Discovering the hidden significance of the Bloom

Another day at the beach for his usual seaside coffee at a well known Adelaide coffee shop. It was well into spring now after a bleak and miserable winter. In past years he had especially loved the seaside starting with onset of spring with its blue skies, sunshine, warmth, blossom, and the promise of glorious summer to come. It normally lifted his spirits tremendously. But this year the miserable winter had lingered on into the early spring dragging his spirits down with it.

For some weeks now he had been finding it depressing, menacing - and in an ill-defined way somehow ominous in a way he could not put his finger on.

He continued sipping his cappuccino and looking out across the foreshore towards the sea.

This was normally a pristine sea blue or green in colour and generally wholesome in appearance. In past years the seascape offered up differing moods – pristine translucent green or blue morning seas in calm weather usually in late spring and into summer - and wild winter seas lashing the foreshore in winter. He was used to, and loved, all these moods and had done since his childhood beginning just after World War 11.

But this year – 2025 – was eerily different.

On this day he looked out across a murky grey spring sea with the breaking waves gently lapping the shore – the white of each breaking wave merging with a frothy white foam that lined the entire suburban shoreline as far as the eye could see. Dead sea life had been washing up on the shore. And coffee shop patrons were complaining of minor respiratory irritation that was, it was feared, connected with the unusual foam and dead sea life on the foreshore immediately outside the coffee shop. Adelaide citizens had become fearful that locally caught sea food might be toxic and started to shy away from it.

However, officially there was no alarm. The relevant state and national authorities assured the public that the beaches were safe if common sense health precautions were exercised. Adelaide citizens had been reassured that that there was no immediate cause for alarm. The algal bloom situation – the toxicity had from the outset had this name - was being closely monitored and the public would continue to be informed of any developments as needed.

So, what was it that was causing him such unease at the seaside now? What was it that was causing this apocalyptic fear in him as he looked out to sea? He was puzzled and not reassured by the official statements on the subject. Despite there being no cause for alarm he could not escape the feeling there was something evil – menacing – threatening –out there in the ocean despite there being no visible evidence to that effect. His very well educated, logical, mind told him that the algal bloom that lined the foreshore, while still only a partially understood phenomenon scientifically, was no significant physical threat to anyone.

Despite this, as he looked out across the Gulf of St Vincent from Adelaide’s foreshore he couldn’t shake the feeling of an evil presence off shore – of impending calamity. He couldn’t shake the feeling that, hidden beneath the waves, was something bad that was out to get him, his companions in the coffee shop, and the citizenry of Adelaide and beyond more generally.

He knew it was verging on paranoia but for some reason he couldn’t shake it off.

Again, he gazed around at the others in the coffee shop. No sign there of obvious alarm at impending disaster. Instead it was a picture of delightful normality.

A middle aged woman was bent over saying something to a frail old man – perhaps her father – undeterred by the vacant expression on the old man’s face. The intimacy of this – the tenderness with which she assisted the old man - suggested some close connection between the two. Perhaps they were father and daughter he mused.

At another table a young man and young woman were deep in conversation about something. The young man was pointing at an article in one of the coffee shop’s newspapers and gesticulating with his other hand. His young female companion was nodding in obvious agreement with what he was saying.

In the far corner of the shop a mother was restraining a small boy who kept banging a spoon on the table.

‘Stop that will you’, she said as she took the spoon from him.

‘You are annoying the other customers.’

At another table five senior girls in the school uniform of a local college were chatting and giggling over a morning breakfast. It was 8am and they were obviously on their way to school.

Over another newspaper open on a table adjacent to his own a young bearded man of academic appearance was discussing an item with another patron in a shirt and tie who held an opposite point of view.

He could just catch snatches of their conversation over the hubbub of coffee shop chit chat and a background of popular music playing softly in the background.

‘You can’t ignore the fact that Trump was democratically elected’ said the man in the shirt and tie.

‘Yes, but that’s meaningless in an American democracy that is completely fucked’ replied his bearded companion.

Once more he gazed around at the other patrons. Most were rugged up in winter clothing. Spring warmth was yet to come.

