Swing Saws and the Queen

So this post is about swing saws. Have any of you heard about them? Swing saws are pretty much the most dangerous pieces of farming equipment I ever come across. Forget about tractor fatalities or deaths/dismemberments/injuries caused by post hole drillers, let alone those ATV bike rollovers. Swing saws are part of an archive of 1920s new chums (immigrants) turning up to buy and clear land in a country that delights in the mythology of the hard-working land clearer, and part of the mythology when bits of wood or the saw itself turns on the operator in a kind of karmic deliverance.

I'll get back to swing saws in a moment. For now, here is a photo of my dog. 

Queen. She was early-morning sunning when I took this pic.

The inlet is about to bust its bar. I've never seen the water sitting so patiently on the banks and I've been here for a few years now ... but it's full and ready to split, ready to spill out into the sea. I'll post this photo and then when the bar breaks, I'll post another photo from the same spot. Stay tuned.

Back to the swing saw. They are pretty much a petrol engine driving a circular saw blade attached to a rotary hoe set up where you can turn the blade from vertical to horizontal. During the farm sale and the assorted paraphernalia that went with it, the swing saw sold to a local farmer who promised me he would never, ever work the thing. He bought it as an article of interest and it was to be hung in his shed for perpetuity. He promised me that.

Others had expressed interest in the swing saw because old WW2 motorcycle engines had been repurposed into these land-clearing, sleeper-making, personal decapitation machines. I'm not kidding you. Have a look at this puppy and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Late to Mothers Day

In the wee hours last night, while entertaining the monkey mind with endless hypotheticals, separating wishfully rejigged reminiscences from the more authentic ones, searching out patterns, inventing story lines, and generally making a complete ass of my circadian rhythm again, I somehow brain-trekked back to Mothers Day. Yes, I know it was a week ago but just indulge me the title of this post. Thanks.

I had received a text message from Stormboy's Dad, wishing me a happy Mothers Day. The next day I rang him to tell him I appreciated it (plus something could he fix the tray-back on my ute something something). "Oh, yes, it occurred to me that Father's Day didn't happen last year," he said, because all good things must begin framed in the negative, right, "and it made me realise that it was you who always made sure it had happened in the past."

A survey recently detailed women's frustration with partners who do not honour them on Mothers Day nor support their children to do the same. When mothers mentioned their grievances to their husbands, they often answered, "But you are not my mother!" A friend of mine complained to me of the same answer in the same week, in an unrelated conversation.

Personally I think "But you are not my mother" is a valid response for both its genealogical logic and the generally unsexy places where Oedipal complications tend to end up ... but anyway, more about that later.

Maybe my own ambivalence is due to the fact I've been trained well by morbid circumstance not to expect too much on Mothers Day. Pearlie's father died when she was very young. (The painted pasta necklaces from kindergarten were gorgeous. The picture of 'My Family' with the father figure hastily scrubbed by the teacher out was not.)

Stormboy was eight months old when he, his father and I awoke in our bed, the night lightening into day, in the front room where the huge sash windows looked out to the rose garden. Stormboy's father lay still and quiet. It was not light enough to see his eyes but I knew he was awake. "Hey," I nudged him. I wanted a rise out of him, for him to laugh and hug me. He'd been so distant lately.
"Hey, it's Mothers Day."
"I know," he said, and of course he knew and that's why he was so still because he'd woken and remembered it was Mothers Day, because he'd woken and remembered that his mother had just died.
So receiving his text message last Sunday, after seventeen years of radio silence on Mothers Day, was kind of lovely.

007 drove his van out to Pallinup a few years ago, to visit our fishing camp. He used to do things like that: just take off for a few days and stay somewhere different, talk to different people, just for the experiences. He wanted to come out in the boat in the morning, to see what it was like picking up nets before dawn. That evening Old Salt, 007 and I sat around the fire drinking Stones green ginger wine. The cold was brutal. The cold rolled down the snow-capped Bluff Knoll (no kidding, I think it actually did snow up there that night), into the Pallinup system, where it crept along the river, around to the river mouth, over Miller's Point and straight into the back of our kidneys.

