Johnny Walker's Sausage Roll and the Fledgling

There's a man we call Johnny Walker because he walks the highway everyday into the little town. He swings his arms as he walks, always dressed the same; dark clothing, a backpack and peaked cap. He lives in the forest some where only he knows, ten kilometres or so from the shops. His living in a tent in an unknown location tends to stress the authorities out a bit but the general consensus is that he is better off here than on the streets of Perth.

It was a weird day in the fire tower yesterday. Smoke from the bushfires stymied any chance of me spotting a new one. Once the southerly came in and cleared some of the smoke, low cloud descended and I could only see for about twenty kilometres. A long, frustrating day!

As the sun slid down, I went into town for supplies and saw John, striding towards me, waving me down. We always stop to have a chat, quick snippets of life, how we are feeling today. John doesn't do eye contact but once that is comfortably established, he is a great conversationalist.

'Hey lovely Sarah!' John said. 'Would you like a sausage roll? Got a heap half price from the servo.' He brandished a few brown paper bags at me.

'It's a long way to the top, John, so yes please,' I said and he handed me a bag with a sausage roll and a bonus cheddar kranski.

On the Broke track, the long gravel road through the karri forests to my home, I was again stymied. (Yes, it's a stymie kinda day and also I like that word. It's almost onomatopoeic.Try saying it slowly, out loud.)

 Karri trees drop their enormous limbs without warning, often when warm weather suddenly cools and the resins in their joints contract. This one happened probably only an hour or so before I got there. The scene was a mess, from twigs and leaves to logs half a metre wide. It was six o'clock. Long day and all I wanted to do was get home.

What beekeepers call the 'karri flow' is on at the moment. It's a phenomena that happens every seven or eight years. The trees burst into bloom and the smell is amazing, like the air is laden with honey and memory. Normally you can't see the flowers because they are sixty metres above us but as I started pulling away branches, the source of that scent became obvious. One more leafy and perfumed branch later, I uncovered a crime scene: Three fluffy chicks lay scattered about what was once their roost.

 

By then, I'd already been on the phone to my boss about the tree. It is a fire road after all and crew are using it every day when heading out to the bush fire. Plus, yeah, I just wanted to get home and I couldn't move those logs myself. The problem was that it was six thirty on a Friday afternoon and all the shire roads mob were going into relaxation or limp mode. It seemed intractable.

'But I have chicks!' I said on the phone and like a movie, the three chicks began to recover from their momentous fall and start chirping and moving about. 'Oh my God, they are alive!'

 

'Okay, keep them warm and when you get home, give them some sugar water,' my boss said. So ... how do I get home with a recalcitrant karri limb playing door bitch? Boss pulled some strings and an hour later, headlights threaded through the trees as one of the fire crew  on stand by turned up with a chainsaw and towing chain.

It was quite dark by the time we'd finished piling the branches onto the sides of the road. I beckoned the fire fighter over to the tail lights of his truck. 'Check this out,' I said, holding the brown paper bag.

'It's a ... sausage roll?' He asked, peering into the bag. 'What am I looking at? A sausage roll?'

'Look closer, there's three little chicks in there.'

He did and said, 'Wow! Where did you find them?' When I showed him the spot where these fledglings had fallen to earth, he said, 'Good spot! I guess sausage rolls are not part of their normal diet. Mixing it up a bit are you?'

'Boss told me to keep them warm. This *on special and then donated* sausage roll is still sort of warm, so I thought it might be a nice place for them.'

Two of the chicks died overnight. The violent crashing down of their home was just too much. But the third (the one in my hand) cheeped and moved about on the hot water bottle and gave out a tenacious 'I will survive' vibe. I fed it lemon barley cordial from a pipette and my dog hovered about, no doubt anxious about hierarchical matters.

Today, I was rained off the tower which was quite excellent, given the bushfires, and drove seventy kilometres to meet a wild bird carer. We met in the car park of a roadhouse and I handed over the tiny featherless chick to her. 'It's pooing! That's a good sign,' she said. The last I've heard is that the little trauma baby had a good feed and is going well.

So, next time I see Johnny Walker, I'll tell him that he did good by giving me that brown paper bag with the warmish sausage roll inside. It may well have saved a life.

