Last week I joined a couple of friends for a drive up the coast to Gnaraloo Station. From Perth, Gnaraloo is a thousand kilometres away.
I had a seat in the back, pressed up against sleeping bags, wetsuits, and something that smelled like banana bread. For the two hours before the sun rose, I watched suburban porchlights streak past, all tungsten yellow, then the city lights, giant bug-zappers of brilliant white, then the northern fringe cities with their pale blues and intermittent fuel-station-golds. And then, nothing. Just a comfortable darkness, visited occasionally by a passing car or a stray streetlight.
Nick drove the entire way. For twelve hours he chatted and laughed and shared his stories and listened to ours. Ian is almost twenty years older than me, and engages with others as if we know the secrets of the ages, and just need the time to get it out in words.
My focus drifted from conversations within the car to conversations with the horizon. For hours it was dirt-red, then a splash of canola yellow, forest green, granite and limestone, then back to dirt. It was quite beautiful, an entire palette comfortable with her loneliness.
Gnaraloo is in the middle of nothing. It really is. It's a sheep station, but I barely saw any sheep. Wild goats, though, they were everywhere. They looked down on us with their proud beards and funny tails, like they owned the place, like they were running the show. A people-farm, run by the goats. The locals of Gnaraloo don't dissuade this idea at all: they are wild and earthy and distant, their language is the land and the ocean. People come here for only three things: to surf, to fish and to feel free.
A few mornings in, I asked Ian why he's here. Why it matters to drive all this way, peel yourself into a wetsuit, and take your board out into the hyperthermic waters to ride a few waves. He had just returned from the ocean, and was crunching through an apple, watching Nick finish up his last wave. I got out and leaned on the car with him, and squinted into the glare. Me with my notebook, Ian with his apple.
"Why do you do this?" I asked him.
"Because it's who I am," he replied, then paused, "but only as long as I'm actually doing it."
He talks like this a lot.
"You don't feel like a surfer unless you're surfing?" I ventured.
"No, I still feel like a surfer, for sure. But that identity requires some action, you know? The longer I don't surf, the more I become a person who used to surf, not a person who actually surfs."
I looked at him and blinked twice, and he took another bite of apple.
"It's about identity," he continued, "by doing this stuff, I'm revisiting my identity, empowering it somehow."
"Empowering it?
"Yeah, I'm empowering myself, my belief in myself. It's one thing to become who you want to be in life, but a whole other challenge to stay there. Over time we can start to question ourselves and our abilities, and we can start to doubt ourselves."
"And our identities can lose their way."
"Exactly. Our identities get blurry. And the only way I know to return to clarity is to act. To do something today that reminds me of who I am."
"And who are you today?"
He laughed. "I am a person who surfs!"
Nick appeared on the path just then, and we headed back to the homestead for breakfast.
-
In storytelling, there is always a tension between a character's aspiration and their reality. There is a version of themselves they WANT to be, or that they THINK they are, and then, there is who they REALLY are. It's a gold mine for writers, exploring those gaps, revealing to the protagonist their reality and pushing them off the cliffs that will grow and transform them.
A character can be amazing, but think they are nothing special. Or they can have some serious flaws, but think they are just perfect. In the end, what they, or others, say about themselves doesn't matter half as much as what they do. Like Ian observed: identity needs action.
After that conversation with Ian, I had to ask myself the same question: "Why am I here? Why did I travel a thousand kilometres to a surfing station when I don't surf or fish?" It was an identity question.
While Ian and Nick were revisiting and strengthening their identities as "people who surf", I found myself revisiting childhood memories. Hours of wandering in white-bright sand dunes, playing with shells, drawing in red dirt, watching the shadows from stones stretch out across my bare toes. Being at peace with the nothingness of those places.
By joining Nick and Ian for the trip, I became what I always thought I was, but perhaps hadn't acted on for a while:
A person who seeks wonder and beauty over comfort or progress.
It just took a few thousands kilometres to remind me it was true.