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.