Billabong Pro Tahiti The Outsider: Minutes to Midnight

In: Billabong Pro Tahiti by Steve Shearer 12 Comments Mon 23rd Aug '10

Tags: kurungabaa , tahiti , The Outsider , NIck Carroll , Teahupoo

"Have you heard about the Midnight Rambler...the one that shut the kitchen door"

Papeete.

I walk across the tarmac like a pilgrim approaches Mecca, with a heart full of religious feelings. Already I can hear the Tahitian cock crow, a faint call in the fragrant night.

On the big flying bird which transported me across the beloved Pacific I'd seen a movie. The new Roman Polanski fillum: Ghostwriter. In it, a hard-bitten writer gets thrown into the maw of a world beyond his ken. It's a wonderful fillum, the equal of Chinatown in every respect and it gave me great insight into my own strange predicament. How did I get to be wandering across the tarmac in Papeete, with the clock ticking towards midnight?

Yesterday I was washing windows, the lowest of the low, now less than 24 hours later exalted to a position beyond my wildest dreams. A chance online encounter with an old boss, a weird competition, a faltering series of negotiations; then as all hope was lost an eleventh hour public subscription sparked by the grand old man of Australian surf letters, Nick Carroll. It wasn't strictly Marquis of Queensbury, as they say. When the Tahitian lady next to me asked me who I worked for I said without hesitation: the people.

The roosters woke me sometime before dawn. Roosters everywhere. Joy and jubilation. Silvery peals of cock crow echoing through the village of Teahupoo, which lies nestled in a thin, verdant strip between beetling crags and fringing reef. It's more than a wave. It's a place where people live. A proud and noble race of people who speak in the mellifluous tones of a polynesian language. Almost achingly beautiful in the early morning light. There are small neat houses, with iron roofs. Yards full of broad leaved breadfruit trees and guava. And roosters.

Roosters with their emeraldic tails held proudly aloft, their feathers iridescent in the morning sun. Nothing could be a more powerful symbol of the cultural disconnection of western reality from that which sustains life than the excision of the rooster from everyday life. Humanity and the chicken have a common past stretching back into antiquity. A common past which is mutually beneficial. There is no hope for humanity until the Rooster is returned to it's rightful place as the standard bearer and clarion caller of the new day.

The press conference came and went. Carroll was absent. Shame about that. I had a bone to pick with him. In a recent article in the Pelican he had tagged me as a 'New Sarcastic' lumping me in with stone- cold hodads like Derek Rielly and Chaz Smith. It's not just the bottom half of the 44 who feel the dull ache of dishonour in Tahiti.

But Carroll wasn't there so I wandered over to the Marina wall where a couple of Tahitian men were fishing. Flicking a small metal lure into the mangrove lined bay. We spoke for a bit, freely and easily. A man squatting down, Tei'ho, pulled out a gunny sack and offered me a warm tallboy of Hinano.

"Drink", he said, more as statement then question. He wore a wide grin and his arms were covered in scars. I nodded, it was 10 o'clock in the morning, and still half delirious from jetlag the last thing I felt like was a warm tallie. Who was I though, to refuse the simple hospitality of Tahitian fishermen?

We drank for a while in silence, watching the silver lure shimmying beneath the water as the man retrieved it.

"How's life here?", I said to the man with the lure, Steeve.

He squatted down beside me. "No worry, no stress," he said.

Tei'ho threw a shaka and laughed uproariously. My own country was in turmoil, rent asunder by bitter political division which belied the prosperity of the majority. These people had very little and yet...

Steeve went on, "Here you have good feeling. Special feeling." He moved his hand in a broad sweeping gesture which took in the mountains, the rainbows drifting in between cloud banks, the ocean with it's silvery strip of breaking waves on the reef.

"Inside here," he put his gently closed fist on his heart." Everybody have it...this mana." Tei'ho pulled out another beer and passed it to me. It was warm and tasted wonderful.

I saw Carroll in the media room but before I had a chance to accost him he was onto me. "What the hell are you doing Shearer. Go surfing." You don't argue with a forehead like that.

By the time I'd gone back and grabbed a board, dizzy and half drunk the opening ceremony for the Billabong Pro was under way at the Marina. The scene was antediluvian. Heavy rain had begun to fall and under a marquee a band of tattooed Tahitian warriors were beating the war drums, blowing the wooden trumpet and conch shells in preparation for battle. A heavyset Tahitian man was speaking excitedly in French, whipping the crowd of mostly Tahitians into a frenzy. The winner of the trials Tuamota Puhetini is escorted inside and receives a lei from a Tahitian princess.

The band of warriors, with gloriously proud heads and backs as broad as the great Ma'o suddenly erupt into a war dance which eclipses the haka in power and strength. They are stamping their feet and beating their tattooed arms against trunks broad and implacable as ancient trees.

I'm humbled into insignificance by the mana of this display. How this proud and noble race of warriors could have been beaten almost into submission by a sickly and subterranean culture will forever be a mystery to me.

With the intoxicating war drums still beating I'm in the lagoon paddling out to Teahupoo. You think you can imagine what this is like...to be in the lagoon paddling out to Chopes, where you can see gusts of wave spit being blown out from the barrel.

You can't.

You fucking can't.

No matter how many images of those green, jagged mountains you see the mind can't conjure up the impact of seeing them with one's own eyes. With the mid-morning drinking, the jetlag, the overwhelming power of the warriors I'm almost overcome with a sudden wave of intense emotion.

Grief, joy, relief and love roll through me in cascading waves. My family at home suddenly feel so far away. I am disintegrating; all that I thought I was is cracking and peeling away like old weathered paint. It takes an effort of will to lie down and keep paddling. I see a Hopgood take off deep and thread an intense round barrel.

You think you are going to paddle out to Teahupoo and take a set wave off a crowd that includes Michel Bourez, the Hopgoods, Kieren Perrow quite a few more of the Top 45?

You aren't.

The wave lurches out of deep water and cracks hard onto almost unbelievably shallow reef. There is a mix of gurgled out tradewind swell and every so often a diabolically thick wave wedges in hard out of the west, coming back in at the reef and draining the end bowl almost dry. You think it must be easier at four feet.

It isn't.

Your correspondent scraps around for a while, desperately trying to get off the mark and ease the nerves. It takes a long while. The Hopgoods take off unbelievably late on the thickest wedges. Finally I picked up a scrappy insider that runs and barrels down the reef.

As the day starts to wind down and the sun descends over the ocean I picked up my best and last wave, a proper barrel. It's a good end to a session that was more sobering and intimidating than victorious.

A reggae band is playing at the marina, the mood is festive. Twilight comes quickly at this latitude. A brief flaming sunset is over by the time I walk home. The mountains are drifting back into a primordial blackness.

When the last dregs of mankind are wandering through the charred and smoking ruins of our so-called civilised world; when they are competing with cockroaches for the remaining scraps of sustenance I have to believe that somewhere in the human soul it will be minutes to midnight in Papeete and that out of this formless idea of infinite potential new life can spring.

A Hinano soothes.

Sleep comes like a benediction.

*Ma'o: Tahitian for large shark

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