The light and the dark can live together | Sam Bloom

Sam Bloom is about as local as this show gets. Her mum and dad bought the shop at Newport in 1980, and as a teenager she worked behind a counter that came up to about her nose. In first grade, asked to draw what she wanted to be, she drew a nurse. She got there. The other childhood dream was West Africa, planted by a man from Senegal she met at fourteen and a Lonely Planet guide her grandmother bought her at Dymocks, and she got there too, at 22, on an overland truck. Cam Bloom walked into the pie shop as a customer, a photographer in ginormous red glasses, not like the other boys. Their first date ended watching The Wailers at Dee Why. In 2013, on a family holiday in Thailand, Sam leaned on a rooftop balcony rail that gave way. She fell six metres to the concrete and has not walked since. In this hour she talks about the part the world skipped: that nobody in Thailand told her she would not walk again, that the nurse who had spent years looking after people on the worst day of their lives suddenly understood how little she had understood, and that coming home meant staring at her favourite surf spot through the lounge room window, unable to get to it. The world knows what happened next as a story about a magpie. Sam's version is smaller and truer: people started coming to the house to see the bird instead of her, which she loved, and the injured chick needed feeding and holding, so the nurse got to be a nurse again. "She was like this gorgeous little time-waster," she says, the way you'd say it about a baby. Then a kayak, two weeks out of rehab, and a coach named Gaye who had never met the old Sam and treated her completely normally, no pity look, plenty of cheek. A place on the Australian team about a year after the accident, which she calls the game changer: a reason to get up, a purpose, something to aim for. Five years on, a surfboard at Palm Beach, and eventually world titles. Asked who has been winning them, given that she has said she would do anything to be herself again, she goes quiet, and then gives an answer she has never given anyone. Five songs, hers: Porcelain, for running at sunrise above Bilgola. Everybody Hurts, for a friend. Forever Young, for the night a room full of people showed up for her family. Walking on a Dream, for mountain biking at West Head. And These Days by Powderfinger to play us out, for a drive to Narrabeen with tears on her cheeks. beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 7, from Saturday 19 September at 9:01 am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.