Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Earthrise Diary (Oct) 2012


                           THE EARTHRISE DIARY (October 2012)

                                                                                                     Don Diespecker
            © text Don Diespecker 2012.

For sundry reasons, some of them physiological, this October Diary is shorter than usual.
There were a couple of leftover days following the September Diary, one of them auspicious: on Sept 29 Saturday I met my friend Sharon Snir at Bellingen Library where she gave an excellent presentation describing her recent book, Looking for Lionel. The presentation was marked by a short video that explained aspects of Alzheimer’s and showed how communication can be achieved and maintained. This was an emotional experience and I was glad to have been present to see and hear. Sharon also discussed her latest book (now out), The Little Book of Everyday Miracles.
Because it is now spring the local weather has been impressively changeable all month: warm to hot and dry one day and surprisingly cool and even showery a few hours later. It seems to suit my present mood as I wrestle with difficulties of locomotion (due to a lower back injury) and difficulties of short-term memory associated with a TIA (transient ischemic attack) on Sept 26.
The first week of October was filled with strange sounds at night (it’s spring, after all). Many of these night-time noises are made by inquisitive and perhaps playful possums exploring the house from the rooftops: I hear them climbing (like noisy cat burglars) the poles that support the sheltering roof over the front steps of the house; then they climb to the topmost ‘cathedral’ roof above my bedroom and race along the roof ridge. They make a surprising amount of noise and have been successfully blocked from entering the roof/ceiling space for nearly 30 years. They don’t like me shining a flashlight at or near them and are otherwise fearless. (Until I recently took down an overhead poly-pipeline that ran through the trees to my storage tank, possums could be seen at night negotiating the swaying line like uncertain circus performers… for reasons never made clear). Some of the other non-possum noises are more mysterious: either edgy micro bats shifting about between flights (though I’ve blocked most of this nightly traffic with strategically placed materials). And, of course, there are the usual roof- and ceiling- loving serpents that enjoy the hot spaces surrounded by fibreglass insulation. I imagine that the snakes would rather be outside hanging laconically on tree branches and snoozing near the cool river on spring nights, but they perhaps know best what is good for their souls. These inhuman possibilities of the varied fauna can be comfortably dealt with by ignoring them or by leaving the radio on, at low volume (I like to think that the discursive intellect is frustrated by my partly listening to Radio National until my brain decides it would rather be in sleep mode than listening either to the Noises Off or to any of the radio programs). If Radio National doesn’t subdue the noises beyond me I encourage my brain to explore up-coming scenes in whatever story I may be working on during the day (currently fiction and some non-fiction essays). Surprisingly, some of the more adventurous characters/protagonists (fictional) are so active (within writing compartments of my too busy mind) in the wee hours that I easily can remember much of their schedules and intentions in the morning when I am again more or less awake again.
 
