The Writing on the Wall

Cups of tea and coffee propelled me around university and to the drive back down to the coast.

Early evening. Gentle autumn sky. The tall, tall poplars that line the road coloured fall-gold. Glowing, almost, against the clouds.

The coffee and tea had their revenge, and I stopped to use the public toilets in drowsy, country Braidwood.

The writing on the walls was the same as it always is:

“Troy is gay”.

“Call XXXXXX for a good time.”

“Braidwood crew are fags.”

Except. In humble black pen, “Kia Kaha Aroha.”

The author had scrawled the translation underneath, for the benefit of Australian readers.

Me, I felt warm in my ebbing caffeine daze. And slightly homesick. Maori words on a fading wall, glowing, almost, like poplar trees, against the autumn clouds.

This morning

Clouds drift south. Sunlight sprawls. Cockatoos. Tumbling, spiralling, falling. Anarchic. Calling out.

Flight! Flight! Flight!

A lawnmower growls resentfully.

And the beginnings of the the nor-easter, bending leaves. Starting. Moving. Off. Along the beaches, and around the curves of the coast.

The Only One Who Got Through

I must have blogged this before. But ANZAC day reminded me. Radiohead’s tribute to Passchendaele survivor Harry Patch. It always brings me to tears. The first line alone enough to remind me exactly why I am anti-war.

I am the only one who got through.

I agree with John Quiggin:

“As we reflect on the sacrifices made by those who went to war nearly 100 years ago, we should also remember, and condemn, the crimes of those, on all sides, who made and carried on that war.”

Avoid like the plague

Reasons why you should buy Telstra Elite Pre-Paid Mobile Broadband:

1. You are a masochist and enjoy suffering.
2. You are an internationalist and enjoy long pointless conversations with call centre workers in other countries.
3. You are a communist and wish to hasten the demise of capitalism by supporting a company that routinely shafts its customers by doing its best to artificially foster a natural monopoly while at the same time not actually providing the services it claims to provide.
4. You feel sorry for stratospherically wealthy white men and seek to donate money to them even if they don’t provide the services they claim to.
5. You are a creature from a distant dimension, living under the depths of the deepest sea. You despise light, love and humanity.
6. You are not sure about communism but have read Slavoj Žižek and like the idea of ‘heightening the contradictions’ even if it happens at your own expense.
7. You don’t like the internet and did not want to use it anyhow.

Reasons why you should not purchase Telstra Elite Pre-Paid Mobile Broadband services:

1. You live in Australia and wish to use the internet.

The Cry

I was feeling unduly pleased with myself. The caper wasn’t really that smart, but it came off. I saved a 50 dollar taxi fare and managed to thread the local buses together to get me all the way from White River to Honiara airport. I dodged the intimidating drunks at the KG6 bus interchange and arrived on time for Jo’s flight. The trade winds kept the air almost cool; tufts of cloud sailed across the pretty tropical sky.

There is no arrivals terminal at Honiara airport, you just wait on an extended concrete footpath adjacent to the car park, under the shade of the overhanging roof, for people to emerge from immigration. This is where I was when passengers from the Nadi to Honaira flight started coming out. Everyone re-united with someone. Smiles and hugs, and chatter in different local dialects.

Watching, I was humming cheerily to myself when the young man walked out of the exit. He was limping — visibly but not terribly. He had a baseball cap on and was slightly chubby, in his very early twenties. His skin was quite pale, and his hair was frizzy, coloured the rusty blond common in Western Melanesia. I’m a limper and, by the standards of these things, he wasn’t that bad. I would have forgotten him within the hour were it not for the cry.

I’d hardly noticed the group of women behind me. There were maybe ten of them. Some young teenagers, some my age, at least one in her sixties. When they saw the young man they all began to cry out. I want to call it a wail, but that word sounds wrong, suggestive of a high-pitched or unpleasant sound. The noise they made ached, but it wasn’t unpleasant. There were no words. Just anguish, rising and falling like ocean swells as he hobbled their way. As he got closer he started to weep and, at the last minute, the women broke formation, flooding forward round him. Still calling out. That sound — so mournful — told tales. A student whose study in Fiji was ended by a terrible injury. A long, lonely recuperation in Suva hospital. Or a poorly understood illness with treatment gone wrong. Or a car crash and dead friends. They were all trying to hold him at once. Then shepherding him to a truck. The noise was almost a song. The saddest one you ever heard.

Jo arrived in his wake. Close enough to hear it all. We hugged longer than usual. And then stumbled off into the car park. Smudging our own tears across our faces. Holding hands, waiting until the need to plan our journey home overcame the sorrow of the cry.

Language Barriers

Yesterday, the sky was perfect, uninterrupted, not a cloud. Just a big thirsty blue, that stretched in an unnerving way between faint horizons. It was the sort of sky you could imagine dying of thirst under. The day baked. Grass and trees wilted. And we drove around Canberra’s empty wide streets running errands.

The super-market was easy. The barber’s more difficult. There I had to talk. But the barber and I lacked enough shared words to converse. We tried, but our sentences fell to the floor like cut hair.

“Summer Nats this week mate.”

“Oh, um, yes, all those noisy cars.”

“…”

“We went home to New Zealand for Christmas.”

“Cold there? You been watchin the cricket?”

“Um no not really, are we playing you guys?”

“You’re bein’ thrashed by the South Africans.”

“Oh.”

“You’re bein’ thrashed by the South Africans.”

“Oh.”

The tire place was worse. The guy was friendly, bearded and tattooed. He knew everything there was to know about tires, I knew nothing. We tried. I should have pretended to like the Summer Nats car show.

And so I realised later, as Jo and I sat atop mount Ainslee, almost cool in the evening breeze, watching the land grow gold as the sun fell from its empty sky, that somewhere in my life I’d failed to learn an important language. I can speak reasonable Pijin. My Portuguese was passable once. And I had alright traveller’s Spanish. There was even a time when I could at least navigate in Bahasa Indonesian. And yet, despite growing up in the Hutt, I never learnt bloke. I can’t talk rugby, or cars, or common sense. All I can do is stare at my shoes awkwardly, and fudge for a bit until my accent gives me away.

Not that I really mind: I yearn to be a lusophone more than I’ll ever yearn to be a bloke. But there are times, I confess, when I wish I knew what to say when someone says in a confident drawl: “Mate did you hear the Kiwis got bowled out for 44.”

Getting there

When I travel the first part of me to arrive is always my imagination. It scouts the route ahead, sketching scenes and picturing people. Empty open spaces make it uneasy. Given a chance it races to fill them.

I had been imagining the Weather Coast for months before we actually got  there. It was at the heart of the civil conflict that submerged the Solomon Islands from 1999 until 2003. It was another land, people in Honiara assured me, only 15 minutes away by helicopter but in every other aspect as distant as the archipelago’s most remote atolls. When it rains I was told, paths become rivers and rivers rise to torrents. When the swell picks up, people said, it becomes impossible to launch or land boats off the shingle beaches; villages are cut off for months. While people talked, I pictured steep cliffs falling into a groaning, grey ocean.  And I day-dreamt of floods and swallowing seas.