All in all it was generally a homely, comfortable atmosphere typical of the charm and normality that was always there in this coffee shop.

‘If the algal bloom is still here in the summer I won’t be able to have my usual summer sea swims’ he said mournfully to an attractive young barista bringing him his second cappuccino for the morning.

‘Sadly, yes.’ She replied. She was a university student nearing the end of her course. ‘Employment – real life – is just around the corner for her’, he thought.

Above the conversational hubbub he suddenly heard voices raised in disagreement.

It was the couple discussing Trump’s presidency at the table near to his. Their conversation was reaching a crescendo of intensity.

Suddenly, the bearded academic looking young man stood up abruptly to leave.

‘I’m sorry John. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the matter eh’, he said.

‘No hard feelings eh.’

‘No hard feelings’, said the other with restrained politeness.

Xxxxx

In the early summer of that year he was still struggling with that feeling of foreboding that he couldn’t understand.

His thoughts turned to past summers at this beach since his childhood in the early post World War period. Warm seasonable weather that could be relied on to deliver heat waves of very hot weather. Then it was a dry heat – quite unlike the moist tropical heat that typified the summers of the new millennium.

Young women in modest bikinis. Blue skies. Ice creams. Church tennis. Short tennis skirts when that became the fashion. Family picnics under suburban seaside jetties.

This was the benign seaside that seemed now, in some ill-defined way he did not understand, to be turning into an evil beast.

One night he’d even had a dreadful nightmare about that stretch of suburban foreshore littered with dead fish, a beautiful dead Irish Selkie (mermaid) and other deceased sea life littering that stretch of beach while a monstrous creature looking very much like the Loch Ness Monster hovered menacingly 50 metes or so off shore.

It was especially the deceased Selkie that remained vivid in his memory of that nightmare. She was in death strikingly beautiful as she lay there, half fish and half human, naked from the fish tale up, her long hair splayed out above her head on the sand, with a serene expression on her face as though she was sleeping.

Of course he recognized this bizarre dream as having little to do with reality – with the Adelaide Bloom threat – and was more to do with his interest in Irish mythology. But he found it ominously threatening nonetheless.

xxx

At last the 2025 warm summer beach weather arrived. But with it the menacing foam, increasingly urgent health warnings, dead Sea life washing up on that suburban foreshore, murky unhealthy looking seas, increased shark sightings remained a strong presence. And so his overwhelming feeling of foreboding meant that he was too afraid to swim in the sea as he had done so in countless summers before. He and most other former summer sea swimmers there. Very few, it seemed, were prepared to take the risk. As he drank his coffee he stared gloomily across the beach remembering the all-round gaiety for young and old that characterized this beach in past summers.

xxx

But then, one day early in the summer of 2025, something happened to change his mood and outlook.

It happened one morning when he was pleasantly surprised to see in the coffee shop a young French woman he had encountered in Darwin while holidaying there with his wife. His wife was a fluent French speaker and so he was able to sit in on numerous discussions with young French men and women backpackers who were there in abundance. It was the outlook on life of these young French travellers that intrigued him. Their philosophical self-awareness. And the fact that they seemed uninhibited in wanting to explore the meaning of life in an unselfconscious way. He noticed that the young French women – for that matter European women in general - were much less inhibited in talking about their bodies and bodily functions than was the norm in Australia. And that they have a philosophical maturity much more evident than is the case with their Australian counterparts.

This French woman in her early 20s was one of those.

As she was on the move around Australia they had recommended this coffee shop to her – and suddenly – there she was.

They instantly recognized one another and immediately picked up the threads of their Darwin conversations with her. He began by phoning his wife at their home nearby so that she could come and join them.

Yes, she had indeed, bought a car and driven on her own down the vast largely empty continent of Australia all the way to Adelaide. Indeed, she was still disillusioned with French politics. And yes, she knew and had heeded the warnings of him and his wife of the dangers of the Australian outback. She reiterated the life threatening health scare in France that had prompted her to embark on her overseas bucket list odyssey. She still very much wanted to experience life while she was young and before possible mortal illness struck her down. She knew she was taking risks but was still strongly philosophical about the danger.

‘C’est la vie!’