In my now faulty and otherwise usual and most frequently experienced reality I enjoy a gluten-free lunch in Bellingen at The Grain with Russell Atkinson, who lends me a Hal Porter collection of stories.     
The last 2 days of the first week in October are hot and unpleasant, the temperature about 34˚ and there is news of fires on the Central Coast. Later each day I sit outside in the cooling wind. Carl phones me from Mayfield (his mobile, my landline) while Nick (in Ottawa) is talking to Pam who is standing next to Carl.
The weather is smoky again. I take the iPhone and attempt a short video from Richardson’s bridge. Hazy. The river is well down, the light poor for filming. Before I properly get under way at the bridge next to my garden I see a healthy-looking black snake (a metre or so long) at this (west) end of the bridge. I say Hi. I’ve been watching a brush turkey on the other side of the river and almost miss seeing the snake. When I return from my walk down to Richardson’s Bridge a second smaller black snake crosses the road in front of me then has some contact I think with the first of the black snakes. These near misses (for me) seem more than a coincidence.
The second week.is again hot and I visit my osteopath who refers me to the radiographer in Coffs for a lumbar X-Ray. It’s still hot and dry and I wander the garden at lunchtime without reading—merely sitting or moving about slowly. Leaves fall in ordered flurries that are strange in spring. The Yesterday Today and Tomorrow bush is flowering; its scents are heavy and sickly sweet. The local birds are loud for hours in the hot garden and they sound happy enough.
Oct. 10. I drive to Coffs Harbour and Park Beach Plaza and the Homeland area to visit the radiographer. To my surprise I wait scarcely 5 minutes before a kindly technician leads me toward the machine room and a change booth. I imagine I look very odd in a disposable shift. I’m in and out of the place in a few minutes and go shopping to Park Beach Plaza. The sky becomes stormy on the way home. I’m glad to be home again: the principal reason for going out on a hot day is that there has been yet another “planned power interruption”. I wait impatiently for the return of the electricity.
Oct 11. Light rain began falling last night. It’s now cool and wet.
Oct 18. I again go to Coffs to search for books at Book Warehouse. There are no copies of Salter or Stegner. I go to the PO, buy some Reflex paper and have new ID photos taken and also obtain a copy of the official passport application form. I no sooner get home than I receive a call from the Book Warehouse: my copy of Salter’s A Sport & a Pastime has arrived!
Oct 19. Friday. The power is again off for most of the day. I fill in the passport application and ask my neighbour, Doug Spiller if he will kindly endorse a photo of myself and he agrees so I go over, complete the application and then phone the Bellingen PO for a passport application appointment: I can have the interview this afternoon. I successfully lodge my application and proceed on to Coffs and collect my new book (James Salter) from Steve. It looks excellent. 
Oct 27. Saturday. I’ve felt hung over since Sept 26 when the TIA walloped me and left me feeling like a visitor to two somewhat different realities. Although I’ve been writing daily my prose has been writing of particular kinds: essays that have been started and need progressing, emails, the fiction (“The Belvedere”) and then a ‘better’ version of that fiction, the tense changed (I’m redrafting the novel in the present tense and writing more directly and without so much detailed historical stuff: searching for more immediacy, if that makes sense.
Outside: I also work on the log pile that accumulated during floods last summer: Carl, when he visited, Oct 22/23, was encouraging in that endeavour and I’ve spent a few more hours axing and using the crowbar to split logs or lever them and roll them over the riverbank edge and down into the river—rather than walking up and down the road for exercise in the smoke and dust.
Today I’ve had two work sessions on the log pile and have cleared part of the area.
I also am making small piles of leaves starting with leaves on the path to the lawn from the house. The leaves will help clear the lawns and will reduce in their own time on the downstream riverbank. In this operation I am shadowed by a black goanna that follows my strenuous moves with interest and shows no signs of fear (or urgency of appetite). I chat to him or her and respectfully walk around the reptile. He or she watches impassively and seems interested to see me clearing areas and shifting leaves and chunks of wood. Perhaps the goanna is stalking me? It’s small rather than large. After all the activity with axe, crowbar and rake, I read and complete Salter’s fine book and begin to read the Griffith Review: Novella project.
Reproduced below is a non-fiction piece (personal essay) that I wrote describing a 1998 visit to France. The journey was made with my cousins Jill Alexander and her brother, the late Gene Diespecker and our friend, Ilse Vogel. This essay was previously published Online in the Diary: here I have re-edited the writing and changed the tense.

                                                             Kin
                                                                                                                  Don Diespecker

Easter and I’m in Gourdon with my two Canadian cousins and our German friend, Ilse. We all have a taste for the wines of the region, not to mention the food. Gene and his sister Jill live in British Columbia. Ilse lives in Germany. We’re in France at my suggestion; since 1950 I have always loved being in France. Perhaps because I am a hopeless romantic, this country and its culture, customs, civilization, people and geography are important to me. I know that Ilse is a Francophile, too.
Gourdon is an interesting old town, although not nearly as interesting as many other old towns in a region containing Lot, Périgord, Dordogne, Cantal, and Auvergne. Wandering through these landscapes is a joy. In ways reminiscent of longish sea voyages I am happily out of time, intentionally cut off, yet also open to new adventures.
A few days earlier we were in north Bavaria in the town that gave my family its name: Diespeck (between Nuremburg and Wurzburg). We have been discussing much history and family history and visited the old Jewish cemetery surrounded by oak trees up on the hillside. The cemetery had not been vandalised by the Nazis but the locals blinked when we spoke our family name because Diespecker is pre-holocaust to them. (This has been odd—for me: there I am in a German town the name of which is the origin of my family name and the locals are very surprised that I and my cousins should have this name. In the cemetery there is a section dedicated to members of the Wehrmacht who served in World War 1. I have been wondering whether the locals considered that unusual. I also wonder how many German and non-German members of our family might have been shooting at each other in the Great War.
Ilse has explained that: “The family name means ‘die Specke,’ viz., a corduroy road, made with logs laid side by side over the ground.  Nowadays they pronounce it ‘Dies-peck,’ but if [we] look at the Hebrew spelling on tombstones, it is spelled and pronounced ‘Disch-bek.’  That is the way everyone born there pronounces it.”