Of the three villages we planned to visit the one that captured my imagination most was Sughu, our second destination. Sughu had been home to Harold Keke, the most notorious of all the militia leaders. A man who had terrorised the Weather Coast, evading government forces and killing their soldiers. He executed priests, villagers and his own troops too. As people told me this, I dwelt upon the legacy of war, and decommissioned fighters returned to their villages.

I imagined our welcome in Sughu. Unlike most of the places we were visiting for my study, I wasn’t confident that people in Sughu knew we were coming. There was no cell phone access, no road access, no regular postal service, no regular boat. No way if finding out if we’d be welcome. One afternoon a friend of mine drove me down to the Honiara wharves and found a boat that was heading to a village about eight hours walk from Sughu. On board that he found a relative of his who was going to be walking that way. We gave the relative a letter for the chief of Sughu, sealed in an optimistic yellow envelope, and that was my introduction, hopefully destined to arrive in advance of Jo and I.

From Kuma (our first stop on the Weather Coast) we had hoped to take a boat down to Sughu. But on the day the boat never arrived. Eventually the captain sent us a message. To travel to Sughu we would have to pay an extortionate fare. And so we decided to walk. Abandoning as much of our gear as possible in Kuma.

For the residents of the Weather Coast walking is the main way of getting anywhere. A two day traverse of steep mountain passes is how many travel to Honiara. A two hour walk to tend hillside gardens is common. It is a land of amazing walkers. Locals assured us that they could walk from Kuma to Sughu in two hours. Although, after a considered look, they figured it would take us four.

We left Kuma in the early afternoon, accompanied by the chief’s daughter, who was heading to her high school between Kuma and Sughu, and two women who took pity on us after they spotted us wading precariously across the Kuma river.

We rotated packs, the women making much lighter work of the load than we did. After two hours of trudging, kept almost cool by intermittent puffs of trade wind we finally rounded a corner and saw in the distance a headland that our guides identified as Sughu. It was nothing more than a silhouette, smothered in clouds, but at least we could see it.

As we walked further the cloud came to greet us, wandering in on the wind, arcs of rain in its wake. And as the showers closed in, our companions departed. The chief’s daughter turning off towards her school and the other two young women turning back to Kuma, seeking to avoid the impending deluge and to make it home before dusk. Jo and I walked on, Jo carrying the largest backpack and me carrying the small pack along with the day bag. Walking, wondering what lay in wait for us behind the cloud.

Solomon Islands fell into conflict in the late 1990s. First, militants from Guadalcanal expelled Malaitan settlers from ‘their’ Island, then Malaitan resistance arose, taking control of Honiara. Combatants began to extort money from the government and then from their own people. In rural Guadalcanal the armed militia splintered and then retreated in the face of government policing operations. Keke, in charge of one of the militia groups, based himself on the Weather Coast, marching from Sughu to the other end of the Weather Coast and then inland. His troops caught and executed a band of Malaitan ‘commandos’ that had been sent to hunt them, and Sughu was razed by government troops. Keke flayed some of his own soldiers to death on trees. Possibly as a result of injuries, his mental health frayed until he was, by all accounts, insane. In the end he surrendered without a fight to Australian peacekeepers.

As I chewed over this, plodding over the shingle, the clouds grew to fill the sky and rain started to patter on the beach around us. Keke was safely in prison now, and there was no reason to expect Sughu to be any different from any of the other villages we had visited as part of my study. But it was also unknown, and I filled that unknown with worry.

After a while we were joined by a group of boys who materialised as we passed a small coastal village. They weren’t unfriendly, but they weren’t smiling either. If they exuded anything it was uncertainty. Most of them hung back, watching, silent, leaving two of the younger boys to come up and speak to us.

“You going where?”

“What country you coming from?”

They tried to speak to us in English, but their accents and broken grammar made understanding them almost impossible. And when I tried to speak in Pijin, my questions drew confused stares, my own grammar and accent rendering Solomons’ lingua franca unintelligible. Not being able to communicate we couldn’t ask the questions we wanted to ask (How far was it to Sughu? Had anyone there mentioned us?) and we couldn’t explain what brought us to be walking along their isolated stretch of beach. But despite all this they wanted to help.

“We carry you bags?”

It was help I didn’t really want. I didn’t want to hand over my research notes or the EPERB, our lifeline to the outside world. And I didn’t want to think about whether we could trust this group of boys in the middle of nowhere, with whom we could hardly communicate. But equally I didn’t want to offend them, to turn the tentative friendliness into resentment. And so we unburdened ourselves and, as the rain came and went, acquired an entourage, the two talkative kids confidently shouldering our packs, and their mob of teenage accomplices walking along with us, watching quietly.

Eventually, we arrived.

“Displace Sughu,” one of the boys announced.

It was almost dusk. The village sat beyond a rise on the South East side of a bay. As we walked across the shingle we could see a few houses on top of the rise but nothing of the rest of the village.

“I guess we need to find the chief?”

“Mifala nid fo tok tok wetem seif. Iu save findem?” I tried asking one of the boys.

It was then, as I was trying to convey this message, that we noticed a woman standing on the top of the rise, waving her arms, calling out something. At first I thought she was shouting at the boys but then it became clear her attention was directed at us. She strode in our direction. Calling out. I tried to figure out what she was saying.

She was short and slender, with an angled face that was framed by an explosion of black, curly hair. When she reached us she spoke again. This time I could almost make out what she was saying

“Hello-i’m-Gladys-we’ve-been-waiting-all-day-for-you,” her English was clear but so rapid fire that her sentences tumbled out as if one big long word.

“Waiting?”

“Yes. We thought you were going to arrive this morning, and we organised a welcome party for you. Everyone’s gone home now. But the kids are still waiting in the church. They are going to sing you some songs.”

“A welcome party?” If my imagination had been scouting ahead trying to picture Sughu, my conscious thought was now struggling to keep up with the reality of the place. “You knew we were coming?”

“Yes. We had most of the village out here waiting for you. The kids were going to sing.”

“It’s ok for us to stay?”

“Of course”, she smiled, “you will stay in the church guest house. We’ve prepared it for you. The pastor’s wife has cooked for you. I will take you to the guest house. But can we go to the church first? The kids are still waiting there? They want to sing.”

“Um. Sure. Sure. That sounds great.”

And so we wandered up into the village, over the coral pebbles that they used to cover the ground, and past poor but tidy houses. From doorways people waved. We stumbled into the old wooden church and sat down on pews at the front. And on Gladys’ urging a group of teenagers in clean white shirts began to sing.

We were tired and we were damp. And the hard work of my research still lay ahead. But we had arrived. And to a far friendlier reality than any I’d dared imagine. And so, as puddles formed on the wooden floor around my feet, I soaked up the hospitality, gave into relief, and set my imagination to thinking about dinner.

Four More Years

This time, four years ago today, as I listened to analysis of the US election I was feeling deeply troubled.

Troubled, not by the election, but by aches in my knees and back that had been progressively getting worse all day. This, I worried, felt like a relapse.

It was. The next morning (my wife being away for work) I had to ring my parents and ask them to come and help me. I couldn’t dress myself. Within 24 hours I went from: have survived open heart surgery; arthritis in remission; looking forwards. To: can’t move; worrying about damage to my heart; wondering if I can work enough to keep my job.

