the boiler keeper
1962.
There were times when I envied the boiler keeper in the shed next door, especially in winter when the cold night winds blew down from St. Helena and through the wide doors of the shed where I laboured alone stacking dried hides for the morning train to Sydney, everybody else having left for the pub and later a hot dinner with mum and the kids .. see ya Pete they said, do it right and you’ve got work tomorrow. Chuckle and chaff.
Byron Bay.
Love at first sight and divorce at the second; Byron a hard town that enjoyed making Sydney kids suffer under the yoke of hard labour.
A surfer knows what it’s like to paddle out in optimum conditions at a place for the first time .. sliding through the tight group of locals and deliberately stirring them up by parking on the inside.
Everybody waits.
In the distance a set.
I envied the boiler keeper in his warm office across the bone-littered yard, his feet up on a chair and reading a novel through his midnight to six shift in the same way I envied the locals who assumed right of way in the north corner of one of the northern beaches best breaks.
George didn’t know what to do when one of the boiler ignitions flared back and ignited a stack of hessian bags he had been told to remove some weeks previously just as he didn’t know which way to run when the smoke and flames drove him from the building.
He lived.
Similarly, the tight bunch of locals didn’t know which way to paddle when the newcomer picked up the first wave of the set and faded them into a mess of boards and bodies.
petebowes.com 