Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Whale skull

Sometimes we dreamed together. a strange thing. We'd wake up in the morning and when talking, our dreams would be similar, even the same.
A few days before we camped at Cheynes Beach, I woke in the morning and told him about my dream. I was on a beach, a long sandy expanse, a squeaky sand kind of beach where the sand is so fine and white, it squeaks beneath your feet. I walked through the standing ribs of a stranded whale.


Half drunk we wandered down to the beach and that's where we found the whale's skull, standing like a gigantic hip bone on the sand. That night we slept on a shelf of granite, drank Stones green ginger wine and fished and pulled up shitty bream and rock cod. 'That skull is mine,' I said to him that night. 'I had a dream about that whale. It's mine. You have to help me get it tomorrow.'

It's quite illegal to take whalebones from the shore (even seashells, so I hear). In the pre-dawn gloaming we pulled his one-tonner ute up beside the whale skull. It must have weighed a ton and a half, but with his crow bar and a bit of lever-logic we got the skull onto the back of his ute.

The next day we drove through town on our way home with a bone that was maybe 8 feet long and 3 feet high. It looked like an elephant's ears. It was amazing.

Recently I told my son the story about how me and his dad found the whale skull and he said that it was mine now.

4 comments:

  1. The idea of you drinking Stones Ginger Wine on the foreshore is even stranger to me than the skull. Here we associate it with Dickensian Christmas. You know, snow and all that.

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  2. You’re right, that is strange! In Australia it is the ultimate night-fishing drink.

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  3. Really important to remember the good times, when the love was real. I saw the welder-mask-cross cenotaph by the side of the road the other day. I'd been seeing the police markings on the road and they reminded me every time I went to work. The mask is a nice touch. Reminds me of Ned Kelly. XX

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  4. Yes it is good to bring those moments to forefront of mind again, all part of the letting go of the rest. Finding that whale skull was amazing.

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