Wondering in my wild west

October 1, 2014  |  ibrainmapadmin

I roll into Lightening Ridge like limp tumbleweed. The big rig I’ve been following since the turn off 5ks back, turns into the Information Centre. It pulls up beside another big rig. Caravans and cars, hats and the sky are big out here. I think I must be driving the smallest car in town.

I’m like a city cowgirl on a Shetland pony driving my Toyota Corolla next to the powerful beasts prowling the highways.

My imagination fills my head with fancies as I drive down the main drag. For a moment I picture myself with short plaits (the sort that kick out at the end like an upside down question mark), and a big hat. I wipe my lipstick off just in case.

Following Kay’s instructions I turn right at the Black Opal Motel. I keep driving out past the aerodrome sign, but wonder if I’ve come too far as the road turns to dusty red gravel and dogs rush out from their shady hiding places to bark at my passing dust and grey metal show pony.

The buildings look banged together as an afterthought. Most are a collection of ill matching constructions hanging together with tenacity and imagination, surrounded by stunted whispy trees and bright patches of bougainvillea.

Just before the road ends and veers towards a ramp into the aerodrome I see the two blue gates. I turn around, pulling in under the sparse speckled shade of the thin tree that looks like it needs a good lie down out of the hard sun, and unbuckle.

Kay’s orange T-shirt is the brightest object for miles and is topped by a wide smile and a wave. The golden brown skin of her face is framed by short cropped grey and white hair. John hobbles slowly towards us pushing his walker, and we’re introduced. Kay has already told me he’s an indigenous artist.

Ten minutes later we’re sitting in the breezeway, called “the entertainment room,” a large gauzed in area with a cement floor, drinking tea. John sips his tea in silence. Kay tells me later it’s hard for him to talk. He has Parkinson’s.

Occasionally he looks up and smiles that smile of all Aborigines I’ve met. It lights his face and all age and worry are gone, and I see a child in that smile, as bright and innocent as if he was four, running with his friends in the evening sun, the warm earth between his toes and the sun kissing his dark head, eyes shining with wonder. The smile comes like a puff of wind and then is gone.

I also feel the sorry bruise in my heart, like a yellow stain against my beating blood.

It’s always there when I meet my dark brothers and sisters on this wide continent. A kind of confused shame, mine and not mine, that’s been there since I can remember, even when I kissed Richie Freeman on the school oval. I loved his smile and wanted to taste it between those dark, so pink inside, lips, and yet felt some wish to mend or make right, that was beyond the comprehension of my fourteen year old hormonal brain.

Kay is Sinhalese but has the traditional shape of Aboriginal women elders and tells me most people in the town think she’s indigenous.

I wonder if indigenous women have delicate ankles to walk lightly on the earth and large bellies for all the babies and family they carry and love (or have lost), and also for all the sorry in their guts that’s too much to digest.

I don’t think all this in the entertainment room of the camp, but at 3am my wondering comes as the dogs bark in the next paddock where the generator hums on the drilling rig.

As I toss and turn my mind rolls back through the day, and the short-long drive from Dubbo, less than five hours is an easy days drive out here.

The day had started as a joke.

I had a chipped windscreen. I’d been following some knuckle head (knuckle is such a beautiful word. I like how rolls around inside my mouth, and my tongue has to flop and then harden around it at the back of my throat) driver in his “empty” gravel truck who had left his back end open, dumping black rocks onto the road each time he went over a bump. There are several stories to tell there but I’ll stick with the windscreen tale.

So I rocked up to Mr Windscreens O’Brien first thing Monday morning.

I intended to leave my car there while I went off to the Apple guys, the techy ones not the red crunchy edible types.

I’d had a bingle with my iPhone and computer the night before and was hoping to sort it out before leaving Dubbo. I wasn’t sure how much Technical support I could get in Lightening Ridge.

Mr Windscreen whipped off the little clear sticky labels I’d stuck on to protect my windscreen from dust and more flying rocks from said knucklehead. He wandered off and got some spray and said,

“This is going down as the record for windscreen repairs.” Then he sprayed something onto the chip and wiped it with a soft cloth. Well I guess it was a soft cloth.

I peered at the chip in my windscreen. Whalla. All gone.