Everyone was getting pretty pasted by the wine and the fire and the frozen kidneys. 007 had this way about him, maybe it was just around women, I'm not sure, but he softened and often his conversations were fuelled by a more female sensibility, like someone had surreptitiously rubbed estrogen cream into his arm. Amazingly this night, it seemed to rub off on Old Salt too, notorious for his bluster, sharp tongue and tough guy bravado.
They began talking about mothers.
"You know," Old Salt said tentatively, like he was bracing for ridicule, like he had realised for the first time in his 70-odd years, like he was imparting a great secret, "when Mum died, I think I began to see my wife as my mother."
Both men stared at each other.
"I believe you are right," said 007. "You are absolutely right."

Not long after that, with a dearth of sweat lodges and bongo drums, we all took to our respective swags. I only had to get up once to throw rocks at 007's Maltese/Shitsu who was keeping me awake with his yapping. Okay, I didn't chuck rocks at him, but I did scoop him up, slide open 007's van, throw in the dog and slam the door shut again, hearing muffled grumbles as I stamped back to my tent in my socks.

The next morning was bitter cold and we were hungover as fuck. Even the fisheries officers turning up in the pre-dawn gloom with their headlights turned off didn't merit much interest as we donned beanies, gloves and fishing boots to wade through the shallows to the boat.

Grandie Hands

Two quotes I'm loving today

There is only one recipe - to care a great deal for the cookery.
Henry James.

All of us here who ‘write,’ we do not know what we do, we are crazy, foolish, we wander along invisible streams, we run backwards and forwards incessantly before metal- grating that doesn’t exist, we seek till the exhaustion of the

contents of our heads, to pass, to pass what, to pass from a region of feeling to a

region of what, of painting with words what moves us without wandering

abandoned along deserts without knowing where the door that opens that gives

access to the other side.

Helene Cixous.

Also here is my grand daughter just because she's awesome

The Fear and the Gong

Before I wandered off into promiscuity (no, not like that), I was thinking about anxiety during Saturday's tree planting ceremony. As we sat and watched others work and magpies build their nest, Ursli's pup wandered down to the footpath. She was sniffing around where the magpies had been picking up twigs and gradually she moved closer to the busy road. Ursli called her back and the pup ignored her.

Ursli walked down the hill to call her up again. As she got closer to the road, the little dog gave her a look, like "so make me" and ran off. She ran straight onto the road and was immediately crushed to a furry bloodied pulp, in front of everyone, by a cavalcade of Hell's Angels on Harley Davidsons. After the roar of the bikies faded away, the screams and sobs of horrified onlookers rang through the valley.

Okay, so that didn't really happen. But it did in my mind. I had played out the whole scenario and was going into a state of fight, flight or freeze. My guts were churning, I was dizzy and later I realised I'd stopped breathing. While Ursli picked up the pup and walked back up the hill, put her on a leash, I was still scraping the carcass off the road.

What interested me was tracking my propensity for inventing worst case scenarios. The scene on the hill with Ursli's dog also made me realise how easily I can be towed around by my own fear. I mean, things have been going really well. Mine is never a very safe life, but it is exciting, loving, challenging and occasionally quite successful. An example of all this good juice is my gorgeous grand daughter Matilda Grace. (gratuitous grand child picture coming up)

There is another good thing that happened recently. I've been shortlisted for the Premier's Book Awards.

“From emerging writer Sally-Ann Jones’s book Stella’s Sea set at Cottesloe beach, David Whish-Wilson’s book Perth describing life by the Swan River and Sarah Drummond’s Salt Story about life as a fisherwoman in Western Australia, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards continue to attract the finest literary works created in Australia today.” (Margaret Allen, State Library of Western Australia CEO.)

Wowee. Although the award is a West Australian one, entries are open to all Australian writers and there are only four shortlisted in my Emerging Writers section. The winners are announced on September 22nd ... something else to get anxious about ... but there are no worst case scenarios in this one.

