In choosing Beth Spencer’s poem, “The Shipwreck Coast,” as the fall/winter Writing It Real contest third place winner, guest judge Molly Tinsley wrote: “Yes, poetry is memoir–at least in the case of this intriguing narrative poem. I loved the resolutely unpoetic, sardonic voice.  Again, the emotional control over deeply painful material impressed me. We have all these archetypal ingredients–the ocean (“the great ocean”), terrible illness (“chronic fatigue / post-viral blah blah”), isolation–treated in a most “descendental” manner. Time is important–recalling the past, unrolling it forward into the present, with a hint of suspense as to what’s going to happen when we arrive there. ”  Read Beth’s poem this week; next week, we’ll be publishing her essay on the place in her writing life of setting these words down.

The Shipwreck Coast
by Beth Spencer

I have seldom seen
a more fearful section of coastline.

— Matthew Flinders

Driving down the Great Ocean Road
(great ocean! great road!)
and my heart clenches.

It’s twenty-one years since I drove here
in my white sedan car (already a little rusty)
packed with books, files, clothes and a typewriter.

I had just been diagnosed with
chronic fatigue / post-viral blah blah whatever
and I needed rest I was told.

Fresh air seemed a good idea too.

Sydney – way too crazy busy.
And here was this house, vacant most of the winter,
cheap enough – and across the road — the ocean!

(A little sea-bathing to set me up forever.)

I had to learn to drive again
after a decade of buses, trains and walking.
A little skittery at first.

And I had to dismantle my life.

But hey, it was already crumbling.

While I’d just ended a long deep relationship,
my friends were busy nesting —
moving in with partners, buying houses,
consolidating careers, creating babies.

 

So goodbye job, goodbye share house,
Farewell most of my possessions.

***

At the end of a gravel road
in the national park
I stop the van and make a cup of tea,
and watch the remaining Apostles lovingly, savagely
being eroded by the waves.

Two millimetres a year, say the guide books,
with now and then a larger block calving
into the ocean, like the way London Bridge
fell apart in the middle.

Peterborough, the tiny town (one-shop-one-hotel)
where I stayed all those years ago
— at the start of my crazy shipwrecked
twenty-one years —
is next along.

***

I feel an enormous welling
of sadness

for that thirty year old
who thought ‘rest’
meant going off alone, with a typewriter
and a few reams of paper.

(Feeling weak and vulnerable?
Try something harsh and challenging,
That’ll do it.)

***

Back then, within a month of arriving
I was diagnosed with more acronyms.

And so began even more
renunciation, relinquishing, peeling away.

No more wheat-rye-barley-oats-dairy-pork-
lamb-potatoes-tomatoes-lettuce-chillies-
spices-eggplants-capsicums-egg whites-
cucumber-citrus-bananas-tap-water…
And of course no alcohol or caffeine.

(I was so shocked and hungry
when I got the results
that I ate a meat pie,
last meal of the condemned.)

But I was exhausted
and broken open,
willing to try anything.

I bought soy milk, rice flour and dried beans,
and made lots of soups and stews,
flavouring them with goats milk yoghurt
(which as one friend said, tasted a little
like a goat’s armpit).

But look! The ocean!
Who could ever be unhappy with the ocean
just across the road? And books, and paper?

(It’s going to be great! – the great ocean –
I’ll finish my book,
I’ll get well again…)

***

It was the tail end of winter when I arrived
and for weeks everything was
grey and beige.

Grey sky.Grey ocean. Greyish sand.
The grey-green rock stacks in the Bay of Martyrs.
And the vast constantly moving
grey of the wind-pruned scrub that stretched
inland and west as far as I could see.

The house — last on a street
of mostly holiday houses
vacant at this time of the year —
was disappointingly drab.

Hardi-plank. Not a stitch of plant-life
except for the wind-mown couch.

Beige carpet, beige walls,
olive-green laminex,
fake woodgrain cupboards.

There was a deck but it was too exposed
to the wind and the rain to ever sit out there.

***

I learnt to set a good fire.

My ritual (on a good day)
was to come in from my ‘office’
(a bedroom off the deck)
just as the sun began to roll down and
turn the sky a darker grey.

I’d light the fire, turn on the television
(which only got one channel)
and watch Degrassi Junior High.

(I dreamt about the characters at night.)

***

Outside, the plastic drink bottles full of water
that were strategically placed around a neighbour’s yard
beguiled me into thinking that I’d landed in an
awful, empty but prim surburbia.

Until one morning I woke to find that dogs
had torn apart a rabbit on my front lawn.

My last residence had been Bondi.
Blue sky, blue-green ocean, yellow sand.
Life, food, colours, rich textures, rich smells and
sounds…

The grey beige relentlessness of my haven,
and the constant howling ripping of the wind
ate into my brain.

And then just as I was about to crack
one morning the sun came out.

And the wind relented just a little.