PS ate the kranski 

 

Night Shift

There is a massive bush fire prowling around the forests about 20 kilometres to the west of me. Every day, conditions change according to the wind direction or rain. Large tracts of karri, marri and jarrah country are in the conflagration and occasionally, while on tower, I'll see some black smoke go up, which usually means tea tree or some other kind of melaluca. I can smell the track of the fire in the smoke, as it moves through grass trees, karri forests and peat swamps. Fragrant, warm, dusty, acrid.

All roads into the area have been closed and Fire and Emergency Services have ordered traffic control people to block the roads with their cars.Traffic control do twelve hour shifts from 5 to 5, sitting in their cars all night or all day. The night before last, a traffic control crew were evacuated from the fire ground when the wind changed.

This whole experience has changed my thinking about traffic control: they are pretty much first responders but in a boring sense. Sitting in a car for twelve hours. No internet or phone range. Nothing to do but deter randoms from the fire ground.

This is a photo from one of those guys who saw the moon emerge from the clouds, with the lights from his truck illuminating the foreground.

Photo by Beer Garden Philosopher

 

 

Southern Cross neck tattoos

 So ... after numerous mechanics I know giving me *that look* about the oil light and the inevitable bang bang bang demise of Queen Ben, I began to feel like I was in the docks for manslaughter. Please see the previous post if you need some context.

Tonight I went to Brownie's bush camp with some corned beef wrapped in alfoil. *That look* has been banished to the dark days of New Years Eve for him because I'm now the proud owner of a Toyota land bruiser and apparently, these old utes excite young nostalgists, old rev heads and pragmatic farmers alike.

And this is where my post takes a sideways lurch. I drove the tractor beast home and was walking around my new car, checking out the decals that previous owners had stuck on the ducco. 

'This one's gotta go,' I said to my sister.

'Oh, just put a swastika in the middle of it and she'll be right,' she said, laughing.

Her words burned. It's something I've been thinking about for years. When did the Southern Cross become an emblem for white nationalists and racism in Australia? It's always been an abstract thing for me until I bought this car, with Southern Cross decals on both sides of the rear pillars like some kind of statement.

The Southern Cross in our southern hemisphere skies makes up the head of the dark emu and further stars outline the body of the emu. Her body is literally delineated by stars. Once you've seen it in the night skies, you can never unsee the dark emu. 

So now, I've bought a car with this emblem stickered all over it, but it is meaning something quite different to a wonder of old knowledge and seasonal change. It's meaning 'Fuck Off We're Full' and 'White Power'. 

Maybe it began with Cronulla, maybe it began with the internet, I have no idea. The appropriation of the Southern Cross by right wing organisations in Australia is something I'm curious about.

In the meantime, I've just murdered Queen Ben and perhaps that is more pressing. She's sitting where I towed her a few days ago, waiting to be resurrected or wrecked, piece by piece.

* And Selkie! She's still on three legs but recovering after her encounter with that boar at Pig Bay.

Past tense

Years ago I wrote a story on A WineDark Sea called 'Can't kill him with an axe'. It was an account of the times I'd nearly killed Old Salt on his fishing boat. He'd previously had heart surgery ('they put a bit of pig in me!'), licked asbestos as a kid because he liked the tingling feeling on his tongue, had an affinity for battery acid and thought electrocution was a fine remedy for Ross River Virus.

Bill died on Monday. It's a weird feeling. When a close friend is dying, people ask if I want to visit them but I'm already there, somehow. Several hundreds of kilometres apart and I'm with them. I don't really know how to explain this. Despite this feeling, when Nga told me on Sunday that he was now on morphine, I'd said, 'Yeah, I'll ring him in the morning.' He sounded fine on Friday when he took of his oxygen mask to chat. Fine.

He was my mentor and teacher. He taught me everything about what it is to be on a boat, how to follow the channel markers home to port in the middle of the night. That was one of his first lessons as we motored home from Michaelmas Island. He taught me about family, about how fish think and how to tie knots (still terrible at that).

He seemed incombustible, unkillable. An incorrigible white man with a stout sense of right and wrong, a strong interest in his family's history of fishing the Great Southern inlets. He never gave up. So Bill, the star of Salt Story is gone. Bizarrely and so bloody banal for someone who always sailed too close to the wind, he copped covid at a funeral a few weeks ago. On Monday, we'll go to his.