I would have married Catweazle

"I wanted to marry Catweazle."

I shouted this to my boss yesterday while he was up against a dastardly weed tree with a petrol hedge-trimmer, me holding his wobbly ladder straight.

"Catweazle? That guy?"
"Yep. Definitely. Would have married him."

He swept through the tree in a two-stroke swathe. Limbs, twigs and leaves of the feral plant fell around my sunglasses. I gathered their bits into the wheelbarrow and when he came down from the ladder he was still thinking about it and said:
"That's kinda weird Sarah. How old were you then?"

I was about nine when I fell in love with Catweazle.
Catweazle had Touchwood for a friend, plus a fox. And some rabbits. He could talk to the animals. He had a beard that was soft and white, and eyes that knew, and he lived in a forest hideaway that could be stumbled upon if you were a girl child who knew where to look.

You know, if Catweazle were alive and gave me that sideways eye right now I would fall in love with him all over again.

Mother of the Bride

Yesterday I rode my bike down to the chalets where my daughter was staying for Christmas.
Her partner came outside and said, "Sarah, d' you reckon you can go and get us a coupla bottles of champagne?"

I should have clocked the look in his eye. But bewildered because he never drinks champagne,  I said, "Yeah yeah, fine. Just wait. I'll finish this cigarette and be off."

Meanwhile, in his impatience, in his moment, in his foresight, he walked inside and asked my daughter to marry him.

I rode my bike home into a finished sun and a misty fugue of midgies, past the cow paddock, past the bogans with their pit bull terriers and black headed sheep, over the bridge, past the Vietenam Vet's house, past the old couple who grow their own food, and the karri tree that refuses to die, past the pony breeders on the corner and that weird old Italian man's brick house.

And at the gate, me and my bike performed a joyous, age-old broggy in the gravel.

This afternoon

This afternoon I heard Poetica on the radio, a tractor reversing through lines of broccoli, a magpie impersonating a kookaburra, Dave the farmer yelling at his dog, who barked at the cows, and Mick using a grinder to fashion a washer from a length of steel scrap to fix the mower.
(Poetica, on a good day, makes me feel like my neck is being kissed. The smell of a grinder cutting steel takes me back to tin sheds and strange machines and the work of men.)
A still, chilled afternoon: the big, white clouds of autumn always threaten rain and sounds ring clear through the air.
As I hang out my washing, the neighbour shouts over the electric fence, "It must be about to rain, Sarah!" My clothesline habits, it seems, are his storm barometer.

Tis a breaking of the seal, of sorts. Perhaps that is too juicy a metaphor for my situation. Tom Stephenson has posted his recipe to draw out a dried up blogger, when he worried that his mates in other worlds were either dead, buried or walking the Valley of Shit. You can read his recipe here (the comments are v.funny if I may say so myself.)
The only reason I've stopped writing over the last week or so is that I've stepped off my red wine highway. Red wine tends to be my amphetamine or blue meanie when it comes to creativity. It can feed me in more ways than mere alcoholic sustenance, so giving it up for a week means that I am flailing just a bit. I wake up in the mornings feeling brilliantly (or at least vaguely) cognitive, and free of that nasty guilty thing called a hangover. But the rage ... the beauty ... the landscape ... the story ... all these elements have been obscured by a bewilderment, a numbness and the lack of drive to say anything at all. This is confusing for me because I always thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

So please bear with me. There is plenty banked up that I would like to write about: Helen Garner on literary prizes and writing non fiction in the Weekend Australian, google street view and the paranoid collective, a breath of sunlight outside the gaol for my ex, dancing to my 'own' band C U Next Tuesday in a garage in Lockyer, a visceral lesson in kangaroo tick management, Japan's potential leader's response to the demands of the Comfort Women, my grand daughter's amazing, open mouthed smile when she hears me say 'Hey Tilly, Tilly! It's Nana Sarah!'

