The Second Step's a Doozy

Did I say that the journey began with a single step?  As true as that is, the next step can easily be a detour not imagined when the first one was taken - and so it has turned out.  This has been a year filled with side-tracks, diversions, and unexpected busyness.

 

When our government announced Covid lockdowns and restrictions on mingling with other people, my wife and I looked at each other and shrugged.  

"Not keen on crowds" we said to each other "and always happy pottering in our own garden and doing our own thing - sounds like we have been handed an excuse to live our lives in a fashion most congenial to us"

Within days, we found ourselves "in loco parentis" to grandchildren who had been sent home to do their studying online for an indeterminate period.  What fun!  What wonderful mental exercise for us as we reached back five decades or more to our own long lost schooldays, in search of discarded bits of geometry and algebra - it was amazing just how many forgotten formulae surfaced from the depths.  What wondrous new skills and words did we acquire as we grappled with the many and varied types of software chosen by the many and varied teachers who, only the previous week, had the pleasure of close daily learning experiences with those grandchildren, but now had to find, on short notice, ways of teaching them via the internet. Everyone involved found themselves on the proverbial "steep learning curve" - a trite business cliche that, for once, was deadly accurate.

 

 

 

So much has happened since then - in our family, our community, our country, and the wider world - and we have, like so many others, been busy just keeping up with it all.  Somehow, the time allotted to matters creative was nibbled away by the effort involved in keeping ourselves afloat, and helping other family members in worst straits than us - until the inevitable happened.  The long lapse in creative work began to feel inexcusable, and recommencing the work seemed almost impossible - the creative impulse was swamped by a sense of guilt and failure.

 

 

 

Now, the warnings of the scientists are again proven true, despite the wishful political thinking that had gained the upper hand, and Christmas is to be held under restrictive conditions, due to the virus once again slipping through our defences. 

 

The garden is soggy, but productive, as La Nina helps us recover from the horror and dessication of last summer's drought and bushfires - our creek is busy with minnows, crayfish, and small perch (who are growing fast) but no trout - the cicadas have had a bumper year, and the night is full of frog song. Clutches of ducklings, baby magpies, and parrots have visited our garden with their parents, learning which of the neighbourhood humans are soft touches for a bit of extra tucker. One of my 18 year old Apple Tree bonsais has flowered for the first time, and set tiny fruit.

 

 

 

The human grandchildren have resumed normal schedules, and we can allow the trigonometry and calculus to slip back into the oblivion of ancient memory - and now, with time on our hands, there is no excuse for not picking up the frayed threads and setting to work again.  Let's see what next year brings.  Ours has turned out pretty well, in the end - I hope it all comes good for you, too.

A Journey of a Thousand Smiles can Beguine with a Single Step onto the Dance Floor...

.... or down that Forest Path Less Travelled, or any other place where your imagination both yearns and fears to go.

Green Respite

It has been a  couple of months since I last posted, and for much of that time I have been carrying buckets and watering cans around my gardens, fighting a rearguard action against advancing drought and heat.  When the restricted time allowed for watering each morning has passed, it has been out with the rakes and pruning gear, refreshing fire breaks, or up the ladder, cleaning gutters of the dead needles strewn from the Casuarinas by the hot, dry winds of spring and summer.

There was one half decent fall of rain in November, and a few miserly, drizzly showers in December, before the heat grew fiercer, the wind stronger, and the moisture was sucked from the ground again. 

As 2019 entered its final weeks we watched the northern ranges of NSW burn, and then, as Christmas approached, the central ranges were aflame, along with the southern ranges and coast, as well as much of Victoria, South Australia, West Australia, and Tasmania.  Smoke became our atmosphere as gardens wilted and the younger trees and shrubs began to die.  Lawns, well, they turned tawny long ago, and were now crumbling into the dust.

