Earthrise Diary 209

The Earthrise Diary

Don Diespecker

Jumble to mix in a confused mass; put or throw together without order. –Syn. Muddle, hodgepodge; mess; chaos.
The Random House College Dictionary

February is usually my favourite month. Generally, the weather continues to be hot and humid; but I like the four weeks because of the changed light: it’s softer and has an end-of-summer glow that’s distinctively different from the harsher glare of midsummer. And February is quieter, too, because the school holidays are over and gardening is more enjoyable and sitting in the shade catching up with the summer reading or watching the brown fruit pigeons in the bleeding heart trees is relaxing for me. Most of February 2009 has, as usual, been hot and humid and without rain: careful hand watering of particular plants was necessary. On Friday Feb 13, however, the rains eventually came: a monsoonal depression dumped huge amounts of rain here and primed the river for flooding. The forerunners of the flood arrived on Monday, February 16 and on the 17th the area was well and truly flooded, the Plains Crossing Bridge invisible beneath metres of the river.
Sometimes, late in the summer, I realize that the spangled drongos have been absent because they suddenly return and for a few days their raucous calls can be heard and then there’s silence. The birds will not then return until next September. This February, however, the drongos became silent in January and have not been heard since. Also, water dragon activity has been infrequent and I’ve seen very little of them through the summer (although they were friendly enough in the spring). –But, following the flood, the dragons have reappeared on the debris that I’ve thrown down from the Belvedere (down there, they’re literally on the river). Perhaps the birds and dragons were examples of signs or portents because the hot and humid summer changed dramatically and wet weather has predominated. The cooler wet weather continues and it seems possible that another flood may eventuate. In Bellingen I heard accounts of homes being flooded and parts of the town being isolated by flooding. Later, there was an announcement that Bellingen had been declared a natural disaster area (one implication being that (Government) emergency funding will be made available. Damage here has been minimal with one exception: large stacks of logs and other debris have created chaos along my river frontage and I’m unable to move much of it.
The Belvedere is almost back to basics having had the river over it (the river then burying it with logs and other debris that floated into Earthrise and was then prevented from floating out again, although some debris did float out as the flood descended). Flooding of this splendid serpentine river is not unusual and I’ve lost count of the floods that have visited here. Some rare floods scarcely break the river’s banks; others are monstrously big and frightening. Later, and when this flood had peaked and fallen, I looked at the damage; however, at the time of the flood’s rising and with the peak a great unknown, the flooding experience was very unpleasant indeed because it’s never possible to predict how high the torrent will be.

The flood had risen during the night. At first light the big river looks unusual as it roars through the morning mist: the water is chocolate-brown and loaded with suspended solids. The smell of the floods here is unmistakable: as the river rises onto the banks there’s a strange sweet-and-sour smell (not unpleasant). Waves run fast along the centre-stream and logs of all shapes and sizes bob and swirl. The midstream is like a horizontal waterfall and it rushes past at an unusual speed. At night, and with the rain coming down hard on the corrugated iron roof there’s no visible sign of the torrent only a few metres away, there’s often an eerie silence when the flood is high: the river is too full to make significant sounds when surging high above the usually noisy rapids; the flood may already have peaked or there may be a lot more to come. To say that this is a worrying time conveys nothing at all: hours before and with the road threatening to also become a flooding river the car was driven safely to high ground. In a rising flood there’s a swelling creek between the house and the carport; the driveway to the gate is under water and torrents pour down from gullies behind and above the house; more torrents flood into the road from the West End garden; tonnes of water pour from the flooding Deer Park paddocks and spill into Darkwood Road directly opposite my gate; there’s an increasingly dangerous gap between the concrete swale and the road proper: it pays to get the car out early. With storm waters and newly inspired creeks pouring into Darkwood Road and the rising river flooding into and up the road, the road itself becomes a 1-m deep torrent; the car must be got out early. These waters meet turbulently in front of my house and frequently destroy the road and add to the flooding of the gardens and not being able to see any of this in the dark is sometimes as much a blessing as it is a curse. On this occasion, the road was saved from destruction (as always, the approach on the far side of the bridge was washed out and later repaired by neighbours from Dreamtime who used a tractor to fill the gap). And at night it’s possible to see glow-worms in the timber retaining wall behind the house and to see, also, luminous fungi glowing on trees close by. Once the flood has peaked and the rain has stopped the river begins to change colour again: from brown to cloudy pale green. Over the next few days the stream is wonderfully clean and it becomes a slightly more distinctive green.