That relapse eventually quietened somewhat, but has never fully gone. And over the last few months – temporary steroid induced respite not withstanding – things have slowly got worse again. Not nearly as bad as they were the day after the election in 2008 but bad enough to make things difficult.

I think the main point of this post is simply to say that it doesn’t feel like four years has passed. Or, on the other hand, maybe it does: I feel tired enough.

-

More cheerily, under low grey skies I snuck away from my computer this morning and found myself a quiet little river bar, with glassy waist high waves rolling down it. I kneeboarded a few and pulled myself slowly to my feet on a few. And boy did that leave me feeling happy.

I’m pretty happy about the election results too, of course.

 

The other thing that makes chronic illness hard…

…it is very hard to trust research on the efficacy and side effects of medication. This situation is insane, and technically could be cured, but thanks to the chronic problems of political economy it probably won’t be. Depressing. All the more so when you’re trying to figure out what to take.

At Sea

The term the TV presenters use here in Australia is cell. Thunder cell. Like an al-Qaeda cell. Clouds gone bad. Mingling together in hidden valleys. Gathering. Spilling down from the hills. Darkening. Growing. Gathering.

Jo and I have figured a way of going surfing. If I use the soft, floaty, blue, learner’s longboard, I can catch waves and ride them on my knees. It’s exercise (in the sea!) and it doesn’t hurt that much, physically. Although I hide from other surfers. Trying to find quiet lonely corners of beaches where no one will laugh at a broken guy riding a soft foam board, awkwardly, on his knees.

And so that’s what we were doing – surfing – three evenings ago while the thunder cell massed. First there were just clouds, and then ‘it was looking a little dark to the south’, and then there was a big black wall, creeping up the coast from somewhere near Moruya.

We caught our waves a little anxiously, watching its progress. The lick of the lightning; the thump of the thunder. We rode small lefts down a sandbar, peeling into a bay. Not big enough for anyone else to be surfing but folding fast little sections for us to skim across, and bent by the curve of the coast so that the ebbing nor’easter was offshore.

Arms of cloud reached out off the edge of the storm, trailing soft curves of rain, blurring the horizon behind. And through that haze, on the other side of the weather, the sun was starting to set, burning colour around the edge of the clouds.

Jo was counting the seconds between lightning strikes and the sound of thunder.

The cell had crept north, maybe over Broulee.

“Time to take a wave in?”
“Yeah, that lightning’s getting close.”
“And it will be dark soon.”

So we caught one last set. I paddled into my wave, just off the edge of the peak. Paddle. Then the motion changes. Then I pull myself to my knees and turn down the line. And as I turned the sunset flared. The half of the sky yet to be swallowed by the black of the clouds was melted, molten, and reflected in the glassy water that I sped over. The impossibly red sea also reflecting, for a moment, then a moment, then a moment, the dance of lightening across the sky. I skimmed along laughing, shouting. If I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful surfing, I can’t remember it.

After, we hobbled up the beach, got changed into towels, and drove north away from the rain.

Hurting

Possibly my jandals were the culprit. Maybe I wore them too much, and they were too hard on my feet. Or perhaps inflammation returned because of my poor diet. Or perhaps the cause was exhaustion in those last few, too-busy, weeks in Honiara. Or maybe my arthritis just came back because that’s what it does.

Really, this time it had barely gone away. After the major relapse in 2008 it got better in 2009, was quite good in 2010, and then got a bit worse in 2011. Since 2008 I’ve never been well enough to surf properly, and sleep’s been hard. But I have been able to walk a fair bit, and day to day life had been ok.

But in June sometime the underside of my right foot started to hurt. Usually when I have a relapse it happens overnight, but this was slow, up and down, but with downs outweighing the ups. By the time I got to Wellington in the end of June I was too sore to surf. And a few weeks later struggling to walk. My hip, shoulder and back have joined in now. My back gets me when I sit. My hip when I lie. And my foot when I walk. And with the pain comes fatigue and inertia. And I’m worrying about my heart. I’m worn out. And sick of being sick.

I’m lucky too: helped by my wife and parents, and money. And being a PhD student is easier than if I were someone who made a living from physical labour. Lucky and tired.

For complicated reasons I can’t take methotrexate right now. But I need to get my inflammation under control (along with anything else I can’t risk any more damage to my heart). I probably won’t be able to get on TNF inhibitors unless I’ve been taking methotrexate (and I don’t know if you can travel when taking these anyhow). So my plan is a few months on steroids. Which don’t work that well but will help. The trouble is, it looks like I now have to wait, several months possibly, until I can see a rheumatologist to get steroids prescribed.

If I’ve learnt anything from all this it’s simply that actual illness is only a small part of being ill. The real story is you, and the intersection between you, disease, uncertainty, your friends and family, the country you live in, what you hope to do, and what you’ re happy doing without.

Not His Mother’s Story

“I want to be your friend.”

Christian was tall and skinny. I was drunk. Swaying about the dance floor of a ramshackle bar. In a tiny port town where trade winds covered everything in fine Saharan sand.

The first few days in the village I spent in my room, or out walking along the coast on sandy tracks that wiggled amongst ancient lava. Reading, exploring , avoiding. In my room and by the sea’s edge things were familiar. Elsewhere, I was out of place. The one visiting surfer in a village with no visiting surfers. A very strange stranger. A guy who’d turned up dragging an oversized bag filled with boards, wetsuits and a leaking ding repair kit. A self-conscious traveller with thinning sun-blond hair, frayed blue jeans and a purple hooded sweatshirt. A young man struggling to separate the Africa of his slightly frightened imagination from the Africa he was actually in.

Not a lot of language, a shyness which travelled with me as reliably as my passport, an exaggerated sense of my own difference, and just a little fear. It left me solitary at first – I spent my birthday alone – but in time it ebbed. Slowly I started to socialise: starting with the kids who watched as I fixed the dings on my boards. And then the teenagers, and curious families who came to look at the tent I’d set up to keep the ants off me at night.  Day by day my interactions grew, culminating with an invite to the disco.

I can’t have seemed a particularly promising friend that night, babbling in badly broken Portuguese. But Christian persisted. We were neighbours, living in the same rectangular row of half-built concrete flats.

“I want to be your friend.” My memory of his voice on that night is as clear as everything else is blurry. The start of our story.

Over the following weeks, on the days I didn’t disappear down the coast chasing Atlantic groundswells, we’d hang out and chat. Drinking beer in the evenings or smoking spindly little joints, sometimes with other friends of Christian’s, sometimes alone. I paid for it all but it was cheap.

With the help of my small green dictionary, and his slow, patient Portuguese, Christian deciphered village life for me. Who worked on the fishing boats. Who didn’t work. Stories about the slender, beautiful girls who danced elusively every Friday at the discos. About his father, who’d lost his legs in a motorcycle accident. About his sister who lived with cousins. About an old guy in the village whose local celebrity stemmed from his claim to have once gotten stoned with Bob Marley. About the woman in the room next to mine. The woman who talked to herself day and night in agitated, muttered bursts that carried through the gaps between the concrete walls of our apartments and their corrugated iron roves, forcing me to sleep listening to my Walkman.

“Quien e a mulher que sempre falar?” (Who is that woman, who always talks?) I asked Christian, with unconcealed exasperation, one afternoon.

“A minha mae.” My mother.

My exasperation fled. Retreating amongst an army of a thousand jerks.

