I had visited Lagos State, Nigeria about five or so times in the past but not the area where any of the beaches were located. However, in 2009, I had the chance to visit Victoria Island, one of the areas bounding the Atlantic Ocean where we have a major beach. They call it the Bar Beach.
Our bus reached Lagos around 8pm after about 10 hours journey. I was not able to reach my friend's house due to the perennial Lagos traffic hold up popularly called "go-slow".
Lagos is a place I find difficult to understand. I usually keep asking people questions in other to find my way. Good a thing, this time around my friend Ema, came with his car to pick me up from one of the bus terminals, Jibowu.
Getting close to his house. which was adjoining the Abia State Liaison office, I began to hear some noises that included a clapping sound repeatedly apart from the noise made by people and vehicles around.
"What's that sound about?" I asked.
"That's the Atlantic Ocean," Ema responded.
Throughout the night as I laid in bed, the sound made by the waves kept coming up. Initially I had thought I may not be able to sleep in the midst of the noise. But sleep has a way of stealing someone, especially someone that's tired due to a long journey.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, the sounds were louder and clearer as vehicular movement had reduced drastically.
'How could someone ever have a good sleep in this kind of noisy environment?" I soliloquized.
All the same, as the noise became monotonous, after a while, I slept off again.
When the morning light came, and we all woke up, all my mind was on the Atlantic and its ceaseless noise.
"Does it mean it's always like this? Would there never be a time of calm?" I asked my friend as I kept wondering.
"Never. It's always like that everyday, from January to December, year in, year out," Ema answer with a tone of finality.
As soon as the breakfast of tea and bread was over, I decided to go and see the Atlantic with my eyes, while my friend drove off to somewhere. It was just a stone throw across the road.
It was sand everywhere. I walked up to the sand deposit to have a closer view of the expanse of water that stretched to as far as the eye can see and beyond. As I looked to see where the water stopped, it appeared to have joined with the sky up above.
"Could someone ever reach that spot where the sky meet with the waters of Atlantic?" I asked myself without expecting any answer.
I had never seen such a sight in my life. In the East where I came from, you could just see simple rivers that had no comparison with an ocean. In fact, the largest of the rivers is the Niger which you can walk across its bridge in a matter of few minutes.
As I stood there on the sandy bank of the Atlantic, wondering what a sight, people were all over walking around unmindful of my presence. Some were hawking different items, mostly edibles. Others were just relaxing and discussing. There were some religious people who were singing and praying. The whole place was just a busy spot where various activities were going on.
After a while, I sat down on the sand like many others, my gaze over the ocean, imagining if one could see or get to the end. All this while the ocean was sending waves upon waves that were crashing on the sandy bank. As a wave was receding, going back to the water centre, another wave was coming with a force to hit the bank.
It was a continuous exercise, waves upon waves all the time. There was nothing like rest in that water body. It was as if the Atlantic was annoyed against some unseen forces, or maybe it was under stress. And the clapping sound the waves made when they lash on the shore was a thing to wonder about.
The waves when they splashed on the sandy bank threw up millions of sand grains into the atmosphere of which many dropped on someone's body and other objects around.
I kept asking myself, "The force with which these waves were using to rush to the shore, what is igniting it?"
"There must be a tremendous amount of energy in the depth of this water that was generating that force," I analysed.
"By the way, this energy must be inexhaustible otherwise, the waves won't be coming up with such a force every minute, day after day, all through the years.
Till date, anytime I remember my visit to the beach, I think about the inexhaustible energy inside the Atlantic.
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