IT STARTS HERE
Dave Rastovich looks like he’s been washed ashore.
He is lying on the southern edge of the Australian landmass, on a beach, on a spongy bed of rotting seaweed, in repose, hands folded across his chest, legs crossed, a white floppy hat crowned by an eagle feather pulled down over his face, a swarm of sand flies forming a halo around his head, eyes closed, nostrils whistling, lights out, cooked.
As he likes to describe it, Rastovich is currently experiencing an “altered state.”
How did he get here? Twenty-four hours earlier, Rastovich had flown halfway across Australia, driven overnight, only stopping to violently evacuate his stomach after contracting food poisoning from a truck stop, didn’t sleep a wink because he has a rule about never falling asleep in the passenger seat as a courtesy to the driver, arrived at his destination at dawn, loaded a 9-foot surfboard into a tin skiff, motored out to an offshore reef, surfed some very big waves under a hot white sun, came in, stepped onto the shore by the boat ramp, looked down and discovered the universe had provided him with a perfectly-fine, natural mattress. It’d be rude not to, really.
Dave is channelling The Ancients. He’s been fascinated for years by stories of Mike Doyle and Joey Cabell experiencing “papaya consciousness”—eating nothing but fruit for days to create a state of “oneness with the ocean” before embarking on a leisurely swim along the length of Kauai’s Na Pali coast. After hours in the ocean, pickled and exhausted with the Na Pali skyline towering above them, they’d experience total immersion, delirium, and, eventually, a form of transcendence. “The old boys were gnarly,” offers Rastovich. “They’d get into these altered states by just pushing themselves in the living world. I love the idea of marathon surfs,
