Tim Winton: Breath

And your old boy was there, Pikelet. He saw him go.

When was this? I asked, trying to sound sceptical.

1965.

How. . how do you know?

I live at the pub, you dick. Only thing flows faster'n beer is talk.

It bothered me not to have known this precious detail about my father. I rode on in silence.

We freewheeled downhill a mile or so until we came to the long, flat stretch where the estuary meandered into shoals on our left and the boggy horse paddocks opposite rose to steep timbered hills. The sun was on our shoulders and already, over the whirr and clatter of our bikes, you could hear the ocean.

On the last uphill stretch a flatbed truck wallowed off the saltpan onto the tar ahead of us. Without a word, Loonie put on a spurt and chased it. There were people on the back of the truck who laughed and cheered as he caught up and grabbed onto the tie-rail. The old banger went up through the gears, making speed against the incline. Loonie and his bike drew away and I saw the pink flash of his face as he looked triumphantly back across his shoulder. I doubt the driver even knew Loonie was there, clinging on gamely in the rear, but they surged uphill, leaving me in their wake, until all I could hear was the whining diff and the faint sound of laughter. Eventually speed and one-handedness got the better of Loonie who got the wobbles and let go. He veered wildly onto the gravel edge and was gone through the reeds, a rippling commotion like a blast of wind, and the last thing I saw was the bike shooting riderless from the vegetation before it somersaulted into the shallows.

By the time I finally ground my way up to the crest of the hill Loonie and his crumpled machine were loaded on the bed of the idling truck and the driver seemed to be waiting for me. When I drew alongside I saw that although his knees were stripped and his shirt was in tatters Loonie looked insanely happy. He mugged and winced for the benefit of a girl who looked sixteen and had flowers painted on her jeans. Beside the pair of them was a stack of surfboards and a three-legged dog. From the cab, three blokes with tumbleweed hair told me to climb up, and so we rode like that to the headland until the bitumen gave way to a dirt track that we bounced down through peppermints and wattles to the hard white beach and the overpowering roar of surf.

The blokes piled out of the cab, snatched up their boards and were gone before either of us could climb down or thank them, so we thanked the girl instead. She shrugged and wriggled her toes in the sand. The dog plugged around in circles, competing with Loonie for her attention.

From the granite headland whose rocks were daubed with warnings about the dangerous current, the beach stretched east for miles. "We watched the surfers plunge into a churning rip alongside the rocks and from there they shot out toward the break. Waves ground around the headland, line upon line of them, smooth and turquoise, reeling across the bay to spend themselves in a final mauling rush against the bar at the rivermouth. The air seethed with noise and salt; I was giddy with it.

Loonie had a nice old limp from his prang but it didn't prevent him from clambering out across the rocks with me and the girl and the three-legged-dog to watch the blokes glide by on their boards. They hooted and swooped and raced across the bay until they were like insects twitching in the distance. The girl, who said she was from Angelus, gave us apples from her woven bag. She talked about Iron Butterfly and plenty of other things I knew as little about and I don't know how I kept up my end of the conversation because my mind was firmly elsewhere. I couldn't take my eyes from those plumes of spray, the churning shards of light. Was this what the old man was afraid of? I tried to think of poor dead Snowy Muir but death was hard to imagine when you had these blokes dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair.

I couldn't have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers, with one butcher and a rep from the rural bank beside the BP, men did solid, practical things, mostly with their hands. Perhaps a baker might have had a chance to make something as pretty as it was tasty, but our baker was a woman anyway, a person as dour and blunt as any boy's father and she baked loaves like housebricks. For style we had a couple of local footballers with a nice leap and a tidy torpedo punt, and I would concede that my father rowed a wooden boat as sweetly as I'd seen it done, in a manner that disguised and discounted all effort, but apart from that and those old coves with plastic teeth and necks like turtles who got pissed on Anzac Day and sang sad songs on the verandah of the Riverside before they passed out, there wasn't much room for beauty in the lives of our men. The only exception was the strange Yuri Orlov who carved lovely, old-world toys from stuff he fossicked up from the forest floor. But he didn't like to show his work. He was shy or careful and people said he was half mad anyway. When it came to blokes, his was all the useless beauty the town could manage.

For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn't go. There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn't know what endorphins were but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching. We talked about skill and courage and luck — we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death — but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do.

We sat on the headland with the girl and the dog until the breeze turned and everyone paddled in. We rode into town on the back of their old Bedford, sunburnt and blissed to the gills.

The old man was furious — he saw the truck, caught sight of Loonie hauling his warped bike home and figured it out for himself- but nothing could touch me, no threat, no expression of disappointment, and certainly no gentle appeal to reason. I was hooked.

Loonie and I went back and back and back that summer. We hitched and rode and walked, begging boards from the Angelus crew when they paddled in for lunch or at day's end, and week by week we literally found our feet, wobbling in across the shorebreak, howling and grinning like maniacs. Even now, nearly forty years later, every time I see a kid pop to her feet, arms flailing, all milk-teeth and shining skin, I'm there; I know her, and some spark of early promise returns to me like a moment of grace.

The first boards we got were Coolites, short, boxy styrofoam things which squeaked when you touched them and blew wherever the wind wanted them to go. Because they had no fin they were all but impossible to steer, like a sailboat with neither keel nor rudder, but we thought they were the duck's nuts. Loonie pestered his stepmother into buying him one and I got mine second-hand from a farm kid who'd just returned from a holiday in Queensland that he'd hated. Those boards certainly made the ride out to the coast a fresh challenge. They were too wide to fit neatly under a boy's arm and so light that they lurched and twisted as though they were alive and trying to take flight. A good crosswind gust could put you and your bike into the roadside scrub in a moment. Our early efforts with them could hardly be called surfing. We were little more than animated flotsam. Then we shaped crude fins from plywood and set them into our boards with paraffin wax and everything changed; we had control, we could steer. At last, we were surfing.