I had toured the Dordogne years ago but this is the first time any of us have ever been in Gourdon so we make it our base for daily trips. There are features of the town that look almost familiar to us, even as strangers: the busy open market, the old buildings, the entire town rising above a mound like a lively hub of humanity. Perhaps I'll revisit one day and repeat some of this tour—I will surely remember the hotel with pleasure. The hotel is nothing fancy and as with any French hotel that boasts a restaurant we are well served with good food and good wine. Clear images stay in mind: dinner scenes, for example. We examine the menu and think hard on the choices while the young waitress smiles understandingly because we are foreigners and a menu of delicious options in France can be a trial for anyone. I generally make a quick choice because I think first impressions are surely worth something. While the others roll their eyes and groan imagining the tastes to come I look about and am touched to see that the evening dinner ritual is not in the least disturbed by our intrusion. In some ways we are probably only partly visible to the French diners. I think that may signify both a civil and civilised respectful gesture. There is the family that I first met on the stairs one evening. They are an elderly couple together with their married children and their spouses, a baby and a little black poodle. The poodle is obviously part of the greater family. At table the small dog is perfectly tolerated and no one turns a hair when the dog sits up on a chair to receive portions and titbits with excited pleasure. I doubt anyone in that comfortably full restaurant sees that behaviour as remarkable except possibly, us. We are the outsiders, after all. The French are accepting and tolerant in ways I have never quite appreciated until now.
Another thing about the evening meal: how good sorbet is at the end of the meal. One sorbet contains berries and that reminds me of my earliest years in Victoria (British Columbia’s capital city): Dad used to grow raspberries and loganberries in the back yard up against the house and there were always late summer blackberries in the suburban lanes. That remains true in North Vancouver, Jill reminds us: you may have a second breakfast walking those lanes should you wish to.
I can’t honestly compare a casual hotel meal in a French town with a similar meal in Canada or South Africa or Australia; the world isn't like that; we each live in our different cultures more or less comfortably. Now I’m remembering another time on our trip over in Burgundy, where we stay at a small hotel in Beaune. As is our custom (‘Multinational, temporary’) at the end of each day we meet for wine and cheese before dinner. We’re in my room talking about history and sipping red wine and taking bites of Cantal on leftover lunchtime baguette. What comes up for me is a wartime memory of Pilgrim's Rest up in the Drakensberg in the Eastern Transvaal where we once lived and I reminisce about those times. I was just a kid in those days but the older guys, the ones we admired because they made swing-out ropes over the swimming pool and knew everything about life--they soon went off to the War in 1939, most of them not much older than I and my school friends and most of those older guys were killed in the Western Desert. They had all too briefly been role models to we younger kids. The village was stunned, all those years ago. Telling that I choke on my words. My grief has lain waiting for all of the long years and I am glad I am with family.
The long-ago War encourages me to think about the river at Pilgrim's Rest, the Blyde. ‘Blyde’ from the Dutch means happy in Afrikaans. At home in New South Wales I live in the bush and on a similar sort of river, the Bellinger and thinking on that reminds me of yet another far-off river, the Cowichan that hurries through the woods on Vancouver Island: the Cowichan River is my first river in time, the primary river of my childhood. We used to go up to the Cowichan on vacation even in the Depression years of the early ‘30s because one of Dad’s brothers, Jill’s father, owned a cabin in the woods there. It overlooked the river and the five brothers would take turns to share the cabin. We would drive up from Victoria in an old Graham Paige: Mom and Dad and Deirdre and me, and Wolf my German shepherd. Families had little money in those days, but almost everyone owned a car.
The enormous trees at Cowichan make the woods gloomy except when the sun gets through the canopy to the forest floor that’s always damp and has a good earthy smell. Nearby is a rail track and logging trains roll by regularly. On twilight evenings the driver and the fireman wave down to us from the high steam locomotive while we gather berries (‘Oregon grapes’) in the bracken near the line.
The cabin is close to a coldwater creek and is high above the river where on sunlit days we float on tubes and swim and fish for trout. The cabin walls are covered with coloured tracings of the best fish The Boys have caught, fly-casting. Remembering the cabin now I sense that long ago smell of trout frying on the riverbank in a pan of spitting butter.
In South Africa upstream of the mine’s reduction works at Pilgrims Rest the Blyde has long pools with reeds in places and there are shadowy parts that run through black wattles. The Australian trees didn't arrive until well after gold was discovered in the 1870s but they always look natural there in the high country. Near the river there are or there used to be great plantations of blue gums grown for timber props in the mines. They’re trees just like the flooded gums at home in Australia, at Earthrise, magnificently tall and straight. Downstream there are rapids and then shallows with coloured gravels patterning the bottom. Some afternoons after school we’d ride our bikes upriver to First Drift where there’s a rock shelf near the suspension bridge. Lying flat and peering down you can watch rainbow trout hanging in the current waving their fins slowly in the clear stream. 