Ballast

I've been unkindly referred to as ballast once or twice in my life. Okay, thrice. Twice by Old Salt who really should know better and once by my ex in the throes of a rear tractor torque situation. "Shiiiit. Just jump in the bucket at the front and hang on, will ya?" To balance the ton of pavers at the back. Nice.

The ballast I'm referring to now is the ballast that keeps us upright in big seas. My friends Greedy and Em built a beautiful fireplace in their backyard from the basalt that was once used to stay 19th century tall ships on the high seas. The stones were dredged out of the harbour recently to make room for the new marina and taken to the rubbish dump. I say basalt but the stones look flintier, more like slate, with the heavy density and colour of local basalt. Perhaps these stones came from England? Africa? South America? Imagine.

Anyway, I'm digressing for a second time. Ballast.
Here is my ballast. Gracie, her Mum and her Dad made up a little trio who kicked arse in 2012 and showed us all how it is done.

Greedy sat down beside me on New Years Eve and rested his dancing legs on the stone fireplace.
"You know Sarah, I just can't wait to have grand kids. Teach them how to catch fish and go hunting and take them out to the bush block, go crazy for a week, teach them to drive the old bombs around the fire breaks, how to do that firestick dancing thing at night ... "
He stopped and looked at my earnest nodding. "Ha! I was being facetious, Sarah. But you're serious, aren't you?"
"Of course I am Greedy. She's got shorter big toes, just like me."

A Membrane Between Two Worlds

I have come to take your place, sister
At the high fire in the forest's heart ...
Anna Akhmatova, 1912.

If I could take your place, daughter,
to relieve you of the quickenings at midnight ...
to rise, put on the kettle and wake him from his slumber.
To ignore the 3am bustle of midwife and husband
and the sleepy, friendsome dogs as they stir.

And when amniotic rushes to the bathroom tiles,
to look in the mirror and to see your eyes changed from blue to bright green,
to experience the veil between this world and another fall away.

to feel your drum-tight belly ripple like sheet lightning
and your cervix stir deep within you.
To drink bittersweet lemon and honey tea,
to feel warm hands on the small of your back,
to know that all your bones are parting ways,
to think that you are actually going to die,
and finally, in the crisis, that it is just not going to fit!

If I could, daughter, I would take the pain away.
But I can't. It's your turn now. This is the way the world has always rolled.

And so, instead, I take the kitchen stove apart, scrub the oven, polish the stainless steel sink and sweep the gum leaves from the doorway. I wash clothes, evict the spiders and flies and stock the fridge ... and all the while I am heavy of breast and feel a strange, old ache in my womb.

West to East

To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again.
Akhenaten,
Dorothy Porter.

 I killed an owl that night. It rose up from the roadkill it was picking at and hit my windscreen with a wet sound. I thought the glass was broken but it was only a mark like a sweaty hand, an owl essence spread across the screen.

We drove for miles and miles through yellowed fields, the yield lopped off to leave acres of buzz cut. The moon rose and the constant crosswind that had been with us all day dropped away and everything became calm. I stopped at a closed petrol station and the owner came out and granted me and the jerrycan enough fuel to carry on when I told him where we were headed. I drove a thousand kilometres that night. The children slept in the bed of the Bedford and I drove the back roads through rice fields lined with river gums, through a few states. Jack rabbits launched themselves bravely into the headlights. I filled the car with the jerry by a darkened weatherboard house on the side of the road, hoping the kids wouldn't wake up in the still.

Byron Bay: We woke in the morning by the town beach barbeques. Everyone else but us had been kicked out by the ranger. Maybe he'd taken pity on our WA number plate and the ancient van while he walked around thumping his fist on the roofs of all the other illegal campers. After that long day and night of driving, Byron embraced us with dripping trees, humid, silky air, adventitious roots, water dragons on the beach and athletic, tanned people doing yoga in the sunrise.

