The moment has arrived.
Finally, I can feel it in the breeze drifting through this East Coast bush like a brushstroke on my warm back.
I can hear it in the rainbird’s cascading toodle-loodle-loodle nearby. Burchell’s coucal!
My face is buried in a puffy little cloud of nylon-covered foam.
Bugs occasionally crawl over the mattress because all there is separating me from this storm of natural life is a multi-coloured grass mat that does not stick out the side.
Today, December 20, a Saturday I think, we are all a perfect fit.
Seven days and nights it has taken to get us to this point on the clock dominated by capitalism — work life, office hours, earning your crust, doling out to medical aid, exercising madly to chase those Vitality points — the casino of health, and unless you can count cards, we all know who wins.
Bad actors at traffic lights, mad accounting and gouging on the devilish bill, dodging pothole bullets, managing familia, travel options, food choices, prezzies, clothing — it’s a sartorial disaster.
What if it deluges, floods, it all breaks down?
Yes, camping! Especially for those of us with daughter-diagnosed mental disorders, it’s an almighty hustle.
And, naturally, when we arrive at Chintsa West for a traditional Christmas camp, we are loaded like a wagon of old, the oxen merely replaced by horsepower.
But I am a wily bustard on my 66th birthday — I have used the shuttle system.
First day, bum the van off my bud, and ride in the tents, chairs, pots, knives and sauces, all the special kit, to Buccaneers Lodge and Backpackers.
Second day, shuttle in the mother of my children (MOMC).
I gasp on arrival — the camp is still a natural paradise, meadows and a clean boma with fridge and gas kitchen, forest shower, flush loos, everything one needs, and all of it for one!
A young woman solo camping and gigging across the river at Hey Clay, a fun activity if ever.
We have this to ourselves?!
Dream on dude. Within days the campers are here, but not mos anyone. These are interesting folk, such mix of painters and profit-makers, all sharing an unspoken desire for quiet sociability.
And of course, the daughter and partner arrive on day three.
Homes are pup tents, domes and one large caravan with Christmas decorations.
There is the pull of the hill — higher up at Buccs means pizza, beer and pool.
Go higher to the cottages, and finally the dorms, reception and kitchen in the sky — a dining deck and Lee’s Bar which fly over Chintsa lagoon over the beach and surf.
We stay down in the forest. Well, in the grassy, shaded reclaimed guava grove.
Our party sits vas on the stage, the boma with picnic tables. It’s for the birds.
We look onto a half-moon hill, the back of the dune, bursting with forest trees and scores of feathery freaks, crickets and frogs yelling at us.
We can’t keep up.
The MOMC has the mod Robert’s bird guide out and we go through the variations. It’s a bonkers orchestra of bar-chested this, and multiple-call that. I plead PD: pre-dementia memory loss!
Camp life works best when you get out onto the beach and burn calories, and unfortunately for the MOMC, the sun burns her feet.
Daughter and pard, and the rentals, still friends across the years, amble from Cefani to “K”, the first and last truly wild estuary on the East Coast urban edge.
They plonk themselves in the warm shallows amid scores of fingerlings — mullet, strepies and one with circles from top fin to bottom.
In 55 years of coming here, I see them for the first time.
I marvel at the return of wilderness, thanks to the watchful custodianship of Viskop’s Dougie Kunhardt.
In the ’60s and ’70s, vehicles tore into the beach and riverbanks.
Their tracks, nets, bottles and stompies are gone, but some miscreants still leave their trash in the ashes and burned stubble.
Now we look on ancient waters spiked with gnarly branches. The vista is epic.
The big damage is the erosive action of mini and ever-more frequent sea surges.
One riverbank has collapsed as the sea rushed in.
Milkwoods have toppled. Devastation wreaked by the Anthropocene — human-caused climate breakdown. It’s all along our coast.
We remain enthralled. The sea is warm and cheerful, the afternoon light bathes us in colours of wet sand, sea and dune forest.
We bade our friends at Viskop farewell. They are busy with the final touches of an awesome seaside cottage (which we shall rent), and head off for a celebratory draft beer and meal at Emerald Vale brewery.
What a day for a daydream!
It’s the next day, when one of the green-collared, banded, speckled whatever cuckoo bursts out of the bushy-cloaked wall clock that the time we crave is called.
It chimes: " Mei-tjie, mei-tjie!”
It’s the freedom ‘o clock!
We have a rich fine art gallery to visit at Tea-in-the-Trees, Sal Price’s famously sumptuous Christmas dinner to savour, the forest walk to the beach ... so much to do.
And today? Nothing, not even this siren vibe will stop us from dossing all day under the trees.
The great stoppage of time and madness is upon us! A supermoon of sloth.
The bliss of nowhere to be, nothing to do but lie here face down in shorts shifting in and out of consciousness, hoping a night adder does not bite me in a butt cheek. It won’t since it has never happened in this camp!
And it’s teatime! I drag my knuckles to the boma and gasp at the progress made by artists Sven Christian and Phumzi Manana, a film publicist.
They have created a mural around the serving hatch. Sven says the work is inspired by the monochromatic linocuts of the legendary John Muafangejo and Robyn Perros.
And me! What about a hammock? I chip in. It’s iconic to Buccs camp — and there it is, in the mural, a big foot hanging over the side of the hammock belonging to the slumbering contented soul of the East Coast.
Earlier, as I strike this column down on my cellphone at 6am, with two older campers nearby, noses down in their novels — words in a wordless place — Buccs’ co-owner and fine artist Sal arrives to check out the mural progress, collect her little dog Layla, and deliver a pot of her own-made jam.
She approves. I enthuse.
Today it’s raining. Last night it was raining.
But our tents are cosy and dry. The deck is covered with a big old roof. The talk is of Nieu-Bethesda and how to keep tents dry amid the call of the camping bird: “How did you sleep?”
It will rain again, and the sun will shine too.
We are in situ! Let the good times roll! Wake me when it’s all over. Or maybe not!
Merry Christmas, you legends!
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