“I’m sorry. I’m…um…sorry. Que paso?” I’m sorry. I’m a fucking idiot. I am sorry. What happened?

“Nao estava por causo de deus. Estava por causo do homme. It is not because of God. It is because of man.” He translated this one into English to make sure I got it.

As a young woman his mother had gone to work in Italy as a maid. She had come back insane. Not God, man.

A few days later he showed me a photo of her. On the beach with friends in Italy. The paper was curled, the sky and sea were fading. She was young, pretty and laughing.

A week or so later he took me in to visit her. They shared a room. Sleeping in beds on opposite walls.

My visit was a short one. She lay in bed. Her hair was un-brushed. Her skin was pale. African brown still, but overlaid with the dusty pallor of the sun deprived. When he introduced us she didn’t acknowledge me, but started an agitated mutter instead.

If there was an ounce of justice in this world this story would become hers. And it would tell you what god-awful things some powerful Italian man (not God, man) had inflicted on a poor immigrant African maid. Or, at the very least, the story would be of how Christian and I talked and talked of her situation. And how I tried to help. But that’s not what happened. Instead, I left the room that day shocked and sad, and with a better appreciation of Christian’s lot, but beyond that nothing much changed. Christian and I continued on our previous course of hanging out and talking and laughing, with the ease life affords young men.

I kept paying for the beer and we kept enjoying the evenings socialising, while I chased waves in the day. And my story of Christian ends up being about a more mundane dilemma.

At the other end of the island I ran into Benjamin, a French surfing buddy and we hatched a plot to head off to another part of the archipelago in search of undiscovered waves. We booked our ferry tickets and I bade my farewells to Christian. And that was when he hit me up for money.

“Um, yeah, um, ok. Mais eu nao posso dar te muito. Nao tenho muito.” (I can’t give you much, I don’t have much).

“Eu sei.” (I know.) Whether he thought I was lying I’ll never know.

“Ok here’s um $100, ta bem?”(is that ok)

“Sem” (Yes)

“Ok well nao uso para comprar ceveja” I was starting to flail inside and so added the obligatory line about not spending money on beer. I’d paid for things before but he’d never asked. He assured me he would just spend the money on food for him and his sister.

I don’t think I told Benjamin about the incident. Instead, that night as we chugged out to sea on the rusty old freight ferry I chased it round and round in my head.

First I started to doubt Christian. Was he really my friend? Or was the whole point of his befriending me simply a plan to get money from me? Was any of that real?

Then, mercifully, providing at least a little bit of evidence that I wasn’t a terminally shallow person, I started doubting myself. Oh come on. I can’t even believe you are worrying about this. You saw his life. You mightn’t have a lot of money, but he will likely struggle with next to nothing forever.

But what if he just spends the money on beer?

What would have you spent it on?

What if I see him again? He’ll ask me again. I don’t have much money.

And he has none.

Benjamin, who was an infinitely better traveller than me, was already asleep on the hard wooden bench.

I felt bad, and then I felt bad about feeling bad, and then I felt ridiculous for the way my thoughts kept coming back to things. I lay down. I sat up again.

Over the ship’s stern our port of departure vanished into the dark. There was no moon, but a star or planet was shining bright enough to lay a swaying  silver path across the water.

Waves came and went. Thoughts came and went. And eventually, the two sides to my self-torment wearied, their voices grew quiet, I stopped thinking about things, and fell into uncomfortable sleep.

In the Dark

I think it is safe to take the bus at night in Honiara. It’s not Port Moresby or Rio. But people do still get murdered after dark. A young civil servant was stabbed to death just before dawn one morning recently. And the cousin of a friend of mine was run over and murdered as he tried to find somewhere to buy cigarettes one night earlier in the year.

It is about 8pm and I’m on the street in Point Cruz waiting for one of the modified Toyota Hiace’s that serve as buses across the Third World. Taxis and SUVs drive past, occupants invisible behind tinted glass.

I’m under a streetlight but its glow doesn’t carry far. Occasionally groups of young men saunter by. Shocks of hair, jandals slapping the pavement, walking slowly. Watching.

There is a woman waiting for the bus, and it feels better not to be alone. But she’s anxious too. Almost as uncomfortable as I am. She looks Melanesian but won’t speak to me in Pijin, complaining to me instead in loud, broken, Australian.

“The street light’s no good mate. The council should fix it. Blaardy no good corruption mate.”

When the bus arrives it’s piloted by youths. Hip hop music is pounding from the stereo. The driver is singing and rocking back and forth to the beat. The conductor is manic, howling catcalls to girls on the street. I sit in the front seat by the driver. The woman seats herself as far to the back of the bus as she can.

For a while I’m able to enjoy the anarchy of it all. The exotic and the different. And the fact that I can negotiate this city. But slowly the other passengers start to thin out. The woman with the strange Australian patois gets off. Then more passengers. Then, at the second to last stop, the bus empties.

While they watch the curves and sway of a young woman as she sets off towards her house, the driver and conductor are talking to each other about something I can’t quite understand. Taking money. Taking $100 off someone. Taking money from someone, but I can’t figure out who.

I am on my own.

The driver looks at me expectantly.

“Wea?”

“Savo Maket,” I tell him the name of my bus stop.

He turns, talking to the conductor and to me at once. Saying, in rapid-fire, slang-laden Pijin that I can’t quite follow, something about Savo, and danger and fright. I think he’s saying I should be afraid to go to Savo at this time of night. But I’m not really sure. All I know is that I am in the dark. Alone in the bus on the outskirts of town, on the edge of a squatter settlement, with two young men, who are talking about danger and taking things.

I’m swallowing and my mouth is dry. I imagine their plan: drive off further down the road. Where it is empty and unlit. It would be easy to mug me then. No one in Honiara, I think to myself, responds to cries for help from empty roads at night.

My mind races over a counter-plan. There’s the hand break. As we go past my stop I will pull on it as hard as I can and then jump. It won’t stop the bus but it might slow it enough for me to leap free.

We drive by the Reef Island settlement. Drunk men stagger about the road. Groups of youths look at the passing bus. The only reason I ever take the bus home at this time is that my bus stop is beyond the people here and the menace of young drunk men. But now isolation seems every bit as dangerous as street drunks.

Pull the hand break, jump and then run. The brake needs to work. My arthritic legs need to work. Pull the break, jump, run.

“Iu stay lo wea?” (where do you stay) the conductor asks me as we approach the market. The music is quiet now. The only noise in the bus is our voices. It is almost pitch black outside.

“Haus lo dea,” (the house over there) I say trying to sound confident. Trying, as if the tone of my voice alone might reach forward in time and change the end of the story. I point to home, where the front gate’s two concrete pillars are just visible down the road from the market. I’m not sure I should be letting them know where I live. But, I think, I need to keep talking to them. Need to sound confident.

“Ok,” the driver says, his face and voice unreadable. He passes the house, accelerates a bit and then pulls a big sweeping U turn off the space provided by a side road. We sweep round heading back towards town. And we bump to a stop in front of the gate

As we do I open the door. The car light comes on. And in its glow I see the young men aren’t men at all. They’re just boys. The conductor grins goofily.

“Good naet mate.”