By eight am the beach was busy. A school of life savers in Speedos ran by as the three of us dipped our toes in the eastern seaboard for the first time. They stopped and insisted on having their photograph taken with us. (It's one of my more strange holiday pics.) The sand was light, golden crickets chanted and the waves were gentle and perfectly formed. It was a lovers' town, a Babylon, a parody of itself.  The car park filled with people and by eleven, the luscious morning had broadened into a glare and the bearded dragons fled in disgust. A perfect bikinied Diaz walked up the beach carrying a surfboard on her scalp. The graffiti on the point she paddled out to said 'locals only'.

The locals all go to Brunswick Heads to swim. The streets in Byron teemed with trudging folk, blank faced but looking around. Shop keepers were jaded, tired of smiling, of dealing with the mess of humanity. People didn't seem to know or care about each other. It's just after New Years Eve, I kept reminding myself. The mangroves and lush rainforests and turquoise waters and lithe pythons ... this old hippy/mill/whaling town groaned under the weight of sea changer expectations: crowds and money and real estate. Anyone could buy surfboards, sunglasses, board shorts or towels but try finding a litre of milk or a loaf of bread or a moment of peace in the main street.

On the way to the police station we were caught in a gridlock of January holiday traffic. At the counter, on saying why we'd driven across the continent, I was met with a blank look. The policeman who was there the day he died had been recently transferred to Sydney. And anyway, the harried officer told me, you'd be best off heading for Mullumbimby. There was no police station in Mulli but somebody there might remember what happened.

Pearl at Middleton Beach

Oystermen

Sometimes, late at night, the only other fishers around in the Sound are Grievous, and Gawain checking his leatherjacket pots. Catching leatheries is not his day job though. Gawain is also the director of a local seafood company. I see Gawain and Kilpatrick at the Sunday markets every week but the source of the creamy, salty oysters that they sell has always been a bit of a mystery to me. 

The first time I saw the oyster farm I thought it was conglomerates of old wire fences that a farmer had built into the sea to stop cows from crossing paddocks along the beach. I had no idea it was an oyster farm. Then, one morning picking up nets on the east side of the harbour, I saw the barge out there and the figures of men in bright orange rain coats moving about the ‘fences’.

I asked Gawain if I could go out on the barge with them and he rang me at six o’clock one morning. “We’re leaving in twenty minutes, Sarah. Are you coming out?”

I drove down to the Emu Point ship yards where ancient wooden boats lined up with newer steel jobs, past the seafood restaurant, the chandler’s shop and the slipway manager’s sheds. Gawain had the tractor hooked up to the barge. Men donned wetsuits, getting ready for the trip.

“Sarah, have you met Diesel?” Gawain introduced me to the crew: Diesel, a bluff, hulking, fisherman sort, Turk, tattooed with sunnies and a long beard, Jason whippet lean in his sealskin, beanie and sunnies. The two German backpackers in bright orange sou-westers, Chris and John, nodded hello. Kilpatrick was staying to shuck in the shed.

“Where’s yer boots?” Diesel said to one of the Germans. “You got any gumboots mate?” He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Wellingtons? Galoshes? Ahh. Whatever. You right then, everyone? Ready. Let’s go.”

Once the boat was launched, Gawain jumped in and Diesel dropped the propeller and started her up. We backed into the shallow waters around the service jetty. “Tide’s still going down,” muttered Diesel. “Better get a move on.” Despite the early hour, a wind blew in from the east. Two men stood in the water on the sand bar with fishing rods. We motored towards Green Island.

Diesel and Turk lit up tailermades in shelter of the cabin and then put on their white cotton gloves. Diesel looked like he had always been a fisherman. He has been working the oysters for ten years now but before that he was a diesel mechanic. I looked at his boots. He wore diving boots with white gumboot tops elastic banded around them, like gaiters. “What are they all about?” I asked him.

“I invented them myself,” he said. “You see, all the stingray wounds I’ve ever heard of go in at the ankle or the top of the foot, or the sides. Never the bottom. So this is my protection. Don’t know if the theory’s right but I’ve never been barbed yet.”

