‘Dems da Breaks
I stand on a cliff at the end of the world. White capped waves, like blue, jiggling Jello topped with frothy whipping cream, bob and dip all the way to the horizon. Scrubbed air, cleaned by winds that scraped away the stench of humanity while blowing across thousands of kilometers, pulls my hair straight back. I take a deep breath, and then another. My lungs surge with it. My body is caressed by it. My ears are filled with its rumbles. There is nothing of man here on this precipice; I see only the water crowned with its raging lather, and air swirling joyfully, unconcerned with my presence. It rattles the long dry grasses clinging to the thin soil and tears at my clothes before hurtling onward, untamed and uncaring.
We, my daughter and I, have stopped for lunch at this isolated spot, just before the edge of civilization. The winds, off the Pacific, bring with them the most marvellous smell in the world. Clean air and ocean and tropical island all rolled into one. If you go, there is a large, flat piece of basalt, almost as if it was created just for you to sit and contemplate life. Waiting.
And the waves – some of which have traveled thousands of kilometers – break against the ebony black jumble of broken lava at the bottom of the cliff. I watch the salty spray shoot up a hundred meters and create the rainbows which write their colourful obituaries in the air.
We eat our home-made sandwiches, our pungent cheese, and sweet, tangy pineapple slices while listening to the crash of the surf. We watch for signs of hump back whales breaching against the horizon. It has only been a few days since we left a brutal spring snow storm behind and stepped off the plane into this sweet, caressing air. But already we are a golden brown, and have decided that it would be worth almost everything we owned to be able to live in flip-flops and tank tops, here at the top of this lonely, isolated crag.
The clock has stopped and I drift in the moment. I picture myself, forever here, as if my essence were caught in a spell in the land of faerie. Wandering, eating mangos and pineapples, and sitting — pondering the great, wide world. I lick sticky fruit juice from my fingers and sigh. I feel the rhythm of the world beneath me; it is like drinking ambrosia after years of going without water.
Image Credit
“‘Dems da Breaks,” by Peter Lee. www.flickr.com. Some rights reserved.
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