A Lesson from the Wharf

Oxygen tanks, wetsuits, and the worlds inside our world

A couple days a week, when the weather’s good, I like to work from a place called The Wharf.

The Wharf is a large, two-story outdoor structure in the beach town of Mooloolaba, near where we live on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. All white-washed driftwood and dangling greenery and coastal charm, it’s home to a collection of trendy restaurants, small businesses, and clothing boutiques.

On offseason weekdays, locals meet for coffees before their work shifts or grab takeout on their way home. On weekends and holidays, tourists come in on cruise ships or drive in from inland to buy souvenirs and sign up for whale-watching tours and try to look like they belong.

The Wharf is also, in fact, a wharf. It’s situated on the Mooloolah River, just a few hundred meters from where it spits out into the sea. You can walk out of one of the restaurants or the ice cream shops or boutiques and straight down a boardwalk to the marina, where you’ll find tour boats, private charters, and a boat-restaurant called Prawn Star that’s perpetually docked and which serves fresh seafood on deck. (BYOB.)

All of this — the shops, the restaurants, the tour signups, the general busy-ness — happen on the ground floor.

But walk up a side staircase to the balcony level, and you’ll find free tables and chairs overlooking the marina.

At the bottom of the staircase is a grumpy-looking placard, one which looks so reproachful and joyless that for months I always assumed it said “Upstairs only accessible for employees, you worthless civilian” or some other rule excluding the general public.

It wasn’t until one day, when I actually took the time to read the sign, that I realized it read “Additional seating upstairs.”

It’s that additional seating upstairs, where I now sit, which has become my remote-work sanctuary. Almost no one seems to know it’s open to the public, so it’s almost always just me and the occasional restaurant employee on their lunch break. The views of the marina and Mooloolah River are glorious, the WiFi is free and dependable, and the food options downstairs mean I never go hungry.

There’s even a secret upstairs bathroom that’s impeccably clean because, again, I don’t think anybody knows it exists except for the perpetually-pigtailed owner of the whimsical candy shop downstairs — the only other person I’ve ever seen use it.

For a writer like myself, someone who wants to spend my days in nature but who has chosen the least outdoorsy profession imaginable, it’s a dream. It’s comfortable and protected from the elements but very much outside. The beach is a three minute walk away.

It’s also a utopia of people-watching. Just below where I sit is the check-in for a tour/adventure/excursion/cruise company, so I get to hear an impossibly huge range of accents as tourists check in for their vacation activities. As I wrote that last sentence, four barefooted, shirtless surfers who look like they should probably be at high school right now just walked through the central courtyard holding surfboards. The other day, I watched a man frantically carrying a wild bush turkey chick through the main dining area.

(I’ve often found that a lot of Australia stereotypes are ridiculous or overblown, but sometimes it really is everything you think it is.)

But my favorite part of working at the Wharf?

The dive school.

Every morning, from my perch on the secret-but-not-actually-secret upper deck, I see the dive school employees prepare for the day.

Sometimes, they meet at the table behind me. They discuss the day’s schedule of classes and excursions — some beginner classes take place in their on-site dive tank, while advanced courses head out on a boat to actual reefs and dive spots.

Sometimes they hold training sessions, which I get to overhear. One day these might center around technical stuff — oxygen levels, gear management. Other days they might focus on how to be a better instructor — how to keep your group calm, how to deal with one student who’s less experienced than the others in the same class. They share coffees and talk about their boss, or have lunch breaks after three hours at sea before they head back out again for another round.

I see the dive students arrive, watch them anxiously get geared up in their wetsuits and go through the oxygen tank orientation. I see people who seem like experts, probably working toward instructor certification. I see people who thought this might be a fun holiday activity suddenly get confronted by the fact that they’re about to put on 50lbs of gear and sink to the bottom of the sea.

But my favorites are the employees.

I see all of the various tasks associated with the job, from replacing oxygen tanks to sweeping the entryway to loading gear onto the boat to welcoming students to getting on the owner’s good side to budgeting to managing timesheets, and I think:

All this work, all this effort, all this energy — it’s in service of a very specific little bit of magic.

They’re in the business of giving people a temporary superpower.

It’s the power to, for just a short time, breathe under the water. To break free from the restrictive limits of our lungs and experience what it would be like to live in an alternate universe, one beyond gravity, beyond up and down.

And then, when it’s over, to show them how to come back up again — slowly, safely retreating to the familiar world.

Are those students relieved when they return to the surface? Deflated?

When they’re in bed that night, and they close their eyes, do they imagine they’re back in that alternate world, their ears filled with the deep throbbing gyration of the ocean pressing in on them? Do they see the reef fish darting in front of their vision?

Or do they forget quickly, as we all tend to do when we return to what’s familiar?

I would guess that most do. I would wager that the majority of people who become certified go on to let their certifications lapse, while a small minority take more advanced classes, go on more adventurous dives, make SCUBA a part of their lives for good.

Maybe they go on to teach at dive schools themselves.

When you talk to people today, and when you ask us what we think about the state of the world, we’re a pretty pessimistic bunch. We tend to believe things are bad and getting worse, that society is trending toward misery and unpleasantness.

There’s something comforting in knowing that the countless little niches and infinite little corners of interest are still out there.

For all these grand, scary questions of purpose and security and the future of humankind, there are still passions-with-a-lowercase-p. Those things people turn into jobs because they’ve got the skill and the interest and the rent payments to make, and that’s enough. They’re not changing the world, because none of us is — not on our own, at least. They’re content to give a 45-year-old businessman from Oklahoma the chance to walk along the seafloor and look up at the towering structures of a Pacific reef, and then fly home to Oklahoma and maybe never do it again.

There are the local dive schools, the small engine repair shops, the trampoline house operators, the niche newsletter writers. The woman who offers free yoga classes at the library. The man who teaches a dying art twice a week at the local university.

All over the world, even as that world supposedly gets worse and more confusing and robots take jobs and — you get it — people continue doing the little things they love, in service of other people who love those same things.

All over the world, there are places like the Wharf, and within them there are places like the dive school. They are their own small worlds, inside of small worlds.

In this way, they’re armored against what’s happening out here (motions vaguely at the big world). It can touch them in small ways, but it can’t yet destroy them. They’re too numerous, too physical and visceral to be lost just yet.

Here’s to the dive instructors, the flower shop owners, the summer-job-by-the-beach-just-to-afford-a-used-surfboard-ers.

Here’s to small worlds.

Here’s to The Wharf.

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