Tasman gales and the sea roads to eternity
Bombie’s old rainbow painted van was rocking back and forth in the midnight gale and with only one candle to illuminate the interior of his sorry home he was concerned not to lose any of the makings of the midnight joint he was worming up into a smokeable shape.
Outside, a hundred yards away on the other side of the dunes, a mad Tasman gale thundered ashore in a deep fury as it fractured sandstone reefs two hundred feet below the surface. It swept the desolate beaches clean with sandstorms of wind and pushed rivers anxious to unload their brown floodtides all the way back to their freshwater origins.
Underwater boulders ground away at their centuries old positions and the black sky lowered and spat random lightening spikes into the earth.
Bellows of rain filled tempest swept inland from all seaward points of the compass. Everything raged.
– and Bombie left his van and walked under the pines and away towards the southern point. Slow footed stoned and sure he made his deliberate way from the van park to the apron of rock and then to the shelter of an overhanging ledge directly across the water from Wasp island.
Not an island at all, rather just another rocky prominence that had faced down centuries of south spawned gales.
It’s staggered brow a stony receptacle for the torn whitewater, ponded there for an instant in the sandstone dishes before being sucked upward in an hysterical updraught.
Bombie squatted under his shelter there and hummed an old John Lennon number as he watched the water flying upwards from the Wasps’ cauldrons. He stayed three hours.
But he did not hear the first of the five waves that rolled away the two sentinal boulders that had sat massive on the headland for the entire eighty-five year term of record of the South Durrras Steamship Society, and before them the three thousand year songline of the southern Wandadians.
– and he didn’t bother with a breath as the overcoming sea rushed in and took him away to his personal Eternity.
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