“It was a smashed bug,” he said.

“Oh how embarrassing,” I said shaking my head. But I didn’t blush I prefer to save my blushing for more intimate occasions like… … oh … ah no… best not share that here.

The rest of the guys in the workshop thought it was a great joke and smirked at me shyly while I walked around shaking my head, with my hand over my face and muttering “how embarrassing.”

“Better to be embarrassed than pay for a repair,” one young guy laughed.

So off I went to the Apple man. He fixed my drama within minutes. I confessed to having a technological melt down the night before.

“Everyone does,” he said, “as long as you don’t throw anything.”

I wasn’t going to fess up to throwing the Motel compendium across the room in lieu of my phone, which I’d wanted to smash, and then crying with frustration when it refused to do anything other than show an icon that made no sense to me, like some secret language that the rest of the world understood, but not me.

Driving north to Lightening Ridge my past snapped at my heels like an old blind dog barking at every shadow it can’t see.

An ex client wanted a letter, the Real Estate agent who sold my house wanted me to contact my Power supplier even though I’d told her I was on the road and didn’t have any details and had already organized the disconnection. In the end I called Energy Australia from Walgett in Café 64, while I waited for my wrap. Michelle on the other end of the phone chatted like she was in the next room and had no idea about the dark eyes watching me, and why I spoke in a loud whisper. She told me everything was in order and not to let the real estate people hassle me.

Then someone else was trying to call about something else, and someone else, yapping and snapping at me trying to grab my attention back. I started to wish I hadn’t fixed my phone.

I just wanted to keep my eyes on the horizon and the road up ahead.

Things that seemed so easy, and even important, in a comfy living room in Central Vic or suburban Melbourne get hard out here and lose their meaning. No reception, no details, disappearing internet connection, technology is like a mirage. You think there is something there only to grab onto it and it disappears in your fingertips.

The mind enters another dimension on a long drive. It becomes quiet out here where the road runs all the way to the horizon. All the things that mattered don’t seem to make sense under the wide blue bright sky.

My thoughts stretched so far out that they forgot themselves and got lost, somewhere between my mind and the horizon. As if the earth and sky eat up everything other than here and now.

Driving, I’d been listening to Burial Rites by Hannah Kent for a second time.

Her writing is like falling in love, melting all my defenses and opening me up into intimate places so that I feel every word under my skin.

In the book the landscape reads like another character, forcing itself into every scene, spilling across each page like a dark bruise.

I wondered how to write about the Australian landscape. How it’s so different to Hannah Kent’s writing and landscape. I wondered how she found the poetic, the beauty in the landscape, the deep listening that let her find the voice of that land, so close I feel it in my own bones and breath.

As I drove it got harder and harder to listen to the descriptions of Icelandic winters, grumbling cold aching through to the marrow, with the sun pelting down hard and hot outside.

Out here the landscape is a like an old man, withered and greying-green against blood earth. He seems harmless now. But in a few months he will turn into a grizzly old man, half demented with the heat. Screaming into your face day and night and wont let you rest. So close it will make you gag. I grew up in that heat, my skin remembers it and shrinks from the burning.

But in mid Spring the old man is still drowsy and soft eyed, just waking from his winter dreaming.

As I wake to the sound of Kay and John leaving after tossing and turning in my writing and biting dreams of barking dogs, the sun comes in soft and gauzy through the window.

The tiny fruit on the cactus outside the window, silhouetted against the morning, looks like a tiny desert village defying gravity. The only sounds, once the tank rolls off in a low cloud of dust, are the soft hum of the fan overhead and the whining grumble of the fridge across the room.

And now I write this down forgetting most of what I turned over in my head in the night, and I wonder what the next month in Lightening Ridge will bring.

I’m out here to write, to listen to my soul and lean into the landscape to find the quiet poetry under the dry red earth skin.

My question is still revealing itself. I have to live into, to know it in my own white skin and ankles and the earth against my bare feet, the heat soaking into my blood, the bright air in my mouth like the hard dry kiss of an old man, a grandfather’s kiss.

I will ride my question clip clopping into the sunset with my pigtails (or plaits) bobbing, and my wide hat making a strange shadow on the blood red earth.