I’m grinning goofily too. Just boys, and the only danger in that bus that night was that which they’d imagined for me walking around in the darkness on the end of town. That was what they were talking about when they delivered me to my gate.

“Um, yeah, thank you. Thank you. Gud naet.”

I hop out of the bus, fumble for my key ring penlight and use it do guide me the last few yards into the illuminated, understood world of home.

The Cliche

For about three weeks in 1999 I worked for an English marketing company. The job involved driving to various different parts of the UK, wearing a prawn coloured tracksuit, and giving out sample packets of “NEW Prawn Cocktail Flavoured Potato Chips (suitable for vegetarians)”. We trundled around in small trucks, stayed in cheap hotels, and stood on street corners trying not to feel self-conscious.

Ollie, one of my co-workers, was from West London. He was a young man and like all young men, myself included, often he looked out at the world through a tribal lens. Although the odd thing about Ollie was that he only really became a West London geezer once we were some distance from London. The further we got the worse it became. When we gave out our wares in Hammersmith he would talk about backpacking in India and Eastern Religion. When we were in Liverpool he would try and pick fights with the “Scousers”.

One evening, while we were still pretty close to the M25, rattling along in our half empty truck, he confided in me.

“You know Terence…I like sunsets.” While he spoke the fields around us were turning orange as the sun’s light found itself bent and broken by the smoggy sky. “I mean it’s a cliché an all that but I really do like a good sunset.”

I remembered his words this morning as I stood in the half-light looking out over the glassy tropical sea. As I stood there the sun began its climb into the sky, it’s light catching the different layers of clouds one after another. Blood red, then bronze-orange, then yellow-gold.

Ollie was right: sunsets, and sunrises, are clichés. Serious photographers avoid them. Writers pass them by. There’s no point. Everything that could possibly be said about the colours and patterns of the beginning and end of the day has already been said. And every good image already captured.

And yet, I like sunsets too. And sunrises. There may be nothing left to say, but it’s all still there to be seen.

This morning was so calm. The menaces of the night in White River being dispelled by the dawn. The temperature comfortable, the sun not yet strong enough to bring smothering tropical heat. On the horizon islands, the Gellas and Savo, took their shapes. And above it all colours burnt patterns through the clouds.

If only all clichés were that serene.

1989

Three things stick in my mind from that day:

One, the way the wind came up as we rode our bikes back from the harbour’s entrance towards Eastbourne. The road was gravel, a track for quarry trucks; it wove in and out of the bays between the locked gate at Burdens Gate and the surf spot we’d snuck out to ride.

Funnelling down the coast, the nor’wester was strong enough to be tearing small whitecaps off the sun-golden surface of the sea. In the bays there was some shelter, but as we peddled round the headlands it slammed into us. Our surfboards kicked like the booms of tacking boats, and threatening to pull us off our bikes. J.’s bike was a rusting pink BMX with a broken pedal that he never got round to fixing. He was hopeless with that sort of shit. Worse than me even. My bike was an old purple three-speed. Literally a granny bike – inherited from my grandmother.

At times we were close to stopped in our tracks. And J was all for giving up and walking. But if we walked we’d arrive back at his place late, sometime in the evening, and his mother would figure out where we’d be surfing. She was loving but prone to temper too. J was already kind of immune to her squalls but I was terrified of them. And this propelled us. I took over his bike, struggling against the broken pedal and the wind.

Two, when we stopped at Burden’s Gate, having made it in time. We brought coke or ice blocks from the little food stall there. And sat, resting in the sun. The wind was less, under the shelter of the hills. We were glowing, sunburnt, beginning to bask in the caper. Thinking of the waves. As we sat there a group of Mettlers pulled up further down the car park on their motor bikes. Big, tough looking guys in black helmets and black jerseys. One of them rode a three wheel bike with huge handlebars. They ignored us. We were puny, surfies and safely beneath their dignity. But one of the passengers on the back of the three wheeler was staring. L. an old girlfriend of mine. Without a helmet. Slender, with a pretty pinched face like an elf’s. The year before she’d picked me up and I’d stumbled along in her wake for a bit. Frightened of her friends, but kind of attracted to her. It hadn’t lasted long. It didn’t end acrimoniously, just spluttered and then died, like a poorly tended engine.

Neither of us smiled or waved, which was probably safer for me given the company she kept. We just made eyes a little bit. And then the bikes were started and off they rode. Her looking back, her hair waving in the wind.

“She’s still keen on you man.”
“Yeah.”

I remember the cheery flush that gave me. Not because I had grieved her, or hoped to start things again. But simply because she looked pretty under the sun that day. And that she’d looked back. Reconsidered.

A good memory, but the third memory floats there better still: the waves, clean lines of swell, tidied by the offshore wind, standing then falling over the shallow reef, pitching out, barrelling, in front of a jagged tooth of rock. We were the only surfers in miles, and the waves rolled in one after another. We took turns. Me, I was content just to make the ride: to take off slightly to the side of the rock, outrunning the barrel, and skittering onto the gentle shoulder. J was surfing with the all the teenage talent that he was to squander just a few years later. With style he would take off right behind the rock, and angle in under the lip of the tubing wave. And that’s the memory that really sticks: me paddling out, watching, hooting encouragement, as J. got tubed, surfing better with every ride, in the happy summer’s light.

Ballet of Agonies

When I was a kid watching videos of huge barrelling waves, I used to dream of being able to freeze time in a way that would leave me free to walk into the maw of the giant tubes and to explore amongst the spray and exploding water. To trace the contours of the almost impossible to surf waves and to find out just how far back the tubes tunnelled into the collapsing swell they had been born from.

This video is astounding, the next best thing to my dream. Watch it. Watch it full screen.

Marvel also at the agonising ballet as the surfers try to stay on top of the water before eventually pirouetting into the all consuming wall of energy…

Meanwhile from the marketing department…

The wrapper of a sweet given to us in a course recently.

Rich in Glucose!

Puzzling the Signs

On Permanence

Photo taken in Honiara

The Lake

My like for Lake George stems from the following:

1. No one else seems to notice it.
2. Something particularly Australian about a lake that’s been dry for years and only recently returned.
3. It’s the closest place to home that feels swallowing and spacious like Australia should.
4. What the clouds and light did.
5. Windmills!

Australia, Decoding the Signs: the Beach

Australia, where even trips to the beach are exercises in managed peril…

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is dead. His arguments were almost always witty, eloquent, and intelligent. And yet they were also often wrong.

Like Danyl I think he was at his most wrong, most pugnacious and most repugnant over Iraq. And yet I think I can forgive all that having heard his thoughts on death.

“It will happen to all of that at some point you’ll be tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on but you have to leave.”

Will Franzen Set them Free?

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (a review from halfway through the book)

Your parents they fuck you up they do

Your kids – they get to finish you off

This morning I was halfway through Jonathan Franzen’s novel ‘Freedom’, when the penny dropped. The book is the story of a musician, the couple who are his closest friends, and the couple’s children. According to one of the enthusiastic review quotes on the inside cover it is a ‘great American novel’. According to another, it is an ‘indelible portrait of our times’. Maybe. But first and foremost, I realised as I read it earlier under a threatening sky, the book is a horror story. A tale told to frighten the middle-aged.