 

 

 

 

Tank? Empty

The state premier of Western Australia has just resigned, citing exhaustion. He said his portfolio as premier and treasurer will finish by the end of this week. To paraphrase the words of Aotearoa's  (New Zealand's) former Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, his tank is empty. He's done. He's out.

State Premier Mark McGowan closed off the state from the rest of the country in the early days of the Covid pandemic and it afforded us about 18 months of relative normaility. This sounds weird, I know. But we didn't have to endure many local lockdowns - because the state was also shut off from the world. It was really cool. There was no Covid here. We could move around as much as we wanted to. Nobody got sick from Covid in the early days because it just simply didn't exist here. He did that.

When the federal election happened last year, Labor won on a landslide, mainly on the back of various Labor politicians such as McGowan, who'd fought so hard for public health. His decisions were often unpopular. He'd declared opening borders by a certain date and then abruptly closed the borders again. We in Western Australia were called the 'hermit kingdom' and 'cave dwellers' by right wing pollies and journalists in the Eastern states, merely for being anti Covid. Our geographical advantage was obvs.

So the Premier gave a press conference today, stating his resignation. He didn't cry. His wife looked stoked (Oh boy I can only imagine) and he then bowed out with not a Royal Commission or ICAC review ahead of him.

Good job Mark and I thank you for your service.

Vale

 

Grader Driver

Today I'm going to talk about grader drivers. Grader drivers hold a large part of my mind's life. Anyone who has ever lived down a gravel track will know what I mean. 

The track to my house is ten gravel kilometres long, so six miles in the euro lingo. I travel this track every day, have done for the last seven years and sometimes it's just the fucking worst. It's my car that I feel most for, but secondly my mental health. Sometimes the corrugations and pot holes get so bad that I am crying by nearing home, knowing I'm contributing to the condition of the track as much as suffering those bastardy corrugations, that I'll pay with both travel and maintenance. It gets worse. Every year of driving the track, I pay for broken radiator mounts (three times now), new tyres, shock absorbers and all the shit I've lost off the back of the ute on the way.

Anyway, the grader driver came today. The grader driver is like this kinda Zen doctor who puts everything right with the world. That's how I see him. He grades the road so smooth and flawless that people like me fall at his feet in wonder and worship.

Grader drivers work alone in often lonely landscapes. They grade a road and may never know who silently thanks them for the work they do. They are like garbage collectors or nurses.

Today I pulled up beside the grader. It's a huge machine and he kept the engine running as I spoke. 'Thank you!' I yelled. ''I love grader drivers.' 

I couldn't hear his reply over the grader but he was smiling and giving me a thumbs up. The rest of the track felt like I was floating. So smooth. This guy?

 He should be paid like a CEO.

Gentleman John

 He is a quiet sort, Mum's neighbour. A sturdy man with a soldier's gait. One day I pruned the bushes on her driveway and the only good it did was to expose Gentleman John's majestic marijuana growing on the other side of the fence. For the next month, Mum had to see it every time she did the dishes. We all knew he was a good gardener but this was next level.

I'd be chopping her wood and he'd stop by the asbestos fence and say gidday. He'd strung up a dead crow on the apricot tree. There's a riot of dendrophilic orchids bouncing out of a dead marri stump too.

When I worked in the cafe, he came in for a daily coffee and paper and rang his son every Saturday morning. Because he was partially deaf, John was a shouter. The whole cafe was filled with people trying really hard not to eavesdrop. A blow by blow rendition of every show he's seen on TV that week. Every Saturday. Yes, this an obituary.

He was a Vietnam vet who 'never left a man behind', according to another ex-SAS local. When I asked about why he pulled his socks over his trouser legs, he said 'condoms while sleeping too, my friend, those leeches get in any way they can', and who in the depths of his worst PTSD sleeplessness, would walk around town with a backpack full of bricks, checking locks, securing the stations. Once he'd done his nightly round, he could sleep.

I really liked John. He was a cool guy. Two weeks ago he died of Covid and I went to his memorial today. He didn't want any fanfare. From what he said to Mum, he was ready to go. Apart from his pulled-up socks, I liked his hat best of all, how he always called me 'friend', gently, and how he drove through town, looking straight ahead.

