Literary snapshots of life…

Vignettes: the beach

Just as a film is a sequence of scenes, so too are our lives. We live in scenes more than in a continuity. When we write about these brief scenes they become vignettes—a short and descriptive literary sketch that capture just a moment in life.

Russ Grayson
PacificEdge

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AS WRITERS, vignettes train our observation. We notice and document details, the ambience of a place, a person’s appearance, the tone of their speech, their clothes, their behaviour. Vignettes can be used in fiction writing as scenes when we substitute our story’s characters for the people we observe. Details of rooms and places can likewise be woven into the scenes of our fictional stories. The practice of writing vignettes is especially useful to writers of creative nonfiction, true stories told in the form of fictional stories, as their surroundings can tell much about a person.

Vignettes stimulate our thinking. We observe behaviour and wonder about its cause. We notice details of buildings and are stimulated to learn more about them — the architectural style, the times in which it was built, the relationship between building design, wealth and place. We make notes about a place, the sea, the people there.

In writing vignettes we note details that are the sum of a few minutes of attentive looking. Later, as I have done in the examples here, we construct stories around them. These are true stories, mere moments of life.

The cold sea

SITTING. Watching. This is what I do here by the local swell. It’s still too cold to go out. For me, anyway. I’m not acclimatised to eleven degree water yet and, anyway, I don’t have a winter wetsuit.

I’m not the only one sitting in their van and watching the few wetsuited figures bobbing up and down between sets. Others are here too, just sitting and watching. Are they waiting to see if the swell picks up a little? Will they then get into wetsuits, lift longboards from roofracks and sprint into the break?

Sitting. Watching. Waiting to see what the ocean will offer. That’s what it’s like out here on the coast.

Winter’s rain

RAIN lashes the windshield. The wind comes in gusts. Runoff slicks the carpark a shiny dark grey. There’s no one here but us. Look at the weather, I say. There’s usually at least a few vehicles parked here by the beach. Their absence makes sense. Everyone is home in front of their fires.

It is cold. It’s winter, after all, so we shouldn’t expect anything different. Winter. This winter. Not as cold as last year’s and not as wet although it must be down into the single digits today. And it’s raining. Of course it is raining.

Pass the coffee. Thanks. Steam escapes through the lid. I clasp it and feel its warmth seep into my hands.

Are you glad you came here, to this place? She asks the same question every few months. Is she dissatisfied living here by the sea? No. She is making sure that I am not.

She’s been a surf dog (her description) since her teen years in Cronulla. The coast has always been her home other than during her student years in a rural city. City beaches, north coast beaches… those have been her habitat. Now, it is the cold waters of these beaches where the Tasman Sea surges against the obstinate dolerite of steep cliffs.

She is happy here. Me too. I think we have found home. That’s what it’s like out here on the coast.

Man alone

HE PULLS INTO the parking space and sits, sweeping his gaze along the length of the crescent of sand and whitewater. He is one of those travellers who come by here from time to time. They travel in an assortment of vehicles but the van is the favoured type because it is a home on wheels. Look into any of them parked here and you see how their owners have fitted them out for life on the road and for overnights close to the crashing swells.

Two surfboards are lashed to the roofracks, a longboard and a shortboard. So is one of those reinforced, tough plastic boxes that 4WD overlanders favour. This is his home on the road.

I see all these ads for books about living simply, books about minimalism. Who buys them? Middle class suburbanites surrounded by all the expensive conveniences of modern life? Maybe I’m being cynical. I do know people who aspire to the minimalist life and some have achieved it. Like the older couple in their old and somewhat basic house in a bushland setting on the southwestern fringe of Sydney. Last time I was there, their son, who had recently finished his schooling, was living on the property in a one-room shack. The family’s was an authentic minimalism, not one out of the pages of a book on how to be a minimalist. They could have written the book and it would have been all the more authentic because they have lived this way for decades.

Despite all the books on minimalism and simple living, why not take note of how people whose home is their vehicle live? Necessity has seen them pare their belonings down to the basics. People… like that man down by the beach. And, too, those whose home is the Coaster van I encountered in the parking lot yesterday… a dust-covered light green, the home of its houseless occupants, it too carried surfboards on the roof. And what of that old guy, grey beard, in the old Toyota 4WD in the parking lot last week? Who is he and what is his story?

The man gets out, stands by the fence and watches the surf rise and fall. There is an onshore breeze coming in and it is making the swell mushy. Not much doing this afternoon. Would it be better further up the coast?

When you come to the beach frequently enough you get used to seeing the same people and the same vehicles. People like the local guy with his scungy old T2 Kombi. He’s often here. But this man… he’s on the way to somewhere although that somewhere might be nothing more substantial than a rough idea, more a direction of travel than an actual place. It would be good to talk awhile and learn his story but that won’t happen because he gets into his van, starts the motor, reverses and drives off… to somewhere.

That is how it is here on the coast.

No surfcam thank you

“G’DAY”, he says, nodding his head towards me as he waxes a well-used longboard, one of three I can see in his Toyota van. Like his boards, the van isn’t the latest model and had seen just as much use. He travels prepared, I think. Probably leaves his boards in his van just in case there’s a good swell running.

“When you’re local you can come down to see what’s happening”, he says as he scrapes the wax across the board. I agree, saying that like him I’m a local too. He nods in what I take as a sign of approval. “Not many here this morning”.

“Yeah”, I respond, adding in jest “…maybe we need a surfcam here so we could check out the swell rather than having to come down here”.

“We do not need a surfcam”, he responds, with emphasis on ‘not’.

