Lyndon 201: Finding your Inner Pioneer

I have never been particularly afraid of flying. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike turbulence as much as the next person, but for the most part I can kick back and pretend that I am not in a flimsy metal tube rocketing along a bajillion miles above the terra firma that I love so much. Combine this with my new ‘yes-man’ attitude to things at Lyndon (because who knows when I’ll have the opportunity to do some of these things again), and when Sean asked me if I wanted to go for a ride in his plane, of course I said yes. And then, in a fit of weakness of which I am not particularly proud, I gave Naomi the contact info of my loved ones and told her that if I died, she had to let them know; I was mostly kidding, I think. This was in no way due to a lack of confidence in Sean - he is a responsible, skilled man, and I trust him as much as, if not significantly more than, anyone to take me up in a little puddle-jumper of a plane. It comes down to the fact that I apparently read too much, and the only stories I can think of that involve small planes involve those small planes crashing in horrible fireballs of destruction. 

The plan was to fly a couple hundred kilometers to a ‘nearby’ station and deliver the plane, as the manager of that station had just bought it; Sean had acquired a different plane recently, the exact same year but with fewer flight hours on it. Two of the kids were coming with us, Leslie and Molly, who seemed completely oblivious to the fact that they are living out some kind of fairy story of childhood, where Dad takes them for joyrides, not in a car, but in a plane. I know nothing about planes, and was too distracted thinking about the mechanics of flight to ask any useful questions, so I can’t tell you what kind of plane it was - it had a propeller, and two seats in front with a bench seat behind. There you go, all you need to know. Sean pushed it out of the hangar, because this is the kind of plane you can push, and fueled up - I learned that the wings actually hold the fuel in these smaller aircraft, to keep the plane balanced. I decided, judiciously, to not contemplate the idea of an unbalanced plane. Sean then introduced me to Rule Number 1 of propeller planes - don’t go near that propeller. You never know when it might suddenly spring to life and smack you with some astronomical amount of force, like taking a crowbar swung by Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his prime, of course) to the head, except a million times worse. We got the kids settled in the back, and I clambered into the passenger seat with my trusty plastic bag, in the event that I decided that flying did not agree with my delicate, lady-like stomach. And then, take-off! Except that the propeller wouldn’t start spinning ‘round, which apparently is pretty essential to take-off. Sean explained that he would have to ‘prop-start’ the plane, and would I please step on the brakes, and pull back the throttle once it started. Oh God, I thought, this is how it starts. While I more-or-less stood on the brakes and started sweating profusely into my tank-top, Sean hopped out and spun the propeller - this, however, is not like spinning any propeller I’ve ever seen (albeit I’ve only seen propellers about 2 inches long and made of plastic), but requires a full body shove followed by a hasty step back to get out of the way. After a few tries the propeller started, and I managed to not inadvertently allow the plane to saunter off down the runway, which is what I had envisioned, the kids screaming, Sean running after us through the dust, and my face pressed to the window in a silent ‘O’ of horror. 

Then, we actually took off, and it was magical. This is the apotheosis of flight - you can almost feel the wind rushing beneath you, the engine is whispering (ok, roaring) secrets to you, and the propeller is a blur in front of your eyes. Flocks of birds wheeled beneath us, which was just absurdly pleasing to me, to be flying close enough to almost feel like part of their aerial ballet. The landscape revolved into rocky hills and crooked streams, the latter marked by the increased greenery on their edges, which lasted long after the surface water had disappeared. Herds of cattle dotted the landscape, and mobs of kangaroos (yes, that is the technical term, which always puts me in mind of Marlon Brando as a ‘roo, with stubby little T-rex arms and jowls full of cotton balls, sitting back ponderously on his tail) watched our approach and then took off into the bush. There were even wild donkeys, which I didn’t realize existed, and which look significantly larger than the domesticated variety, and much less friendly. Perhaps my favorite part, however, was watching our little shadow zoom  over the landscape - it reminded me of Indiana Jones, with the little plane and its dotted line traversing the distances between points on a map. It was as if somehow my brain couldn’t process that fact that I was really and truly flying, and seeing that shadow was irrefutable proof that we were far enough above the ground to cast it. I also absolutely loved landing, not because I wanted to be back on the earth, but because coming into the runway made me feel like I was in North by Northwest, and all that was missing was a Cary Grant to chase down. 

Seriously, where is Cary Grant? Also, that slash across the sky is the propeller.

After a pleasant stop at Eudamullah Station, we all piled into a ute and headed back in the direction of Lyndon - Tina was supposed to be meeting us halfway, so that we wouldn’t end up being in possession of a Eudamullah ute (try saying that ten times fast). Unfortunately, after the recent rain, there was a river in our way. A fairly wide river, and a river that in one section was over a meter deep. Lest we be washed away and our mechanical oxen drowned in an Australian version of Oregon Trail, it was decided that we would have to ford the river on foot. First, however, Sean wanted to go up in the plane to see if Tina was close, and to try to signal her to continue to the river crossing if she was still some distance away. It was decided that I should stay by the river in case Tina showed up and tried to cross, which would lead to washing away and drowned utes, etc etc. Molly decided to stay with me, and kept me very well entertained by seemingly attempting to do her damnedest to fall in the river. Every time I turned around she was climbing a tree, or sliding down the muddy bank, or jumping across stones; really, the only way she didn’t attempt to fall in the water was by doing a triple backflip somersault straight in. Tina eventually showed up, and years of vocal training paid off when I managed to project (not yell, thank you very much) across the river that it was too deep to cross. Then, I forded a waist-deep river. With a squirming child on my back, which, let me assure you, does not do much for your balance, especially when the river bed is rocky and treacherous and the current is shockingly significant. I have to confess, I felt a teensy bit bad-ass - rivers can’t stop me from getting the little ladies back home!

