Driftwood

Non-Fiction
Location - Gippsland, Victoria
Written - September 2005
[The idea for the story came from my brother Mike. He gave me the idea and central metaphor, I just wrote it down.]


I remember the first time I saw something die. It wasn’t like in the movies, with a groan and then eternal rest. It was slower, and more desperate. Sometimes it is difficult to say when life ends.

Long before the Alzheimer’s disease, our mother used to take us camping. She’d drive us to places like Cape Innes, Wilsons Promontory, and Croajingolong National Park. We never helped her to put up the tent. She’d do it on her own, as my brother and I would be manic with the joy of exploring our surroundings, running off into the distance with flailing limbs. One time at Mueller River we decided to go fishing, like our father. We’d bought a package of expensive frozen bait from the service station, hooked pieces of it onto our cheap fishing rod, and caught nothing. A man told us to throw the package away, and taught us how to catch these tiny local fish which made better bait. He kneeled with us in the sand, and pushed small pieces of bread into a plastic lemonade bottle, which he anchored in the shallow water of the estuary. When my brother and I returned we found a fish trapped inside, as small as one of our fingers. We were excited. We took the bottle from the estuary and held it up, to see this fish gasping, and dying, and with every dying breath it would swallow another piece of the bread, even as all the water drained from the bottle and its movements became faint.

We felt like murderers. It took all three of us, our mother, my brother and I, to put the dead fish onto a hook and cast it out into the sea on our fishing line. When we reeled in the line the tiny fish was gone, and we were left with nothing but an empty hook.

We didn’t fish any more. I think we mostly loved to create. The beach was a field of imagination for us, and we’d invent games for ourselves. Once we made an entire 18-hole golf course among the dunes, with nothing but a tennis ball, a tent-pole, and an empty spaghetti can that we’d move from hole to hole. A passing woman smiled, and took a photograph of us.

But most of all I remember our favorite game. We’d build sand castles down on the waterline. On the smooth, hard sand between the surf and the dunes. We were never interested in building them up on the dry sand, like other people. That didn’t make sense to us. We’d wait until we knew the tide was coming in, and build our castle a few metres from the waters’ edge. A grand monument to beauty that might take us hours to create. We’d decorate it with seashells and pieces of driftwood. And the castle would be strong. Glorious. Our mother would wait for us up in the dunes, sometimes reading, but mostly watching us, with a mind full of poisoned, schizophrenic thoughts, that frighten me to imagine.

By the time the castle was finished, the first waves would come. Nothing but an impotent pulse at first, washing ever closer to us. My brother and I worked together, digging trenches, constructing walls of sand around our castle. The lapping water would be diverted by our cunning trenches, and be held back by the walls, which would soon be washed smooth as the water licked over them. We’d leap over each other in a kind of instinctive unison as we worked. Always careful to avoid crashing a careless leg into the castle we protected.

The tide would come in. Sometimes this game would last for hours, sometimes for days, but it always ended the same way. The lapping tide would turn into a rising froth. We’d be called in for lunch but there was no time – even a moments’ break would be time wasted. Our walls would collapse, and the first seawater would burst through to caress the base of our castle.

We must have looked mad. The waterline would now be twenty metres inland from us, and the froth would turn to breaking waves. All around us. We’d hurl our entire bodies in front of the coming seawater. Using our arms and legs and bronzed torsos as a barrier of flesh, then scrabbling to our feet to pack sand against the castle’s base, as sections became undermined and its structure became unsteady. Our backs would burn under the Australian sun. We were never too interested in sunscreen. There was no time.

And our castle would become misshapen and deformed, until you could barely recognize it. Cracks would appear, and vast sections would split away and crumble. The ornate decoration of driftwood and seashells would be carried back out to sea on the receding waves, and its watchtowers would collapse, until we were protecting little more than an amorphous pile of sand. A pile that an ordinary person wouldn’t care too much about anymore, unless you happened to love the thing.

We fought the tide until it was pointless, and then we fought some more. We’d scream terse instructions at each other in high-pitched voices, with the kind of frantic determination you can only muster when it’s a game you are going to lose. The castle would be underwater for moments at a time. We’d have to wait for the instants when the water receded to see our castle once again, and even then it was but a small mound that we’d slop more wet sand on top of, in futility, as if paying mere homage to a memory, and soon it would come time to accept that our castle was gone.

We’d return to camp to pick the dead skin from our sunburned shoulders. Our mother would crouch over a gas cooking stove to make us dinner as the winds swirled all around her. Back when she seemed as strong as any castle. I’ll never forget the sound of the surf as we slept in our beds. Sometime after the sun had gone down the tide would roll back, and leave pieces of driftwood on the shoreline for us to find at dawn.