Nullarbor Plain, Western Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, Australia
The Dingo Fence stretches for nearly six-thousand kilometers from the Great Australian Bight to coastal Queensland. It is a testament to decay, monotony, and resilience. It works, in the sense that it is better than nothing at keeping dingoes out of the sheep stations and cattle yards of Southeastern Australia, but that is not to say that the dingo contingent doesn’t keep up its fair share of the arms race. The Dingo Fence Board, which exists, therefore decided that the fence was overdue for an upgrade, and after they handed out a contract to a general contractor who then gave it to a sub-contractor who then told his son to hire me I, an American hailing from as far away as you can get from a certain section of the fence on the Nullarbor Plain, became one of the four guys doing most of the work and getting the least of the money on said sixty-kilometer stretch. I landed the job through a chance encounter with my would-be boss three weeks after I nearly ran out of money in the closest nearby town, an encounter drenched in serendipity because I now know that the only way I could have experienced a full winter’s worth of waves in the depths of South Australia was because of that godforsaken fence.
Progress, they say. Bullshit. People lived on this continent for forty-thousand years without building even one fence. You know how? Because the rolling hills of, to me, undeviating patterns of blue bush, white gums, and yellow dirt that create an ostensibly endless grid of disorientation are, to Aboriginal Australians, as differentiable as a caterpillar and an emu, and with that level of understanding comes the ability to freely roam to more fertile grounds when advantageous to do so instead of toiling in the desert for eternity.
I would, in due time, find orientation in details that were initially hidden in plain sight. I would come to know which gulley was halfway between the two cattle grids because its flat stretch had a slightly more red hue to it than the one before it. I would come to know which hill was the next-to-last hill before the end of our section because its dirt was as soft as sand, the last hill being a tad rougher and the trees being a touch taller. All of the objects stuck in the fence, from stubbies to branches to Esky lids to thongs, were once placed there to signify where work would resume the next day, and although what they once signified is long forgotten I still know that the two stubbies right next to each other come about two kilometers before the Jack Daniels bottle, which comes about one hill before the overturned white car that sits just off the road, which itself is another three kilometers before the right-side up white car, both of which are stripped so bare they lack even the needles on their dashboard gages.
I will forever know that Milo can talk to crows. He had more toes than teeth and talked incessantly at the volume of a low mumble which, combined with his accent, rendered him all but unintelligible to me. Oftentimes on our drive back to the camp from where the two of us were working he would hunch over the steering wheel in his cowboy hat while our ute kicked up a rooster tail of dust as we bumped and jumped towards a sky ablaze while he mumbled just loudly enough for me to know he was speaking but not loudly enough for me to understand even one syllable. I’d never make an effort to acknowledge his attempts at communicating and yet he would spew undeterred. The one time I did understand him was when he told me two caws from a crow is their name, three means food, and four means danger. He loved to give a succession of three three-caw calls to lure passing crows to a nearby branch before giving four caws to scare them off.
These methods of stimulation were, I know now, concocted to fight the physical and mental numbness initiated by the brain as a defense against the various tasks that comprised our workday, tasks so repetitive I’d see them when I closed my eyes at night and awake to find that my hands had been repeating the motions in my sleep.
Ned was the one who told me that my aforementioned habits were symptoms of carpal tunnel, which he suffers up to his elbows. He’s forty but looks like Merlin if he walked across the American dust bowl during Manifest Destiny and then didn’t shower when he got on a boat to Adelaide escaping murder charges. He got this way from “only ever working the hardest jobs there are,” which includes driving a dump truck through the tunnels of a mine in Western Australia where he befriended the demolition crew and, in games of chicken, would see how close they could stand to the blasts until they had their helmets knocked off and decided enough was enough. It also includes the Dingo Fence. I respected him infinitely.
“So you’ve never done coke or ice or smack or anything like that?” he asked me one night.
“No.”
“Good. Don’t. I did speed for years and years. You’re not missing out. One time I was up for probably ten days straight driving underground. I was seeing Indian faces in the walls. I finally fell asleep at the wheel and went straight into the wall.”
“Did you get on the speed to stay awake on the job?”
