I found out this morning that Stavros Kyriakides died in late December. His body was found in the rockpools at Breaker Bay. Stavros and I crossed paths countless times because we were both constant walkers of the shoreline. Stavros walked the South Coast every single day, roaming from one end to the other in all weathers, rearranging things he found: wood, stone, brick. He liked to balance big logs like seesaws. He liked to place boulders upright on their smallest point. And he loved to barrage passers-by with a deluge of marine facts.

Stavros didn’t go on the Internet. The time we saw the humpback, I got the news of it online. I raced around the corner on my scooter and I was standing with my scope to my eye watching the whale breaching repeatedly halfway to the horizon— dazzling white pleated throat, barnacley fins, a creature of myth— when Stavros happened by on his peregrinations. I pointed the whale out to him and handed him the scope. I was partly annoyed, because I didn't want to talk and Stavros was always very talkative, but underneath that, I felt how lucky it was that he had chanced along right at that moment, that I could share this amazing experience with him, because I knew that of all possible people, he was a deep appreciator of wild beauty; a true fellow Wizard of the Coast. It was to us that the whale showed itself. Luck / timing / odds / grace. All of these things.

I often felt with Stavros that all his energy and motion, his restless need to always move and tinker, was a way of managing some private demon, keeping himself level. But I might be wrong. He was a pure soul, a joyful, friendly, excitable, knowledgeable human being, and he had deep love for the environment in all its subtlety. The Coast was his playground and his natural habitat. His work was free and wild. He made it and the wind and sea unmade it and he remade it again in ever-changing forms. I felt that he did it because he had to, like a bird its nest, a spider its web. People sometimes kicked his rock stacks over (OK, fine, I did it once or twice, before I knew him), but it wasn’t possible to foil him because he was so tirelessly industrious.

The death is before the Coroner. I don't know how he died, but I know that it's right and fitting that he died by the sea. He would have wanted to go that way, with his face to the rocks and water. Rest in peace, my friend