“We get those little purple stingrays,” Gawain explained to me. “those buggers with the pink undersides. They’re the worst ones.”

“Cobbler?”

The men shuddered in unison. “We don’t talk about cobbler.”

The oyster racks are lined up in hundreds of rows in the still shallow waters of the eastern side. There is something very beautiful about their barnacled repetitions. Held together with sticks the size of tomato stakes, black rubber bands and rope, the racks reminded me of bamboo pathways through some kind of Asian water village. Their rickety regularity and the olive-hued beauty of tidal Oyster Harbour make the structures a kind of art.

The barge was loaded with seeper cages of oysters that had already been graded for size and were being returned to the racks. Diesel steered the barge into a channel just wide enough and killed the motor.

“Watch out for blue rings,” warned Gawain.

I’d forgotten all about the blue ringed octopus. When we were kids swimming at Emu Point, much mention was made not to fiddle with underwater containers or grottos where the deadly critters lived.

“Do you get many here?”

“Yeah, we get a few. Years ago, we were getting ten, twenty a day in the cages. Bloody awful. Then that hundred year flood came through. Remember that? All the fresh water coming out of the rivers got rid of them. But they’re coming back now.”

Diesel, Turk, Chris and Gawain jumped overboard into knee-deep water. Chris held the barge in position against the wind. Jason stayed on the deck with John and started throwing out the seeper cages to them. The three waders clipped the cages full of oysters onto the racks.

“Hey, Gawain, did I tell yer about my blue ring dream?”

I would not recognise Jason is his civvies. His wetsuit, beanie and sunglasses made him a deckie creature. “The night after I got that one on me leg, I dreamt there was one on me arm and I kept trying to shake it off, flaring up its bastard rings all blue at me. Shit. What a dream.”

“Sounds like a nightmare,” Gawain sighed over a broken seeper cage clip and said, “lacky band, please.”

“Oh, nah,” Jason said, handing him an elastic. “Nah, just a dream.”

“I’ve never seen one before, and I’ve lived here all my life,” I said.

Turk handed me a stake with a blue ringed octopus clinging to it. “Here’s one.” The  tiny, slimy creature with electric blue marks jumped off the stick and slid into the sea around the legs of the men.

“Lacky band, please.”

 

The deckies threw the seeper cages and lacky bands to the waders until the deck was clear except for remnants of broken cages, barnacles and algae. Turk kept straightening up in the water and rubbing the small of his spine. I could see he suffered the same back as Salt.  Once the seeper cages were done, the oystermen turned to harvesting. Diesel started up the motor again and moved the barge into another row further to the west, where the burnt out hill loomed brindle against silver water. He dropped into the water and counted the oysters in a random tray. “Forty five.”

Some swift mathematics flew around between the crew.

“Forty five per unit?”

“Four dozen.”

“Fifty dozen times four dozen is ...” Jason was onto it.

“Nah, fifty times forty five!”

It was all too fast for me. Within minutes the crew worked out how many units they needed to load for the Perth markets.

 

Black bream swum around Turk’s feet, feeding on the nutrients that his movements were stirring up, amongst the ferny brown weed and sea grass. “They’re a good size too. Should get that line out!”

“Turk, you gotta fisherwoman on board! Don’t tell her where the bream are.”

“Do you chuck a line in ever?” I asked, trying not to eye those fat bream any more than was respectable.

“Nah,” Turk said, grinning at his boss. “We’re here to work mate, not go fishing.”

After about forty minutes of throwing up racks of oysters to the men on board, who stacked them neatly against the cabin, the day’s quota was fulfilled. By then the wind and the sun had opened up the clouds. The men climbed into the boat and Diesel started up the motor again.

“What species are they, these oysters?”

“Sydney rock oysters. They don’t spawn in these cold waters, so they don’t get away. We’re not allowed to use Pacific oysters here because they might get away. But South Australia uses them, so I dunno. These ones we are bringing in now, they’re bistro oysters, a bit smaller. They’ll get graded and sent off today.”