He laughed. “No mate, I found drugs and alcohol. After that I was never destined to be anything for the rest of my life except a fisherman and a laborer. But you don’t drink either?”
“I do, just not often.”
“Well, we’re due for a couple’a beers one night out here,” but since he often surpassed the “Ten Before Ten” heuristic, he was a bit out of my league. He did this every night before working sunup to sundown drilling holes in the ground while smoking cones incessantly with AirPods in his ears to “drown out the voices.”
I had two beers out there once and it was when our boss was around. He was in his early sixties and, so I was told, one of the last remaining “true, old-school Australians.” I once saw him scale the two-meter wire fence and hop to the ground from it, which is a feat even I had trouble with. One night he was having a bonfire and I approached him and said, “you’re not worried about it causing a bushfire?” It was a huge pile of branches in the dirt mere inches from the scrub. “Or is it the wrong time of year?”
“I don’t give a fuck what time of year it is.”
“I didn’t get the impression there were many rules out here.”
“Grab a beer.”
I did, then asked, “What’s the hardest job you’ve ever worked?”
He paused. “Anything for my old man. Couldn’t do a thing right for the fucker. My sister and my younger brother never had any issues. Me, couldn’t get a fucking thing right. To his credit he sent me to school until I was eleven at least, said to me, ‘I didn’t go to school, you’re going to school.’ But I still didn’t learn a fuckin’ thing since I wasn’t hardly there. I tell you, the most degrading moment of my life was doing the bills in front of my sons without knowing how to read or write.”
We stared at the fire.
“I tell you the worst job I ever did was driving a dozer out here in the bush clearing roads for a mining company to do some exploration work. Every night for seven months I slept next to that dozer in a swag. I drove the equivalent of the length of Perth to Sydney and back going three kilometers an hour. Three.”
“How did you keep from getting bored?”
“Plenty of ways. Mostly I had to hit branches out of the way with a shovel so they wouldn’t break me windscreen. That was a fucker to replace.”
“Did that ever happen?”
He paused again. “About fifty times.”
That was the only night I ever had any beers out there and the only night I ever saw the big man stay out there and, true to himself, he slept on the ground in a swag next to his Land Cruiser.
#
All of this may sound strange in juxtaposition to surfing, but it helped me understand why the people out there surfed the way they did: full-tilt on waves of consequence in freezing shark-infested waters on the edge of nowhere. The first time I paddled out at a secret-ish standup tube with only one local out I was immediately pegged as the itinerant American. Fortunately, he was happy to have me. He asked me how old I was and then told me he would be fifty-two in a few days.
“There are so many older locals out here who still shred,” I said. “Where I come from, it feels like people reach a certain age and they just sort of. . .”
“They give up!”
“Yeah, they give up. And it’s pretty inspiring to see so many people here who won’t.”
And when I said “give up,” I meant it in every sense. The people out here don’t have a choice; to give up is to die. In the States, particularly on the East Coast, there are a lot of cushions and systems that allow people to give up yet stay afloat until their body shuts down just like their mind did long ago. I don’t mean Welfare or Social Security, I mean that that society and culture allows for people to go on autopilot for decades of their life at a bullshit job subsisting on junk food and algorithmically tailored media. On the Nullarbor, those people are buried.
All of this existential running is exhausting and leaves a spiritual deficit that must be replenished. The Aboriginals did it here with Songlines and Dreamings of such complexity and grandeur as to render the cathedrals and stock exchanges of the West but mere ripples in the great ocean of meaning. After forty millennia these tales are a canvas for an intricately detailed origin story that, when woven across the entire continent, successfully combat the intense loneliness of such a remote region of the world. I know this because the white Australian community which so welcomed me simply had no answer to the loneliness except to just grit their teeth and bear it. The only exception to that was the surfers. I know this because even though months of running on empty left my surfing ability a shell of its former self, I found an unprecedented amount of meaning in my surf sessions; the depth of the loneliness produced an equally intense rush of beauty and meaning, a perfectly balanced inverse.