Dim the lights and contemplate – if you dare – the rapid erosion of the freedom that you doodled day dreams all over in your youth. Ponder uncomfortably the path dependency of relationships and how this allows time to take the small flaws we all have and use them to pry people apart. Squirm as the author shows how spookily easy it is to ruin your kids, and how it will be easier still for them repay the favour. Good politics won’t save your personal life, nor will being well read. The gym and veganism won’t help either. And love and kindness will just as readily lead your deeper into the woods as show you the way out.

However fiendish the characters are in Stephen King novels, at least they live for the most part in cemeteries, or other dimensions, or cottages out along gravel roads in distant woods. Franzen’s demons, on the other hand, are much closer to home – your partner’s lingering silence at breakfast this morning, the preciousness of your five year old. The haunted houses here are our own.

I stopped regularly reading fiction about five years ago. It wasn’t a principled stand to do with the decline of the modern novel or anything like that; rather I was, I think, simply tired (probably right after reading the God of Small Things) of how cruelly most authors treated their characters. I’m misanthropic enough in my way: I despair of humanity as a whole, am mildly frightened and repelled by strangers and somewhat vexed by the many of the people I know,  and yet tell me someone’s story and I can’t help but care about them. Paint it vividly and evocatively and, to be honest, I’m just simply not going to enjoy it when by the final chapter you leave them so broken as to only be able to engage in incest.

I suppose what I should have done when I realised this was research my books a bit before I read them: read only Annie Proulx novels and not her collected short stories, or something like that. But there was a whole heap of non-fiction to read, not to mention the internet, and so I quit.

What about Franzen then, will he lead me back to the world of stories? I’m certainly enjoying devouring a book, having to force myself to put it down, feeling emotionally involved, and possibly learning something at the same time. It’s not a perfect novel, I think, good but not perfect. The characters aren’t always convincing, and I’m not totally sold on the structure. And yet it’s certainly dragged me in.

Ultimately, my fiction reading fate may depend on how many of the main characters get splattered before the sun comes up. If they all end up lifeless husks with their souls sucked out of them then I doubt I’ll be racing to read ‘the Corrections’. On the other hand, if at least a couple manage to emerge into the light of a new day, bent and bloodied, but not broken, then maybe I will.

[Update: Never mind profound questions about the modern novelist, what about the modern reader? Absolutely un-pleasable. No sooner had I got to the end of the book and discovered - to my relief - that the demons are vanquished and that most of the characters live to see the light of day, then by brain kicked in and I'm like hhhmmmm...was pretty, two dimensional, doomed Lalitha anything other than deus ex machina?]

The Giant Hunter

[Update: the giant hunter has his own blog! In Polish and English. There is a sad beauty to it, I think. Oddly enough, given the vast differences in our research subject matter, and beliefs about the world, I can still relate, just a little bit, to his travails: field research is rarely easy. No matter what you're studying and no matter how much you think it matters.]

We met our first ever giant hunter in a port town on the island of Malaita. He was a great big man with a tidy beard and short brown hair. He wore clean black t-shirts and a National Geographic hat. He strode about purposefully. We got to talking with him in the dimly lit general store, surrounded by jars of Chinese peanut butter and Indonesian soft drink.

“Hey mate, how’s it going?”

“I am good. How are you?” He spoke deep, purposeful words with a German accent.

“Good. Good. What brings you to Malaita?”

“Giants. I am studying Giants.”

“Oh. You’re an anthropologist. I’m studying political science. Have you collected many legends of giants? I didn’t know giant stories were part of the culture here.”

“No. I am not collecting legends. I am here to study giants.”

“ ”

“ ”

“G-giants. Um, ah, have you seen any yet?”

“No. I am going into the mountains to find them this week.”

“Oh. Um, what are you going to do when you find them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe take some photos.”

“Oh…okay…um…Good luck.”

The next day we headed off to the Langa Langa lagoon in search of answers to electoral questions.

Three weeks later, laden down with data, we clattered back, riding a wheezing old bus. The giant hunting German was there again too. Still walking around with great big strides. Still looking tidy, but also unravelling just a bit, on the way to becoming dishevelled. When he walked by, the guys at the general store joked in a way that suggested they’d situated him as weird. Feeling awkward, I avoided him.

The last we saw of him was on the ship back to Guadalcanal. As we came into berth he descended the stairs from the first class compartment, ignored us, heaved his great big pack, covered with an XXL rain shield, onto his great big shoulders and strode off into the sweaty streets of Honiara.
As he walked away I felt sorry. Great big forlorn strides. I imagined the sorts of sad stories that might send a mildly delusional German man to Western Melanesia in search of creatures that don’t exist. I wondered what would become of him.

And then, for the briefest of moments, I entertained the thought…maybe this wasn’t a tale of delusions at all. Or of a lonely, slightly-odd guy striding in search of apparitions around a lost little tropical island.

Maybe the joke will end up on me and the guys in the store after all. Maybe that pack was filled with film.

Let me know if the National Geographic starts publishing pictures of the ‘Giant Men of Malaita’ any time soon.

Ouch!

An interesting article in the Economist about alternative therapies and the placebo effect.

Giving pretend painkillers, for instance, can reduce the amount of pain a patient experiences. A study carried out in 2002 suggested that fake surgery for arthritis in the knee provides similar benefits to the real thing.

and

Despite the power of placebos, many conventional doctors are leery of prescribing them. They worry that to do so is to deceive their patients. Yet perhaps the most fascinating results in placebo research—most recently examined by Ted Kaptchuk and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School, in the context of irritable-bowel syndrome—is that the effect may persist even if patients are told that they are getting placebo treatments.

! – although I wonder if the weren’t just capturing some form of regression to the mean here?

Iron Bottom Sound

Welcome to the Twentieth Century.

Rain squall over IBS

From 1942 until 1945 the Second World War bashed through the Solomon Islands. Sea battles, land campaigns, dog fights. Tens of thousands dead. So many ships were sunk in the strait between Guadalcanal and the Florida Islands that it’s now called Iron Bottom Sound.

We went snorkelling this morning on the South Western edge of the sound. Swimming in grey, pre-trade wind calm. There’s a wreck on the edge of the beach, a Japanese troop ship bombed full of holes. The hull is worn and rusted now, torn iron giving into the sea; an attraction for divers who clamber through what’s left. It wasn’t the wreck we went to see though. Over the years coral has covered the steel. Grown like flowers. Slender fronds and solid swirls. Fish everywhere amongst the polyps’ sculptures. Colour, shape, movement, colour. Darting, schooling.

We bobbed above it all, low-tech divers peering out of swimming goggles. As we floated, the sun started to filter through the clouds and the grey sea turned to blue. Golden lines of light bounced about. Striped orange characters from Disney movies floated amongst sea anemones and little fish coloured like rainbows watched us from just beyond our reach.

Most war memorials make me uneasy. Too martial and too little remorse. Too proud. Yet this morning watching that grave returned to life, I found a war memorial which felt right. The softness of the sea, the patterns of colour, the sway of the swell. The way time was patiently covering the ruins with living things. The fact that Jo and I had dinner with a Japanese friend the other night. How peaceful it was.

That is the way to commemorate war, by growing its alternative.

May your weapons rust.