Can you see us, can you see us?

To complete this impossibly perfect day, the ladies (the grown ladies that is, not the little ladies) had a camping girl’s night, which is about the only kind of girl’s night you can have in the bush. We built a fire, toasted sandwiches, and climbed up some nearby boulders with bottles of wine to watch the sunset, while the dogs cavorted around us and occasionally tried to hump each other. Upon realizing that the mozzies were going to eat us alive, Naomi and I decided to squeeze into my one-person tent to sleep, that wee little tent that I like to lovingly refer to as ‘coffin-sized.’ I would like to commend the good people at REI for not engaging in false advertising - that is, truly, a one person tent. Fitting the two of us into it required a level of intimacy that I don’t normally engage in on a first date. However, being squashed in together like two football players trying to squeeze into one tutu proved preferable to waking up anemic from blood-sucking flying fiends, so Naomi and I cuddled. I was the big spoon. In the morning, we rewarded ourselves for surviving the night with chocolate fondue that Tina cooked up in the camp oven and billy tea that Patty bravely made the right way, swinging the billy around her head like a madwoman. This is always how I had pictured camping, what I had wanted camping to be like, when I was a child. No caravan parks and campsites, no ugly concrete ablution blocks, no human-imposed order. Just the sky, and a fire, and a sunrise that feels like it is painted just for you, with birds calling out in surprise that another day has arrived. 5-year-old me is so very happy right now. 

Yep, totally fighting robots

I have also worked some this week, just in case you’re starting to think that all I do is run around and smear myself with dirt and pretend I am one with the outback. However, the work is so varied, and so far outside of my last 28 years of life experience, that I sometimes feel I should be thanking someone for letting me do it. For instance, you’re going to let me use a circular saw to cut huge lengths of wire down to size, thus showering me in sparks and letting me pretend I’m in Flashdance? Sure, I guess that’s ok. Just so long as we all wear ear protection so that I can sing “What a feeling…!” without anyone hearing. Or, you’ll let me use a power washer to clean out an old trailer that is destined to become the kid’s playhouse? Yep, I can do that for you, as long as you don’t mind if I pretend I’m a robot-fighting future warrior blasting evil instead of dirt. The power-washer, since I had to use it inside the trailer as well as out, also gave me a free shower, which really helped the red dust adhere to my skin like paint. Even something as mundane as building Ikea furniture (which, I’ve discovered, is a pain in the ass in any country) was enlivened by the appearance of the Balmy Bird. Melody, another WWOOFER, and I had moved an old dressing table out onto the verandah of the guest cottage in order to replace it with a giant Ikea wardrobe. Returning from smoko (morning tea, a delightful tradition that always vaguely puts me in mind of The Hobbit, as I feel like I’m eating something roughly every two hours), we found that the old mirror on the dressing table had made a friend. This little bird was IN LOVE, and yet it could only end in heartbreak, because try as he might, he couldn’t seem to find the other bird. He would sing at the mirror, peck at it, hop up on top and try to peek over the edge and surprise it, pretend to fly away only to dive bomb it from behind. After watching him for 5 minutes or so, we decided it was in his best interest to take the mirror down before he hurt himself. Unfortunately, I think this confused the Balmy Bird, and he started appearing at the windows while we worked, chirping angrily at us. I believe he thought we had killed his friend. I was almost afraid to go outside, as he had a distinctly murderous look in his eyes. 

Yes, I did stop to take a photo. Because, tourist.

On the subject of murder, I met my first red-back spider this week. This was followed promptly by my second red-back spider. In case you’ve forgotten, the red-back is up there on the top ten big bad ugly poisonous creatures list (alright, I’m aware it probably won’t kill me, but I don’t want to be in a situation to find out). I was moving furniture around in the guest cabin in preparation for painting the concrete floor when I noticed a black and evil-looking spider under the kitchen table. Being somewhat masochistic, I leaned in for a closer look, and was rewarded with the sight of the shockingly crimson markings on its back (which, on the plus side, seems much easier to spot than the belly-markings of that sneaky bitch, the black widow). I informed myself that I was fine, but it somehow got lost in the vast distance that had suddenly opened up between my brain and my body. My body decided that the reasonable solution was to abandon all sense of dignity and run out the door and never stop, possibly (probably) while weeping; my brain decided that it was too much work to argue with something as stubborn as my body, and decided to go on a much deserved, and extended, break. To my credit, I walked calmly out the door, and calmly told Naomi that there was a red-back, and then calmly stood there and stared at her as I tried to figure out where my brain had gone, and why my body was shaking. Luckily, Naomi had long since conquered her fear of the hell-spawn, and came inside, knocked the spider on the floor with a stick, and stepped on it. For those of you who feel like spiders shouldn’t be harmed, deal with it. Naomi left, I considered sitting on the floor and rocking back and forth for a few days but decided against it, and then went back to moving furniture. Not 10 minutes later, I found another, hiding behind the fridge. In one lunging moment of brilliance, before my brain and body had time to argue and part ways again, I kicked the wall. Technically, I vertically stomped the spider, but the wall was there to stop me from turning the stomp into the first step of a run and ending up in South Australia. In all likelihood, I made some kind of really tough noise while I was doing this, I imagine something along the lines of ‘GAAAHHHH.’ I believe this scared away all the other red-backs.