The stream beside our garden, once a reliable place to fish for trout, perch and yabbies, was reduced to a few shallow, muddy, smelly puddles, from which, after the temperatures passed 40 degrees Celsius, I had to net and bury the floating carcasses of oxygen deprived fish.  The level of the lake at the head of our little Valley on the Mountain began falling faster as the water bombing helicopters joined the westerly wind in sucking up its water.

As the smoke grew thicker, ash and charred leaves began to gently drift down and sprinkle everything with grey and black. The sound of sirens became just part of the ambient noise of the Mountains, and the news grew ever more alarming. Computers were set permanently to displaying the RFS fire maps and playing the local RFS radio frequency, in the hope that it might give us sufficient warning should the fires to our north and south suddenly change course.

Across the country, houses and then whole villages were destroyed, and lives were lost, including fire fighters.  Whole towns were forced to wade or drive into the salt water as flames of a ferocity not seen before charged all the way to the back of the beach.  Other towns didn't have the luxury of lake or ocean to flee to.

In one case a surge of fiery wind flipped a ten ton fire tanker over, killing one of its crew and injuring the others.  I have been in some pretty lively fires over the years, and been singed several times in the fighting of them, but I had never seen, or heard of, anything like that before.  Trees falling on or near trucks, and crown fires sweeping overhead and forcing crews to turn on the cabin spray bars and hunker down under fire blankets - yep, not so uncommon in the world of bushfire fighting, but that was just beyond anyone's experience.

The conversation here in the Mountains turned to safe places and suitable evacuation destinations - to stay and fight, or get out now, rather than be caught in heavy traffic on the long, bush-lined, winding road to the safety of the City on the Plain. 

As the smoke grew darker and the ash fell thicker, the air tankers began their bombing runs, laying long red swathes of water and fire retardent along the village edges.  Villages once described by real estate agents as "leafy refuges from the bustle of city life" were suddenly tiny, dangerously exposed enclaves within a huge expanse of potentially explosive forest and bush.  More houses and sheds burned, and residents who had not already fled were being told to take cover as it was now too late to leave safely.

Then the weather, at least on our Mountain, turned, and in less than two weeks we have had more rain than fell in the final three months of 2019.  RFS stations across much of the state have "stood down" and for the first time in many, many weeks, their roller doors are closed - their tankers quietly parked inside.  In Victoria, the battle continues, while in parts of Queensland, the fire fighters have retired but the SES is now flat out dealing with storms and flooding.  Oh, Australia....

At first glance, the green we Mountains Folk are accustomed to has returned.  The air no longer smells of charred bush, and the lawn mower had its first exercise since very early spring.  Dig deeper though - scratch among the mulch for example and find dry pockets of soil, or wander down to the barely trickling creek and look at its exposed, muddy banks, and it is obvious we have received a respite rather than a complete reprieve. Three or four days of hot westerly wind and we could be facing the fires again.

But for the moment, we are enjoying the cool and damp.  The ducks who normally lived by the shady pool down stream from the orchard had left us, but are back now that the water has returned to their favourite bathing spots - and little swirls show where, somehow, a few minnows survived the worst couple of weeks when the creek had only one small but shaded pond left for them to swim in. 

Perhaps, in a season or two, there will be redfin perch in our pools again, but I doubt the water will ever again be consistently cool enough to keep trout happy and healthy.

Our Magpies are happily finding food on their own account, instead of relying on scraps of mince from us to keep their younglings half satisfied.  We even had a visitor not seen before - a juvenile Ibis.

The grandkids wanted to name it Bin Chicken, but we settled on Binni - and he or she did a fine job of thinning out the snails and slugs that reappeared all over our garden within a couple of days of the first good rainfall.

Binni appears to have moved on again.  If the rain keeps falling, as it is again just now, we might be able to move on from this awful time and enjoy regrowth and green shoots.  If only our "leaders" would also move on from whatever venal or ideological fixation it is that has crippled their willingness to deal with the all too evident, looming disaster that is climate change.  Oh, Australia...