(When I was 9 or 10 I was given, as a Christmas present, a game based on a collection of skewer-like sticks popularly known as ‘Fiddlesticks.’ One clasped the bundled sticks then opened the hand allowing the sticks to fall in a heap. The game’s winner was the one who could pick up the most sticks without disturbing the rest of the muddle. I was reminded of that old game while clearing flood debris from the Belvedere).
I’ve been writing an essay about the Belvedere (notice that the place is important enough to me for it to have an upper case ‘B’). I’d not intended to write quite so much (nearly 7-k words so far and still growing), but fascinating themes arise and beg to be discussed. The writing, however, has been rudely interrupted by the need to clean and recover the area. There are several big logs that are too heavy to move; they have to be axed into manageable chunks (fortunately for me, these logs can be dismembered because they’re decaying). The logs sit atop a tangle of branches and other debris (these have buoyed the settling logs against crushing all the plants in the area). I salvage poles from the flood and use them as ramps and get the log pieces over the wall and down toward the water without too much damage to the wall). I use the garden fork to lift debris and toss it riverward and both the steel rake and the (plastic) bamboo-style grass rake to lift almost all the fine material and dispose of it. There had been about 10 bleeding heart tree seedlings in the loam that I used to level the area (and into which I also planted a particular kind of grass, cloned from older plants in Big Lawn; these grasses had arrived in the 2001 flood as gifts of the river). Although there’s a healthy young red cedar growing in the centre of the Belvedere I wanted to keep the one or two seedlings that seemed the strongest (these trees live on the fringes of the rainforest and will grow 2 to 3-m in a good season; the fruit pigeons and several other species thrive on the little green seeds). After carefully clearing and even more carefully forking and raking the grass I was able to find and protect two of these seedlings. (A wild tomato plant that had started flowering in the new loam was crushed and has since died, but a red salvia plant (wild) that was flattened has allowed itself to be raised again and propped, as has a new grevillea hookeriana. The Belvedere supporting wall is undamaged except for some minor displacements and the whole wall looks as good as new. Clearing on and around, by hand, took about 20 hours. Although I know that snakes may be found in crevices and probably also inside the Belvedere’s walls, no snakes appeared. There were two other creatures, however, that I avoided. I met three funnel web spiders (one a magnificently big female and highly dangerous) and warrior bull ants (many of whom can leap tall buildings in a single bound in their quests to subdue humans). There are several species of these big ants (all almost an inch long); the two I’m most familiar with are either red-brown or black and their bites are instantly painful. I seldom wear gloves so my fingers are regularly attacked and the pain lasts for about 24 hours. A tip for flood workers: bull ants survive comfortably beneath the barks of logs (perhaps in bubbles of air while rafting or logging their ways through a watery world). Bubbles of air protect underground ants too, or so I understand, when floodwaters inundate ant country.
Clearing the Belvedere wasn’t too difficult; it was time consuming. A few metres downstream it’s a different story: a very big stack of logs and debris has been dumped on top of the bank and covers a densely packed area to a height of nearly 2-m and extends another 4-m or so to the water). This jumble contains logs (some of them 500-600-mm dia.) that I have no hope of moving (more about this in following Diaries).
To explain the flooding of my gardens and Big Lawn: Earthrise is always flooded indirectly when the flooded river hits the hillside 50-m downstream, ‘rebounds’ and, with parts whirl-pooling midstream and other parts flowing back upstream to ‘my’ corner of the river, the in-coming backflow, carrying tonnes of logs and debris, bursts into the gardens when the flood level reaches the same level in the gardens. When the flood peaks and the rain stops, the floating tangles of logs/debris move back toward the river (a much-reduced proportion returns to the river); most of what is dumped here will have failed to move as fast as the floodwaters draining back to the Bellinger, hence the big stacks of logs and debris. A higher than usual proportion of logs, I noted, had recently been chain-sawed (‘old’ or decaying logs can often be broken up with an axe and returned to the river; more recently cut timber, being green, is hard and resilient and removing such material from a stack is virtually impossible without mechanical equipment such as a bulldozer, tractor, Bobcat or a front end loader).

