A Season in Hell: December 26, 2022
In which I flirt with death and offer up a sacrifice to the Elder Gods
A Season in Hell is a series of journal entries I wrote in 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.
December 26
Christmas has a weird, looking-glass vibe in Australia because it’s really hot and the trees are all wrong. In fact the Australian tree commonly known as the “Christmas tree” is bright orange and has the distinction, Australianly enough, of being the world’s largest parasitic organism. It attacks everything it can reach, including power lines.
In The Bright Sword Christmas has that pagan feeling—hope for life and renewal, even in the teeth of midwinter—but in Sydney it’s all sun and palm trees and cockatoos. And parasites. Life does not require renewal.
I decide to take a week off from my book and not think about it. We drive an hour up the coast from Sydney to my wife’s mother’s beach house. I swim, I cook, I surf badly.1 I play tennis at the one tennis court in the local park, which you reserve by going to the one store in town and paying eight Australian dollars.
Whenever my mind wanders off in the direction of my book, it’s like when a baby starts toddling toward the edge of a swimming pool—I panic and catch it and steer it away.
My wife and I go for a walk along Killcare Beach. (Most of the place names hereabouts are corruptions of aboriginal names, but Killcare is in fact an old marketing slogan from when the area was first developed by Europeans: Kill Your Cares at Killcare!) At either end there are good rocks for clambering on, and if you clamber round the point at one end you can find a huge flat stone shelf that only emerges from the sea at absolute low tide.
It’s covered in seaweed and punctuated by tide pools full of anemones and chitons and other cool stuff. There are also deeper pools, big circular bore-holes in the rock, full of ominous dark water, created by some mysterious geological process. Exploring the rocky shelf feels a bit like being a foolish sailor lured into a lost Atlantis, to be drowned and my body claimed by the Old Ones when the tide comes back. My wife wisely hangs back on a higher, safer shelf. But I am as one ensorcelled by the sirens.
An unusually large wave is approaching.
We’re on the Tasman Sea here, with a clear view out to the Pacific and all the way to California, which means you get some real monster waves rolling in. I’ve already seen some big ones smash into the edge of the shelf and send up satisfyingly tall sprays of foam. I’m looking forward to seeing the really huge spray that this unusually large wave will send up when it crashes into the edge ….
But then it doesn’t crash into the edge. It’s too big. It keeps going, right over the edge, and completely engulfs the shelf. And me.
I am knocked down and dragged roughly over the rock until I fall into one of the scary dark bore holes. These holes are deep and cold, and it’s not immediately obvious that they have bottoms. It crosses my mind that they might be the mouths of old lava-tubes, that extend deep under the earth, and I’m about to be sucked down one of them through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
I scramble out of the bore hole and immediately fall into another bore hole. Seawater is churning around me to a depth of several feet. My wife is watching all this and making appropriately concerned noises.
I don’t drown. Eventually I get out of bore hole #2, and the ocean recedes and leaves me lying on the shelf like a sad piece of sea-wrack. I have numerous cuts and bruises, my phone is soaked with seawater, and I’ve lost one of my shoes. But it could’ve been worse.
Miraculously my phone comes back to life a few days later, but the shoe never comes back. I keep hoping it will—it’s a Birkenstock, and kind of expensive, and it’s made of wood so presumably it floats. But I go back to the beach the next day and the day after that to see if it has washed up on the shore.
It never does. A midwinter sacrifice to the Elder Gods.
Little known fact unrelated to writing: bad surfing is pretty easy. If all you aspire to do is grab an already-broken wave, pop up, ride it for 10 seconds and then fall over, you can. When I was 40 I realized I didn’t want to die without having gone surfing, so I went to a resort in Nicaragua with a legendarily easy break, and after a week I could do this. And it’s pretty satisfying!
Surfing well, doing the real thing, the thing you think of when you think of surfing, where you catch a smooth glittering moon-powered water-slab and zip along it slashing back and forth, is much much harder. Fortunately surfing, at least for me, is one of those zenny things that is more about just being in the world than it is about actually being good at it.
I truly had to reassure myself mid-read that since you wrote this, you didn't die. Scary stuff!