Stan
- Jade Symons
- Jan 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 16
‘Two and a half years ago I was playing golf with the boys and I said, ‘What’s going on? I can't see my golf ball.’ Stan, a waterman of unshakable resilience.
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Stan is a poet, surfer, gardener, adoring grandfather and recently, legally blind. Yet, the most defining feature of Stan is his depth of thought and imagination. The way most of us lose our imagination beyond childhood, for Stan his imagination has ‘just never dropped off’. Life feels more magical through his words. Meetings aren’t just that, they are serendipitous moments that take us from one connection to another. Stan finds artwork in each passing moment of life.
He refers to himself as the drunken poet (although he doesn’t really drink). His creativity has a chaos and his mind an unrestrained freedom that the modern fast paced world has not touched. Although not particularly religious, Stan’s character reminds me of a sentiment from the Bible; essentially to be ‘in the world, not of it’ (John 15:18–19).
My relationship with Stan has developed from years of the casual post-surf carpark chat about the quality of waves that day to in-depth discussions of Indigenous literature and our amateur philosophical thought. It is his free form of thought that has captivated me and has seen Stan traverse the unparalleled challenge of becoming nearly totally blind.
There’s a beautiful line from my favourite French book, that many will know; "on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux, (one sees clearly only with the heart; what is essential is invisible to the eye). This feels like Stan.
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Stan and I spend the morning in his garden as he walks me through the suburban plot that teams with herbs, well loved Boston ferns and handmade garden beds. He shows me his sunflowers, chillies ripe for picking and hands me the fig and date loaf he has baked for me. Following him around his home, I forget that he is blind.
In a sweet moment, as we turn out of the driveway, Stan’s young granddaughter catches sight of us and sticks her head out the door to yell, ‘I love you’ before her grandfather is out of sight. For a moment that is perhaps so quotidien for Stan, it fills me with an unannounced joy.
Loss of Sight
‘Two and a half years ago I was playing golf with the boys and I said, ‘What’s going on? I can't see my golf ball.’
In the middle of a humid downpour, rain pelts the roof as we sip on the now lukewarm coffee and nibble cheese toasties. Stan begins to tell me the story of going blind. After his incident on the golf course, he’s taken to emergency and endures a long day of tests and stress. The ophthalmologist diagnosed Stan with severe ocular neuropathy. He had irreversibly lost almost all vision in his right eye.
‘The doctor said, you've got a 20% chance of losing the other eye in five years. And then last year I was playing golf with the same people. I don’t think I should be playing golf with those guys’, he laughs. ‘And I said to Lance, ‘who are those people you're talking to? I can't see them’.
Stan, at the optometrist once again, says, ‘she showed me the scan and she was really upset. And I knew straight away how bad this was. We both sat there and cried’. Stan now has 18% vision in one quarter of his left eye and 23% vision in one quarter of his right eye. A total of 5.25% vision overall. Stan went back to the doctor and asked, 'what about the 20% in 5 years, it's been two and a half years. And he says, ‘you’re just the most unlucky guy’.
But speaking with Stan, he doesn’t sound unlucky. For Stan, he says ‘every moment's a different experience, you know. I had to let go. And learn to accept a new normal. I had to become a different person’. Stan and his son in law made their own cane; a hiking stick with a deodorant ball that they glued. And it was that make shift cane, that ‘set me on my path of changing life'.
‘I said, I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to walk’.
And, in walking and processing and moving, Stan now describes how for him, walking feels like walking On Country. He describes to me the beauty of the morning songs of the birds, and walks the coast on low tides to rest his cane. He feels the Land and energy more deeply now. Stan says, ‘Jade, I can't tell you how the parameters of my mind or my plasticity has changed’.
It is not only the Land that Stan has developed a new relationship with but the community too. Stan says his cane disarms him, and people are more open. On hot days, he brings ice creams to the stores he passes and knows the rhythms of the locals.
The Ocean
Yet, the grief in losing easy access to the ocean and his surfing is what has challenged him the most. His relationship to the Ocean is profoundly visceral. Through a lifetime of reading, learning and listening to the waves, Stan knows the Ocean. He has names for the waves that appear at certain points in the seasons; the Whitehouse wave, the Christmas bank.
And for Stan, there is one particular dream wave. Riding that wave, doing a grinding bottom end turn before the predictable turn into the inside point, is the vision Stan falls asleep to since the day on the golf course. And he knew that if he lost that feeling, if he couldn’t remember that wave, he’d have lost the ocean.
Stan now wears a ‘vision impaired’ vest and can only get out on days with ideal conditions but watching him on a wave, his body just knows what to do. He doesn’t need to see. He knows the ocean. Out swimming the morning this image above was taken and I remember watching Stan. I said to him, ‘you seemed to me a little bit tentative at first. And then the moment you got on a wave. You didn't need to see. You were jumping and you were recorrecting yourself. And your body just knew what to do. Without your eyes or mind; you knew’.
To him, being back in the ocean feels like ‘falling with your wings open. It’s everything’.
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Driving Stan home, clouds hang low on the mountain and the rain drenched ground simmers with petrichor. It reminds me of a misty afternoon in Hanalei Bay, Kauai. Stan tells me about his plans to start his own interview series at the Bowlo, a place he has become a regular. He sees the longing for connection and beauty in the stories of the older patrons there. There is a creativity within Stan that needs to be used.
My car is loaded with a life’s collection of old surf magazines and sailing books that he can no longer read and a bag full of goods from his garden. As I drive off, the image of the blue in the mountains reappearing as the clouds lift, locks in my mind with gratitude. A waterman of unshakable resilience waving goodbye to me from his driveway.
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