Star Dust

Three of my all time favourite travel books are by C.S Lewis: The Magician’s Nephew, Silver Chair and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Nowadays, now that I notice these things, the bilious conservatism and the cruelty of Lewis’ religious views make it harder for me to enjoy the Narnia Chronicles, but as a kid – like most of his youthful readers, I suspect – I missed all that, caught up in the stories and the magic. For me, much of that magic came in the unfurling of new worlds. Literal creation in the Magician’s Nephew, especially the scene where Digby and Polly watch from the back of a Pegasus as the world takes shape, and discovery in Silver Chair and Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Reading them now it’s hard to shake the feeling that in the latter two books Lewis, once he’d gotten his obligatory attacks on liberals out of the way, was simply enjoying filling in some of the blanks in the maps of his creation.

Voyage of the Dawn Treader doesn’t have much of a story to it at all really above and beyond travel adventure. Sure there’s the search for the lords but that’s nothing like the existential challenges that the Narnians face in most of the rest of the Chronicles. This was always fine with me — adventures strung together by journey across the sea. It’s pretty much how my own surf travels played out years later.

Unfortunately, the absence of a single evil, or single climatic contest, containing a story was obviously too much for the producers of the movie “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. And so they mangled Lewis’ original tale in the name of creating an overarching foe (the Mist!). I’m aware that movies are never (or only very,very rarely) going to be adequate when weighed up against the internal images and excitement of one’s favourite childhood books, so I had low expectations, but even coming from a low base I struggled to enjoy the film — the travel tale had been replaced by a Story and that didn’t work.

Another favourite travel book of mine is Comet in Moomanland. Once again there’s imagination, and a journey, and big adventure for little people. An added bonus is that I can still read this book as an adult and not feel repelled by the author’s worldview.

In addition to stoking my childhood desire to travel, I’m pretty sure Comet in Moomanland also helped feed my fascination with observatories. A few weeks back we went out to Mount Stromlo to attend an open night of the Canberra astronomy society. Astronomy society members brought their telescopes and the public got to gaze through them. People patiently explained to us what we were looking at but, other than the Moon, the details didn’t stick. Stars galaxies, nebula: pretty distant dots.

We went to a talk too and, as is always the case when I’m reminded of it, the sheer size and age of the universe (or, to put it another way, our own infinite brevity and tininess) left me awed. Best of all though was to learn that all the elements that make up our bodies were themselves born in stars.

If you’ve read Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you’ll remember that in the end Caspian wins the heart of, and gets to marry, Ramandu’s daughter — the daughter of a star. I always thought that — marrying a the daughter of a celestial body — was pretty darn cool in a romantic kindof way.

Cooler still to learn though, that we ourselves have our origins in the stars. Forget about marrying the daughter of a star; we’re all, each and every one of us, our own special, tiny little dot of star dust.

Just a link…

…for myself really: 10 tips on academic writing.

Brief Thoughts on Doing a PhD

Two XKCD comics handily sum up two of the most prominent aspects of my PhD experience thus far…

The Internet…such a powerful tool…such a powerful distraction.

And

…the challenge of whittling a general academic interest in an area down to something that approximates a viable 3 year study.

Webs

For the first two weeks of the year it rained almost every day. The sky was cluttered with damp, dreary clouds and the air almost cool.

The end of the rain came one morning when, instead of gathering, the clouds gave way to the insistent sun. And from then on it was dry, defying the weather bureau who kept confidently predicting showers. The dry built. Culminating one day with temperatures of nearly 40 degrees and a hot, arid wind that felt like it was blowing from a desert somewhere. And then the whether turned again. Still hot but humid now, with most days ending in booming thunderstorms, purple strokes of lightening and flooded streets.

With it the water brings life. After the rain, the park behind our house fills with what we think are tiny whistling frogs chirping from the tops of trees. Insects too. Our flat is home to a bunch of gangly, spindly house spiders that hunt mosquitoes, moths, and the little black flies that are everywhere now. At night either these spiders, or some secretive cousin of theirs has taken to criss-crossing the flat. Abseiling from ceilings, and sailing across the spaces between walls, trailing thread in their wake. I don’t know why they do it, the single strands can’t possibly catch anything. Maybe they’re safety ropes for arachnid alpinists, or the bungees of base jumping bugs. Either way they’re left waiting for us in the morning, long after their owners have retreated to dark distant corners.

And so the barely awake stumblings of our early mornings are accompanied by gossamer tickles. It’s too fine, and not sticky enough, to be unpleasant. Just an almost intangible aid to awakening, courtesy of the Canberra rains, and everything that flows from them.

Present

For all intents and purposes Christmas day begins on the eastern end of Lyall Bay Beach. It’s not yet 7am but the stretched out summer day is already under way. The water is clear. The sky is clear. The wind is light. The surf is flat. The wave models were wrong. Out on the sand a couple of early risers are walking their dogs. In my car I’m chewing glumly over the absence of waves. No surf, I’m short of sleep, and my arthritic aches are more severe than usual.  Each of these things combining to add to my gloom. Slightly teary (the arthritis does that to me) and topped up with self-doubt, I’m trying to calculate my options. I could go for a swim or a paddle. But neither really seem worth the discomfort of contorting myself into my wetsuit for. So the real choice is going home and keeping mum company while she cooks, or chasing the remnants of the northwest wind swell on the west coast.

I’m good at doubting myself. So I make the decision to head west several times only to have it repealed by something akin to guilt. What sort of man chases waves on Christmas morning? The empty ocean in front of you is a sign, you should go home. It’s at least 10 dollars petrol extra if you go to the west coast. Think about how much money you’ve spent already. Think about the CO2 emissions. Anyhow, the tide’s wrong up there. And you’ll be late home.

Fortunately I’m even better at ignoring my doubts, eventually, once they’ve kicked me around a bit. And so, next I know, I’m speeding along an almost empty SH1 and into an empty car park at Titahi Bay.

Waves!

The tide’s wrong. But the swell’s there. Slow sloping lefts peeling across the bay. Not bad for an arthritic old guy on a longboard. Barely pausing to look I’m shoving protesting limbs into neoprene. Hoping that my joints will actually let me get to my feet when I’m out there.

Did they?

Of course they did. Slow and sore, sure. But able to get there in the end. In time to make it down the line.

Wave after wave, after wave. And then I’m driving home, endorphins or whatever they are, conspiring with replayed rides, ridding me of aches and doubts. And the morning’s impossibly nice. Like Christmas in Wellington never is. Still and sunny.

As I drive choral music plays on the radio. And I wonder about that. Enjoying it. Agnostic. The sound is sweet – devine. First I figure maybe it really is evidence of god. Could something so beautiful really arise by chance? Could it? In the end I decide it could. Which seems forlorn in a way. All that effort and beauty misdirected. All those appeals unheard. Eventually, though, I conclude, cheery again, that, no, any god that could create something as beautiful as this music deserves some credit. It’s quite an achievement — especially if you don’t exist.

Dusk

From melting midday heat in Honiara, to chilled, fragile aeroplane oxygen, to Brisbane on dusk.

Outside the terminal the warmth is striking. Not hot, warm. Still t-shirt and shorts but also move-without-sweating.

As I wander to the train station the world glows with the falling sun. Pools of red form on metal panels, occasional orange strokes of cloud hang over the horizon, and the light is kind enough for even the concrete and tarmac to look forgiven.