Bathroom Mirror

This mirror can be brutally honest first thing in the morning. The lines on my brow and fleshy, wrinkled undersides of my arms. The window full of light and luminating the sight of me. Gah!

Skinny Gran looked into this mirror once, long ago. Then her son built her a house in the House Paddock, next to the Apple Tree paddock. It was said her husband, Viking stock, went away to war a good man and came back a bad one. North Africa campaigns. One of the Rats. She survived the car accident, when her drunken husband and some of her children did not. Her son survived it too and left school at ten to go to work. He became adult, slicked back hair, weekly dances at the community hall, shearing teams. Skinny Gran moved with him here, to this house, when he married the daughter of a Dutchman and they staked all of their money into a patch of dirt on the south coast.

Skinny Gran died quietly. The men here die violently as a rule. The women are taken by a more interior means – clusters and squamous cells. For decades, a lifetime, Skinny Gran’s daughter in law, a merry-eyed woman with tight curly hair inspected herself in this mirror before making tea in an aluminium pot in the mornings, quiet time before the children awoke. Listening to the bulls and the magpies. Curly Mum’s daughters were babies and then suddenly they were teenagers, the oldest wielding a tight-lipped authority over her squally middle child brother. Sometimes when she looked in the mirror, she could see the straight brow and nose of her children’s’ genes, the Dutch, the Swede, the hard scrabble life land. 

Sometimes I wonder, as I look in the same mirror, whether Curly Mum thought of the farm as unceded Aboriginal land. It must have been a silent reckoning and certainly not of the times. The work, the constant work and interest rates and carting water for the cattle in the dry years. Her son was old enough now, angry enough and strong enough to take on his old man. Her son went away at fifteen.

Her youngest, who idolised her big brother, sat on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror and cried as Curly Mum stood behind her, cutting her hair into a blonde crown of curls. If only they wouldn’t fight, she said to her mum. Why do they fight? It was a Saturday and the midsummer light through the window was fierce. She was starting high school in a week. Her mum reckoned that there is always a week between a bad haircut and a good one.

They tiled the bathroom, took out the bath with its lion claw feet and installed a sliding glass shower cubicle. No one had baths anymore anyway and the water pressure was improved with the new electric pump. Curly Mum stood in front of the mirror, a towel around her waist, right arm raised and crooked over her hair, her left hand feeling around her boob, seeing if the lump was visible to the eye.

Two years later and, stepping out of the shower in the mornings with bright light shining in, confronting again the scars beneath her absent right breast. So … an Amazon now. Silences from her husband and fearful looks from her daughters. Trips to the city were a necessity rather than privilege. Clearances, cleared, remission. Twenty years. Her son returned.

Her son’s girlfriend was a sturdy, uneven girl who already had a daughter from another man. Curly Dill (‘daughter in law, love’) would seek refuge in the kitchen with Curly Mum when the two men, now bonded in mutual recognition after all those years of antipathy, became intolerable to her in the shed. Curly Mum found this kid’s activism around the forests and feminist thought tilting at windmills and pretty quaint. She’s pregnant, her son said to her one day. How do you feel about that? Curly Mum asked her son. I’m not sure, said her son.

Curly Dill gave birth on the side of the road on the way to the hospital. Not long after that, Curly Mum had a proper hospital bed delivered to the house, and a nurse, so that she could die at home. Which she did.

Grannie Violet had been sweet on Curly Mum’s husband from the days back when Skinny Gran was a single mum and her son was slicking back his hair and going to dances. So when Curly Mum died, Grannie Violet moved into her house and soon became grandma to the expanding progeny of this family. At first there was resistance from them, then acceptance as they realised she was staying for the long run. She would see herself age in the bathroom mirror, over the years. She kept her own house and worked still, cleaning houses and government department buildings, as her partner grew older and his heart condition worsened. Grannie Violet went into the house two days after he died to ‘collect her things.’ I’d like to think that she stopped in front of the bathroom mirror but maybe she didn’t.

Curly Mum’s son took over the farm when his father died. He worked full time at a sand carting company to pay back the loan incurred by his father’s lack of a will, and spent his nights in the calving season with a calf-puller, a torch and his four-wheel drive. He looked drawn and shadowed. The next woman to look in the bathroom mirror brushed her teeth, inspected her fringe, eyebrows and hair, before rushing her daughter off to the school bus that rumbles along the gravel road past the gates, every morning. She hoped for a future, any future. At the gates sit concrete casts of a pair of lions, an Italian plea that the people within own this piece of land. 