We had guests one night this week, the new managing couple at a ‘neighboring’ station, who couldn’t get back because the rain had made the roads impassable (I’ve mentioned the rain a couple of times now, but haven’t had the chance to say how incredible it sounded when it rolled in, pounding down on the metal roof of the donga and streaming beneath the thin floors like your own personal river). Obviously, I know that hospitality in this instance is a necessity, there would be nowhere else to go, but the city girl in me is still so thrilled by the complete openness with which visitors are received. People are always welcomed with warm smiles, a hot meal, and a clean bed. Out here, this is the natural order of things. I don’t want to romanticize a way of life simply because it is different from what I am used to, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy to know that there is still a place where a stranger can show up and become a friend. When we were out camping, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would like look from 200, 300, 1000 feet up. This little pinprick of firelight in a sea of night. I am not a poet, so bear with me, but that’s how it feels all the time out here, to me - people have formed these beacons of warmth that serve as lighthouses in what would otherwise be impenetrable darkness. It’s so easy to get caught up in the glow. 

Lyndon Station 101: Getting to Know Your Surroundings

One of the first stories I heard upon getting to Lyndon Station was from Naomi, the Irish girl currently serving as cook for the Station (she is not a cook by choice - the dictates of the unbelievably complicated Australian visa system demand that, in order to get a second-year working holiday visa, you must do 88 days of ‘regional work’, aka, the work that no Australian seems to want to do, in the corners of the country that much of Australia seems to have forgotten about). She told me the hilarious story of how, one of the first weeks she was here, she found a snake in the toilet. While she was on said toilet. It stuck its little serpentine head out past her leg. But, don’t worry, it was all ok because it was just a python! Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d be stopping to consider the merits of what kind of snake was staring up at me from the watery depths before there was a lot of screaming and probably a bit of a mess. After this heart-warming tale, Naomi offered to walk me to my room in a row of dongas (basically metal storage units, broken into rooms, as far as I can tell - any Aussies feel free to correct me in my understanding of donga culture) across a yard from the kitchen where we had all been cozily gathered. She asked with fleeting concern if I had a torch, because that way I could look out for the snakes and the scorpions. Needless to say, I just sort of stood in the center of my little room after she left and stared with increasing panic into the corners trying to figure out from which direction death was going to slither, creep, or crawl. This is not a very effective sleeping position, for the record.

To give you a little background, Lyndon Station is a sprawling cattle station (what an American would call a ranch) surrounded by other sprawling cattle stations in roughly the northeast of the middle of nowhere. By sprawling, I mean 1.25 million acres, the kind of sprawl where in order to muster their cattle (about 8000 head, I believe), they require the use of spotter planes and helicopters to even find the happy cows (which I think trumps any other claims of ‘free range’). We did some research before I left the states, and I believe that its sprawl makes Lyndon Station bigger than Rhode Island, Los Angeles, and a handful of European countries. And in that whole swath of land, there are about 10 people on a regular basis. Their nearest neighbors are about 40 km away, and they’re only that close because by some fluke of geography and ancestral construction proclivities, the homesteads happen to be built on the closest parts of the neighboring stations. There is an isolation out here that is simply unfathomable in the states, or probably in most countries. These are the people that I think would be most likely to survive the (zombie) apocalypse, because really, if the rest of humanity disappeared, it wouldn’t much change their day to day life.

Because of this, there is some pretty serious infrastructure in place to keep them tied to the 21st century. There are huge solar panels for electricity. A satellite provides phone service, and there is even a sat phone, which looks like a cell phone circa 1985, that they take out on the range (I have no idea if this is the correct term, but it’s how I keep thinking of it, and have been singing ‘Home on the Range’ under my breath at regular intervals all week) with them. This satellite also provides TV and, gasp!, internet, although due to the vagaries of having to bounce my emails off of a giant orbiting hunk of metal in space, it doesn’t work particularly well or often. Facebook will have to survive without me. 

More impressive to me than technology, however, is how they handle an emergency. There are 4 kids out here - Leslie, an 8-year-old aboriginal girl who Sean and Cath (the lord and lady of the station; these are almost definitely not the technical terms) are fostering, Mollie - 7, Griffin - 5, and Saphie - nearly 3. There is an in-house school teacher, Patty, who lives in an adorable little cottage near our dongas and somehow manages to corral the oldest 3 into classes 5 days a week. I could rhapsodize for pages about how great an environment this seems to be for kids to grow up in - there are so many trees to climb, so much land to explore, so many new people coming and going. The kids are bright, sociable, and absolutely fearless. But, being kids, they are also prone to the thousands of illnesses and accidents of childhood. When I first met Griff, he had a cast on his arm, and I innocently asked what had happened, expecting some story of a bike overturned or a fort fallen out of. Instead, Griff showed me the stitches running up the entire underside of his arm and said that he ‘ran into a window.’ Patty and Naomi, who had been here when it happened, said that he had been running full-out around the house and had tried to put out a hand to stop himself and, unfortunately, the old window hadn’t held. These things do happen, especially with kids as energetic as these, but what do you do when you’re 150 kms over bumpy dirt road from the nearest roadhouse, let alone a hospital? You act like the bad-ass pioneers you are, obviously. Patty wrapped Griff’s arm up tight in a blanket, Cath put him in the car and started the long drive to Carnarvon, Naomi called the nearest ambulance (hundreds of kilometers away) to start driving down the same road to meet them, and then they called the nearest station and asked for a plane. It seems it’s a bit of a pre-requisite out here to own a small aircraft. Of course, it’s basically a necessity, when the distances between people, not to mention towns, are so vast. Sean was out on the station and completely impossible to contact, or else Griffin would have already been in a plane halfway to Carnarvon. As it was, the neighboring station man came swooping in like some aerial cavalry, picked up Griff and Cath from the side of the road and flew them to the ambulance. It must have been absolutely terrifying, but I was blown away with the resourcefulness with which this was handled, and the matter-of-factness with which they told the story. Had the accident happened during the week, the Royal Flying Doctor Service would have been here in less time than it can take to get an ambulance in some American cities. The RFDS is exactly what it sounds like, really the only way to handle emergencies in Western Australia, the largest state in Australia, and the least populated. This story held me on a pinpoint of emotion - on the one hand, I was so impressed with how incredible these people are at dealing with any situation that comes up, on the other hand, I realized that I damn well better not hurt myself, because I don’t know that I have the inner fortitude to survive that kind of journey, and not just run around in hysterical circles like a headless chicken until I collapse in the red dust. 

