Season Cycle |
Summer: Hope Beach / Mojave Desert
This is where the margins re-arrange. The horizon compresses to a tiny blip or looms in a grey wall. The sea and sand talk about flotsam. At night from Goat Bluff the beach is a three-mile curve; a milky scimitar on which the black ocean throws itself in arcs of slow foam, sliced by lighthouse beams. By day the waves rear in marbled, green walls and crash down on the beach�s northern rocks leaving behind dirty froth billows, like a head of Guinness. Gulls hover like hammers, and sometimes fall, nailing down fish. Many times in the heat my horse and I pounded half-moons into the wet sand from end to end. This was nearly 20 years ago, but it lives now; the blue glint of the sea, the percussive thudding of hooves, the stink and the feel of the sweat-drenched, slightly mad horse. Years later, horseless, I float offshore in a warm sprawl at the day�s end. I am alone, thinking of faraway friends in California. The sky is powder blue, changing suddenly to a violent orange the colour of Fanta; an Australian sky, then it becomes the sea. Under the same blue the Mojave has a mind of rocks and sand, and mutters to itself in a shrub language. When it pauses it is with something exclamatory. A cactus; a furnace of spines burning blackly from within, or a bristling, club-fisted joshua tree punching the sky. People come here to hear this murmuring, and are aware that they are, in a way, foreign; like English words interrupting a hieroglyphic story. The desert seems indiscriminate and careless. It leaves itself lying about in shameless disarray beneath the cobalt scrutiny of the sky. Only the boulders are house-proud, and cluster together purposefully in domed communities, cultivating shadows. The ocean broke over the sands of the Mojave, sighing and booming in the same cryptic and familiar language. I stood on the rocks, getting drenched by mountainous waves thrown in by the wind. The sea and sky were huge and the horizon was seething with mutton-birds going south in a long, brown avalanche. On the beach were hundreds of men�o�war; impossibly delicate crystal sacks of blue poison, their metre long fish-killing tentacles crusted with sand. The ocean had evicted them. |