And I fell instantly in love.

***

I wrote letters.
(No phone, and long before the
days of mobiles or email.)

If I could manage, I sat
at my makeshift desk
and looked out over the crazy
wild horses in the ocean and the majestic Martyrs
– those rock islands rising squat and solid
out of the water, crowned with
wind-harried but tenacious green,
and circled by birds.

Every day that I could
I walked on the beach.

I loved the drift-woody feel under my hand
of the staircase leading down from the
top of the cliffs.

Sometimes the bottom steps
were buried under sand dumped overnight
by the waves. Every day
a little different.

When the sun glinted on the cliffs,
revealing a jewel box of colours
and layers of lines and textures,
it was like walking amid prehistoric towers.

***

I stopped wearing make-up and dying my hair
— for the chemicals, but also
because the birds and the wind didn’t care.

I wore the same baggy clothes
day after day.

I became salty and weathered
and rarely bothered to look
into the tiny mirror in the laundry
unless it was shopping day in Warrnambool
or a rare trip to Melbourne to see friends.

***

I became slightly reckless as a driver.
I loved the trip each week to do the shopping,
and even the journey to Melbourne, though it exhausted me
for days afterwards. But it filled me with joy
when I rounded the bend on the home stretch
and saw the sheep in the soft lumpy paddocks and beyond
them the ocean. I’d sing to myself and
yell out to the sheep and the waves, as loud as I could.

Until one day three little birds on the road
failed to get out of the way,
and I heard them — boop boop boop —
and saw them fly up a short way in the air
through my back window
and crash down onto the asphalt.
I slammed on the brakes, but it was done,
and I drove slower after that.

***

— Being back meant
lighting the fire,
putting on a cup of green tea,
and Degrassi… (those sweet passionate young things,
so hard not to worry about them while I was away).

***

At night, before bed, I put the fire out with the teapot
and I learnt to move the big armchair up against
the front door
so it wouldn’t blow open.

Some nights I would lie under my borrowed doonas and blankets
with the wind screaming, the windows rattling and the walls shaking.
And when I’d finally fall asleep I’d wake suddenly from dreams of
waves crashing in through the
glass doors a few feet from my bed.

***

I paddled through the days,
and then a letter would come –
a rejection or an opportunity lost –
and I would sink.

(Shattered.)

I’d rise eventually, of course.
Buoy myself up.
And then something else,
(something so small)
and I would come to grief again.

***

Rising and sinking.
Is that a form of swimming?

***

As the months passed and I didn’t ‘recover’
— and as the pages didn’t fill up
(somehow my brain just didn’t work like it used to)
a steady numbness set in. A deep shock.

***

Meanwhile, the bouts of exhaustion were like
nothing I’d ever experienced.
Deep and bone-stripping.
Frightening in their intensity.

Some days it felt like my chest
had been carved out with a knife and there was
nothing, no life-force.

Most days my head felt like
a bucket of shit filled with razor blades.

Perhaps the worst was being so exhausted
and yet too wired to sleep.
Every nerve painfully alert.

***

The feelings could be so total
it was hard to remember what it felt like
to not be overwhelmed by the slightest task.

Hard to believe that this mysterious thing
energy — that connects us
to ourselves, and to each other —
could ever be mine to command again.

And then bewilderingly it would pass.

And then it would come back again.

***

Rising and sinking.

I’ve learnt to live better with it, although it
can still capture me so fully that it is
terrifying.

But struggling and panic only make it worse.

Patience. Let the waves
take you for a bit.

(But what to do with the
anger ,when you can barely breathe
let alone move
to get it out of your body?)

***

Back then, on the days when I felt good
I loved the solitude
and the wildness.

As the weather warmed a little, I would look out my
window and see people walking on my beach.
(My beach! How dare they?)

I would gather driftwood
to add to the fire
and barely wonder where it came from,
how it turned up in my world.

Although once I found
a dead penguin on the beach,
its feathers slicked with oil.

Everything, after all, just a step away.

***

At the end of the five months
my tenancy was up, the house
wanted by holiday-makers,
and I had to make my way back to the city.

My car a little rustier.
My bank balance dipping
further into the red.

***

One afternoon in that last week, a blue wren came
and perched on the driver’s side mirror
while I was backing out the car.

It chatted to me and to its reflection for ages.

And I cried when it left, because I wanted so badly to believe
it had a message for me.

***

I reach the Bay of Martyrs
just as the sun is setting
and pull the van in amongst a forest of buses.

Across the road, the house, still there.

Beaten by the wind,
perhaps a little greyer,
strangely unchanged.

I stare at it for a long time,
then turn and look out to the ocean
and consider following the wooden steps
down to the beach.

(My beach.

All that beauty,
all that rage.)

But the light is leaving quickly now,
and the sand is cold.

People are filing into their buses
and the doors clanging shut.

So I continue on.