Not a tan

And let’s take a moment to talk about that red dust. It is everywhere. At first, I thought everything was rusted, but once I got over my blond moment and acknowledged that plastic is not particularly prone to rust, I realized that everything is coated in a layer of varying thickness of fine red dirt. It’s on the floor of your room. It’s on your clothes. It’s on your tools, your utes (what Americans would call trucks), your dogs. If you blow your nose, don’t be disturbed by the color, and I can only assume that I have eaten a fair amount of it one way or the other. It is endlessly disappointing to me to shower at the end of the day and watch what I think is a slightly-scarlet tan disappear down the drain. All that considered, however, it is much greener here than I imagined. Popular lore had led me to believe that I was headed to a barren land, where trees are few and far between and cattle are lean and mean and carry switchblades to fight each other for the best grazing spots. I am lucky enough to be here after they’ve had quite a significant amount of rain, but I still never would have imagined the lushness. I am hopeless at plants, so I can’t even begin to tell you what anything is out here, but there are groves of fragrant trees, small flowering plants and bushes, gum trees dominating the horizon, and acres upon acres of spinifex, a tall grass that grows in clumps and looks sort of inviting until you touch it and realize that its one goal in life is to watch you yelp as it stabs its needle-like points under your skin. Red dirt tracks wind through all of this, and distant bouldery hills waver under a sky that seems to go forever. I’m sorry Montana, but you are not Big Sky Country - Lyndon Station has stolen your title. It is a sky that at its finest moments feels like it’s reaching out to embrace you, and at its worst feels like it’s going to press you down into the dirt until you suffocate. 

My journey to Lyndon started in a little roadhouse in a place called Minilya. This is not strictly true, it technically started on a stuffy, smelly bus from Exmouth to Minilya, but that part was stuffy and smelly and just generally unappealing, so I’m going to skip over it. Suffice it to say that some people were taking that bus another 17 hours on to Perth; I think, given the option, I would rather walk. I had arranged with Sean to be picked up at Minilya by Ray, the ‘wind___ man.’ When Sean and I talked, I couldn’t tell if he said windOW or windMILL, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, just that Ray would roll up in a ute with an “unusual trailer.” I was a little disappointed that the roadhouse was basically a truckstop with some rooms at the back; I don’t quite know what I was expecting, but I thought somehow it would be badly lit and built of concrete and I might see a fight between two big burly men with knives the size of my forearm. Instead, the big burly men quietly sat and ate fairly healthy meals, at least by American truck-stop standards, the proprietor gave me a glass of water and let me charge my (useless) phone, and the shelves were stocked with boxes of ramen and shampoo and my preferred brand of tampons. I sat for a while and read a caravanning magazine, and then a tattoo magazine, and eyeballed every man walking through the door, waiting for the infamous ‘Ray.’ 

Yep, that's a windmill

Ray did not disappoint. He was so tan from working outside he looked sunburned, or perhaps it was the other way around. He had on a standard-issue bush hat (similar to a cowboy hat, but subtly different in a way I can’t quite put my finger on) perched atop a downright jolly face. He was easy to a laugh, and within minutes had warned me that he was a ‘dirty old man’, which I took as a good sign, because the real dirty old men never realize that that is what they are. He had a habit of laughing at things I said as if I had made some kind of clever double-entendre, even when I hadn’t, and I’m afraid if I spent more time around him I would start thinking of myself as much funnier than I actually am. And, as Sean had warned me, his ute most definitely had an ‘unusual’ trailer. It had a windmill laying on it, at least, the legs and frame of a windmill, minus the spinning head. So that solved the mystery of window versus windmill. A windmill man, I decided, is much more exciting. 

We were only on asphalt road for a few minutes before we bumped down onto a dirt track, and I haven’t seen asphalt since. Instead, I have become a connoisseur of the dirt track - there are the wide, nicely graded and maintained tracks that are the main thoroughfares in this country, complete with road signs (!), and then the tracks slowly degrade til you’re left with not much more than a cattle path through the bush. Utes are hardy machines though, and don’t think much of fording a river or running over some small trees; vanity trucks, these are not. After we had been driving for about an hour, and were quite thoroughly in the middle of nothing, with only our headlights and occasional herds of cattle in the middle of the road for company (Ray’s method for making the cattle move involved turning his headlights off and then back on while he approached them; while this did manage to make the cattle move, it also terrified me, because there’s nothing like making a run at a herd of cattle in the pitch dark, operating under the hope that they’ll decide to get out of your way), Ray asked me if I wanted to ‘grab a drink.’ Now, I don’t know if I’ve always been an idiot, and have just been masking it well, but I feel like I have had more head-slapping moments in the last week than in the previous 5 years combined. When Ray asked me this, I looked around in confusion and said that I would love a drink, but from where. I had this image in my head of Ray pulling over to the side of the road and digging up a secret cache of beer that he had buried there years before. Luckily, Ray didn’t seem to notice my confusion, and just handed me a beer that he pulled out of a little refrigerated cooler on the back of the ute. Not quite as exciting as a secret pirate store of beer, but infinitely more practical. 

