The Earthrise Diary (July 2011)

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (July 2011)

© text Don Diespecker 2011

Don Diespecker

Hospital emergency rooms are large, cold and sterile places. Rows of broken people with dazed expressions lie on metal beds covered in white sheets that have been branded with the hospital logo, just in case they have forgotten where they are. Wires and tubes hang off bleeping machines, and sharp needles are inserted into soft, aching flesh. Grey-blue curtains suspended from steel semi-circular wall protrusions give the illusion of privacy. There is no privacy in hospital. Charts with every detail of your life hang naked at the end of each bed, and every interaction and decision, every rise and fall of fluid intake and out-put, and every heartbeat is meticulously documented from the moment you become ‘the patient’.

I saw Lily the minute I walked through the heavy double doors. She looked like she had just done four rounds with Muhammad Ali. Her right eye smeared with violent streaks of turquoise and purple. Someone appeared to have gone berserk with the latest eye shadows. The colour rose up and over her eye right brow where it deepened into a dark, indigo-violet, that lifted off her face into a golf ball size swelling.

She smiled. “Mama! Did you fall?” “Yes, I think so,” she mumbled, and then tried to get out of bed. Lionel was sitting next to her. As her bed was so high he could only see a few inches above the mattress as he stretched his arm across the cotton blanket to reach Lily’s hand.

His lined face was a sickly pale grey, and his red-rimmed eyes revealed his concern. Lily tried to move closer to him but she fell back as a lightning bolt of pain shot through her body. She screamed out and my blood temperature suddenly fell to sub-zero and stung my veins.

Sharon Snir: Looking for Lionel- How I Lost and Found My Mother Through Dementia.

Somehow, knowing a place deeply transcends its description and nothing seems as encompassing as the experiencing itself.

Thursday morning: July 7. Three large ADF “ducks” steamed into the marina this morning. We heard them before we saw them, their engines vibrating sound through the hull of our boat and into our consciousness. Each vessel is dressed in khaki, as are their all too-young inhabitants: a reminder of a world outside this haven, still fighting.

Later... I've walked up the steep path to my hideout far above the sea (a place where once I saw Loggerhead Turtles diving for food in a rough swell dangerously close to the rocky breakers). My plan is to meditate out here on this point after resting and watching the sea. In this moment the water is calm and placid and deceivingly inviting… I could almost swim there...just floating and letting the current move me to wherever it will.

The ocean stretches out before me all olive green and turning a deep sapphire closer to the horizon. The many small islands become markers of distance for me with those closer to shore still holding the green hues of foliage and those further away turning to blue-grey and merging slowly with the sky. All are landmarks I once knew so well. Now though, I am barely able to recall just a few of their names: Cape Capricorn, Hummocky Island and Humpy Island... Those now forgotten places have become melded with the images in photographs and the memories of our travels along this coastline in what feels like an age ago. Turtles would know these places altogether differently, intimately, bodily. Turtles today might find their watery olive-green world strangely still...

A Turtle! And another! I’m staring down at them in disbelief. Two Loggerheads are swimming lazily around in the gentle swell and doing just as I had wished to do! One of the pair raises her head and a glint of sunshine catches the water on her face and then she dives. They both dive. They are below now in another world swimming in slow motion. A fishing-dinghy races past; the pair must have heard it’s engines much sooner than I (as we did this morning on the boat with those ADF “ducks”). The water is cloudy and affords them much needed protection from less sensitive souls. There are long graceful strands of kelp moving with the ebb and flow of the sea and her tides. This is my meditation today.

Petra Meer, from her “Sailing Journal.”

I’ll do my best to put a photo or two or three into this Diary. One may show a detailed photo of flood debris that has settled on the top of the uncompleted River-wall. Another may show post flood debris in the house area on June 17, now half cleared.

Elsewhere I’ve been writing about detail and in this Diary I’ll try to address the same notion.

