Arc Tangent

A Tale Of Rol­lick­ing Adven­ture
By Andrew R. C. White, BIT, Esq

It all began one mar­gin­ally hung over Sat­ur­day morn­ing — as these things often do — with me rolling roughly out of bed. This would nor­mally be an unre­mark­able thing to do of a morn­ing, save that my fur­nish­ings have yet to arrive in my new apart­ment. I thus awoke to find my face planted firmly in the floor.

Head aching and dehy­drated, I realise with alarm that it’s nearly 8.30am and I’m due to be sea kayak­ing at 9. A hasty shower and brush of the teeth later and I’m on my way (large bot­tle of water firmly in hand).

I man­age to arrive on time — not even break­ing any speed lim­its — and spend the next hour and a half falling uncer­e­mo­ni­ously out of my water­craft. Inter­spersed with my amus­ing hops out of, and back into, the sea kayak, I man­age to keep up a fairly crack­ing pace. This typ­i­cally lasts until a boat (usu­ally owned by some­one fan­tas­ti­cally richer and higher in sta­tion than myself) zooms past and upsets the oth­er­wise com­fort­ingly flat sur­face of Syd­ney Harbour.

(I’ll take a moment to aside here, in some small degree of self-​defense; the ves­sel I occu­pied was a V10 rac­ing surf kayak, a fairly unsteady beast. When allowed to pilot instead my mother’s V8 — a much wider-​draughted affair — I remain firmly out of the water).

Still hung over, I even­tu­ally exit the water and we tod­dle off to con­sume morn­ing vict­uals at a local café (where the cof­fee is, some­what sur­pris­ingly, of rea­son­ably good stan­dard; gone seem to be the days when Syd­ney remained a rel­a­tive back­wa­ter of qual­ity beans).

We shop, we rest, we laugh. I pur­chase, with my first pay­cheque, some body­board­ing equip­ment with full-​hearted intent to use it that very after­noon, then self-​defeatingly have a nap when we return to our friend’s place.

We go snorkelling (with newly pur­chased equip­ment) at the South end of Manly beach (a small aquatic reserve known to the locals as Cab­bage Tree Bay — I can only assume the name was bestowed upon the bay, which is hardly deserv­ing of even that title, in pure whimsy). In the course of inves­ti­gat­ing a small flock of cut­tle­fish, I feel my snorkel detach from my mask. I reach up to try and grab it — too late! — only to see it sink into the sty­gian depths.

I sur­face, take a breath, and dive again, almost man­ag­ing to reach the irri­tat­ingly non-​floatational device. My fin­gers gen­tly brush it — pres­sure pound­ing in my ears — when … alas and alack, the thin tube of plas­tic slips between two rocks, and is lost to sight.

The rest of the hour is spent with me “snorkelling” sans snorkel (an activ­ity that is far more labo­ri­ous than it may at first blush appear).

We pack up, and I head home.

There had been some sort of surf car­ni­val on, and the traf­fic was thick. I man­age to cross the sole bridge in and out of Manly (Spit Rd. Bridge) in fairly good time, keep­ing ahead of a large surge of traf­fic. I reach down to adjust my radio (find­ing old-​timey rock not to my taste) when sud­denly, the car surges and begins to smoke.

In a word: shit.

I’m ascend­ing the hill on the other side of Spit Rd Bridge, a 3 lane high­way with no safe shoul­der upon which to pull off.

My car has com­pletely given up the ghost. It’s not mov­ing. I put on the brakes. Smoke con­tin­ues to pour out. I rapidly dis­en­gage the engine as a kindly motorist runs for­ward to offer me her fire extin­guisher. We pop the bon­net — mer­ci­fully, there is no fire.

The car, how­ever, is not going any­where, much as the traf­fic behind me would very much like it to.

Said traf­fic man­ages to hold up my tow-​truck by a good half hour — my car planted incon­ve­niently in the left­most lane, unmov­ing. We even­tu­ally get it back to my apart­ment com­plex, only to dis­cover that the tow-​truck is too wide to fit down the thin road to the dri­ve­way. I pay the good gen­tle­men (of Egypt­ian extrac­tion; a sturdy, friendly fel­low with a pen­chant for highly aro­matic cig­a­rettes) the whop­ping sum of $230 for his time and roll my car down the dri­ve­way, assisted solely by Newton’s the­ory of gravitation.

Manoeu­vring the car into my park­ing space proves a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge. Some friendly neigh­bours assist me with loco­mo­tion and we man­age to park the dis­tressed auto­mo­bile, only once chanc­ing to lose the driver-​side door (a fate nar­rowly averted by quick-​thinkingly slam­ming said door shut).

Exhausted and defeated, I pull out a fas­ci­nat­ing book on the nature of beaches and waves (Dr Rip’s Essen­tial Beach Book, highly rec­om­mended), make it 10 pages in and promptly fall asleep, thumb still mark­ing my place.