Since that first night, I have helped take a windmill down, and put another one up, I have dug some holes and mixed some cement, I have knocked fence posts into the ground and strung out barbed wire, I have ridden on the back of a ute and pretended that I’m a real honest-to-god country girl, I have watched an Australian-rules footy game and almost understood it, I have learned the appropriate snake-spotting procedure (yell/scream for help, and keep an eye on the snake while someone comes with a snake-book and a shovel - if the snake isn’t poisonous, let it go on it’s way, if it is poisonous, make like the queen of hearts and off with it’s head), and I have realized that all the working out in the world could not have prepared me for actual labor. Why, oh why, is it so hard to dig a hole? All I could think, as I was flailing around with a shovel and a pry bar, for the tough bits, was that the gravedigger scene in Hamlet has it all wrong - those bastards would be winded! And yes, I am aware that I am a nerd, no need to point it out.  I also discovered that I have horrible aim with a sledgehammer (which I luckily figured out before I broke a finger, mine or anybody else’s) and that jackhammering requires not only more strength than I have, but just more body mass in general - without a big belly to rest on the handles, it doesn’t seem to have much interest in breaking up cement. Other than these realizations, however, I was shocked by how applicable technical theatre is to this kind of work. Lowering or raising a windmill is only vaguely different from lowering or raising a boom or bit of scaffolding, a clove hitch knot works anywhere, and a crescent wrench, my tool-of-choice since my freshman year of college, appears to work the same with the nuts and bolts of a windmill as it does with the nuts and bolts of a lighting instrument. In true theatre form I was clambering all over the back of the trailer tying down the windmill that we were moving, when Sean warned me to be careful. WWOOFer insurance, apparently, only covers $5000, so I’m not allowed to break anything bigger than a finger. 

Not a bad view from the back of a ute

Sook, in her favorite spot

After all my fears of spiders and snakes and scorpions, I have yet to see anything really scary. The worst that has happened is being snuck up on by Patty’s black dog Basil in the dark as I walked to my room; he definitely elicited a bit of a yelp, and I was vaguely concerned that no one came running to see what had tried to eat me. The next night, it was the pony that snuck up on me; I can only assume that Basil told him that I was good for a laugh. Aside from Basil and the pony, there is a tiny little squirming bag of puppy named Lulu, who likes to lounge in my lap and use my braid as a chew toy, which I don’t mind in the least because 1) she’s about the cutest puppy I’ve ever seen, and 2) my hair is now so strong and so long that I could probably wear it like a bullet-proof vest. In addition, there is Sook (Australian for cry-baby), Tina the overseer’s year-old pound puppy. Sook is…special (sorry Tina). As an example, one gorgeous evening after a heavy rain, Tina and I decided to take kayaks down the Lyndon River, which had magically filled itself up after the previous night’s storm. It was a beautiful, lazy trip, drifting down the gentle river with eucalypts leaning over us and the setting sun dying the sky pink and orange. The water was quite shallow for the most part, so shallow, in fact, that we frequently got stuck and had to perform a really inelegant combination of scootching and shimmying and prying to get ourselves back into deeper water. Right off the bat, however, Sook managed to find a deep part of the river and promptly discovered that she can’t swim. Not liking to be far away from Tina, she spent the rest of the trip running madly down the bank, trying to leap over the shrubs and low-hanging branches but more frequently smacking into things chest-first and doing somersaults like some kind of klutzy canine acrobat. Tina finally pulled up and man-handled Sook onto her kayak, and the pooch spent the rest of the trip down river standing proudly on the prow like George Washington crossing the Delaware, effectively preventing Tina from seeing or steering. 

After this first week, my callouses have started to pull their weight, my farmer’s tan is alive and well, and my boots most definitely no longer look new. But most importantly, I think I’m starting to fall in love with station life - the camaraderie, the work, the open spaces and the smells and the peace, the simple fact that a perfect river can appear one day to carve a rusted track through the bush and disappear the next, the sky that feels close enough to whisper secrets in your ear. I can’t wait to see what else Lyndon has in store for me.

Exmouth: The Beginning of the Middle of Nowhere

I finally made it to Exmouth. Now, given that I was traveling by plane, and not by covered wagon, or camel, or, god-forbid, foot, this shouldn’t be that big of an accomplishment. True, there are only about 4 flights a week up here, and true, the airport is simply the most adorable little airport that I have ever laid eyes on, but still, it is a 2 hour flight in a relatively straight line in the comfort of a (fairly) modern jet. However, this does not take into account that the gods did not want someone on that plane to get here. If I was a more superstitious person, I would have cut and run. As it was, I stubbornly refuse to believe in my own mortality, and just kept up my running mantra of “this is not how I am going to die” (more on that later). Funny that this follows my last entry waxing poetic about the joys of flying in Australia; while my enthusiasm remains undiminished, the irony does not escape me. 

