Shorelines (27 page)

“It’s amazing what some people will do to get out of a bungee jump …”

Where’s the perfect life? Who’s living it? Waddabout my slice?

This is for fellows in the 50-plus age group. What say we quit the city and take up the surfing life at Jeffreys Bay? Swap our PCs and spreadsheets for Apple Macs, a photo-software package and a music-edit suite? Trade the Merc and the endless repayments for a little bubble car that runs on the smell of an oil rag? Pawn the golf clubs and the rest of the urban stuff and buy an electric guitar, a microphone and a brace of surfboards?

What’s that you say? Pie-in-the-sky idea? I should grow up? Read on, O faithless one …

Jules and I drove in through the fire season of the Eastern Cape and Carpark Vanessa could smell the smoke on us when we arrived. The Isuzu’s upholstery reeked like a burning tobacconist’s and I was desperately in need of good Scotch therapy. Like most people, I tend to keep my head in the midst of a real crisis. Afterwards, however, I get the shakes.

“There’s a bus full of school children trapped at the Van Staden’s River Gorge,” said the attractive, Kiwi-born Carpark Vanessa, as she handed us the keys to our luxury suite at African Perfection, a holiday apartment complex overlooking the shoreline at Supertubes. Not really wanting to think about those fires any more, we explored our new digs instead.

You could see this was a place for surfers. There were surf racks in the room and requests on signs for wetsuits to be placed over balconies, not in bathrooms. For a split second I felt like a wave rider. But the reality is that wave rider and golf have only one thing in common: both activities are alien to me. I do, however, really like to watch people surfing. Golf? Not so much.

A week before, Jules and I had dropped in on Rod Hossack, the veteran surfer from Vic Bay, for a Surfing 101 session.

“The Aussies were the first to colonise the world in terms of surfing,” he said as we sat on the porch of his marvellous guesthouse overlooking the bay.

“In the ’60s, they were heading off to the furthest islands, living like feral cats wherever they went. But even then, there was an overwhelming spirit of ‘localism’. Transport was not always available, so surfers used to specialise in their own bays and were often downright hostile to strangers.”

Rod, in his mid-50s, was also living a really good life. For two months of the year he ‘and a few good mates’ went surfing in Bali. The rest of the year was spent in the idyllic Victoria Bay with his wife, Shanel, and their daughter, Amber, with occasional jaunts up to Jeffreys for something different to ride.

Back when the world was younger and Jimi Hendrix was still a proudly Seattle muzo, surfers looked like suntanned hippies with their long locks and their Kombi camper vans and their stashes of marijuana. Nowadays, there was big money involved. The sponsors had stepped in and the sport had spruced itself up. Short back and sides.

We stood on the porch of our apartment and watched rhythmic lines of green-grey swells unfolding in our direction, neat pleats, raised rows like corduroy, rising swiftly and gracefully to become glassy and translucent. Then they began breaking from our right to our left, lifting, curling sweetly and falling on their foam, peeling across the bay, a movement that seemed to last forever. The surfers leapt on their boards at the last possible moment and danced on the green-cream speckled face of the waves.

This was what had driven surfers of all ages to this place for more than four decades: the delight of Supertubes peeling down from Boneyards to The Point, steady as rice-paper ripping.

There was one more thing that hadn’t changed about surfing: the girls. Count on the babes to be there through all stages of Aqua Man: from feckless hippie to sponsored yuppie to old fart squeezed into a wetsuit, accompanied by his forlorn dogs at the waves’ edge. The girls were always present on the beach, often pretending not to notice their men out on the waves. But you knew. A girl loves a singer. A girl loves a surfer. A girl loves a man who can cook. Which brings us to Steve Walsh of 20 Pepper Street.

I hadn’t seen Steve’s craggy face since the dark and desperate days of the 1980s in Jo’burg, when he played music in clubs all over the city. I remembered his voice, a throaty mix of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen with wistful shades of Neil Young.