I agree. Park Beach is well known as a surfing venue. Come the weekend we see people from the city drive out here to catch the local swell. Not that the surf here is anything spectacular. It is seldom over three feet, a metre, but the beach’s southerly orientation ensures it catches the swells coming from that direction. Clontarf Beach is the other favoured surfing locale close to the city, however it is way over the other side of the bay, a long way from here.

Why this local’s evident hostility to a surfcam? No need to ask. I already know. A surfcam would only make Park Beach, and the entirety of Carlton Beach of which it is the western end, more popular. Behind his opposition lies a fear of crowded swells, the fate of so many beaches on the mainland and the source of the tensions you sometimes see between locals and blow-ins.

“Haven’t seen it like this for awhile”, I comment, indicating the long, consistent swell coming into the beach. It is nothing big but it is better than the choppy, broken swells we have been getting recently.

There must be a good half dozen out there. A couple sit patiently outside the break. Another paddles to catch a swell and misses it while someone further along catches one and cruises along its smooth wall. Closer in, an adult learner lies prone on his board as the break carries him shoreward. Park offers only short rides, just a few seconds balanced on a moving band of energy as it rises and breaks. Most out there are on longboards.

I look over to the guy. He’s somewhere in middle-age, moppy blonde hair, suntanned, fit-looking. It’s obvious that the beach is his scene, the surf his element. He’s almost a stereotype. He’s like a lot of others who call this modest little town their home.

Ours was another of those encounters between locals. They’re always friendly, always ready to nod a hello or a g’day. That’s what it is like here on the coast.

Taking a dip

THE ONE and only bakery-come-coffee-stop in town makes large and cheap fishburgers. They’re not quite as cheap as those from the fish and chip shop in Port Macquarie over on the mainland, but they’re not that much more. Stuffed with a couple pieces of fish and lots of fresh veges, they’re a bargain. Filling, too.

We’re eating them and sipping cappuccino while sitting in the van down at the beach. Passing showers ripple the view of the sea and the water runs down the windshield. Just as I finish my coffee a long-wheelbase 4WD van pulls in. A Mazda or Toyota. Just one person in it. A young guy maybe in the latter half of his twenties. He sits there gazing out at the sea, like us.

Is it a good ten minutes later that the rain stops? He gets out and opens the sliding side door and pulls on a changing poncho that you use to change out of your wetsuit in public. Then he doffs the poncho to reveal that all he wears is a pair of red boardshorts. No wetsuit? The water temperature is cold today, just checked it on the Beachsafe app. He closes the door, hides his van keys in the wheel well, jogs down to the break and duck dives an incoming wave. Just a few minutes, that’s all that he is in for.

Nothing remarkable in this. I guess some people tolerate cold water more than the rest of us. I’ve seen swimmers without a wetsuit even in winter when the water temperature hits 11°C. Not all that many, I should add.

He’s a traveller, my partner says. He’s taking a wash. That’s why he was in and out quickly. He likes the feel of drying salt on his skin. There’s no freshwater shower at this beach to wash it off. The salt is probably cleansing, anyway.

Rainy days at the beach offer curious glimpses into human behaviour. They are the little stories of the everyday. This has been one of them.

At Pambula

Robyn’s orchard.

THE MAN rushes out as the rain starts. Folding his photovoltaic panels and collecting whatever it was he has been recharging in the now-disappeared sunlight, he carries them into the picnic shelter.

We are at Pambula Beach on the NSW South Coast and we are headed south after a night at Robyn Rosenfeld’s house. Robyn publishes PIP permaculture magazine and her home is a good example of permaculture design principles in action… food growing in the garden, chooks roaming in the yard, fruit trees over by the fence. She surfs the local breaks, so we wanted to check them out. She started surfing only recently. I suppose that’s because she married a surfer and learning to surf comes as part of the package. Anyway, she loves it.

On first seeing the man and his belongings spread out on the table, I thought he might be homeless. But how many homeless men travel with a folding photovoltaic panel?

“I’ve got some computer work to do…”, he tells me. “… which is why I was charging my battery.” Looking out at the rain coming down, he turns and says that it is expected to snow in the highlands. That’s okay. We are not headed up there.

Who is he and how did he end up here in this picnic shelter? I guess he would be in his sixties. His hair is grey and unkempt. His khaki shorts and Tshirt are dirty. He wears no shoes. His skin is tanned. My impression is of someone who spends most of his time outdoors. None of it tallies with being someone who does computer work.

The rain eases and I watch him load his stuff into a grey Ford Falcon of some year’s vintage. The back seat is covered in stuff. He opens the boot and it too is packed with belongings. There is a tangle of cables and electrical stuff on the rear window shelf. I’m guessing that he is living on the road when he volunteers the information that he is staying around the beaches here. Sleeping in his car, I assume. How, I don’t know. It is a sedan, not a station wagon or anything he could stretch out in. But when you are living a basic sort of life as people on the road do, shelter for the night need be nothing more than a rainproof roof over your head, somewhere out of the wind and somewhere tucked away in the bush or behind some beach so you won’t be bothered. Is this his story? I think it is.

The rain stops. I’m left wondering who the man might be. What is his story? How come he was here at the beach? Does he really do computer work? And what beach is he headed for now? It has been one of those momentary encounters we have on the road. Two people whose lives momentarily crossed, leaving one of them with unanswerable questions.

It is a few years since I sheltered from the rain that day at Pambula Beach and every so often, like just now as I sit writing, I wonder about that man, about his mysterious computer work and which beach he is calling home tonight.

Vignettes…

Stories…

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