Next train 4 minutes

Over the road from the platform giant, billowing purple trees, sway back and forth in the breeze. The air smells sweet, like purple flowers.

In the distance, out in the suburbs, lights are being turned on and I day dream about a 1,000 barbecues, imagining happy tanned people in tidy backyards. Deciding, as the train pulls into the station, that the nicest place is probably the one where you never actually stay but just get to glimpse as the evening gives out and you continue on your way.

 

Dawn

On the edge of dawn. Somewhere between Goulburn and Mildura. Outside, the stars ebb back into the sky while, inside, we wait for breakfast, our bus stopped at a truck stop. Fluorescent light, pastel plastic, and “serve yourself and pay at the counter, mate.” I feel grimy and unslept. Hungry and queezy at once.

I load my plate with egg-like stuff, chewy toast and collapsing fried-tomato, and sit down, hardly noticing the woman next to me. Instead I stare at the TV on the wall. It’s evangelical hour — a broadcast from an American mega-church. The thing is like a stadium. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, in row after row of cinema chairs. It’s clean, glitzy and ugly. The preacher’s doll-like, decked out in a suit and tie. His voice rises and falls, loves and condemns, advises and exhorts. The parishioners are ecstatic.

“Looks like a horrible place”

That’s the lady next to me. I’ve nothing against churches but she’s right: this one looks appalling.

“Yeah. I guess  it doesn’t look that nice”. I glance at her then down at my plate, wary of speaking to people met on bus journeys. It’s still hours until Mildura…

“I used to go to a church like that”.

I look over at her. She’s middle aged with dark curly hair.

“Oh, um, what was it like?”

“Awful. They manipulated us. We had to give so much money. And when we left they threatened us and then told our friends never to speak to us again.”

“That sounds really wrong.” I’m looking at her more closely now. She’s lucid, sensible, suburban. Not rich or trendy, but tidy. In her 40s I guess. Her face is kind-of round, criss-crossed with care lines. By the looks of it, she’s dealing with sleep deprivation a lot better than me. How, I wonder to myself, did she end up beholden to religion?

“At first we thought they were wonderful. Just like a family. Felt at home. So secure. But they wanted to control our lives. And take our money. You had to pay so much.”

“So what did you do? How’d you leave?”

“Oh, it was awful. In the end we had to move houses. And the people we’d met there, our friends, none of them spoke to us again.”

On TV the audience was cheering. The preacher bathing in adulation.

“Oh, that’s um…so why are you going to Mildura?”

“I’m not. All the way to Adelaide for me.”

“A holiday?”

“No my daughter lives there, but she’s in trouble. Trouble with her husband. So I’m off to bring her home.”

“Oh god – that sounds like a difficult trip.”

“Yeah.”

When the bus driver announces it’s time to go we get up. Leave the TV behind. She’s short. Not slender but not chubby either. She moves carefully and deliberately. Outside, the tarmac’s speckled with litter. And determined, thirsty little trees are bracing themselves for the sun.

She’s seated near the front. My seat is down the back.

“Hey, um, nice to meet you and, um, good luck with Adelaide.”

“Thanks.”

Once the bus has pulled back onto the road, I put my walkman on, and sit there, looking out at the unending land. Mulling over people and gods, children and parents, lives and stories. And hoping for a happy ending to the story I’d just heard. Hoping for this lady, and the daughter I’d never met.

Honiara

If you wanted to you could: focus on the air so hot and humid it makes you sweat in streams; or the grubby tilted footpaths daubed with blood-red pools of betelnut spit; or the angry addled Quazo-drunks. You could. But if you did you’d likely miss the market’s busy business chatter, and the soft-friendliness of the people. And you’d probably never get to marvel at the bus conductors’ slang as you wove around the city. Worst of all, if you hunkered down away from it all, like I did from time to time, gulping in quiet and refrigerated air, you might miss your chance to stare out at the morning sea, pretty, patient, glassy-smooth, and punctuated with islands.

Grasping for Metaphors…

Slow internet. Slow internet. Sllllooooooowwwwww innterrnettttt.

How slow?

Slower than the doldrums.

Slower than siesta in the south of Spain.

Slower than a tortoise towing a glacier.

That slow.

Since the beginning of time…

Inspired by Garth George I finally found this quote:

Smithers: Well, Sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the
          Elementary School, the local tavern, the old age home...you
          must be very proud.
   Burns: [stuffing money into his wallet] No, not while my greatest
          nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and
          energy.  I call this enemy...the sun.
           [throws a switch; a control panel appears at his desk]
           [another button slides the floor off a model of Springfield]
          Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the
          sun.  I will do the next best thing...block it out!
           [another button raises a shield over the model town]
Smithers: Good God!

Travelling Light

I once met a girl in Central America. She was a New Yorker, her parents were Yemeni, I think. She was pretty, and smart. And I was seeing someone else at the time. So, over the few days we shared a dorm room, I busied myself trying not to develop a crush on her.  Tried – she was striking. Although the thing that strikes me most now was just how light she travelled. A comfortably stuffed day-pack was enough to keep her clad, clean and groomed over several months of travel. This contrasted with me. A great hulking board bag, packed with two or maybe three boards. And still smelling of the ding repair kit which had leaked in it on the way to Mexico. In addition to the boardbag I had a day-pack that would barely close, filled with books, and note books, and tapes, and a walkman, and a camera. And then I had my pack. Contents – a tent, a sleeping bag, warm clothes for the south, cool clothes for the north, a few more books, a camp stove, and cooking utensils. I was cumbersome. I moved like a camel train. When she left for Honduras she just picked up her day-pack, scribbled me a note goodbye and sailed off over the border.

I’ve never travelled light. In the Cape Verde Islands I carried all the usual plus the wheels and axle from a pram, which I’d strap to my board bag so I could drag it rather than carry it.

I’ve never travelled light. Which must explain why, tomorrow, Jo and I, who are off to the Northern Territory for a week’s holiday – no surf, one temperature zone, no stove – are laden with my bulging-at-the-seams backpack. Key contents: deckchairs.

Yes people. I am travelling with deck chairs. Like I said, I never travel light.

Aches and Pain

Thanks to Carina who sent me the link, an interesting article in Salon about pain.

It’s the pain tired nexus that gets me. Pain makes me tired. Being tired causes me pain.

The pain makes me tired bit makes sense: in particular my shoulder and lower back often wake me sometime around 3 or 4 am. Also, being sore has a fatigue of it’s own. It takes an effort. And so it leaves me tired even when I sleep well.

The other link in the chain is something slightly stranger. If I don’t get enough sleep, I end up sorer. Or, more accurately, if I have a late night, I don’t necessarily hurt more, but if I wake early in the morning I do. I haven’t the faintest idea why this might be but fitting into the cycle as it does, it’s a real pain.

Meanwhile, in the world of strange search engine queries

To the person who found my blog by Googling, “what is a wandering terrance?”. I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I’ve been trying to figure that one out myself for years…

Worst. Election. Ever.

Almost over. Just a week to go. So close, and yet so far.

And via Johann Hari, Benjamin Barber has some good advice, initially given to Bill Clinton, but relevant to any centre left politician.

You don’t always have to tack to the polls. Our extraordinary eloquence and capacity to mould opinion can change how polls read and where the wind blows.