Morris Point - in Still Bay

Fifty-five more days from today before I can sit down beside the faithful breakers at Morris Point.

December means summer when Christmas happens. The annual migration south for South Africans in the highland interior starts late November. Tropical heat drives us toward the cooler Cape coasts where inherited beach cottages stay decorated with family traditions and salvaged sea shells all year round.

My first introduction to this unique enclave between the semi-arid Karoo Complex and the temperate Indian Ocean occurred at the age of fourteen. My brother and I claimed sole ownership of a secluded stretch of rough grained shells mixed with sea debris. We called it “whistle-sand” every time our soles would disrupt solitary dunes tracking the spoor of disguised bushbuck in the dense Fynbos (unique shrubbery found in this African ecozone only).

When exhausted by the South-Easter pushing our sweater-hoods over our eyes, we hid beneath the wind shadow inside the rock pools. Teasing hungry urchins by dropping bits of snail we scraped off the black and orange rocks into their waving tentacles―conducting a purple symphony underwater.

I turn my head east toward the unseen beckon where the lighthouse at Ystervarkfontein (literally it means Porcupine Fountain) warns off seamen fishing for cob and yellowtail this time of year. With my jeans rolled up I find my favorite seat in these ancient boulders where I have spent hundreds of sunsets speaking to God about my life and what I wish he would tell Derek for me with him in heaven. Stirring the shinny grayness with my feet I wonder where this water came from. How many seasons have these saline drops survived?

The tiny hydrogen and oxygen molecules that run down my shin could have existed inside the lungs of Jesus in Bethlehem or condensed inside Neil Armstrong’s helmet on the moon. Did they melt in Antarctica and travel with the mammoths back to India to evaporate off the fore arm of an African slave working in the rubber plantations under the Carolina sun? The ocean sprays her wet secrets across my face and I lick the history of all mankind off my lips. Do I taste the blood of a young German soldier who lay alone on another beach staring up at the empty evening sky as I? Waar kom my hulp vandaan?

The last time I stared at the Southern Cross lying on the warm sand of Skulpiesbaai I listened to my friend and fellow architecture student―Jaco―describe how we could make beautiful glass sculptures out of this beach if we could control a small new clear explosion deeper into the ocean. A proclaimed atheist at the time and also addicted to science-fiction novels, we enjoyed numerous theological discussions over red wine and his home-made eggplant fritters. He died the next summer when his paragliding-gear dropped too short and pulled him into the waves before he could untangle himself.

When I drink dead water anywhere on this planet, it becomes alive in my body. It absorbs me as part of this churning tidal mass, uninterrupted, rocking in royal blue splendor since the first day of creation until the nanosecond the Incarnation decides to quiet its dance.