In the Gourdon restaurant Ilse and my cousins are discussing fish and I’ve been eating mine almost without noticing. I realise something else: when I was 11 years old and swimming in the Blyde and sometimes learning to fly cast with Dad, our long-lost new-found cousin Joel in Israel--the same age as me--was a refugee and being arrested in Spain with his parents, then separated and gaoled. They had fled Germany to live for a time in Marseilles before the War caught up with them. By a miracle they are eventually reunited and later they safely reach Palestine.
Later on this trip, Jill and Gene and I go to Israel and meet Joel and Sarah; they live on kibbutz now near Jerusalem. They were living there when first I went to Israel in 1976 sensing possible connections, but we did not meet then because we didn’t know of each other. Our 18th century ancestor, the Rabbi David Diespeck had married three times; now it is time for the descendants to see and to meet each other and to try and figure out how we'd become so separated in time.
Later in the evening in Gourdon we four sit talking about some of the places we’ve been visiting: we have returned from a drive over to Cahors where we wandered about the wet and windy streets. Later when the sun comes out we walk across the big 14th century Valentré bridge: a stone bridge with high roofed towers and set above a barrage that pools the river. It's funny how one thing reminds me of another: that surprising stone bridge at Cahors is so old but it looks strong enough to last for hundreds more years. The Joubert Bridge over the Blyde at Pilgrims Rest close to where I once lived in the 1930s is also stone-built with big arches but now is still not much more than a century old.
I remember when we were about ten years old in Pilgrims Rest how Leonard Franck would sometimes climb up on the undressed stones of the Joubert Bridge parapet and calmly walk across, deadly high over the river, the only kid game enough to do that. The bridge next to where I live now in Australia is timber--all the timber bridges in the valley are low-level and become submerged in floods and are sometimes destroyed; predecessor to the bridge here was torn away and washed down in 1985. It was replaced of course, and has even been modified to become the best and strongest of the valley bridges. Nothing is permanent, however.