She raised her cappucino cup inviting him to join her in making a toast to life’s uncertainties. As she did she shrugged her shoulders in dismissal of life’s uncertainties – mortal and otherwise.

Suddenly, with a devilish gleam in her eye, she announced to him her intention to have a seaswim in the murky soup of a deserted sea on that warm early summer’s day.

‘I am going to take all my clothes and dive into the beautiful sea contaminated though it is’ she declared with impish humour.

‘I like to be physically close to nature’, she explained. That is why I often swim au naturel.

At first he cautioned her against it. Apart from the health risk, and despite the fact that up until the bloom young women bedecked the foreshore in very revealing swimming costumes no more substantial than shoe string, Australians could be very strict to the point of puritanism when it came to beach decorum and the risk of a public complaint at such a display of gay abandon could invoke a complaint and/or police charges.

But she went in anyway.

As he watched her disrobe through the coffee shop window before stepping over the toxic foam at the water’s edge and plunging into the sea he experienced a mild tremor of eroticism. But only momentarily. What was stronger was the sudden lifting of the fear and anxiety he had experienced in that seascape since the algal bloom emergency had begun. Somehow the reckless courage of this charming young French woman had re-ignited his own youthful sense of adventure of over half a century ago and transformed it into a better understanding of this natural aberration of the bloom. It was something that served as an antidote to his fear of what he felt was the hidden threat of this seascape.

But it also helped to clarify his thinking. He could see now that the menace he had felt so strongly wasn’t really hidden. It that sense it was only a partly visible uncertain natural phenomenon that was in effect in plain view. He just needed the courage and stamina to live with it – confront it even – as that young French woman was doing.

C’est la vie indeed.

The following day the young French woman, without announcing it, moved on from Adelaide to explore her adventures elsewhere.

His wife – his lovely, charming, French speaking soul mate of well over half a century - had been unable to meet her in Adelaide but knew the young French woman quite well from her many chats with her mostly in French in Darwin.

That night he told his wife all about their conversation and her swimming escapade.

The following morning – it was another hot summer’s day – the foam had cleared and the sea was remarkably green and translucent in the early morning light.

He hobbled down to the water’s edge and carefully put his walking stick on the sand before gingerly walking into the sea and lowering himself into it. Sure, the clearing of the foam was only temporary. It could be back tomorrow. Or the day after. And clear though the water was on that day it could still be toxic. But then again it might not be. Science was struggling to keep up with it and he – everyone – just had to live with the risk and get on with life.

He could see it so clearly now. The young French woman had invoked an epiphany in him on the algal bloom. There was an invisible indeterminate threat on that foreshore and for the time being the population just had to live with the uncertainty. And philosophically, there were all sorts of possibilities as to what it was and why it was there as the young French woman had said. Maybe it really is a dark ominous presence out to get us as humans he mused. Perhaps as a nemesis for all the bad things human kind has been doing to the natural world down the millennia. Perhaps the algal Bloom, and before it Covid, was nature’s way of turning on human kind for treating it so badly for so long. Maybe.

But after meeting the young French woman he was more of the view that his feeling of foreboding over this plague-stricken forlorn seascape had somehow become a sort of metaphor in his mind for a general dislocation in global society that was gripping the world at that time. The world was turning itself upside down in a way which was dangerous and difficult to comprehend. The Gaza genocide, the desperate and belated attempt to save the world from the disastrous effects of still uncontrolled climate change, the ascension of a dictatorial tyrant into the US White House, the never ending Ukraine conflict – all this was an inchoate threat to all human kind with no clear and widely accepted remedy and, he surmised, the whole Australian population must be sharing a burden of tremendous unease over this - perhaps without knowing it. His torment, he could see now, was probably that of the whole global population. In that sense the bloom was a wakeup call from somewhere that had to be accepted even if it could not be fully understood – and above all heeded before it was too late. When he looked out to sea what he knew in general terms was that the danger for humankind, even though not all of it was a tangible, visible, physical presence, was nonetheless real and could not be avoided.

And, above all, he also knew that in seeking answers we must not only look at the world external to us but have the courage to have a long, hard, look at ourselves as human beings internally, and what we have become, as well.