THE EARTHRISE DIARY 8/10 (August, 2010)
Don Diespecker
© text Don Diespecker 2010
While Earthrise and the rest of the Valley containing this place have been beautifully unpacking the early spring, I’ve been experiencing a topsy-turvy time: the end of a busy winter writing narratives (fiction and nonfiction) and some verses coinciding with a sudden illness in the family, followed by some home-front dramas and several medical and dental alerts, but I’ll excuse myself from impelling you too far into dilemmas and apprehensions. With the completion of stories, essays and poems I’ve also been able to partly return to some favourite jobs that are also exercises, as well as Ordinary Work: gardening of the casual and meditative kind (code for spasmodic weeding, pruning and clearing, whispered encouragements to new plants), colleting or cutting firewood, continuing the build of the riverside lawn’s protective stone wall, visualizing a back-up pipeline from riverbank to the big storage tank next to the carport. And I’ve had a return drive to Newcastle where everybody who has a car now seems to be driving f-a-s-t in traffic—as though Peak Oil is about to arrive in the Hunter Valley. It was a time (down and up the Highway) of White Knuckle driving… There was a time when all long distance drives were adventures, fun, but I’m now an Old Guy in an Old Car and I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m the only driver driving within the speed limit. And what about these lethal Overtaking Lanes? And since when did the drivers of loaded logging trucks start behaving like Formula One drivers? Wince. Shudder.
Speaking of logs. Cutting firewood is a good exercise and a good learning exercise: breaking a length of old wood (up to about 100-mm dia.) with either an axe or a blockbuster requires the cutter to cut in the right place with just enough force to break the wood without causing it to fly up in one’s face—hit it too forcefully in the right place and the cutter will need medical attention. Splitting sawn bloodwood rounds requires a blockbuster because of the hardness of the wood. The splitter has to be able to see the concentric rings of growth on the flat surface of the round and aim to split pieces on or along a ring to try to break off fuel-sized chunks. Cutting across the rings requires much more force and is counterproductive. Everybody in the area knows this so I’m really addressing Dear Readers who have not yet had the experience of splitting bloodwood rounds. Further, one 250-mm high round, after sawing, that may be 80- or 100-years old is too heavy to be moved, other than by rolling it a short distance, as you would roll a wheel. Please read this last sentence before surrendering to boredom: bloodwood is a hardwood and will attack your hands fiendishly with Hideous Splinters: handling it requires caution and patience otherwise you’ll need the point of a sharp knife and fine tweezers to remove the splinters: gloves may help to ease the pain. Once cut the pieces are best moved toward your slow combustion heater by wheelbarrow (the rounds that I’ve referred to are so big and heavy that splitting one half a round will more than fill a wheelbarrow… We’re dealing with Big Stuff, here, guys. And a word of caution: heavy axe or blockbuster swinging may put your back out and/or your wrists, and/or sundry collections and arrays of muscles.
–Which reminds me: I dislike wearing gloves because my hands seem clumsy in them. I have a fine pair of fleece-lined leather gloves somewhere but never wear them (I used to wear them when I lived in London, though, because the winters there used to be damp, chilly, unpleasant). And I’m reminded now of some black leather gauntlets that I wore in childhood: I used to walk to school in all weathers in Victoria, B.C. My cowboy gloves had a red star sewn on each of them and leather fringes and I used also to wear, in winter, a leather helmet with goggles—just like those flying helmets worn by the intrepid fliers Sir Charles Kingsford Smith (1897-1935) who made the first trans-Pacific flight in 1928 from the US to Australia; Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) who made the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic (New York-Paris) in 1927; Amelia Earhart (1898-1937, born in the same year as my mother, Grace: in 1932 she was the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone and who disappeared over the Pacific in the year when I was an 8-years old cabin boy on the SS Bencleugh); and Amy Johnson (1904-1941) who flew from the UK to Australia in 1930 in 19.5 days and who disappeared over the English Channel in WW 2 while serving with the Air Transport Auxiliary)…and. Ah, childhood, it was all so very long ago!
Slow combustion heaters, by the way, vary in their efficiency and they all like to be made hot before the enthusiastic owner starts shoving great splintery chunks of bloodwood (the very best firewood locally) into the firebox. The implication is that a store of dry deadwood twigs and branches is required to start the ‘young’ fire. By bedtime my less than wonderful heater will have consumed several pieces of heavy bloodwood: their remains glow and produce electric blue flames that twist and dance at midnight…which is one of the factors that make bloodwood so special. Now you know!
The new wall, set back from the lawn edge in a grand sweep, is only a half-metre or so wide and may barely reach as high as the adjacent belvedere’s companion wall and encloses giant maidenhair (some of them more than a metre high, together with bracken and bleeding heart seedlings). This new wall also contains some big stones (if you value your back, do not try to lift very big stones, ever! Rather, turn your wheelbarrow on its side next to the biggie, kneel down and push or roll the stone into the side of the barrow and, while still on your knees, push and lift the barrow on to its standing points. Wearing kneepads helps.