I'm remembering another hotel-restaurant, at Souillac, and again the meal is excellent. I remember it for a peculiar reason. The proprietor also serves at table and because she is so busy in her crowded restaurant she appears to be eating on the wing: a succulent mouthful in the kitchen becoming a delicate clandestine cud as she swiftly serves her guests. I've not seen that before or since.
All of these images compose in an early spring. Thinking now of our tour, there are hundreds of images to choose from, each poignant and shining. There is the winding road that leads up into the hills between Brive and Souillac where it is cold and drizzly, and as we drive higher there are sleet and snow showers. Early flowers bloom in the falling snow and when we stop for breaks the silence is eerie. While in Montignac we visit the nearby Lascaux caves and I once again sit in the big church in Montignac: it seems unchanged in the more than 50 years since my first visit there with Pam and my parents, Durbyn and Grace so long ago. And there is the old three arches stone bridge with its water level quay for fishermen to pass sunlit days; when the river rises the long flat quay is submerged. The low quay is carefully designed, I imagine, and located in a sweeping bend of the river where it also prevents scouring.
There's a restaurant on a corner in Montignac on the way to the caves where we all eat paté followed by entrecote in wine sauce--and then sorbet. It's funny how some things stay in the mind and then reappear rising to this surface reality once again.
I'm not a religious person, not a church-going person (though I won second prize for attendance at the Methodist Church Sunday school when I was about 11 years old). I try hard but can't remember where or when I've last been to any kind of church service although I've wandered through hundreds of churches in many countries. When my companions suggest we all go to church at Gourdon on Easter Sunday I am embarrassed and almost refuse to go, yet I do go and it is a most peculiar experience for me. Again I see in my mind's eye the kindly face of the long-ago Anglican archdeacon in Durban as he tries unsuccessfully to persuade my mother to urge me toward communion; and I remember how cross he becomes when she and I both turn him down. My mother's people were all Scots. Then I think myself a hypocrite to have married, the first time, in a Church of England. My sister married a Christian Scientist, I recall, and her second marriage was to a Christadelphian. My great grandfather outdid us all: born a Bavarian Jew (which I didn't know until recently), he married my great grandmother, Christian Warmington, at St Martin in the Fields, London. Apostasy and assimilation are powerful things. I often puzzle about our ancestry having been a secret in my father's family. Great grandfather Samson, born a Jew, became an apostate Jew, married a Christian woman named Christian in a Christian church—and was ‘reclaimed’ by his brother and finally laid to rest in the Balls Pond Road Jewish Cemetery in London.  Bu which time he was also known as ‘Louis.’ Full circle. 

In the church at Gourdon this Easter it is damp and cold and there is a strong smell of candles. I follow most of the service although I don't try singing in French. I think the experience is perhaps more important for my companions. In some ways it’s important for me too, but I am hardly present, if you know what I mean. Perhaps I am a little embarrassed in that place and because I'm an outsider I start thinking of something that isn't embarrassing. While candles smoke and voices rise and fall about me I visualise a springtime view from my house; it's a soothing experience that calms the mind. The surface of the river at all times is worth seeing. When you look down to the river there's a long stretch between the bends and there's often a wavering stab of blue on the surface reflected from the sky. Beyond that and downstream the top of the river is like burnished gold with a smear of light green along it. On the right bank going down past the cool rainforest creek it's a darker green. The shimmer in the middle of the stretch comes from the top of the ridge against the sky where the setting sun behind me lights up big old trees along the ridge. The whites and also the living greys from those old trees in the forest are a meld of stunning mixed lights below on the surface of the river. The picture of this is framed by straight bloodwoods close by and by some thin young flooded gums. There are hanging-over casuarinas along the banks down toward where some bedrock islands stick up proud of the stream and if you search hard you can generally see a duck or two far off or a cormorant drying its wings. I know it as a wondrous river, a river to dream on and to remember by.

Now I'm home again and France is far off, and it's springtime here. It's been so warm and dry, perhaps too dry. The snakes are out and about. I've seen a young fox for three days in a row. As I drink breakfast coffee the fox ambles along the edge of the lawn on the riverbank. He has patches of black fur and looks oddly distinctive. There are fires all over the region now and the valley is often filled with smoke and that's a worry. Yesterday the morning was damp and grey but by noon a wind got up--one of those late westerlies we normally get at the end of winter. It was a cleansing strong wind and branches flew about like arrows, and then it died down and everything was still. The air is like crystal now and I can see exactly what I'd been thinking on when I was in the church at Gourdon. 
I know we're never alone and barely separated, and if we're all standing on the earth somewhere we're surely connected even though Australia is the world's greatest island. Looking at the river now I'm wondering if I might again be more intimately in contact with my dispersed family were we all to dip our fingers in the water at the same time—in the river here, under a tap there. Then we'd all be in touch at the same time.

October 31 2012. Wednesday. I have a new Outside job: the groundcovers, weeds and the developing Christmas orchids have been scratched and raked into oblivion by a solitary brush turkey. This huge amount of litter covers the path to the house and will take time and energy to shift. I suspect that the turkey is just a wee bit obsessive/compulsive. I’m not in the mood to explore brush turkey psychotherapy. I wonder why the bird’s behaviour seems so persistently pathological to me—he’s probably looking for a good feed. Drongos and honeyeaters are singing at the same time. It’s a warm spring day at Earthrise and jacarandas are flowering all the way to the coast.
Please see Russell Atkinson’s blog at  www.theoldestako.wordpress.com
Best wishes to you all from Don.





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