Yesterday, Curly Dill looked in that bathroom mirror, remembering this history. She first looked into that mirror when Curly Mum was still alive and she was 24, and in love with her son. If she looked a bit emotional in the mirror, it’s because the farm is about to be sold after the death of her own son’s father, Curly Mum's son, and so this whole story comes to an end, of sorts.

 

 

Bin fire grass fire

Today on the fire tower was more anxiety than boredom. Once again it was a sched 5 and I was up there earlier than usual. Lots of tourists. High winds meant that small kids were freaking out when they got to the peak, scared of being blown off the mountain. The mesh fences to stop this occasioning didn't seem to make them feel any better. Parents talking 'face your fears' didn't help. The only thing that worked was someone taking their child's hand and talking them beyond how scared they were.

There's thunder tonight and no rain which means dry lightning across the southern forests region. Wheee!  Today I called in a smoke out Rocky Gully way. It was out of our district and there were all sorts of hectic happenings in our own but still, the spotter pilot radioed me for coordinates and passed it onto the neighbouring spotter. It turned out to be a few hectares of paddock going up. Grass fire. Must have been a decent one because I could see it from fifty kilometres away. Soon after I called it in, the radios went crazy.

On another note, Selkie was terribly happy when I returned home. She sleeps on my bed whenever I leave the house because she's a stinky, passive aggressive bitch. I returned to a house smelling of passive aggressive bitch. As soon as I turned up she headed down to the beach to retrieve the treasure she's been sniffing at all day. Turns out there's another kangaroo carcass down there.

 

I think what is in the photo is part of a spine and rib cage (including said dog). She's very pleased with herself. I'm really not sure what's going on at home any more.

I did find a bird's nest. Check this out:

 

I found it under a tree outside the local day care centre. When I brought it into work, the ranger said, 'That's the string and felt we use in the day care centre!' She has kids who go there. The nest is also threaded with parrot feathers and bits of serviettes from the cafe. This pretty much my best find all year.

Finally, these two ... just because they are pretty bloody funny:

 

 

If I don't get to post beforehand ... Happy New Year Bloggers. I just love you mob and think you are all awesome. Thanks for being around this year and ones past. I really appreciate it.

X Sarah

Canteloupe

I saw him on the town road driving towards me and rather than our grinning windscreen greetings, it was a terse raised hand from me and a concerned look from him. How I would love to smash that windscreen, must have flashed my eyes, seeing his knowledge that I was beyond cajoling now, or lies.

You know it is over when he stops enticing you on midnight adventures and day time rain time trysts; when he begins to wife you and you oblige. You know it is over when you make him toast in the morning instead of cooking him kangaroo meat in a cave at midnight. You know it is over when he provides just enough goodness for his pass card to embark on his next adventure without you.

My phone rang as I pulled into Crypt’s house. No Caller ID. I switched it off and then Crypt opened his front door and said, how you going Sarah?. Aussie’s birthday ey? Party, party! Do you want a beer? It’s cheap beer. Just shit beer really but something to get started on.

I’ve dug her up an orchid for her birthday, I said. I think it will take. They’re amazing.

I showed him the orchid, sprouting long, crimson stalks in an old tin stock pot I’d found in the Creepy House. I’d cut some flowers too and wrapped them in wet tissue, alfoil and wreathed them in a copy of the Weekly.

That’s impressive, better than my effort, he said. I just bought her a pile of sausages. Crypt's night shifts usually involve cleaning the blood and bits of bone off the floors, the walls and sometimes even the ceilings, when the arterial sprays hit the light fittings of the surgery room at the hospital.

You know it’s over when you can’t stop thinking about the night your lover's last lover was the usher and his wife took the stage alone and her father had just died. The white orchid in the usher’s dark hair. His wife's red lips stretched into what was supposed to be a stagey hilarity. Project that voice, actor. Put on that mask, usher, and usher us through the night. Go on. Both of you.  Break a leg.

Both women looked terrified.

