bank. That was always where we would end up, escaping the stand-up crowds on the reef to float around in savage closeouts instead.

Out there in the breeze, the take-off zone was a mess of wind waves and little pulses of swell that went nowhere, forcing you to constantly turn about, paddle in vain, or reorient yourself around the rips. In the thick of it, you could never quite see the big sets coming. With sun and spray in your eyes you would push over the top of a small wave to see a big, green wash-through looming on the other side, stretching across the whole bay.

When it was big we generally surfed the end of the shorebreak that was slightly protected by the reef, where the waves were more shapely and forgiving. But the northern end of the beach, far away from the stand-ups’ reef, bore the full force of any lines that came through. The further up the beach you went toward Falcon Point, the bigger and heavier it seemed to get. And the weed gathered there too, pushed up by the current against the point, so those waves which held up unloaded in thick, dredging closeouts full of sand and kelp.

It was up that end of the beach that I was looking on the occasion I am now remembering. I had just got out of the water after a late surf, during which time the swell had picked up and the day had gone to dusk. In those last gasps of yellow, cloudy sky I remember thinking that the north end looked somehow biblical; an apocalyptic field of angry water growing darker by the minute. There was no one out there. Just relentless, surging closeouts detonating in a sprawl of rips and foam. What little sun remained forced its way through the clouds in pale gold rays, throwing the waves into proud relief.

In true sublime fashion, the scene came with a revelation. I realised that, even though I had just exited the water at the same beach, I was looking at an entirely different ocean only three-hundred metres to the north. One that might as well have belonged to some remote stretch of unknown southern coast, hundreds of miles from the suburban beach I had surfed countless times before. That is to say, its image was so distinct that it constituted a completely different body of water to what might ordinarily be called ‘Cosy Corner’ or ‘Falcon Beach’, let alone ‘the Indian Ocean’. How could such broad designations capture the true essence of this particular patch of ocean?

The simple answer is that they could not. A scene such as this one forces us to acknowledge that the standard practice of ‘naming’ and thereby demarcating a geographic entity is woefully inadequate when it comes to something as impossibly large and fluid as the ocean. Even the process of dividing them into smaller ‘seas’ and ‘bays’ and so on implies a singularity you cannot ascribe to a body of water.

Surfing attempts to overcome this problem by going deeper and naming individual ‘spots’. Some of these become entrenched (e.g. ‘Pipeline’), but others reflect varying depths of local knowledge. When I was younger, one of my favourite aspects of surfing was the power and pleasure that came with naming a spot. For example:

Weedies – the aforementioned north end of Cosy Corner shorebreak on the occasion that it was especially weed-choked.

Mayhems – a less surfed section of Smiths Beach to the north of Supers, so-named because of its unpredictable closeouts.

Cairos – an inside reform at Brighton/Scarborough, named on a hot and sunny day that for some reason brought Egypt to mind.

The Zone – the reef at Grant Street Dog Beach, Cottesloe; an ironic reference to a much more powerful and iconic wave on the East Coast.

None of these marked newly discovered waves. Instead they were attempts to subdivide existing beaches and waves into even more granular localisms. Some are even ephemeral, describing spots that only materialised under certain weather or swell conditions (e.g. until the next time Scarborough has an inside reform and reminds me of Egypt, ‘Cairos’ cannot be said to exist).

While names of this sort are generally reserved for fishing and surf spots, they could in theory be used to delineate individual zones of ocean, each of which possess a unique image or resonance. When I swim, I am drawn toward one end of the beach because it feels ‘right’. When I am surfing and I look up the beach to the waves breaking in the distance, they seem strange and unfamiliar despite being geographically right next to where I am. Each of these zones is an ocean unto itself, worthy of naming. A body of water that has no clear borders but is perceptibly distinct from other bodies owing to environmental characteristics and psychological effects.

The Diamond Sea is the name I give to a very familiar wind-ruffled ocean whose ripples and waves sparkle in the light of late afternoon. Others could be identified and named too. It may even be appropriate to break with the geographic naming construct of ‘the X ocean’ or ‘the Y sea’, which feels too definitive for such an amorphous subject. The most fleeting oceans could instead be given names such as:

Ocean Graphite – a storm-swept ocean under dense cloud.

Proud Ocean – appears during stiff morning offshores, lined with crisp and perfect swells that feel somehow regal.

Ocean Steel – a grey ocean that feels hard and relentless owing to cold temperature.

Martial Ocean – an ocean that occurs when the offshore is so strong as to have the inverse effect of actually roughing up the water, blowing bullets of spray off the top of incoming waves.

Ocean Terra – open water viewed from above, an unsettling perspective so named because it looks like an expanse of blue, featureless land.

Of course there is no way to map them all. Considered in this way, a single beach can contain infinite oceans. All of them are ephemeral, emerging due to endlessly complex and changeable factors before disappearing just as fast. Maps and names of the oceans can therefore become redundant within hours of their creation.

To complicate matters further, the vast majority of oceans are imperceptible to the human eye. This is not only because they are largely untravelled, but also because the observer generally relies on landmarks to tell them apart. Almost always, we sense a change in oceans due to some feature of the coastal landscape; a building, a dune that stands higher than the rest, or a particularly isolated stretch of beach. In the case of Cosy Corner, the north end is clearly identifiable as a different ocean even on a calm day because it sits right on the cusp of Falcon Point – a literal and metaphorical turning point that marks the transition from family-friendly Falcon Bay to the wilder, western-facing beaches further south.

In open water, however, there are no landmarks. And perhaps only the most experienced of seafarers can visually identify what might be called an ‘oceanmark’. As a result, there’s no clear way to tell one ocean from another. They travel with the weather, flowing in and out of one another like idle thoughts. Only those that arrive at the coast are likely to be identified, and most never do.

Some oceans, however, make themselves visible again and again. They can reappear on another side of the world, or at the same coastline many years after their first visit. The Diamond Sea is one such ocean, travelling as it does with a particular kind of afternoon sun.

Yet the ocean I am remembering now, at the north end of Cosy Corner, has not reappeared for me. I have seen plenty of heaving, stormy seas under overcast skies since, but none of them are quite the same. Perhaps in some other part of the world, the same ocean is right now being watched by someone else, who will be marked by it in the same way I have. And once that happens it will travel again until – I am almost sure of it – I will see it again.