ADAM PAVITT

Seasonal Pass

Seasonal Pass is the first song on my debut album ‘Seasons Will Pass’. The song is based on memories and often called the “summertime song” by friends and relatives.
I was lucky enough to be put on a surfboard one summer at around five years old. The old single fin was dragged out through the breakers. As my dad pushed me into my first wave and i stood up, I turned and tried looking away from the shore to show dad that i done it….He yelled to me “look at the beach! Look at the beach!”. As i turned back towards the shore and rode the wave towards my Mum waiting on the shore, I knew i was a surfer for life!
Growing up around the beaches of Northern N.S.W allowed me to interact with some wild and wonderful characters….There was Bill who everyone knew as ‘Big Red’ due to his carpet cleaning business. I used to help him out with as a teenager. His greatest passions were surfing and surfboard collecting. He had over seventy classic boards from different eras that he would lend out to anyone willing to experiment. I took a quad fin board of his surfing once that was like “trying to take your front veranda for a surf” (as my Dad would say). Bill was so encouraging and the next surf i persevered while trying out a malibu, and had a ball.
Then there was Matto, still a great friend, who would sprint his entire paper round and then ride his pushbike at break-neck speed to get to the water at first-light. The enthusiasm did not waver at all after he jumped of the rocks and into the first wedge at Southies either. Matto was and is perpetually stoked.
Ofcourse then there was whane, who after taking up surfing in his late thirties, was seen at the beach practically every day for the next few years. His hair progressively got longer and blonder. His van became rustier by the day, and although his family didn’t seem understand his new fanaticism. In later years when his back started playing up and kept him out of the water, people would admit it was those few years in the surf that he seemed most content.
My Dad also lost his share of the waves eventually. His spine also gave out and kept him off the surfboard and away from the ocean. He still tells me he “still misses her every day”. It sure doesn’t stop him taking anyone to the beach for a lesson with some old boards from under the house and a bunch of patched up wetsuits from under the seats of his Kombi. He is still living the dream through the smiles of surfers around him. Dad also has about a hundred great stories about his days surfing all those waves.
So we drift up and down the coast. Friends and associates come and go. The distances between the capital cities make us a transient tribe. Families live and work apart, friends move away. We get a postcard or a birthday card from afar…to remind us. To help us think back to the beach…. We sat squinting as the glare bounced off the water. We sat “on the sunny side of a winter’s day”, because we were happy. Chasing the waves, casting our cares and fears aside for the thrill of the next ridden wave. If the waves took us to our final rest, so be it. We thought we would die smiling. It sounds ridiculous, yet, i still quote statistics about more people “being crushed to death by snack and beverage vending machines every year than are eaten by sharks” to try to prove the my point. I must admit i am unsure of the validity of those stated statistics anymore. Yet don’t mind repeating it every so often.
Eventually Bill was coming in from a surf at his favorite local break and passed away on the sand from a heart attack. Despite the tragedy of his passing at around the age of fifty, people took comfort knowing that he had just surfed at The Island. We knew that he probably would not have had it any other way.
Matto still chases the Autumn swells around the world. He still also rides a pushbike at a hurried pace too when he knows that a surf is on. Instead of delivering papers now he is planting trees.
I still have a vintage surfboard in my small collection of boards and also two mals that are perfect for people to learn on. I also love sitting on the beach playing songs or floating in the swells while surfing humming a tune. The winds, the temperature, the places and the people change, and yet we still have the memories to draw us back to those summer and winter’s days spent on the sunny side. ‘Seasonal Pass’ is all about those memories…… Adz