The morning opens heavy and grey. Dark smudges of cloud fill the sky, thick and stagnant, lighter in the east where the morning sun is filtered and confined to a dull constant. There is a sense of the suns presence, but the dense blanket has defeated the raging luminosity. All is damp with an enveloping weak mist, a soaking fog that creates tiny droplets that hang from leaves like miniature earlobes, somehow still glistening despite the drab, colourless light.
Against this murky, soggy panorama, the sand of Lucky Bay still sparkles vivid white, running from the dunes that are pocketed by green crags, across the beach and down to the tide where it is covered and revealed by the water.
The water… the clean, diaphanous water.
As the waves crest before they topple and break, it becomes translucent, transparent in its purity and bed of pure blanched sand. The water crashes onto itself, and produces a foam somehow whiter than the bleached bottom that it bubbles over.
Across the bay, a headland overlooks. It rises sharply from the blue, the kinks and twists of its tortured evolution softened by the dark olive blanket of gorse and shrub. The thick band of green is crowned by an imperious chunk of bald granite, thrusting upward into the silvery sky, a petulant challenge. The protracted combat against wind and rain has rolled the great rocks shoulders to softened points, but there is still a grand stubbornness to its presence.
Nature warrants time and patience. It reveals a majestic whole created from detailed parts.
The bush that scarves the granite mountain exposes bursts of colour – flowers lilac, red and white, amongst greens that run from a yellow-khaki through to a dark, deep olive as if moving from the seed to the outside of a ripe avocado. Soft flowers of lucid colour erupt from gnarled, wind-strained branches that look like salt-faded chunks of rope twisted and bent.
A fiery orange-red flower, like six bright trumpets bursting forth, with the tips of the petals spinning back as if the shrill sound of the fanfare could be physically embodied. Another is an explosion of purple, perfectly mimicking a joyous detonation of fireworks. The grand old banksia flowers, the local variety actually called the Showy Banksia, demonstrating its ostentatious appearance. The beauty of this flower, actually made up of hundreds of smaller tubular flowers, is dependent on the violent destruction of fire which at once ends the lifecycle of many, but starts the existence of this majestic blossom. And one final fascination – a tiny white furry specimen that looks like hundreds of minuscule pipe cleaners, or strange little caterpillars, that when combined on the bush resemble a huge lamington covered in shredded coconut.
All vivid and complex when close, but then fade into the greater green from afar. It pays to bend, to stoop, to stop and to peer. There is no greater teacher of time and reward than nature.
Suddenly, the sun pushes through a crack in the clouds and the bay explodes into shimmering, dazzling silver. Still no soul walks the beach, it is deserted and alone. The water crashes, the sand dazzles and the bay exists, unconscious of its beauty. Lucky Bay indeed.
Big Country 