'Modern'

See, they got a big storm in Exmouth. And by big, I mean 240 mm of water in 24 hours. I don’t know what that means in real numbers, and I’m too lazy to look it up, but it sounds like a lot, and everyone certainly treated it like a lot. We took off on Saturday, despite the dire warnings of rain, got halfway to Exmouth, executed a pretty turn, and flew right back to Perth. The little Beanie Baby of an airport up north had closed due to extensive flooding. From the way people were talking about it, I think the town of Exmouth almost got washed away. To the everlasting credit of the airline I was flying on (I refuse to give open endorsements; let’s just say that this airline is the opposite of a porn star), they not only put us up in a swanky hotel in the heart of Perth, they also gave us free meals and cab vouchers to and from the airport. America, once again, your airlines are being put to shame. I decided that this meant I should take a vacation from my vacation, and spent an indulgent afternoon going to the gym, luxuriating in a steam room, ordering room service, taking a bath, and walking around in the hotel bathrobe because I could, dammit. I then attempted to occupy the entirety of the king size bed while I slept, because on the rare occasions when I am confronted with a king size bed, I feel a moral obligation to make sure that no part of it feels neglected. I also used all the complimentary tea bags in the room, and stole all the bath products, as payback for them tempting me with absurdly expensive minibar items that I didn’t really need. If I had had room in my backpack, I may have taken the bathrobe. Sadly, it didn’t fit, and I thought they might notice if I tied it to the outside of the pack like a rain flap. 

Bein' fancy

Our plucky little band of travelers arrived back at the airport Sunday morning, full of hopes and dreams of perhaps actually making it to Exmouth this time. Everything seemed promising - we had our little safety demonstration, we were ordered to turn off our electrical devices, all the babies on the plane started their pre-takeoff caterwauling - and then the plane admitted defeat and turned back to the terminal. A problem with the fuel pump injector. Not a clue what that does, but it has fuel in its name so I would rather it was fully operational. After a delay while the ‘engineer’ ‘looked at’ the thingymajigger, we got queued up for take two. This time, a passenger got violently ill, and we again headed back to the terminal while a truly remarkable number of medics and assorted other personnel flooded the plane and we listened to the dulcet sounds of someone hurling in the bathroom. We all had a nice panic that maybe this was something communicable, until the rumor started circulating that the gentleman in question was just supremely hungover, and then we all snickered behind our hands while he was escorted off the plane. Take 3. We actually take off…and turn around and come back to the airport, because that pesky little fuel pump is apparently still not working. So much for the engineer. At this point, we’re a pretty tightly knit group, with a somewhat fatalistic outlook. The girl in front of me is debating the merits of renting a car and driving. The lady across from me is starting to voice concerns that the flight is cursed. The gentleman behind me can’t stop laughing. They remove us from the plane, and we all have time to sit in the terminal and think about whether we really want to go to Exmouth. Needless to say, when we get onto a new plane, roughly 4 hours after we were initially supposed to take off, we’re all a little skeptical. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief once the beverage service starts, as if this act of hospitality confirms that we are actually going to make it this time. I was a little disappointed that we were not welcomed with champagne and balloons when we finally arrived in Learmonth airport. Instead, we just wandered in to the little toy poodle of an airport (one room, that serves as terminal and security and baggage claim and rental car desk), were strictly warned not to take pictures (it’s an active Royal Australian Air Force base), and told that many of the roads were still closed due to flooding. 

Shh...don't tell them I took a pic of the airport!

So that is why I am quite pleased with myself for actually making it to Exmouth. 

The rest of my time on this remote spit of land has been much less adventurous than getting up here. I treated myself to a rental car and drove down the coast 120 kms to the beautiful, TINY town of Coral Bay. I have clearly been much too influenced by my Southern California upbringing, because I really do worship at the altar of the automobile. I was so pleased, so ecstatic, when I got behind the wheel of that car, I thought I was going to burst through the windshield. I have bought all the hype, and I truly did feel free, unstoppable, the wind on my tail fins and the sun gleaming off the chrome and all that. It helps that the drive down to Coral Bay is stunning and desolate. I don’t have the vocabulary, I’ve discovered, to describe this landscape, so please bear with me as I bumble along, and confuse my dunes with my mesas and my limestone with my sandstone. In any case, picture an endless sea of red and brown, rising and falling gently in small mounds, covered in low scraggly bushes and threatening grasses that seem nearly gray close up but in the distance are almost sparkling in their greenness, with an occasional gum tree standing sentinel on a lonely hill, all unfurling below a sky that is so blue that the clouds seem lost in it, and right through the middle of this runs a solitary road, no buildings, no outposts, just a two-lane road disappearing into the horizon, shimmering in the heat. The drive is something like that. Even here, relatively close to civilization, and nowhere near the oppression of the outback, it is palpable how quickly this land could kill you, just swallow you up without a sound. I saw 2 cars in the 2 hours that I was driving, and there is not a hint of cell service or any of that nonsense. It would be a long, hot, thirsty wait if your car broke down. On the plus side, there are massive quantities of sheep, frequently in the middle of the road, so depending on your speed, agility, and bloodlust, those could keep you going for a while. 

Yep, I was standing in the middle of the road. Nope, this wasn't a problem.

I spent nearly 2 days in the town of Coral Bay, although town may be a bit of an overstatement. Sans tourists, I believe the population is about 30. I am not exaggerating. The town consists of one road, along which is arrayed a hostel, 2 (!) caravan parks, a resort, a dive shop, and a general store. That’s all you get. God forbid you run out of gas in Coral Bay, because I’m fairly certain that even as basic an amenity as a petrol station eluded this tiny hamlet. I’m not even sure how Coral Bay managed to come into being; the obvious explanation is the fantastic beach and easy access to Ningaloo Reef, a fringing reef that runs for 250 km up the northwest coast of Australia, but given that the rest of the coast seems equally superlative, and completely uninhabited, I’m not sure what really set Coral Bay apart. In any case, it’s a lovely little town, perhaps assisted by the fact that it’s just such a shock to find it there at all. There are barely any signs, you just pull off the ‘highway’, such as it is, onto a smaller road, bump along for some 15 km, and then suddenly, oops, there’s a caravan park and people are walking down the middle of the street and there’s sparkling blue water off to your right. I continue to be amazed and pleased every time I see the ocean up here; it just seems so out of place. All this arid, desolate scrubland, rust-stained and thirsty, and then boom! Water and white sand beaches and the general feel of a tropical paradise crossed with a deserted island. It never fails to be a pleasant surprise. 

