The Cut - by Kushla Haenen
As we round the final bend in the road that follows the Kaituna river to the sea, fishing rods appear, sticking up from the concrete jetty like so many radio aerials. The dusty parking area is crowded with cars and people here to fish, kayak or just walk the beach.
The sky is a hundred shades of blue over the people, but the sea refuses to reflect the sky’s colours accurately; waves beat on to shore in a stubborn, frothing green. We might hear the sand sizzle as the waves suck at it, if the waves weren’t so noisy themselves. Every grain is a tiny storage system absorbing the heat of the sun, burning the feet of anyone who dares walk on it barefoot, providing the yang to the ocean’s chilly yin.
It would be beautiful here if it weren’t for people. At the edge of the car park boulders mark the boundary between sand dunes and parking area. Beyond the boulders the dunes are littered: yellowing fish-and-chip papers discarded to blow like tumbleweed in the grasses, blue plastic bags sticky with old bait and fish scales are half-buried in the sand. A paper coffee cup is squashed flat where it lies amid tyre tracks. The insole of a shoe points towards the sea, as if it had stepped out of its shoe all by itself in eagerness to reach the water, before realising that without shoe and foot it had no method of propulsion.
Fishermen spit from the jetty into the foam of the waves, chucking cast-off scrap ends of nylon line aside as they replace hooks and rearrange traces. The wind snatches the ends away, dragging them up the beach the second the fishermen turn their backs. Occasionally a lucky person scores a fish, kahawai. They duck and dive, passing their flexing rod over and under the rods of others in a complicated weave to avoid tangling with other lines as they reel in their catch.
Down the beach, a man is isolated from the crowd on the jetty. He sits, a small figure on a dried-out, washed-up log. His green bush shirt makes a tree-clad slope of his rounded shoulders as he gazes at nothing in the sand at his feet. A fishing rod stands erect at the margin of the wet sand that slopes away to the waves in front of him, its tip bending and vibrating as the waves pull and tug at the nylon line connecting rod and sea.
A cigarette is balanced on his full lower lip, his upper lip resting on the filter tip, barely preventing a fatal fall to the sand. He looks up over his shoulder as we approach. His eyes are young and curious, despite the salt-and-pepper stubble that shadows his cheeks.
“Any luck?” we ask without stopping our walk, as is the social norm when strangers meet on this beach.
The downturn of his mouth and wrinkling of his nose offer an answer to the negative.
“Bit late. Missed the tide, eh,” he says. “Got heaps yesterday though. They were running all right.”
The wind is already whipping his words away up the beach as we smile and nod, walking sideways to keep our eyes on him until he finishes speaking, then continuing on our way.
By the time we return from our walk an hour later, the old man is gone. A few pieces of bait lie in front of the log where he sat, their edges already beginning to dry and curl. His footprints, multiple tracks from log to water and back again, fade into the wet sand. The wind works more slowly than the tide, but will soon erase his prints, and gulls will shortly claim the pieces of bait in the sand.
We turn from the sea and the jetty and the fishermen and dunes towards the car park. We step over dog shit left near one of the boulders, unclaimed by a neglectful dog owner. The council rubbish bin, green and expectant, half empty, flaps its black plastic liner disappointedly as a gust washes in from the sea.
In the rear-vision mirror dust rises from our tyres as we leave, coating cars, kayaks, fishing rods, people and rubbish in a fine layer of dust.