Twenty years later, I found Steve Walsh again. He had a funky little bistro right in the basement of African Perfection. That night, he introduced Jules and me to the world of sushi and sashimi – clean, raw food, straight from the sea. Someone had brought him a fresh yellowtail that morning. Steve prepared the meal in front of us: slices of yellowtail sashimi and hand-formed nigiri sushi, showing us how to hold and dip the little portions, what the pickled ginger was for and how dangerously delicious the wasabi mustard could be.

“It’s considered good luck and good manners to rest the chopsticks with the sharp points facing left,” he said sagely. Was this really the Steve Walsh of Jack Daniels Rockey 24 Prohibition Club and late-night Fontana Hillbrow fried-chicken fame?

“These days, I’m hooked on sushi,” he said, sneaking a little rice roll off my plate and quickly swallowing it. “That, and surfing.”

Steve also had his music corner in the restaurant, a tiny stage setup that sported a Fender Telecaster, an amp and a microphone.

“No gigs, mate. I sing when the mood takes me,” he smiled, with no apparent regret. I pulled him into the past with a couple of questions.

“I got out of the music business 10 years ago. I could see I wasn’t going to become a rock star,” he said.

Steve’s one and only CD so far, a very good collection of his own songs called
Mister Dog
, said it all on the inside sleeve:

“These songs were written between 1975 and 1995 when I decided to reinvent my life as a cook and open a restaurant rather than end up singing requests for a bunch of ‘play it again Steve’ drunkards in some poxy bar while drowning my dreams in brandy and Coke.”

The ‘Conversion of Steve Walsh’ didn’t begin here at Jeffreys. It started out at St Helena Bay on the West Coast, where he ran a restaurant and cooked over an open flame.

“At first, it was terrifying,” he said. “Would people like my food? I’d see a car’s lights come bouncing down the long track to my farmhouse restaurant and I’d think, ‘Go back. Oh please, go back.’ Then we started getting repeat business – people took to the food.”

We thought we knew the West Coast after our long ride from Alexander Bay to Cape Town. We thought we knew all the legends. Steve Walsh knew more. And he had the inside track on the issues, as well. He broke out a bottle of Jamesons and we rambled on about perlemoen and lobster to sharks and then West Coast dynasties we’d never heard of.

It took Steve nearly a year to learn the discipline of making sushi.

“And the respect one needs to give it.”

We asked about life on the water.

“The locals are traditionally very defensive of their turf,” he said. “Three years ago there was a vicious battle for command of the waves. It was sparked off by foreigners muscling in, which incensed the people who live here. The locals started wearing white vests over their wet suits and called themselves the
J-Bay Underground
, showing a bit of muscle themselves. It wasn’t all heaven out there. Surfers would slash one another’s tyres in the battle for a place on the waves. This happens all over the world.”

The next day, we would find the following graffiti on a face-brick wall near the shore:

“
Don’t live here – don’t surf here
.”

Steve said things had eased up in Jeffreys Bay, however.

“Turf has been established. The locals are more relaxed. In fact, a lot of foreign surfers are now remarking on how friendly the J-Bay crowd is.”

He spoke of the lure of surfing, the ultimate sensation of ‘the green room’, the cylindrical wave that put you in another place. The Mystic.

“And then there’s the power pocket, the critical breaking section of wave that speeds the surfer along at nearly 80 km an hour,” he said. “You use every muscle in your body, and are constantly competing with yourself.

“Supertubes is not the place to learn surfing. You’ll kill yourself. Have a look at those rocks at low tide. At high tide they’re only a metre below the surface. You come here when you’re good.

“After a while you become a water-man, you learn to deal with the ocean conditions, how to judge the waves. Every good surfer is a good water-man.”

In the old days, he said, surfers made up a small group of people with a bad reputation for grabbing people’s daughters in the back of their vans, taking drugs, throwing wild parties and dressing strangely.