Apologies for the hastily written and haphazard editing of this Diary (floods have this effect on diarists). –And I’d intended writing more, but this is a short month and I’ve chosen to suspend my usual work programs in order to do as much of the cleanup as possible. I’d hoped to mow down the dreaded broad blade grass because it will now seed prolifically, as it always does every March. Maybe I’ll get the grass next year.

I’m including here a short piece that was published in the Australian Gestalt Journal (2000) 4(2), pp 28-29 (parts of it may be relevant to the current Flood Season).

© text Don Diespecker 200/2009

Looknsee
O that wondrous thing seeing not looking necessarily just simply seeing because it’s a given maybe a godgiven right anyway I remember seeing a film on TV or was I watching & sort of trying to study the flowing action all those little bits at 24 frames a sec jerkily made into a flow by my quirky perceiving anyway in this film an artist was explaining some beautiful things shed made one of them was the stage of a tiny theatre open to us & complete with proscenium arch & wings & a set so you could look down into it & although yes I could see all of it or so I thought I really could not see anything like all of it it just isnt possible unless I get really close into such a thing & suddenly achieve a flys compound eye view because if I could do that then Id see it all every nook & cranny & if you think on what Ive written here that your reading now dear reader please notice that while you can see the whole page you cant read the whole page at a glance & neither can you see let alone read the other side of the whole page if you see what I mean & now if you will please imagine sitting where you are possibly inside a room youll agree Im sure that you simply cant see the entire room in which you are at any time just you try & see the ceiling while looking down at the page something a fly could do without thinking & seeing vague parts of the floor merging with whatever cant be done can it or pretend youre me sitting scribbling with a wild river running by in the middle distance I can see it I can see it steady on old chap its only the moving surface bang in the centre of the picture theres no depth to it from up here just eternal movement so much so that the river I was writing about just a few lines ago has already gone forever because the riving flow I see is all moving parts & its sort of like an illusion that the river is at all stable permanent right there its about as startlingly ephemeral as the morning suns rays flashing on its surface in a wondrous show of scintillation all these glistening glimmers winking knowingly as if to say what you see is what you get what you see is momentary & playfully changeful change being the only constant in the universe if you see what I mean until of course the universe melts down & disappears without trace & besides Ive just remembered where I was a few lines ago namely you can never see the whole nor I without necessarily having to imagine it imagining an entire sphere or all the sides of a cube could make your head swim so Ill say that again you cannot see the whole of anything without also having to imagine the whole of the whole that is not without our stupendous gift of imagination I wonder about that I really do & here I am now able to imagine a three dimensional river out of its contextual ground & see it like a great serpent in the air the complete & transparent river from beginning to end or can I because I need also to see it from every imaginable angle as whole & here I am not even able to see the back of my head & yet can imagine that I am indeed also somewhere within me that which has a part called the back of my head that reminds me that a beginning exercise for the apprentice magician consists in sitting & imagining seeing yourself sitting & imagining as if seen from somewhere else opposite or above or from the other river bank its something I sometimes indulge in while walking & I put a part of me atop a tree while Im about to walk beneath it or into the visual perceptual field of the kingfisher shortcutting riverwards across the paddock or how do I seem to the bobbing butterfly & something else Ive just discovered is how tricky it is to see that full serpentine river in all of its dimensions while also seeing myself seeing it through my minds eye or should that read minds I & something else really awesome Im in a system called forest & river yet cannot see the interconnected interrelated interdependent systemic root systems of the trees as parts of our web of life yet in my imagination I somehow can see that & so I wonder if you too can see that that I imagine I can see & yourself know we too are the web of life.

If you’re interested in a daily guide to Arts and Letters, see www.aldaily.com/

If you’re interested in seeing rugby photos by Carl Diespecker (he does social events too) see www.newcastlerugbyphotos.com.au or Google his name.

This Diary is No.15 in the New Series (previously 1107, 108, 208, 308, 408, 508, 608, 708, 808, 908, 1008, 1108, 1208, 109; this is 209). DDD February 26 2009.