“These are from Carnarvon aren’t they?” Diesel asked Gawain.

“Sydney rock oysters from Carnarvon?”

“Yeah, I think they got bred up there.”

“How many did you pick up today?”

“Two thousand dozen.”

Diesel found his shucking knife. “Grab one of those things.”

I picked out a nice fat oyster. He prised it open while Turk held the steering wheel for him, flicked the top shell overboard and turned the oyster flesh over in its base. Then he handed it to me.

There is nothing quite like a fresh oyster, with the liquor still liquoring and that salty sweet creaminess all going on ... wowwee

Back at the boat yards, Gawain backed the tractor down to the ramp and Diesel drove the boat straight on to the jinker. The others piled out and headed for the hose, past the neatly swept piles of barnacle shells below the sorting racks, to rinse off their gear before their nine o’clock coffee break. 

 

Oystermen.

Wooden Boat Tragics

Some weeks ago Aussie rang me from the local arts centre.
"Your boat is here."
"The Pearl? No! I've just taken her to the tip."
"She's here. She's out on the lawn."

A few years ago, I wrote on A WineDark Sea to "stay tuned for the voyage of the Pearl." It seems her voyage these days is less traversing wavy seas than waving clover and now she's bogged in the grass less than half a kilometre from my home as an art installation.
Classic. Pearl's true north always spins south to Toa. She's been following me around town for quite a while now.

At the opening of the Boat Show exhibition, us three past owner/lovers of the the Pearl - the New Romantic, the Mad Frenchman and me - gathered on the grass with glasses of the artists' red wine to toast the Goddess of the Wooden Boat.

We are all still in love with her ... but we three also know that affairs with the Princess are high maintenance and best avoided in the interests of sanity. So it was yet another happy goodbye.

Carval Knowledge

I've had a few great ideas for the Pearl. The first one was to patch her up, install a diesel Lister and go fishing. My last great idea was to upend her above a mud brick plinth so she could crown a shop full of great books in the middle of nowhere.

This was long after I had given her away. So I reclaimed her in another fit of wooden boat self-flagellation. All the people who had fallen for her siren song shook their heads but they understood. My new plan was that the Boatshed Bookshop could be a go-to destination. Like a drive from Port Hedland to Broome, it is the journey through the desert that makes the oasis so gorgeous. Imagine driving for days and then finding Another Roadside Attraction (thanks Tom Robbins) in the form of the best boat shed bookshop ever, out the back of beyond. Poetry.

However nice the idea was, the reality of getting the Pearl out there started to do my head in. (Yes, I really was quite serious about the book shop in the desert thing, This is not another WineDark yarn.) The trailer chassis was rusting through. The wheel bearings were, well, not bearing up. I needed a truck with a tip trailer and a winch. Once I got her curvy half-ton self out there, white ants had to be kept at bay with rock salt or something harder.
Then I had to replace all the ribs, because they were rotting into the stringers and terrible things would happen to inhabitants of any bookshop she roofed. I don't know how to steam and bend 98 kauri pine ribs of a 20 foot 1920s carval. If I did, and I had the time, I'd steam the bastards, put the Pearl in the water and go fishing.

I guess the moral of this tale is that if you fall in love with the Siren of Wooden Boats, you should be a rich, retired carpenter. Do I sound jaded or just a bit tired? Yes. She has nice lines this girl but her witchery is cruel. I'm worn of old wooden boats. Give me an ally hull and an outboard any day.

Tonight, under the cover of darkness and some illegal  borrowed hastily-attached number plates and lights, I took her to the tip. The plan was to miss peak hour traffic while I negotiated the major roundabout with her hull creaking and rocking behind me. I completely forgot about Thursday night shopping. Crazy. Anyway, Greedy, who works at the dump, wants to turn her into an installation, surround her with sunflowers and cover her in poetry. He is the right kind of siren lover - one who does not go to sea.


So, the Pearl has returned to where I found her three years ago.