It is a hot summer’s morning and already the crowds have turned up. Plonked on a towel, I divide my time between being fixated on the ocean and fascinated by the people. There is a peculiar etiquette to claiming a bit of sand to sit on when the beach is crowded. Distance is worked out through some sort of unspoken bargaining based on your own personal space and tolerance of those around you. Towels are laid out as if this were a suburban lawn, and the trappings of suburbia are substituted with sun umbrellas and chilly bins. The beach is one of the few places where it is okay for an adult to play. Actions and dress codes that would meet disapproval inland are nicely ignored. It is the kind of place where you can let down your guard and relax.
The woman next to me is wearing a conservative floral-pattern one-piece swimsuit and Far Side lady sunglasses. Like everyone else, she is oriented towards the sea, yet her gaze is directed down the beach at other people or at the paperback novel in front of her. Occasionally, she will stare out to sea, but it is never long before she closes her eyes, as if the sea has asked her a question she just can’t remember the answer to.
The cause of all this distracted focus could be something to do with measure. The sea and sometimes the vast expanse of the beach itself lack scale. Like Antarctica seen for the first time, it has no grounding in the usual laws of landscape; no trees and no buildings dot the ocean so we can take a measure of it.
Adding to the lack of familiar scale is the fact that the sea is always in motion. It is like watching a mirage that constantly changes in a subtle, kaleidoscopic way. Even when the beachgoer remains still, the sea, the light and the wind provide a constant moving hallucination. If you pin it down to this or that, it has already moved on, skipping ahead of you. No wonder the woman in the floral-pattern one-piece and Far Side lady sunglasses finds the narrative of her book or her neighbour’s choice in swimwear more interesting than the salty trickery of the sea itself.
There is a soft offshore breeze blowing over our shoulders towards the horizon. It has a pleasant cooling effect and is grooming the small waves that break just off the beach. I am deep in my sea-watching when I’m startled by a voice. “Isn’t it wonderful? … It looks like the wind flowing over the tussocks of the high country.” The woman in the floral swimsuit seems to be talking to the sea. She is referring to the pulse of wind as it gently feathers the faces of the waves as they stand up before breaking and sending manes of spray out behind them in the offshore wind.
Dangerous words
Had she been aboard a sailing ship 200 years ago, such an outburst would have put her in danger of being promptly locked in the brig. Calenture, as it is known as, is an inflammatory fever accompanied by delirium, and was said to be common on long sea voyages, especially those that transited the tropics. The word calenture comes from the Spanish “calentura”, meaning “fever”, and from the Latin “calere”, to be warm. Stuck in the doldrums on a sailing ship for weeks on end could try the patience of even the hardiest old salt and it wasn’t long before cases of calenture would begin to surface aboard. The afflicted swore the sea had become green fields and grassy meadows and became possessed with a desire to jump overboard and run from the ship. The condition was sometimes associated with heat stroke and occurred mostly in Europeans not used to the tropical sun.
The Reverend William Smith described a version of this unusual affliction in 1745. “Having heard so often of a calenture, I expected to meet with some instances of it, even before I arrived in the West Indies; but they are now grown very scarce, for I never saw above one person labouring under it: he was continuously laughing, and if I may be indulged in the term, merrily mad. One day in the height of his frenzy, he jumped overboard in Charles-Town Bay, but was luckily saved from drowning by one of his sailors, or from being devoured by some ravenous shark.”
Today, it would be called a pathological psychosis, but any reference to the condition in medical journals is confined to the 18th and 19th centuries.
By the 20th century, the medical journals fall silent on the effects of calenture. In the modern world, you would be hard pressed to find any trace of the condition. It disappeared around the arrival of the steam-powered ocean liner, whose reliable speed consigned to history the monotonous months at sea endured by those aboard sailing ships. The rise of air travel has further pushed calenture back into the dusty archives of odd conditions surpassed by technology.
On land, the only thing that can compete with calenture is the mirage of water on a hot day across a desert or on the black asphalt of a highway. Although it may not be a life-threatening psychosis, it is a pleasant trick of the light that offers the eyes what they need most: a deep cool oasis on a hot day, and escape from the new monotony of driving and the constant beat of the road thumping under the tyres.
In a trance
On the beach, the woman in the floral-pattern one-piece is still staring at the sea with a faint smile. She repeats, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Like fields of green,” I reply.
She nods, her eyes still firmly fixed on the sea as if she is in a trance. She slowly stands up from her beach chair, removes her Far-Side-lady sunglasses, dusts off the sand of her floral-pattern swimsuit, and heads down to the water’s edge. She walks slowly into the sea until she is up to her shoulders. She breaststrokes out beyond the breaking waves, her head bobbing across the tussock meadows as they shimmer in the wind.
She rolls onto her back and luxuriates in a field of fantastic, feathered green.
Matt Vance’s latest book, Innerland, is available now.