My wee little tent

Much to the delight of the part of me that likes to pretend to be self-sufficient, I camped for my two nights in Coral Bay. This was fairly cushy, as I had a car to keep all my things in, a nice shower block not 50 meters away, and a restaurant and pub at the resort. But still, camping! Roughing it! I continue to be inordinately proud of myself when I manage to set up my tent in less than 10 minutes. My tent is a cute little number, just a quarter dome big enough for one person, and quite comfortable. It looked like a dollhouse compared to everything around me. Australians are very serious about their camping. Without even getting into the size and complexity of the caravans, the ‘tents’ are a wonder to behold. They look like structural installations; I without a doubt know people that are currently living in smaller NYC apartments than those tents. They had multiple rooms and foyers, antennae sticking out of them like command posts, and quite frankly I wouldn’t be surprised to find full beds inside of them. I tried to explain to my tent that size doesn’t matter, but I don’t think it believed me.

My main purpose for being in Coral Bay, other than proving to myself that I was capable of camping, was to dive on the Ningaloo Reef. This reef is host to over 200 different kinds of coral, and is rich with all the associated sea creatures that like warm, protected waters. Having learned my lesson on the Great Barrier Reef, I doped myself up with delicious sea-sickness tablets and got on the boat. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that sea-sickness tablets make me dumb. Not sleepy, as I had been warned, just very very stupid. I don’t think I could have told my right from my left if asked (perhaps not a great example, I’m not very good at that under the best of circumstances). It’s a miracle I remembered how to breathe at all, let alone breathe underwater. Luckily by the second dive of the day, the tablets had worn off, and I was capable of actually enjoying myself. I’ve already waxed pretty poetic about the Great Barrier Reef, so in an effort to not repeat myself, I will just say that this was the same, except better. Now, before people panic about this sacrilege against the Great Barrier, let me say that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of dive sites on the Great Barrier Reef, and I only saw 3 of those, 3 that are among the most frequented by tourists. I am sure there are parts of the Great Barrier that could blow Ningaloo out of the water (no pun intended, amazingly), but for the few sites I visited, Ningaloo simply looks a little less ravaged, a little more pristine. I saw coral that looked like alien beings, like giant vases and bowls, like the bony fingers of a polydactyl witch wearing blue nail polish. Sweeping schools of fish, moray eels peeking out from rocks, octopi pretending that if they didn’t move they would be invisible, and reef sharks swimming around with their mouths open while tiny fearless fish cleaned their teeth. All of this, less than a kilometer from shore.

Underwater photography is hard.

Turtle!

While I was in this trip for the dives, the actual name of our tour was Manta Ray Interaction. Between dives, we got to swim with manta rays, which in case you aren’t familiar, are bloody big rays, about 4.5 meters (I’ll do the math on that one for you, about 15 feet) from tip to tip. ‘Swim with’, however, is a very subjective term. These things are fast, powerful, and effortlessly graceful. Human beings, particularly in the water, are not. So when you put 10 humans on the back of a boat, and command them to quietly enter the water and swim as fast, but as silently, as possible towards a spotter who is hovering above, and attempting to keep pace with, the moving manta ray, you have a recipe for disaster. A loud, sloppy, damp disaster. Bodies went flopping into water, fins and elbows went flying, the ocean around the boat became a sea of bubbles, people thumped through the sea like dogs missing 3 legs, frantically swimming back and forth attempting to find, catch up to, or keep pace with this giant, magnificent creature who must have wondered what the hell it had done to deserve this. What does a ray have to do to eat in peace? Visibility wasn’t great underwater, so we must have looked perfectly ridiculous as we stuck our masks in the water, swam frantically for 5 or 10 meters in one direction while trying to dodge the fins of the person in front of us, popped our heads up like awkward aquatic groundhogs, realized that the rest of the group had fled in a different direction, and hurriedly splashed off that way, only to realize that we were wrong once again. It was like synchronized swimming being performed by chubby blind 3 year olds who didn’t know how to swim. That said, once I realized that it was pointless to try to keep up with the ray, and much easier to just float lazily on the surface and watch it swim in gentle figure-eights below me, the experience was quite lovely. It is powerful, and humbling, to watch something that large loom out of the murk below you and glide by with such astonishing elegance. Especially when compared with the slapstick ballet that was occurring on the surface. 

No pictures of floundering snorkelers, sorry.

