Opinion: “The Mentawais now belong to the kook!”

A trip to Indonesian playground reveals startling truth, "the new line-up politics of adult learners and aggressive Europeans!"

Despite the darkness an opening ride at Macaronis feels as inalien as walking down the main street of a hometown.

A wide awake dream come to life.

Not a single original thought, word or deed is possible after 30 years of hyper-saturation. My trachea are filled with Indonesia’s finest clove scented tar and nicotine; liver with barley, hops and fermented sugar cane, bloodstream with the molecules imbibed after a friend scraped the rendang excreta off a rubber surgical finger swallowed and carried across oceans.

Soft pulses of light chime around thunderheads arrayed in a purple bruise which rings the horizon. Megalithic fauna wanders amongst the mangrove roots and dead trees to the last low rumble of the night. Mugwumps and plutonium wives slither out from coral crevices. Blood warm water envelopes like a jade green sap; the feeling of homecoming, so familiar to every Australian surfer at least, is almost over-powering.

Florid language is white noise to the working gal. We return to the prosaic.

Two, three or four hours later a pair of French-Canadian gals, wielding harsh accents and peachy buttocks like weapons of war take over the line-up, paddling straight to the inside wave after wave. The display of aggression, overt and implied, is stunning. Flailing limbs and basic positioning errors ruin many waves but the gals resolutely paddle straight back up the inside to the top of the line.

We portray global lineups poorly whenever harmony is implied. It’s more accurate to view them in biological terms: full of dominance, aggression, uneasy truces and, in non-gendered lineups, sexual sovereignty. Biogeographer Tim Low wrote about the uncommon aggression inherent in Australian birds and made the case that the abundance of flowering Eucalypts was a resource worth fighting for.

“Nectar”, he wrote, “rewards aggression”.

So too, perfect surf. Adult learners master that before a basic skill set. Like screaming lorikeet flocks fight tree by tree to dab tongues on sweet nectar heads; lineup politics in the Mentawais are negotiated boat by boat, day by day, hour by hour, set by set, bikini by bikini.

The screaming 50’s and roaring 40’s have shrunk the globe for a second time – not as ends to drive the spice trade – but as means to ends where a new wave of European expansionism finds common cause in energetic by-product on the reef breaks of the Mentawai. Sipora, Siberut, Pagai-Utara, Pagai-Selatan. Kepulauan Mentawai.

Here you’ll find Germans, German Swiss, Austrians, French, Italians, Russians,Slovenians, Slovakians, Portugese, English. Australians remain the dominant force, for now. Perplexed and enraged, as my Bribie mate was, by the new line-up politics of adult learners and aggressive Europeans.

“What the fuck are these kooks doing here?” he asked.

The world belongs to them now, I answered.

Why and wherefore this desire to get fucked up in Indonesia?

We hadn’t been in Padang more than an hour when I turned to my oldest friend and said, “For some reason, I feel like getting really fucked up.”

He said, “Me too.”

Hours later he was engaged in the kind of stupidity which makes a family man squirm with shame. Mike Oblowitz’s redacted 2008 doco Sea of Darkness offers clues. It charts the course of Indonesian exploration and exploitation and the dark temptations that wandered, like Neil Young’s beggar, from door to door.

Filmaker and Indonesian veteran Dick Hoole spoke in the film of the Asian sense of freedom and the difficulty in returning to normal life after tasting it. The dream, according to Martin Daly associate and convicted drug smuggler Jeff Chitty, was “60 feet on the waterline”. A boat to explore an endless oceanic playground. Chitty spent most of his adult life doing hard time, Daly veered left and steered the Indies Trader to fame/infamy. It’s stunning how easily the dream is now obtainable.

Apocalypse Now/Big Wednesday writer John Milius called bullshit on the whole program.

I paraphrase, because I was drunk when watching, but his observation was that the outcome of living this lawless dream was to become, not larger than life, but smaller than life. It diminished a man, in his eyes. That scarcely rings true, and if you look at the vision of Mike Boyum, whose life the film commemorates, you’d have to say it exerts a greater hold now than ever before. It’s scarcely possible to imagine an Australian surfer, fr’instance, who doesn’t have this virus embedded deep within, ready to take over the organism at the first whiff of clove cigarette.

Even with a scrappy forecast, the bang for buck on a boat cruising the Ments is immense. Day three and I’ve surfed into a state of almost total oblivion. Compared with a three-week passage between Honolulu and the Marshalls where the board didn’t come out of the cover and the salty taste of seasick pussy was all that sustained.

“Maybe you should go back to Kansas,” I suggested.

“Screw Kansas,” she said.

The family man does experience sudden shocks of panic in Indonesian perfection. He forgets home. Then forgets that he has forgotten and the whole thing starts to seem like a dream from another existence. He can’t touch his childrens’ faces, feel their little fingers wrapped around his neck, see his wife’s naked body in the moonlight.

Games without frontiers, ay. Family man now though, ay.

The family man does experience sudden shocks of panic in Indonesian perfection. He forgets home. Then forgets that he has forgotten and the whole thing starts to seem like a dream from another existence. He can’t touch his childrens’ faces, feel their little fingers wrapped around his neck, see his wife’s naked body in the moonlight.

Is it still there? Or gone.

Another set shimmers in the sunlight and all memory evaporates. Perfect surf is remorseless.

Feelings of home are counter-factual. The Mentawais remain remote. Shit can turn pear-shaped in a heartbeat. Clashings of the Burma, Sunda and Eurasian plates create the most tectonically unstable area on Earth. It’s probable more than possible that everything built to satisfy surf lust in the Islands will be one day smeared into rubble by a wall of water. These facts don’t alter feelings I have spending hours roaming freely alone up the outer edge of a central Mentawaiin reef, safer and more at peace than I do surfing a kay from my house. It makes no sense.

But we are who we are, as Nick Carroll said to Chas Smith at Lemoore, I think a version of Marcus Aurelius statement: “Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee for all eternity.”

You can surf too much, I think.

Into the state of dereliction that Bill Finnegan warned against in his memoir Barbarian Days, which reads, ironically, as a paean to such dereliction.

What seems more seductive? The Pulitzer or weeks alone on Tavarua?

I guess he got both, in the end.

In the end I got a prime set wave at a perfect reef and shared it with my friend, criss-crossing tracks as the coral heads flew by under-neath.

That was the last wave and now that the high has worn off the come-down seems scarcely worth it.

Wtf, yes it does.