I learned something this week (this is a gross understatement, I learnt many things this week, but only one is relevant to the story at hand) - my feet are remarkably uncoordinated, or at the very least, do not seem to enjoy a healthy level of conversation with my hands or my brain. They seem perfectly well-suited to walking, but give them something more complex to do and they panic and try to hide in my shoes. Normally, this isn’t much of a problem for me, as I don’t make many demands upon my feet, but this week, I required them to help me learn how to ride a motorbike, and I discovered that they are bad students.
Motorbikes are an important part of Lyndon Station - there’s a whole shed full of them, everyone knows how to ride one, and they are used to muster the cattle. Also, they’re just good for a ride around the bush. They’re such an integral part, in fact, that Sean had just returned from town with a kid’s bike in order for Leslie, Molly, and Griff to start learning. So when Tina offered me a lesson, I figured I had better jump on it; the kids were already zipping around the yard like little Evil Knievels, and it seemed silly to be afraid of something that they made look so easy. Besides, I ride a (pedal) bike around NYC, which is just complete insanity - this had to be easier. Of course, what I wasn’t taking into consideration is that 1) children are naturally hardy and fearless, which I should have been aware of after I attempted to climb a tree, inspired by the kids’ monkey-like acrobatics, and promptly fell out, bruising both my bottom and my pride, and 2) NYC streets, while littered with cars and people and…litter, are paved, and relatively flat, and generally don’t involve sandy embankments and river crossings.
But I am nothing if not stubborn, so once Tina had given me a basic rundown of which parts made it stop and which made it go, I clambered on, and almost fell over in surprise when I started the engine. I don’t know what I was expecting, but my delicate sensibilities were offended by how loud it was, and how much it vibrated. All I could imagine was going about 5 feet and then having the thing topple over and pin me underneath like the small kid at the bottom of a school-yard dog-pile. To my credit, I did not fall over, but did, however, go around the oval we were on in fits and starts of roaring, confused engine. My right hand, never having been called upon to control a throttle before, was not exactly smooth, and alternately gunned it and pulled back almost to the point of stalling. Once I had finished my wobbly circuit, I pulled up next to Tina and promptly stalled, a recurring theme of my afternoon, and apparently my preferred method of stopping. She asked me how it was, and I replied with perhaps a bit more enthusiasm than I felt, given that that slow and stately ride in a circle had sent my adrenaline pumping through the imaginary roof. But Tina took me at my word, and suggested that I should go down the ‘driveway’ next (please note: the driveway is a 3 kilometer packed-dirt road, leading to a separate, but indistinguishable, packed-dirt road). She told me if I wasn’t back in 15 minutes, she would assume I fell over and needed help and would come looking for me. Great. I took one more stuttering, leisurely turn around the oval, and then went crazy and put it into second gear (I had already determined that it was asking far too much for me to change gears while turning; this requires a level of coordination far beyond my wildest dreams). The driveway is relatively straight, and after a bit I decided that maybe this wasn’t so bad, and started going up through the gears. And then, suddenly, I got it. It was incredible - the wind was whistling past my helmet, and I felt swift and light and like a part of the bush. I even, in a moment of recklessness that I congratulated myself on afterwards, managed to look around for a quick moment, instead of staring fixedly at the dirt in front of me in an effort to will it not to leap up and attack me. I executed a slow turn at the end of the driveway, for some reason checking for traffic before I did so, and gunned it back to the cattle yards. I could get used to this, I thought, just before I stopped/stalled in front of Tina.
