Breath

by Tim Winton

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

Yet there were days out at the Point when he wouldn’t even acknowledge our presence, especially if the Angelus crew was over. He sat out beyond everybody, waiting for the intermittent sneaker, the wave of the hour, and when he caught one he came flying by the rest of us, his big, prehensile feet spread across the deck like something strange and immoveable. On those days his eyes were glassy and distant, with not a flicker of recognition.

He was often aloof and he could be fickle. At times there was a palpable restraint in his manner, a sense that he could say a good deal more than he did.

He was, for us, a delicious enigma. He never quite did what we might expect him to do and there wasn’t a man in Sawyer or Angelus in his league.

Ten of us sat there in the noise and spray doing our best not to stare at him, because even without a board he outsurfed us all. Nobody dared paddle for a wave that Sando showed interest in. For the first time as surfers we found ourselves – man and boy – deferring to a mere swimmer.

Sando was good at portraying the moment you found yourself at your limit, when things multiplied around you like an hallucination. He could describe the weird, reptilian thing that happened to you: the cold, supercharged certainty which overtook your usually dithering mind, the rest of the world in a slow-motion blur around you, the tunnel vision, the surrender that confidence finally became. And when he talked about the final rush, the sense of release you felt at the end, skittering out to safety in the beautiful deep channel,

Animals react out of instinct, Sando continued. Like they’re always on automatic. We’ve got plenty of that, too. But our minds complicate things, slow us down. We’re always calculating the odds, measuring the consequences. But you can train your mind to live with fear and deal with the anticipation.

Every day, people face down their own fears. They make calculations, bargains with God, strategic manoeuvres. That’s how we first crossed oceans and learnt to fly and split the atom, how we found the nerve to give up on all the old superstitions.

Our higher side. We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.