I was born and raised in the lap of the sea.
The tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, is the heartbeat of the world, the coast where humans have had one of the longest relationships with the ocean, perhaps 200 000 years. Africa is the birthplace of us all, and this wild shore is where some of our earliest ancestors first walked. This place is not just my physical home but possibly the ancestral home of every human who has ever lived.
It is also the Cape of Storms, home of giant rogue waves. My earliest memory is of sitting in the bath as a tiny child with my brother, Damon, as a huge wave hit the bathroom door and smashed it open, filling the room with seawater to the level of the bath. I remember the seawater was freezing in contrast to the warm bathwater, and swirling with thousands of white bubbles.
But I made the sea’s acquaintance long before the waves came searching for me inside our little home. When my mom was pregnant, she would dive in the cold Atlantic kelp forest without a wetsuit up until the day before I was born.
Then, as now, the seaforest was filled with the magical sound of cracker shrimps. I am still excited each day when I put my head underwater, to hear the clicking of thousands of shrimps snapping their claws, firing bullets made of air.
On the day I came home from the hospital where I was born in Cape Town, my dad placed me in the freezing ocean. Of course, I screamed, but this ritual was part of our family life.
Our wooden bungalow was built below the high-water mark, and storm surges used to rush around the house. The house was clad in a kind of waterproof hardboard, but the force of the rain and wind was strong, and my parents had to attach thick wooden boards to the house before storms, to stop the windows from being broken by flying rocks and powerful waves.
I would watch them, Mom in a pair of blue jeans, her long blond hair in a ponytail, Dad shirtless in a pair of tattered rugby shorts, with his preferred brand of cigarette, a Texan Toasted Plain, dangling from his lips.
But the things we build with our human hands are rarely strong enough to withstand the energy of water.
We always knew when the storms were coming, because the isopods told us through their mass migration to higher ground. Thousands of these crustaceans would emerge from the rocky shoreline and crawl into our garden, and sometimes into the house.
“It’s going to be a big one,” my dad would say. “I hope the sea lice don’t block the drain again.”
Scientists still cannot determine how isopods know a storm is coming before the barometer begins to drop. In recent years I’ve come to learn as much as I can about these creatures’ inner lives, their mating rituals, and their birthing processes. I have come to love them, though much about their wild intelligence remains a mystery.
I sometimes wonder if we have our own version of that wild wisdom; we’ve just become too tame to notice it. For 300 000 years of human history, we lived in accord with nature, as free as any other animal. We were nomadic, roaming the land in search of food and water, living in small bands, each member interdependent upon the others.
It’s only in the past 10 000 years or so that we have become domesticated, spending most of our lives indoors, separated from one another and from the rhythms of nature. It’s traumatic: we’ve lost our ancestral link, our connection to animals, our inborn ability to track — all of those things that keep us healthy in body and mind and spirit.
Yet that wild intuition is still deeply buried inside of us, trying to get our attention, telling us to move to higher ground when the storms are coming.
My family always thought that the sea might take our house, but the stream running under the road did more damage than a wave ever would. One night, I awoke to find my father and mother at my side. It was still dark and I could hear a harsh wind howling, and rain thrashing against the windows.
“Come, Craig,” Mom said. “We have to go.”
I looked up at them, still half asleep, unsure of what was happening.
Night was a frightening time for me. I didn’t like the darkness, and would often sneak out of my bed and into my parents’ room when the fear took hold. I was a sensitive child with a wild imagination, and many nights I had the feeling I was not alone in the room.
I could feel, and sometimes even see, the presence of shadowy beings moving through the darkness, and when my parents would send me back to my room, I would pull the covers over my head until sleep came. It’s not that my parents were cruel; they just didn’t understand my fear.
My father seemed invincible to me, and his calming presence that stormy night told me I didn’t need to be afraid. Still, I knew something was wrong, and when I looked down I saw what the problem was. The water had gotten in again, and the floor had been transformed into a rushing watercourse.
With my parents on either side of me, my father holding my hand, I stepped into the cold river as my father scooped Damon up with his other arm. The water was already deep, running through the house, cascading down the staircase like a waterfall. As we made our way up the stairs that led out the front door, the water spilled over my feet and I shivered.
When we got to the road, we saw our old Triumph floating in the current.
I was too young to fully make sense of what was happening, but through the sheets of rain we could see the source of the flood: an empty forty-gallon oil drum had drifted down from the road and plugged the drainage culvert as tightly as a cork in a bottle. And more water had backed up behind the debris-clogged fence that ran along the shoulder of the road.
My dad didn’t hesitate. He rushed out into the flooded street and started working on the fence with a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters. It was dangerous work, racing against the rising water to give it an outlet. As soon as he cut through the fence, much of the floodwater drained away. If he hadn’t, I think it would have carried our house off.
By the time the storm subsided, the house remained, but it was completely filled with silt, waist-deep up the walls. It took four months to clean the house out and replace all the floors and ceilings. The flood had been so powerful that huge curb stones, heavy stones even my father could hardly pick up, were washed a hundred yards out to sea. When we were diving a month later, we spotted them, looking out of place on the seafloor.
My mom has an amazing memory from the flood of my blue rocking horse being taken out to sea. It must have been visible because of the crude floodlight on the house that used to illuminate the water. I imagine her pausing briefly to take in the surreal vision, a riderless blue wooden horse bobbing in the floodwater under stormy skies.
Craig Foster is a South African documentary filmmaker, naturalist and co-founder of the Sea Change Project. In 2021 he won the Best Documentary Oscar Award for My Octopus Teacher. He has created more than 100 films and documentaries in addition to his photography. Amphibious Soul is published by Jonathan Ball.