The stones come from old sources in the gardens: the central circular wall in front of the house is being demolished (it served no useful purpose other than to ‘store’ stones and enclose weeds), big-ish stones from the areas where back-flow floods enter the property (adjacent to the river’s Earthrise corner where very large eddies or whirlpools develop in rising floods), and a protective stone surround opposite the deer park gate (some fast-rising floods enter the property from the deer park and wash gravel fines across the lawn from this stone surround that also has doubled as a seat, thus is also being demolished). (The worst of big fast-rising floods are the ones that enter here via the upstream paddocks of the deer park more or less simultaneously with back-flow floods in the aforementioned river corner that smash into the old casuarinas and the lomandra on the hillside a few metres downstream and then swirl back into Earthrise). The wall will be, I’m afraid, only marginally effective because nothing stops a very big flood from invading and dumping tonnes of logs in this area (largely from disposal stacks left in flood zones by upstream property owners for easy disposal by floodwaters).
The new wall is a meditative pleasure, rather than work (the work part of the build consists in collecting barrow loads of stones and pebbles). Most of what comprises these gravity walls is the invisible inside of the walls: stones and pebbles fill that add to the density of the structure; the viewer sees only the ‘showy’ outsides of such walls). Building gravity walls is relaxing because whatever stone I pick up is bound to fit somewhere: I need only walk along seeking a likely spot and when found, place a stone and support it with stone-fill then find another stone to fit in another part of the wall and so on. Intending wall builders may want to know that no fine, medium or coarse sand should be used in such walls. Sand inside walls invariably causes walls to fail or collapse when saturated in heavy floods or heavy rains.
Lest the reader become dismayed by these stoic anecdotes, there are also Good Moments when the Old Incumbent enjoys his lunchtime reading in the sunshine or shade on the belvedere, for the river is always there always moving, forever stimulating ideas, vague thoughts or new images of old memories.
Lomandra mentioned above is a native plant that has long leaves (like sisal) and tenacious roots that hold the riverbank together. Yesterday, while I sat in the bright sunlight reading I realised that the lomandra that so powerfully resist the most destructive of big floods are so ‘designed’ that I am unable to see the tapered tips of their long green spiky leaves in strong light: the mind is obliged to imagine the tips of those sunlit leaves and the entire plant is then easily distinguished because the lower part of the lomandra is an unmistakable dark green colour. Lomandra look almost fragile at a distance, but 4- or 5-m-high roiling flood waves seldom wrench one from the ground—which is why I’ve moved and split a couple of these strong plants into small new clones and set them along the river lawn’s riverside edge.
The young red cedar next to me on the belvedere is showing its pink buds; a similar tree behind me is showing its branching new twigs and leaves. At the foot of the first red cedar are relatively tall young kikuyu grasses, all of them nibbled by Night Creatures (which have decapitated and de-leafed most of the young bleeding heart seedlings. The bleeding hearts have all rallied to make new tops and new leaves, so I’m optimistic). Bandicoots (presumably) have continued making holes in what otherwise looks like lawn (all mow-able grass and lawn is being rested until September and so is being grazed: the grasses include tasty morsels for certain animals. Feral deer, bandicoots and possums and perhaps passing wallabies are the presumed grazing animals. The tradescantia is also being grazed (by deer, I think). If only the critters would adroitly nibble and remove the roots of the currently blooming Mist Flower (which is, I think, the smaller cousin of the bigger and more ferocious Crofton Weed). Mist Flower has indestructible roots it seems and has infested the lawns since it was gifted here by the March 2001 flood.
The finest of the red salvia plants is also on the belvedere and next to the budding red cedar and a healthy bleeding heart seedling haltered to the cedar to straiten it). This red salvia was not only repeatedly knocked down and buried beneath logs and debris during the three floods a year or so ago (and later propped up by the Old Gardener), but it looks healthier than any of the other old salvias nearby (all cloned from plants in the 1980s). Can it be that despite the stone fill of the belvedere, this small area is perpetually damp and sunny? I remember using my steel wire divining rods in this area years ago before building the belvedere and there certainly were indications of springs there. When I think about it, springs and underground streams along the riverbank will almost certainly be the result of water draining beneath the surface from the steep hillside above the house. You, too, may be a rhabdomantist; you need only a wand or wires to find water.
All of the azaleas have begun flowering. The Very Tall Pear tree in Cedar Grove has suddenly allowed itself some blossom although there are still dead winter leaves that haven’t yet fallen (despite the Westerlies that have blown strongly enough to fell many eucalypt branches and twigs).
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I’m frequently surprised when I realise how quickly time is passing: it’s now about five years since Katrina and the American inaction that dismayed so many who hoped for rescue; it’s nearly a decade since Leighton Hewitt won the US Open and who was arriving home as 9/11 occurred—and also nearly ten years since the Big One here, that monstrous March 2001 flood that destroyed three bridges and scared us all. Time seems speeded up (at least for me).
What else? The light is different, the air more balmy; spring has sprung. The river is so low and has a static look about it: the tops of bedrock outcrops dry off, cormorants perch on rocks and snags drying their wings in winter/spring sunshine. Despite the brighter sunlight and despite the sounds of early morning songbirds, the area seems still and somewhat listless. The spangled drongos will be flying in soon: my bet is that they’ll be heard here on the morning of September 12, give or take…