I found that feeling at even the most crowded spots out there (which would have had triple the crew if they were anywhere else). There were other places, however, where I knew I could take this idea to its zenith, and when I had some time off of work I went to one alone. I won’t say the exact name here because I believe it to be one of the last remaining surf zones with multiple world-class waves and no crowds. It’s no secret, but none of the spots are household names outside of that part of South Oz. There is a cattle grid that serves as the literal gateway to the area where most of the premier waves lie and on that gate someone has scrawled a post-hoc message in sharpie: “Fuck photos clips and brands.” I have no reservations about putting this description here because the only way a reader could pinpoint its location is if they’ve already been there; if you know, you know.
It was my second trip out there. On my first I talked to a bodyboarder from Reunion Island who had mentioned camping out there alone and that it was “fucking scary.” At the time I didn’t believe him or even understand how it could be. Now I do, and I will try to explain what I now understand. There is a book called The Plains, an Australian cult classic about an unnamed film-maker who travels to interior Australia with the intent of eventually producing a film that captures the landscape’s essence. Thematically, the book is about “meaning[s] behind appearances,” or what the things we know and see imply about the things we don’t or can’t know, like a character who “stared at the intricate brilliance of a chandelier and guessed at the presence of sunlight in the memories of people he himself scarcely remembered.” It is the final passage of the book, however, that best explains the long night I had in my leaky tent: “. . . I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.” In my sleeping bag I saw that the lengths I had gone to in search of waves had revealed in me the corresponding darkness that was the catalyst behind all of my actions. That darkness now enveloped me and I no longer knew what, if anything, was preventing me from succumbing to it.
When I did awaken before sunrise I was sipping my second coffee before I could see three immaculately groomed slabs spitting their guts out before me. I was the only living human sitting at the edge of the Earth convincing myself that fear was not an excuse to pass up this opportunity. It took me an hour to do so, and another thirty minutes to ease myself into the drop, until I was finally positioned to go deep and awaiting a set. I paddled over a small wave and a dolphin came up for air so close to me that I could see the wrinkles and cracks in its blowhole. I knew exactly what it was but I screamed involuntarily in a way that made it sound like someone else was screaming. I then let out a voluntary “fuck” as I turned away from the dolphin only for it to come up in front of me again just as close as the first time. “Okay! Fine! I get it!” I heard myself scream before I heard it come up again behind me. I don’t know why but I then looked down. I saw something big with a white belly in a position and orientation that did not compute with where the dolphin had been only seconds before. That’s all I know, but all of the instincts that kept my ancestors alive to birth me that had been accumulating within me since the night prior were screaming at me to go to shore. I rode two shoulders and then some whitewater, all of which were set waves, and when I could stand on the reef I saw two more sapphire barrels as smooth as freshly-blown glass taunting me from within spitting distance. I started to second-guess my decision, and I still wonder if I did just see the dolphin again or if I even saw anything in the first place, but after talking to some people who have spent their lives in that ocean I’m pretty sure that that dolphin was warning me about something.
I will never know, but I do know this: in five total months of packing up camp and resettling nearly every day I only ever left one item behind and it was that day as I angrily threw everything into my ute to go surf a more well-known spot. I forgot my tide watch, and I’ll let the reader guess which surf brand manufactured it, and then I’ll let the reader decide how much they believe in coincidence, but this is why my memory of that morning is now punctuated in my consciousness the way that all moments are when we stare into the gaping white-hot jaws of the Absolute and carry on afterwards forever changed.
Because in the long days of onshores that immediately followed I had a lot of time to unpack and analyze these events. In some ways I wished I had seen something, anything, with more certainty so that I could at least have some answers; the scale of my uncertainty now knew no bounds. Had I seen my own death? Was I an apparition in somebody else’s dream waiting to be blinked out of existence when they awoke? Was I stuck in the throes of Eternal Recurrence, doomed to repeat all of the actions and thoughts comprising my life over and over again forevermore without the awareness to break free of such cosmic monotony? I drifted to one of my favorite quotes from another book called House Of Leaves, a thematically similar yet more existentially ominous tale than The Plains: “what’s real or isn’t real doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same.” And so I eventually decided, in order to finally fall asleep with ease again, that knowing the truth amongst these outcomes doesn’t matter because the proper course of action is the same no matter what: just keep going.