Winter Solstice Part Four

 

Jayden put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘Mum will really like these shrooms too,’ he said and then remembered that night out on the water poaching, when he felt scared and small and cold and his Mum was ranting about poetry or something and about the end of the world.

‘Parents, man,’ Jayden said, trying to sound understanding but he also knew what he was talking about and he tried to communicate this to Matt through his side hug.

Parents who didn’t think, who were so busy with their own dramas that they forgot to pick him and Matt up from footy training on that low, misty oval late at night. Parents who privileged their ancient vendettas against teachers over the yearly school camp. Parents who fought a landlord’s injustices in court and then ran some poor bastard down outside a BP service station. Fucking parents.

Jayden’s Mum had read him Beowulf, explained the Lady poem about rogue onions and the Narnia Chronicles and she knew what happened to the children of those men who’d abdicated responsibility and still she got arrested and locked up and left her kid alone to deal with the shit..

‘The swan roads,’ Jayden said, pointing to the lake. ‘That’s the swan roads, like in the poem..’

‘What, the lake?’ asked Matt.

The two of them stared at the pond and the birds. Jayden saw lights behind them but also lights gathering in the swans who squwarked and gossiped on the water.

 

The green leaf letters

One day early in February, at the beginning of our second summer, eucalypts began dropping their green leaves. Bright green sickles mosaiced the concrete steps to the fire tower where I work. I’d never seen this before. Normally the track is covered with dead brown leaves. Noticing the green ones was a bit different.

Two days later, I phoned my boss from the tower at the end of the day. ‘I’ve just spent the whole day with a sense of impending doom,’ I told her.

‘I don’t even go there,’ the fire officer said. ‘Every morning, the crews are organised, FDIs are finalised and then it’s like, whatever happens will happen.’

That day was the hottest ever I’ve spent on the tower. Most of the small schools in the south west shut down due to fire danger. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of the emergency site that day because looking at the school shutdowns made me think – this is the future. If this happens every year from now on, whose parents will be able to go on checkout at IGA? What happens to medical centres when doctors and nurses have to stay home?

The temperature readings in the tower blew out because I was sitting on granite, which warms faster than soil, meaning the little tower room turned into a hothouse. Sweat soaked my clothes. It was an act of endurance to stay there. I saw a smoke curdle into the sky behind Mount Lyndsey, mapped it and reported it in.

‘It’s kinda grey blue. I think it must be around the Hay River area. It’s a weird colour.’

Turns out the smoke came from silage that had spontaneously combusted in the heat, knocking out a whole season of feed for the dairy family who worked there for generations. The smoke’s colour was from all the plastics catching fire. Silage doesn’t normally self-combust, my farmer son told me. Silage is too wet. Normally.

‘How you going on the granite?’ Marty who also works on the tower was in contact throughout the day. ‘Do you have enough water? Use mine if you run out.’

There’s a code between us. We carry our own stuff up the mountain and we don’t share, especially water at one kilo a litre per trek up the hill. We may text each other when the clock battery needs replacing or maybe metho for the Trangia but never the water. Believe me. It’s a thing. We never share water.

‘I’m afraid I’ve already crossed that line,’ I messaged him back. By then I’d drunk four litres of water, poached two litres of Marty’s stash and not even had a wee.

‘Do you want me to bring some more?’ Marty replied and I thought, bless this man. The only person on Earth thinking of me today is the other fire tower guy.

Just like prior to a wind storm, the Eucalyptus trees dropped their green leaves in anticipation of the event a few days later. This time, it wasn't a wind storm but an extreme heat event. All of the trees knew this event was coming up. 

They knew what was about to happen.

Winter solstice part 3

 

They drove through the night to Ellis Creek Road. Jayden looked over to Matt as he was driving. They turned into an orange gravel road. It was jarrah forest, deep and funky with fungi. He could smell the damp settling in for the night after a day’s meagre sunlight. ‘Close now, yeah?’ He asked Matt. The forest was crowding them now. Jayden could feel it closing around the car. Forget Matt’s bikie family, the trees were enough. They stopped the car at the pine plantation growing in the middle of the jarrah forest.

‘This is the spot,’ said Matt.

‘Hey, we’ve got these,’ Jayden handed Matt an MDMA tab. ‘Special occasion. Let’s go picking.’ The two young men stuffed some beers, rollie papers, water and plastic bags into their backpacks. Jayden locked his car and they walked into the pine forest.

The moon was fully over the trees now and making shadows of them. Their boots trod quiet upon the pine needles. Snuffling of roosting cockatoos and the scampering of critters up trees. A bird flew overhead and screeched at four points of the compass. ‘Owlet nightjar,’ said Jayden. ‘How do you know that shit?’ Said Matt. Jayden couldn’t explain that. Too many references to his Mum’s knowledge would be getting weird now.

‘Do you think anyone’s out here?’ said Matt. ‘… oh hey hey here we go, Jay!’ Matt’s whole dank demeanour changed into a capering Catweasle. In the groove of the trees, he shone his phone torch on a grove of tiny mushrooms. They poked out of the pine needles like tiny fists, all yellowy and nippled in their centres.

As they both stared at the psilocybin mushrooms, Jayden felt his trip coming on. It was almost as though by looking at them, they communicated their properties to him. He bent down to one of them and tapped its cap to loosen the spores into the earth before he picked it. His back teeth began thrumming as the MDMA kicked in. He closed his fingers around the stem of the mushroom. He could feel the muscles in his crouch and the moon’s benevolence. He knew the owlet nightjar was watching him. His balls were tingling and the forest was saying, ‘Best leave now, son!’ The mushroom screamed as he broke it.

Jayden picked just one magic mushroom. The noise of his plastic bag in the moonlight, as he dragged it out of his backpack and put the mushroom inside, felt deafening. Matt was running between channels of pine trees and shouting in a kind of whisper. ‘Oh my God, Jay, Jay! There’s fucking heaps of them.’

Then Jayden saw lights and he wasn’t sure if the lights were behind his own eyes or in front of them. But then Matt was running towards him, his backpack jogging on his back and a white plastic shopping bag swinging to one side. ‘Turn off your light man,’ he said. ‘Got plenty anyway. Turn off your light.’

Matt was on his own trip, Jayden realised. But turning off their phone torches was probably a good idea. They walked together up a slope in the pine plantation until they got to a peak where they could see down to a water reservoir.

Jayden tried. ‘You know Matt, we’ve been mates since like forever.’

The full moon lit up the water.

‘What the fuck,’ Matt said. ‘Dad killed someone. He’s going to jail, Jay. He killed someone.’ Matt began to weep.

Jayden put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘Mum will really like these shrooms too,’ he said and then remembered that night out poaching, when he felt scared and small and cold and his Mum was ranting about poetry or something and about the end of the world.