As always, I’ve been thinking on too many things in short periods of time: last month’s flood and its leftover debris, construction of the Concourse wall and the hard-standing area, working on an essay about reading in the garden, slowly drafting a novel, polishing short pieces on the river, and muttering about wet weather depriving me of my lunchtime reading in the garden. The result of too much thinking and too much trying to do some of everything is that not much of anything is completed. Also, priorities continually change: the hard-standing area is crucially important because the car, as my only means of transport in all situations, has to have reliable access and a guaranteed escape path against flash flooding. Everything else on my List of Jobs has needed rearranging. This isn’t too hard to do but it adds to the already burdened Thinking Program. A rearranging of schedules is suddenly essential and something has to give and the now infrequent ‘lunchtime read’ is dramatically curtailed.

I’m being tedious about this (sorry) because regular reading is important to me: garden reading particularly is a great opportunity for insights. Reading and writing accompany one another so well that I regard them as an essential pairing. The garden is for me a state of consciousness for varied reasons, one of which is an awareness of detail in Nature. From within the house I can see some of that at a distance, but being inside is also being behind a barrier. Outside is different because I’m within or I’m contained by the natural world—which is why I can be in the world when outside, but being inside the house is not the same as the experience of being in the world (even though I’m merely in my garden).

Despite the detail I wrote about in the June Diary (largely about the flood aftermath and debris clearing), I’ll detail a little more about recent Outdoors Stuff: making the Concourse wall and the hard-standing area; removing the old citrus trees; recovering a sunken lomandra plant.

Detail. I find eleven ‘meanings’ of detail in my Random House College Dictionary: each has some appeal, but the surprise is that detail comes to us from the OF word, detaill(er), to cut in pieces.

When I re-read the extract from Sharon Snir’s book, I comprehend well-observed descriptions of the hospital ER, of Sharon’s mother as patient and of her father’s reactions, as well as Sharon’s directly reported feelings and I also have received a comprehensive understanding of the situation. All of that is made clear in 298 words, or within four consecutive paragraphs of diminishing length. That good and clear writing makes puzzled questions redundant.

Petra Meer’s Journal writing describes a small part of the great outdoors, viz, the outlook from an island off the Queensland coast in the area of the Capricorn Channel, the Barrier Reef and its islands, i.e., some south parts of the Coral Sea. The reader is enabled to ‘see’ what the journal writer can see and to focus on what compels her attention while momentarily she is the sailor ashore. Economy of language and the beauty of images allow the reader detailed access to that world. We each will visualize or ‘make’ our own imagery and I suspect that however many readers may do that, our images will be similar to those of the writer.

Making the hard-standing area and the Concourse wall

The hard-standing area and it’s adjoining Concourse wall. Concourse, from late ME < MF. Six explanations reveal attractive words such as assemblage, throng, promenade (esp. in a park), boulevard, and an open space for accommodating crowds, confluence. These appeal to me because when I’m not having a very big party I can promenade solo while also looking thoughtfully at the Cedar Grove a few metres away. And, hopefully, I will never get the car stuck in the mud there again.

My neighbour, Leif, has kindly dropped off several loads of gravel. This well graded material is perfect for an area bedeviled by spongy soil, some grass and lots of ground cover: it is an area that is also ‘the ancient riverbank’. This old bank (I have no idea how old it is) represents a once-wide bend in the river that the house is also founded on (or in). The old bank continues across the road (Darkwood Road cuts through it) and in the Deerpark it has large eucalypts growing on it. Storm water from the West End of Earthrise runs as a small (and dangerous creek) through Cedar Grove and it has cut deeply enough into this old bank to deliver torrents of water into the lower garden in heavy local rain (it floods Big Lawn and produces Lake Eartha and then flows to the flooding river. Years ago I stabilized a track that also cuts through the old bank an this enables vehicles to drive down to the lower gardens. The track, under its cover of tradescantia has been reinforced with river stones. Where the carport now is there once was The Campsite. Briefly, Jannelle and I arrived here in June 1984 where we had already set up an old caravan and a new ‘campsite’ shelter (star pickets supported a corrugated iron roof and gutter that delivered rainwater to an adjacent steel tank: it enabled us to cook outside under shelter). June 1984 was a preparatory time. When we arrived at what is now the entrance the First Honda promptly got stuck there in the mud. I got out and pushed; my back immediately failed and left me helpless with pain in the mud. I duly recovered, but was no help at all for days. Our first night in the caravan was on the crest of the old riverbank (where we also had a campfire for years).