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| Completely unrelated - I can't take pics and ride at the same time! |
For my next trick, Tina and I went for a ride. That is, Tina cruised along at a mercifully slow, and presumably, for her, painfully boring pace, and checked back frequently to make sure that I hadn’t fallen off my bike somewhere behind her. She took me to an area where I could practice going up and down embankments and avoiding trees and rocks. My horse phase when I was younger finally paid off in that, while I have barely been on horseback, given that the only things my lungs hate more than cats are horses, I at least intellectually understood what Tina meant when she told me that I had to think of my body as an extension of the bike, and move with it. I got so caught up, in fact, in moving with the bike, that I took an uphill embankment much too fast and ended up soaring through the air (ok, soaring may be an overstatement, but both wheels definitely left the ground). I was so surprised that I simply landed and kept right on going, almost as if I had intended to do it; luckily, the helmet obscured my face pretty well, because I imagine my expression was one for the ages. Tina had stopped, I presume to see if I was ok, but I breezed past her, partly because I was fine, but mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to downshift fast enough to stop. After that, we took off through the bush, which was both incredible, and incredibly terrifying. I am not too proud to admit that my forearms hurt the next day from the sheer tenacity with which I was hanging on to the handlebars; in hindsight, I’m not sure why I was holding on for dear life - it’s not like the handlebars would have protected me if a tree decided to jump in front of me. My lack of finesse aside, the ride was gorgeous; you truly do feel more aware of everything around you, the scrub sailing past you, the dirt crunching beneath the tire, the birds flocking against the sky. I have no idea how you would chase down an angry bull on one, but for a joyride through the bush, nothing can beat it. Just before getting back to the homestead, we had to cross a river (the same one we had kayaked down a week or two before). We had already forged one, and it had seemed fairly straightforward, so I wasn’t sure why Tina had warned me about this one. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t the river that was problematic, it was the sand banks on the other side. Bikes don’t like sand, and while motorbikes are much more tolerant than regular bikes, there is a limit; the limit, apparently, is an unskilled rider trying to navigate a narrow track through a few feet of sand in first gear. As already established, shifting gears required an intensity of thought that precluded any other activity occurring at the same time, so I was incapable of getting out of first gear, even though I knew more speed would make this easier. Instead, I zigzagged merrily back and forth between the banks of either side of the track, running into one, stalling, pulling myself out, then promptly running into the other side and stalling again. The only reason I didn’t end up laying in the sand with a bike on top of me was because I kept my feet inches from the ground the entire time, to serve as emergency kickstands whenever the need arose, which was roughly every 3 seconds. Tina watched my pinballing progress from the driveway, presumably laughing her ass off, although to her credit she had a very straight face on when I finally made it across.
As much as it was completely nerve-wracking, it was also unbelievably exhilarating, and filled me with a strange sense of accomplishment, not that I’d conquered the bike (far from it, it totally won that round), but that I had conquered some element of fear in myself. By pretending that I was ready to be a bad-ass, I’d actually managed to do something pretty bad-ass. I was so adrenaline-high when I got back that I almost didn’t understand what Naomi and Patty were talking about when they told me there was a snake in the classroom. Apparently, a small python had taken up winter residence in there, and while it was not particularly thrilled to be manhandled again, it obligingly squeezed out what little strength I had left in my hand for a photo op. We then returned it to its spot under a blanket in the classroom, at Cath’s insistence, making it possibly the coolest classroom pet of all time.
Most of the week has been dedicated to a small muster, with Sean and the crew bringing in around 1000 head of cattle. Sadly, my bike riding talents eliminated me from being able to do anything other than briefly watch part of the muster; however, in that brief watching, I got to see the insanity that is a gyrocopter, so I considered it a win. A gyrocopter, as far as I can tell, is a deckchair with a tail behind and a rotor on top. It looks a bit like a Victorian-era flying machine, as if it dates from the same time when they thought a bicycle with one giant wheel and one tiny wheel was a good idea. It is not assisted in this impression by the way it takes off, because the only thing missing to make it part of an old-timey movie is some jaunty instrumental music and some exclamatory title cards. It charges down the runway, its little rotors churning pluckily, looking like it might just have to settle for pretending to fly, when suddenly it jumps into the air like a fish caught on a hook; unsettlingly, it also appears to bank and shimmy much like a fish out of water. This thing can swoop so low, and turn so sharply, that it seems a miracle that the pilot doesn’t just fall out; those must be some serious straps holding that deck chair in place. Watching it land is nothing short of horrifying, as it crashes in like a kamikaze set on blowing a hole in the middle of the outback and then zooms and bumps down the runway until it’s finally brought into check by the pilot. It seemed more like riding a winged bucking bronco than flying an aircraft. Jimmy, the pilot, seemed like a nice, soft-spoken man; after watching the gyro in action, I have come to the conclusion that he’s a lunatic.
