A beach walk in early spring.

Tom and I walked down from the beach house on the hill, and along Canterbury Jetty Road towards the ocean, and then branched off where the walking path follows the shoreline. Here, the wild broken cliffs of the beach itself are obscured behind impassable dense bush and steep sand dunes, and at night you can hear the groaning ocean roar as it smashes itself against the rocks. 

As usual we were talking about music as we went in single file along the overgrown path, the occasional bird flitting startled from the overhang. Fifty years ago a record hit the charts, progressive rock it was called, and it was good and it was on high rotation in that year that the genre reached its zenith. Putatively.

The record was Yes’s Rick Wakeman who, solo, had released The Six Wives of Henry VIII; and once again time was standing still, I being precisely Tom’s age then as he is now. I played it over and over on cassette, taped directly off AM radio; Tom has the actual record - yes the original 1973 vinyl pressing. No credit to me, the wonder goes to fate, or some kind of spiritual or existential Möbius strip in which two eras collide.

We walked on and the sun was warm. Soon the track widened and we reached 16th Beach, where a café on one side of the road and a large car park on the other draws a Sunday crowd - surfers at dawn and the café crowd when they can be bothered climbing out of their peninsula beds and into their black BMWs.

We walked down the track to where the beach stretches south east all the way around to Gunnamatta and the forbidding cliffs rise above the dense ti-tree and moonah. People were figures in the distance, and I looked for one in a red t-shirt. 

Red stands out. She was racing up a sand dune; knees like the horses she loves so much, rising, arms flailing; a thirteen-year-old on the cusp of life. Her mother, near the water, a shadowed figure down near the roiling surf with another figure, her sister; two middle-aged conspirators bending their heads about what life should be, mothers of teenagers and twenty-somethings, enjoying the take-away coffee and the massive waves, but not too close.