Memories, memories: now the Old Campsite is being covered over by the new hard-standing area and the new Concourse wall.

I start with my wicker baker’s basket, a sturdy open basket that I use to carry a load of kindling or a set of small garden tool, or this time, secateurs, string, my Best Rake, The Claw (a Chinese hand cultivator), the machete and a plastic bucket. I take them down to the tools storage area under the house where I add the mattock and my Gestalt Going Away Retirement Present from the Gestalt Training Centre of Wollongong (in some distant time during the past century), the sharp spade and put everything in the wheelbarrow with the ½ inflated tire and trundle down to Belvedere Central where I leave my jacket to sun on a garden chair and switch on my mobile phone to keep track of the time. (I generally don’t bother too much about the time because I can estimate it to within 5 minutes—this isn’t a boast, but a fact that goes with the territory, as I can’t estimate time as well in a city). Timing these jobs allows me to catch the news or the Book Show or to take a break. I start raking out and away from the old round wall that I plan to demolish. The stones in this old build are not distinguished by shape or form and they have combined with soil and flood loam to make a sturdy redoubt against floods and to provide me with ‘extra’ stones when I need them (as I now do). Some of the base stones are so large and heavy that they were collected with the help of an unwary visitor, years ago: two can roll a big stone on to a hessian sack and easily lift it into a trailer or the tray of a Ute). With the rake I uncover collections of stone ‘nails’ that I use for filling small gaps in stonewalls: most are cigar-sized and shaped river stones. I cut down and set aside more than a dozen new sturdy ferns that have colonized this 25-years old wall. The ferns aren’t quite tree ferns, but seem closely related. Behind me newly sprouted bracken pushes up through the remaining flood debris in the area (all debris clearing is postponed). I toss aside into a growing pile any debris or old branches that may dry and serve as fuel for the sc heater and begin to loosen and to pull down the best-looking stones on the flattened top of the wall using the mattock and spade then set some of the stones in the barrow for founding the new wall. Then I push the loaded barrow plus a few tools up the old track to the top of the ancient riverbank, through the carport and out on to the open area I want to change. I use an ornamental tree as anchor for my first string line. Two strings here will designate the intended dimensions of the wall: it will be 12-m long. I unload and hammer in some stakes, then dig down against the slope of the bank and set, angled slightly downward on the slope), the first foundation stones on old newspaper. These will be the outside foundation stones of the wall. Then I distribute some of the river gravel that Leif has kindly dropped off from the tractor: the inside wall foundation stones will be a little higher and also supported by well-graded gravel. Then I put the bucket in the barrow and the spade across the handles and trundle down the access track to Big Lawn and cross to an access point next to the road where I quickly fill the bucket with road remnants that have been washed down the concrete storm water drains (and which now are blocking the drains) and lug the granular fragments to the barrow and empty them and complete the circuit back to the wall I am demolishing at Belvedere Central. The job has begun.

Following this routine for two hours is more than enough to alert every muscle and sinew, tendon and bone because a barrow loaded with a bucket of ‘gravel’ or road remnants plus some select stones plus some small wall filler stones weighs heavy. The barrower, in order to leave the low plain of the lawn must lean forward while pushing uphill—rather like an athlete wearing spikes and pushing off from the blocks. If you’re not fit and well and well motivated you will break something. After two hours I stop for water.

