Christmas in the tower

It was Christmas Day and 35 degrees when I saw the smoke, rising lazy and blue. Mt Pingerup loomed behind it, almost framing the smoke in its centre.

I was feeling a bit maudlin that morning. It was hot, the granite of Mt Frankland acting as a heat sink. My family were gathering for lunch, catching up after a long time spent apart. The tourist family who has climbed the mountain every Christmas Day for years with chocolate and beer for the fire tower attendant (should I declare that?) hadn’t come this year. So when that smoke showed itself, it made all the missing out feel somewhat worthwhile.

I plotted out the fire’s position on the map. My first fire of the season! Whoo! Mt Pingerup is 25 kilometres from the tower so at my guesstimate the smoke was 21 kilometres. With a shaky hand, I wrote out the coordinates in the tower log book, then called the office on the radio.

  “Walpole office, Frankland tower, smoke report.”

  “Frankland tower, go ahead.”

  “Time is 1117, at 259 degrees, approximately 21 kilometres. It’s a bravo 111 and it definitely shouldn’t be there!”

He repeated the information back to me. This is good practice in the event of a miscommunication. Then I called the spotter pilot, “Frankland spotter, Frankland tower, did you get a copy on that?”

  “Sure did,” the spotter replied. “What bearing from the tower was that again?”

  “259, over near Mt Pingerup.”

  “Heading over now,” she said. She was at the opposite, eastern end of the district.

That wait between calling in a smoke and the spotter confirming the position of a fire - or that it is a fire and not just someone spreading lime in a paddock - can be excruciating. All I could do was watch the plane’s slow trajectory towards the smoke on my phone’s Flight Radar app.

The duty officer called me. “What’s it doing Sarah?” I knew he’d be on the phone to crew too, dragging them away from Christmas lunch and needed to know how many fire trucks were required.

  “There’s no increase. It’s just mooching about, still blue.”

I’ve seen fires out that way start spotting around themselves within fifteen minutes. They act like fire crackers going off in weather like this but today’s one was very quiet. Ordnance block had a prescribed burn through it last year and that made all the difference.

Finally, on my phone I could see the spotter circling and then she called it in. “Walpole office, Frankland spotter, smoke report.”

Ha! I thought as I plotted her grid reference on my map. 21 kilometres. Nailed it! On the radios I could hear the crews talking as they headed out to Deep Road. Within an hour the fire was put out. It was a lightning strike apparently, from ten days previous. The fire had sat, inert and dormant in the days before Christmas and jumped up to party on Christmas Day.

 

Mistakes were made

 In a class I run, I teach students about passive language. If you can finish a sentence with 'BY ZOMBIES, then it it is passive sentence. Steven King in On Writing goes to town on passive language. Kathy Bates would be hobbling her writerly students but I'm quite nice about it really. 

I write BY ZOMBIES on the whiteboard. "It's at its most insidious when it comes to police statements. They want to cover their arses right? They don't want to say if the perp is male or female so they just say 'the body was carried to the river.'" Then I point to the whiteboard. BY ZOMBIES. "The most insidious reason for passive language when it comes to cops is when they talk about sexual violence against women. By using this language, for example: 'A woman was attacked in Como last night', they are placing the word woman as the actor in that sentence, not the perpetrator." Dismay ripples across my class as this sinks in.

This post has started quite serious when I had funny in mind.  Yes, mistakes were made BY ZOMBIES. 

A handsome cyclist stopped outside my local supermarket. I was at the checkout when he got off his bike outside and stared at me through the window. He looked straight at me. I was buying wine and broccoli and a newspaper and his look was quite intense. Then he smiled at me, this beautiful huge smile. I could see that he knew me, saw me, recognised me. I smiled back. It was a bit weird because I wasn't sure if I even knew this fit, blonde-haired, genetically blessed human. Then he kind of did this thing with his hair, smoothing it down and then ruffling it. He smiled again and pushed his fingers through his hair and I thought, with my broccoli and wine and newspaper at the checkout: Jesus, he's checking out his own reflection in the window.

There are times in life where we think oh dear I think I got that one completely fucking wrong.We can cover it for a little while with the beautiful prevarications of passive language: mistakes were made.

I hadn't seen Brownie for a few weeks.He's been fishing at the inlet for the whole time I've lived here and then I read his funeral notice in the local paper. It was the last few weeks of the commercial season and I hadn't seen him for a while, so when I saw the funeral notice I thought he's died. Brownie has actually died! He'd had a heart attack at my place a few years ago. Maybe that had happened again?

So I logged onto the streaming service of his funeral and watched family members go back and forth like goldfish on the screen: welcoming friends, family, people sitting down in the chapel. Music played, the whole service going forward. Images of Brownie went up on the screen as the celebrant began to talk. 

It was then that I realised I was at someone else's funeral. This was not Brownie. The photographs on the screen showed a complete stranger to me. The ease of being at an online funeral is so weird. I was at the wrong funeral and watching a different family process their grief.

 This felt pretty fucking weird to tell you the truth. It was like I'd crashed a wedding as a bad actor in a romance. I slapped down the lap top lid and took a few breaths. I felt quite creepy. Does that make sense?

 

Notes From The Tower

FAQ

Mount Frankland is part of the DBCA’s tourist trails in the national parks around Walpole, so naturally the fire tower folk meet plenty of people on holidays. Summitting climbers are often surprised to see someone in the tower and here are some of their questions.

 

“Dr Livingston, I presume?”

Yes, and I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you

 

“What are you doing?”

I’m looking for smoke and doing weather reports.

 

“Are they still doing this? I thought that was back in the olden days!”

