The Club

Chapter 13 - The Coast

It had been several months since I had seen the ocean. For a Queenslander born and bred on the east coast it would seem to be an unbearable amount of time. I had received a call from a good friend back home who informed me that he would be heading down to the South Coast, Broulee Beach to be precise, for a weekend in December. I decided to ask Cloudy for the weekend off to put a little distance between myself and the Club. After 20 consecutive weekends worked I felt I had a little cache built up. Old James Cloudy McLeod had no objections when I asked for a leave pass, at least up until the Thursday evening before I was to leave when he became shocked and puzzled at the potential of him having to show up at the course on Sunday afternoon. Thankfully we had Jason there to walk him through his responsibilities or I could have come back on Monday to a Gatorade cooler filled with Titleists or a computer screen covered in white out. One never quite knew what would go down with Cloudy at the helm.

When my good friend Gerry first called me, I suggested that he and his friends come down to Canberra for the night and then we could head down to the coast all together. That suggestion led to a prolonged period of silence on the other end of the telephone followed by me breaking the silence with the words, “Or I could just meet you down there”.

Most of my friends equate coming to Canberra with having a root canal. So from that perspective, it’s a good place to be if you don’t care much for visitors. I’m not sure if it is the well-educated population, the complete absence of pollution, the total lack of humidity (even in the middle of the summer), or the absence of gridlock traffic that causes this hideous reaction but this aversion is a real affliction borne by the remaining 25 million citizens of Australia.

Even the politicians that cause us so much angst in the city are averse to actually living in Canberra. They fly in for their workweek on Tuesday morning and, after a couple of nights staying at the swanky Hyatt or the upscale Realm, are at the Canberra airport on Thursday night clutching a boarding pass, desperate in their desire to get the hell out of here. The lack of a coast is probably a big part of it. For Australians, you don’t need to go to the coast, but for some reason life just seems a little more liveable if you know that you could go if you wanted to.

I was in the pro shop on the Thursday night before my trip, tripping over the Christmas decorations that Jason had found in a cardboard box in the depths of Cloudy’s storage area. As Jason proceeded to make sense of various bobbles and tinsel, I organized the till, afraid to look up in case my handyman abilities were soon to be called into action. Unfortunately when it comes to anything practical in nature I have two left thumbs. While my father could take apart a boat engine and return it to a new and improved final state I lacked the ability to use a screwdriver.  He would shake his head, look away, and stare out into the depths of the ocean, cursing his god for the cruel genetic joke that made manual labour skip a generation in his family.  As soon as Jason went to the back of the shop to procure the large blow-up Santa with a Calloway Big Bertha driver in his hand I excused myself and headed for the door, shouting a new refrain (for me) . . . “See you on Monday . . .”

I hopped into the car and headed down to the local bottle shop to get some supplies for the weekend. My favourite drink on such an occasion is a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and I needed to pick some up because, as much as I wanted to see my friend, I strongly doubted my ability to find him charming whilst sober. I looked through the section of whiskeys in the shop and finally made my way over to the bourbons where my trusted old drink remained. Unlike every other man in Australia, I’m not much of a beer drinker; I prefer a Jack and coke in my hand with a little ice, sipping away as the world passes by before my eyes. Undoubtedly the first time I tried Jack Daniel’s Bourbon Whiskey it would have had something to do with the label. The brand exudes a certain kind of cool and of course, as it originates from the United States, it contains an element of importance. Despite my mother’s heritage and the pictures she shared with me from her childhood growing up in California, I had never been to the U.S.A. and I saw that as something I would have to remedy at some point in my life. I had no idea where Tennessee was on the map in relation to New York or Los Angeles, but my sense of the place is of something rugged and western, a place where Clint Eastwood would ride into town, spit on the street, and chase out a few rebels that needed to learn some manners.