An excerpt from Rolling Thunder by Bob Harvey

*BOB HARVEY, Auckland's best-known Westie, is so passionate about the Waitakeres and Auckland's west coast he has written two books about them. His first, Untamed Coast, which covered the wild coast between the Manukau and Kaipara Heads, sold 15,000 copies.

His second, Rolling Thunder, is centred on Karekare Beach, where Harvey started as a lifeguard in 1956 and has shared a bach with wife Barbara and five children for 30 years.

The book is enriched with the work of some of Auckland's top photographers, artists such as Peter Siddell, Gretchen Albrecht, Stanley Palmer, Frank Wright and Charles Blomfield, poets such as Alan Curnow and C.K. Stead.

It has a sensitive history of the beach from the Maori perspective. Here is an extract from Rolling Thunder.

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Karekare beach is not for those who prefer safe landscapes. There's an overpowering sense of place here. The moment you arrive, you know this is a special place. You either like it instantly, or you're out of here fast, never to return. Stay, and your senses start picking up a myriad of sensations.

At the carpark, you can hear the booming surf. It comes at you like rolling thunder, echoing off the valley walls and pushing into your ears. The great, gnarled face of the Watchman keens the sound and sends it hurling towards you as you jump the creek before heading towards the beach. Do this at night, and the beach amplifies pure sound, picking up bass chords from the collision of waves against Paratahi Island and sampling the shoreline surf action on the way in.

The Karekare sound is different from that of any beach I know. The surf does not crash here; it rolls the sound waves and pops them on to the Zion Hill cliffs.

I've slept on this beach at night and never felt cold, drifting off for 20 minutes and waking up feeling like I've slept for days. When I was young, I had a favourite Surf Club blanket, which I wore like a toga, and a moth-eaten sleeping bag, singed by the embers of beach bonfires. I still have a passion for fire on this beach.

In the 1960s, some Californians brought peyote to the coast. Through the dazzling haze, a profound experience of sound and night unfolded. In some strange way, it opened me up to another direction in my life; it made me believe that I had something to offer, and it gave me an acute sense of life and death. The experience wedded me to this place as a sailor to the sea.

One afternoon during my first year with the Surf Club, I was swept out to sea. In those distant days, surf rescue was not assured. No matter how hard I tried, I could not regain the beach. Strangely, there was no sense of panic. I felt a sense of safety in the midst of a growing awareness that my life might soon end. In this state of mind, I saved myself. I knew then that this was the doorway to my life. When I reached the sand, I felt a great mystery had unravelled. When I come to a crisis in my life, I will swim out to sea and return later with a sharper view of things ...

There's no easy access to the beach now; you have to work for it. The direct route involves crossing the creek by the carpark, where you can take a flying leap, step over strategically placed stones, or wade right in, washing the city from your feet. The water follows you down to the sea. Black ironsand attaches to your shoes and skin; you can't come to this place without taking some of it away with you.

There's a supercharged energy here from the surf, that's borne on the wind and invigorates those who come here. It's a place where nature's moods change constantly; you can feel it all around you ...

In the spring of 1961, I was given an old brass bed that had rested under a barn in Oratia for 50 years. Peeling enamel and pearl shell inlays suggested a more romantic past. I brought it out to Karekare and placed it on the beach in a nikau shelter close to the high-tide mark, near the dunes, and I lay on that bed on those summer nights watching the stars slide slowly overhead, absorbed by the surf flashing in the moonlight and the sonic boom of the waves echoing around the hills.

On the high tides, the phosphorescent surf would swirl under the legs and the bed would dip precariously. I didn't give a damn. Each night as the sun set, I would read Melville's classic Moby Dick and think of myself as Ishmael adventuring on that great watery part of the world. If it rained - which it seldom did in those days, at least in my memory - I would retreat to the Surf Club, a small, one-room building under the mantle of the Watchman rock. There was no electric power at the beach.

We made do with old Coleman kerosene lamps that, when lit and pumped vigorously, burned with a bright intensity, hissing away with an acrid smell that filled the room. The lamps had a tendency to send jets of flame to the ceiling, before blasting to eternity the gauze filament, returning my world to darkness.

I wanted to be a poet, or a writer like Herman Melville. His narrative influenced my thoughts and shaped my life. I scribbled furiously into the night, my own flame burning with a fire that lit up my soul. Ghostly echoes off the cliffs, choruses from the underworld, joined the discordant thrum of the surf, at times making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Finally, towards morning, dream-filled sleep would come to me on that brass bed at Karekare ...

When I was a young lifeguard, I was in awe of the older club members. Men like Doug Monds, a top field events athlete. We used to spend all afternoon hurling the shot and throwing the javelin across the sands. I was taught to surf and understand the waves by Fred Neale, and learned to body-surf better than most, developing my own style of riding down a wave, even mastering a 360 turn. I thought I could be as good as any world champ. I coulda been a contender, or so it seemed to me then. When you're young and strong and confident, anything seems possible.

Understanding waves means everything to the surfer. When I'm approaching Karekare, I search for signals, looking for the way the waves are falling and forming, and where the rips and currents are today. My eyes map the sea, and my senses measure the direction and strength of even the slightest breeze.

Why is it that people believe that the surf is moving? It isn't. It's only you, and trillions of rotating molecules of water energised from a thousand miles at sea, stirred by the wind and urged by the moon. The ocean attacks the shore at Karekare, its fury finally unleashed and spent on shallows of black sand.

If you stand on this beach at sunset, the red orb appears to sink into the surf. This is because we have been told as children that the sun goes down, and yet for centuries we have known that the earth rises. At Karekare, these two eternal contradictions never cease to amaze me. Up on the Ahu Ahu cliffs where I confront a huge horizon stretching from the Kaipara to Taranaki, I allow myself to believe that I can see the curvature of the earth, with Karekare at the centre of my world.

When each of our children was born, the weekend following their arrival became a family ritual, as we took the newborn out to Karekare and introduced him or her to the sea. As they were all born in winter, we baptised them with a generous sprinkling of chilly, foaming surf, amid much squealing. The boys have developed into excellent lifeguards and the girls are fine swimmers. The beach has always been an extension of home to all five children.

Walk south along the beach now. Behind the dunes is the secret, sensual side of Karekare. This is the place where lovers go. Here in a quiet glade you can be alone. The small stream from Zion Hill cools nikau palms and pohutukawa. The cliffs are human-scale here; it feels as though there are hidden caverns or entrances to another world waiting to be revealed, if only you knew which rock to lean against.

Beyond the headland, the wide, wild spaces of the coastline to the Manukau Heads open out before you. People become specks against the horizon along these reaches. Karekare and its stretch of coast offers up to me unexpected gifts. One day a seahorse skeleton, another, a lost doll. A lone leopard seal in winter, perhaps sick or old. And the tragic surprise of a beached whale.

Here, I never feel like a visitor; I know that I belong to this place and time. Everything seems to fit here in my life, and probably its the same for other Karekare people.

While writing this book, I have been astonished at the connections through personal experience of so many people of like mind and soul. We have unknowingly become another coastal tribe. In some respects, Karekare is a shared experience for this kin; it is also intensely personal. These days, I may have quietened down a little, but I refuse to snuff the spark this place has given me. It burns within me, part of the universe of fiery stars and comets.

I'm planning a beach symphony, a night-time cacophony of gongs, sheets of corrugated iron and brass, driftwood sticks and kerosene tins, barking dogs and the rhythm of the surf, a mystic orchestra beating with a passion for life.

This place demands homage and participation. Karekare is not for the passive.