We’ve been doing fire and weather lookout here since the 1960s. It’s a simple system for early detection of bushfires.

 

“Do you serve ice-cream?”

No. Bring your own ice-cream.

 

“Do you get taken up by helicopter?”

I got up here the same way as you just did.

 

“Great office!”

I know, right?

 

“Do you come up here every day?”

Yes, between December and March.

 

“Don’t you use AI or drones?”

Human eyes and knowledge of the landscape is pretty accurate. AI cameras are getting better at detecting smoke and one day my job will be sitting in front of a computer rather than atop a mountain. At the moment, I can see a smoke hours before it registers on a heat map.

 

“Are you alone the whole time?”

I hope you may be parsing this question wrong but also please don’t be creepy.

 

“How many hours do you do?”

That depends on the fire danger index. My day gets longer as the FDI goes up.

 

“Are you a volunteer?”

(This question always bugs me. Who would volunteer their whole summer when they could be making heaps of money elsewhere. Unless they are retired – and therefore, the insinuation is that I’m old and retired? Whoa, it’s getting personal now.)

No. I’m paid very well, thank you very much.

 

“Do you climb up three times a day like those old tower guys?”

I bring up my lunch.

 

“How many fires have you seen?”

Lots. Christmas Day, New Years Day and I caught that one over near Mt Barker a week ago.

 

“There are no toilets up here. Where do you go to the toilet?”

Bush wees are no problem. Bush poos are horrible and problematic. Would you like me to elaborate?

 

“What do you do with your time?”

I love audio books and podcasts and the radio. I can’t really read books because my eyes are down and I need to be looking up and around, constantly scanning the horizon.

Aftermath of the waterstorm

Last weekend the inlet looked like this as the wind created a storm surge that smashed into the bush.

  

 

And this is the inlet today: See that little grove of melaluca trees? It's the same one!

 

For weeks the inlet swelled and I was thinking, one more winter storm will do it, and then after another storm, well the next one should break it. 

"Never seen her so punishing, so angry," an old resident said, when I sent him a video of the water's influx on Saturday. It was hard to go outside into the intense, oxygenated air. It just felt relentless and the waves were throwing white foam everywhere. Chesapeake road became impassable as the inlet crept through the karri forests and all the river systems backed up. Eventually there was just nowhere for the water to go.

Finally, after days of insane wind and rain, the sand bar to the sea broke open. I woke up on Monday morning, looked out the window and realised we had a beach again. It was an eery feeling after all the drama. A Xenotopia, an in-between space where even the ravens breathed out a more measured Faaark!

Today we headed east along the beach, looking for things, beach combing for plastic and treasure. Peacocky tea tree oil from the forest was still leaching across the freshly exposed undersea.

 

 

 

The trees seemed surprised, caught unawares and exposed after months of being under water. The inlet dropped about 6 feet in as many days. Some of the trees displayed the tattered rosettes of their neighbours' papery bark, wearing them like survivor prizes. 

  

In the photo below, you may see something that looks like a bird's nest. It's not. It's flotsam from the water storm. We looked up in wonder and I measured myself against it, I'm tall but not that tall. "It's like a king tide," said H.

 

Paper bark trees hammered by the water are the most obvious signs of how high the inlet went. They have the tide lines etched into their skin.

 

On How Marrow Bones Can Kill You

And no, this is not about a reality cook-off show where the cravated judge eats a bone marrow risotto and then dies of a heart attack*

This is the story of a plant in Western Australia that contains a poisonous compound - well there are many - but a plant in the gastrolobium family is especially famous for creating havoc with the colonisers. The names Poison Point, Poison Hill and Poison Swamp are mapped by cattlemen when driving their stock out to the coast to feed in the summertime. They mapped the areas where the gastrolobiums grew and they deliberately kept sheep, cattle and goats away from the beautiful egg and bacon plants.

This plant was later developed by the government and made into a synthetic version of its essence: sodium fluoroacetate or 1080: a biochemical weapon now used to get rid of feral animals such as cats, dogs, pigs and foxes.These animals were driving native fauna into extinction So this pretty little heart-shaped plant became weaponised against the ferals. Most native animals who fed on this plant over millennia were totally immune to its killer effects. This is why it is such a perfect poison for interlopers.

Every few months, a plane flies laps over my place. It is the baiting plane, dropping poisonous baits into the national park that surrounds me. I'm constantly warned by letters that these dried sausage baits full of 1080 are highly attractive to dogs and cats.The last time my dog ate one from the beach below my house, it cost her a general anesthetic and probably several years of her life. Her stomach was pumped out with charcoal and I copped a two thousand dollar bill. It will kill her next time. That is the cost of living next to a national park and with a wandersome old dog who still thinks she is invincible.

Every time I hear the baiting plane droning overhead me, I hate it. I really hate that plane. I know they are doing the right thing but I still hate that plane.

I haven't got to the point about bone marrow and what it has to do with sp.gastrolobium, 1080 and dogs. So bear with me here.

In 1885, a Mr Web wrote to the Australian Advertiser (28/07/1885) about cooking up a bronze wing pigeon for breakfast and giving the dogs the wish bone. "I have just had a valuable dog poisoned by eating the breastbone of a Bronze wing pigeon." The dog had died a terrible death. "I have seen dogs die of arsenic or prussic acid but their sufferings seemed mild compared to that poisoning from the bones of the bronze wing pigeon." He then went onto the idea that the bronze wing pigeons, who feed primarily on the poison bush gastrilobium bilobum, excrete the the poison really quickly from their bodies but store it in their marrow bones. This was one of the original 1080 poisonings and it came from introduced dogs eating the marrow bones of bronze wings.

'A valuable dog'