Crypt’s house is immaculate; shabby fibro chic. Now that he has a Kindle he reads three novels a week. He has printed out the periodic table and pinned it up in the kitchen. Most days on my commute, as I shoulder through the door with my back pack full of work clothes, a lap top and a dog, Crypt is asleep, or trying to sleep, or recovering from lack of sleep. But this day he was a bit spiky after a week of night shifts. Someone knocked at the door.

Who the fuck is that? shouted Crypt, throwing open the door. Who the fuck is knocking on my door?

I already knew who it was. I saw his car through the torn lace curtains, parked across Crypt’s driveway, and then I heard his voice, asking for me.

Well I dunno, said Crypt. Who are you anyway? And Sarah? How did you know she is here? Sarah! He turned to me. Do you wish me to let this gentleman onto the premises?

Of course, I said. Come in.

He looked sunburned and intense. He didn’t really smile and that thing he normally does with his eyes when he sees me wasn’t there. I assumed he was reflecting the same lack in mine.

Sit down, sit down, said Crypt. Do you want a beer? It’s not that great but it’s a beer. Crypt slammed down a can in front of him.

He nodded and sat down. He said,

I tried to ring you, just then, from a pay phone. My phone has died a terrible death …

You know it’s over when you block his calls, messages and face time on your phone. You know it’s over when you resign from your secret internetty game with your secret internetty name - he changes his name according to whomever he plays with - and then you delete the app. You know it’s over when he is still too wary, secretive and careful, even in the face of losing you forever, to acknowledge this fact, to ask in Crypt’s presence: why did you block my calls and cut contact with me a week ago? What happened?

Because if he had asked me that, Crypt may have well put up his palms, backed away and left us at the little laminex kitchen table to let us talk some truths. Crypt may have gone outside to gaze over the verge action of the debacle’d meth house next door, or at my orchid in a tin pot, or decide that it was bin day even though it was a Saturday. 

But my visitor didn’t ask me that. He is just a man who has affairs. 

Truth is no option for the romantic strayer, and so the three of us sat around the table, drank beer and talked about toe tags, the day’s sailing, fish paintings and science fiction. I was aware of his discomfort and thought, his discomfort is not a single fucking stitch on the tumult I’ve worn the last four years. Pain expressed repeatedly by me and ticked off on his mental clipboard.

Tick.

No Action Required.

You know it’s over when you realise the futility of explaining why this unequal relationship succours your damaged self and dismantles your true one. He hasn’t listened to you, he never will. Explain yourself woman. Again. Enough. You know it’s over when you recall his complaints about his previous mistress’s bleak, black heart. You always thought you were better than her and now you’ve become that same bleak, sad heart. A once-wild soul, black-mantled by secrecy. And that there will be another soul after you. There probably already is. You’re just not that special, Miss Sarah.

I was feeling restless. Finally I stood, exhausted with the hopping between chit chat pleasantries around Crypt’s kitchen table and the cool narrative going on in my head.

I’m off to Aussie’s place, I said, putting on my coat. I want to help her set up.

Yes, said my visitor, standing. I should get going too.

I’ll see you over there later, said Crypt to me. Are you taking her the orchids?

Of course.

I turned. Goodbye, I said to him.

I felt a small twinge of … something, when I saw his beer can ringed neatly with indents from his thumb nail. I hadn’t noticed he was doing that.

See you, he said.

I was out the door, collecting up the tin pot and the Weekly-wrapped corsage, and I was down the street, stalking along with the pot on my hip, holding it like a baby or maybe a washing basket. I was angry but I didn’t use the pot to break his windscreen. I didn’t feel so wronged after all. I just felt a million different furies spawning from an ancient hurt. I heard his car start and rumble along the road behind me, slowing as he reached me. This was where he would stop and say, can we talk now? But Aussie’s house was right there and I crossed the neighbour’s lawn to get to her driveway. I didn’t look to the road as I waved the spray of orchids at him, waving him away, and so he drove away.

What was all that about? Crypt asked me later and so I told him.

I call him Crypt here, not because he cleans blood and bone fragments off walls for a job but because he is really, really good at cryptic crosswords. He just has that kind of brain. Later he sent me this message:

I couldn't remember your friend’s name so I called him Rockmelon to place him in my mental catalogue. I got it later: Cantaloupe. 

Can’t elope. Can't. Elope.