After the simple beauty of Coral Bay, I have to confess that I wasn’t quite ready for Exmouth. Not that Exmouth is much bigger, it’s only about 2500 strong, but it is certainly the more well-known, and therefore touristy, town. Even by Australian standards, Exmouth is a baby - the town came into being in the 60’s, after a naval base was put in and they realized that they needed some place to provide basic amenities for the military families that had been stuck on this side of nowhere. To my complete delight, the military base is named after Harold E. Holt, who, as any reader of Bill Bryson knows (Bryson wrote what I have considered my Australian bible, In a Sunburnt Country), is the prime minister that went for a swim and promptly disappeared. To this day, no one knows what happened to him. Sadly, the base is not named for him because of this particular ability to render himself extinct, but because he was instrumental in its founding. My first night in Exmouth, while I still had the wonder that is a car, I camped just past this naval base on the very edge of the country, beneath a light house and WW2-era radar tower. I took advantage of my mobility to drive a little ways along the coast, pulling up on beaches that allowed me to pretend that I was a castaway. I have trouble fathoming how empty this land is, how devoid of people. I have visited 4 beaches in the vicinity of Exmouth, and I have never shared one with a single person. While on the beach closest to town, a fair number of 4 wheel drive vehicles blew past, but no one invaded my little sun-bathing sphere. The beaches up by the lighthouse were exceptional, isolated and prehistoric, with huge craggy rocks rising up like mountains, complete with vast gorges and crystalline pools, but all done in miniature, not more than 3 or 4 feet tall. There were endless swatches of flat, smooth gray stone, holding countless tide pools, each teeming with life. I still get pretty excited every time I see a shell move - while I logically know that little animals live in them, it’s hard for me to shake the feeling that they’re just decorative, ornamental objects. I spent far too long watching minuscule hermit crabs make the difficult journey across inches of sand. On one of the beaches, there were even fossilized imprints of long dead coral in the rocks. And all of this, not to mention miles of white sand beaches dotted with bits of coral and stunning shells, jutted up incongruously out of that red waste. It felt like another planet. This, to come full circle, was where my mantra changed to “this IS how I am going to die”, because between the threat of snakes in the scrubby parts, and stonefish, cone shells, and jellyfish in the ocean-y parts, not to mention the utter lack of any human being within shouting distance, I was too scared to really touch anything lest it unexpectedly hit me with a toxic cocktail. Needless to say, I survived. 

I wasn't afraid of my buddy Mr. Crab here

Today, I returned to Harold E Holt Naval Base to dive beneath the Navy Pier. This is apparently one of the top-rated dive sites in the world, and I can see why. Access is very limited, due to the fact that it’s still an operating military base, which means that it has an air of exclusivity, and, for whatever reason, there is a vast congregation of marine life around the base of the pier. I have seen a few reef sharks now on my dives here, but never this many, and never this close. Sharks circling, dozing on the bottom, drifting past, completely uninterested in us but so close you could touch them. There were also giant groupers, we’re talking 2+ meters here, that were so friendly they would come and bump into you, the biggest damn ‘crayfish’ (seriously, this thing was bigger than my head) I’ve ever seen, and a wobbegong shark, which is like an oceanic carpet, just chilling on the ocean floor, looking exactly like a bunch of algae-covered rocks. Schools of fish would just enclose you, and everything was completely fearless. It almost felt as if the fish were eyeballing you, posing for pictures if and only if they decided they liked you. 

Tomorrow, I am trading sharks for snakes, kangaroos, and whatever else the outback wants to throw at me. I am heading for a cattle station in precisely the middle of nowhere. It’s a little odd to contemplate going completely off the grid. To a large extent, technology has made this trip simple, both practically and emotionally; I wasn’t really aware of how invested I was in my phone until faced with the fact that it’s about to become a glorified paperweight. But somehow the outback wouldn’t be the outback if I had access to Facebook. 

'Straya (that's the Australian version of 'Merica)

For my going away dinner, I was offered some freshly caught fish by my new roommate. She had caught, gutted, and filleted this fish (a Spangled Emperor perhaps? Whatever it was, it was bloody huge), and now chucked it on the communal barby. The men in the grilling area looked on in wonder, and one older gent leaned over to me and said confidentially, “That’s what we call a keeper.” I think I just saw the essence of Australia, and it’s 5’2” and sunburned. Not a bad send off before I head into that Red Waste. 

Interlude: An Ode to Australian Airports

At first, I was terrified. Why has no one asked for my ID? How do you know I actually AM Katie Rose Reynolds, and not some evil megalomaniacal impostor (I’m afraid to use the terr**ist word in conjunction with airports, even when simply writing about them. TSA, you have won)? What do you mean, I don’t have to take my shoes off? And I can keep my water in my bottle? But what if it’s explosive water! Why are you all smiling at me, and not brandishing guns and attack dogs? I carefully packed those tiny 3 ounce containers in a ziplock bag, you damn well better look at them!

Then, I was bemused. You mean to say that we’re going to board through the front and rear doors? How quick and efficient you are! You even trust us to walk out to the quaint little stairs that lead up to the back door, you devils you. And what is this strange music that you play in the plane before take off and after landing? No, I did not know that “The Best Aphrodisiac Is Loneliness”; thank you Australian airplane muzak for teaching me new things. Clearly, you don’t know that you’re supposed to feed me stale pretzels, or, preferably, nothing at all. While I am delighted by this chocolate mousse with raspberry sauce, I somehow feel that you just didn’t get the memo, and at any moment you may rip it out of my hands. Pardon me if I clutch it to my breast and eat it in greedy mouthfuls while allowing my eyes to dart furtively at anyone who comes to close. 

Then, I fell in love, because you, Australian airports, actually allow families to say goodbye to each other at the gates, and greet each other, with all the hugs and tears and balloons and banners that this implies, at the gates. Arriving and departing, I feel like I’m living in Love Actually, and we all know that anyone who says they don’t like that movie is lying. Australian airports, you are doing it right, and thank you for reminding me that airports are not actually an alternate circle of soul-sucking hell, but places of homecoming and adventure and chocolate mousse. Now please give me another pudding cup.