beach

The heat makes the roof creak. On such days my good woman goes to the beach. She invites me along but the beach is the last place I ever frequent: sand, flies and the hordes deter me. It’s not a bad place in mid-winter. I tell her I need to ride and might pedal to the beach and join her later. This is a one in twenty shot, but this outsider gets up.

I drive to her place late in the afternoon and pull the Cervélo from the back of the car. The heat bounces off the road but I generate my own breeze with the rate of my two-wheeled progress. Springvale Road is a direct line from the eastern suburbs to the littoral at Edithvale but it’s not bicycle-friendly even late on a Sunday afternoon.

I zigzag across town to the south-eastern part of the city, replicating my route to my dentist’s surgery down by the sea at Sandringham. Vermont sits 130 metres above sea level—high or low tide?—so the uphills, Highbury Road past the cemetery and a couple of minor bumps, are overcompensated with downhill glides.

I pass landmarks but always on lesser roads: the warehouses of Holmesglen TAFE, Chadstone's shopping shrine. At Highett I duck into side streets and follow my nose to Beaumaris and Beach Road, the great cycling mecca for Melburnians. Cyclists swarm the road most days, especially early. Only I am heading south late this Sunday with a stiff southerly beating me backwards. A few whistle past, heading back to the inner city, the southerly up their arses blasting them home.

  

As I slog my way around the bay, lying on the beach becomes seriously attractive. An endless line of departing beach-goers oozes along the other side of the road and I have to force my way through to the side street that leads to Edithvale beach.

My good woman greets me at the top of the sand. I assure her that a bike chain, sand and a stiff breeze are all incompatible, borrow her car keys and stow the Cervélo in the boot. I peel sweaty bike knicks off under a sarong and wrestle my way into black dick-togs. The water is cold and we are the only two people in it as the sun singes the horizon then sinks into the grey-green.

We noodle around, oblique wavelets smacking into the sides of our heads. The refreshment is tempered by grit in every bodily crevice, a salt-crust on every square inch of skin, and a dry gulch for a gullet. I’m ready for more bitumen.  

Rock on.