“Shaun Thompson changed the image of surfing all around the world,” said Steve. “In 1977, he became the world champion. He was presentable and interesting and sponsors loved him.” Steve put himself into the ‘soul surfer’ category.

He talked about the famous surfing destinations around the world, such as Teahupoo in Tahiti, “the scariest, most radical wave on the planet. I’m so happy I’m old so I don’t have to go and surf it. That’s the ultimate punishment.”

Did they respect him out there?

“Surfing is a sport where age makes no difference,” he said. “You’ll get 14-year-olds yelling: ‘Get off my wave, you old bastard.’ Around here, kids grow up quickly, because they hang out with adults so much.”

We visited Steve in his tiny bedsit to see the DVD
Teahupoo – The Two Days That Blow Minds
. There was a bed for himself, one for his dog Duke, a desk and a new Apple Mac he was slowly coming to terms with. Steve’s life was completely pared down. His current reading material was a book on Japanese cooking and a surfing magazine. Girls, Steve, what about the girls?

“There’s someone in Cape Town. I see her four times a year,” he said, and left it at that.

Back in our room, I paged through a copy of
Zig Zag,
the local surfing magazine everyone read in Jeffreys Bay. There was the thing on the Aussie mice I’d heard about. A guy called Shane Willmott was training three mice called Harry, Chopsticks and Bunsen to surf “small waves on tiny mouse-size surfboards”.

Willmott dyed his surfing mice different colours so they would “stand out in the white wash” of the waves.

I liked this story, but at breakfast down in 20 Pepper Street the next morning, I
really
liked the music of Jack Johnson, the Hawaiian surfer-singer whose sound was playing almost all the time in Steve’s place. When we checked the
www.jackjohnsonmusic.com
website later, the musician was quoted as saying:

“Future projects? I wanna collaborate with the waves for the next couple of years. I want to take a little break and surf a lot.” But not before playing a concert at the Waikiki Shell in Honolulu with my personal hero, Willie Nelson, in April 2006.

We had an appointment with our landlady, Cheron Kraak, who owned and ran the South African Billabong franchise and a company called Country Feeling. En route to her offices we drove through Jeffreys, which had to rate as one of the ugliest architectural collections along the SA coastline. Charm-free face brick was everywhere. ‘Low maintenance’ in full supply. One of the property ads at a supermarket read:

“Lock-up-and-go units, compromising [sic] two beds, one bath, open-plan kitchen area, parking baby [sic], walk to beach, limited sea view.” Not today, thanks.

We mentioned this to Cheron Kraak in her office. She pulled a face and agreed:

“Ugliness devalues everything.”

Cheron remembered this place when it was still a piece of hippie heaven on earth.

“I came here in the 1970s and fell in love with the surfing. I ran away from the whole tennis club thing in Jo’burg. An Aussie girl showed me how to make reversible hand-embroidered bikinis and board shorts. I started this business with one portable sewing machine.”

Cheron transformed a matchbox-sized garage into Jeffreys Bay’s first surf shop. She’d found a niche.

“I’d let the surfers choose the material and the buttons, and I’d cut the shorts out on the lounge table, sew madly and deliver them myself,” she said. “I even offered a repair service when they got torn.” And then the
Weekend Post
told her story in January 1981 below the catchy headline:

“She sews sea shorts on the seashore.”

Life was only partly idyllic in the beginning. Jeffreys Bay had been a tiny fishing village, a beloved holiday-fishing spot for the local farmers, who didn’t immediately take to the surf crews.

“We were not accepted,” Cheron said. “You’d see curtains twitch as we walked past. Only a few people would let us stay in their outside rooms or sell us food. So we bought our own property.”

Cheron’s surf shop grew throughout the 1980s.

“A lot of locals still thought it was a front for something illegal,” she said. “But it was just the fear of the unknown. They were scared of change.”

Cheron Kraak now ran an operation that employed more than 200 people and brought an international surfing event to Jeffreys Bay in winter each year: the Billabong World Championship Pro Tour.