Once the cattle were in the yard, Sean was wonderful about bringing me into the process. He is a huge proponent of stress-free cattle management, and is remarkably knowledgable about how to get the cattle to do what you want, without scaring them completely out of what little wits they have. To his credit as well, every time I startled a cow, he explained to me what I did wrong and what I needed to do instead, rather than just kicking me out of the yards. I spent a good amount of time tallying cattle, which led me to start considering myself the cattle accountant - all I was missing was the visor and a pencil stuck behind my ear. I also assisted with rolling out bales of hay, which I was shocked to discover are unbelievably heavy and unwieldy, particularly when you’re being crowded by hungry cattle that don’t even bother to wait until you have the plastic netting off before they dig in. Perhaps what I enjoyed the most, though, was watching Sean, Tina, and Ruben work - it’s a pleasure to observe people who are so confident in what they are doing, that are in such harmony with their environment; also, I felt a bit like I was in a Western, which was easier to imagine when I wasn’t actively involved in losing battles of will with the cattle.
Sunday on the station is a day of rest, which we all desperately required this week to recover from our camping-induced hangovers. This was a slightly more involved camping trip than the previous week, as the Lyndon staff was being joined by a few workers from a neighboring station; by involved, I mean drunken. We camped in a different spot, with a similar, but larger, group of red boulders nearby from which we could watch the sunset. Naomi and I decided to get things off to a healthy start by taking a couple beers and going to explore this new mound of rock. We were quickly rewarded by finding multiple kangaroo carcasses; if I had not had the mixed blessing of alcohol, I imagine I would have found the whole thing rather creepy, like a set-up for a kangaroo-zombie movie. Instead, I just took a photo of Naomi taking a selfie with a kangaroo skeleton. We also took some excellent Lion King inspired photos, because the landscape just seemed to demand it.
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| The circle of life, ladies and gents, with a rock appearing as Simba. |
I had arranged to borrow Patty’s swag before we left, so that Naomi could sleep in my tent in peace. A swag, as far as I can tell, is an uniquely Australian creation - part sleeping bag, part tent, utterly impractical to carry, but divine to sleep in. Basically, it’s a big canvas sack with a thin mattress, like a futon pad, on the bottom, generally with a sleeping bag and pillow thrown on top. You can tie the top off to something, a tree branch or a ute or the like, and form a little tent over your head, so that the swag isn’t actively engaged in suffocating you while you sleep. The overall shape ends up looking like a roomy body bag. The classy ones, like Patty’s, have a zippable mesh screen inside of the canvas, so that you can still enjoy the stars while avoiding the mozzie menace. On the one hand, I still don’t really understand swags, because once you roll them up like a fat sausage, they are bulky, heavy, and completely impossible to carry unless you are traveling with a ute; on the other hand, it may have become my new favorite way to sleep. I had all the protection of a tent, but with an added degree of snugness from the proximity of the canvas. I could feel the breeze as I drifted off, and when I woke up, I could watch the sunrise over the horizon without even lifting my head.
I’m finding it hard to end this post, finding it hard to end the Lyndon chapter. I haven’t even touched on so many of the things that made Lyndon so special - talking to the gecko that lived in my wardrobe, playing games in the kitchen, watching sunset from the verandah, having heart-to-hearts while rolling out barb wire, enjoying a beer after a long hot day and feeling like part of something bigger than myself. I believe Lyndon, both the station and the people, taught me more about myself than any other experience since college. There is no good way to end it, so I think I just won’t - I’m leaving a piece of myself with you, Lyndon, and in exchange, I’m taking a piece of you with me. I promise to take good care of it.
In Loving Memory of Sook
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