The small ‘unwanted’ stones, as filler materials, are the wall: these bits and pieces, useless as building stones, form the inside of the wall (whatever its width) and are locked in place by quite small other bits and pieces that are preferably hard river stone fragments (cobbles, a little coarse gravel). (For the unwary: never ever fill a wall interior with well graded gravel because water pressure during floods will bring down the wall). The outside building stones represent what the viewer will see on the outsides of the wall and, eventually, on the top of the wall: the wall builder therefore will use the most attractive good-looking stones for their esthetic appearance and appeal (even stonewalls have egos…).

The stones being recovered from the old wall are all covered or caked with flood loam or mud and guarded by sundry creepy crawlies including bad tempered centipedes. They clean off nicely when rained upon. The big ones are easily put into the barrow by kneeling next to the barrow resting on its side and rolled in then lifting the nearest edge until the barrow is again vertical (but don’t try this standing up unless you regard your lower back as expendable).

I have a yen for better-looking stones and casually sneak away (without alarming potential building stones at the wall being demolished) to the fallen cheese tree in the corner bend and looking over the severely damaged stone revetment. Many stones have been ripped out but those that remain are partly covered by logs; some of the best stones are now back in the river, and possibly salvageable (but not right now: the water is cold and turgid here). I recover some good builders from here and gingerly take them up the wrecked revetment, falling only once on the unstable slope. Falling on big hard stones hurts like hell. If you have any as yet unbroken bones this is a good place to fracture them (not recommended except to old fools who ought to know better). A river stone builder is acceptable, if not prized, if it has good building faces: flat and perhaps parallel ‘top’ and ‘base’ and compatible in overall size and shape with other stones in the build.

The build is not necessarily non-stop: it helps to stand and stare from time to time. I spot a second unusual fern that I decide to transplant to the far end of the wall and next to a decaying bloodwood log. First I must clear the area with The Rake to remove tradescantia plus Queensland wide-bladed BIG grass that must be hacked out by the roots with a mattock and then destroyed: this stuff grows to 2-m plus and seeds every March). I also bring up five of the almost but not quite ‘tree fern-y looking ferns and, one at a time, some of the biggest of stones to make a little garden. I add some mondo grass. I surround a local native tree (the one with my first string line attached) that has almost the appearance of a big birch tree. This hitherto rubbishy overgrown area little garden will complement the wall and the hard-standing concourse. I add some loam. It looks good. I resume setting stones.

In small breaks I explore the ravaged riverbank beyond the revetment: the minor flood has damaged even the bedrock 4-m above normal water level by ramming big logs from the fast river into the bedrock. I pick up the very dense pieces for use in the wall: they appear to be slate of shale.

Although end of the day comforts such as coffee or wine are tempting, caffeine flattens arteries and alcohol will put undue pressure on umpteen of your systems: lots of water helps. At the end of the work session the builder needs to stroll about casually (if he can) just to wind down and if he be silly enough to later lie in bed with knees up will surely cause his twanging tendons and mashed muscles to lock painfully into situations of cramp that will produce shrieking and yelling such that he will have to eject from bed in a crumpled heap on the floor then attempt to stand and walk casually again prior to returning to the comfort of lying relaxed in bed.

The reader will appreciate that something like the Concourse project is not going to be completed by 16:00 hours on Friday afternoon. It will be interrupted by rain, either magpies (collectors like me) or currawongs shedding an excess of ripe broad-leafed privet berries on you from 40-m heights or by overhead cockatoos tearing into big branches in search of grubs. The weakened branches break and fall, dangerously. The repetitive nature of the job requires that you give it a high priority so that you don’t lose your senses: get it done, asap. This particular job is about half done.

End of an era: farewell the citrus trees.

Saturday, July 23 2011. Leif is to visit with his chainsaws, one short and sturdy, the other saw is somewhat longer. My task is to access each of the remaining four trees (Washington navel orange, Algerian mandarin, tangelo, grapefruit) to get beneath the low branches (secateurs, saw, machete) and to dig access pits around what will be the stumps, then to widen appropriately so that the chainsaw can be laid horizontal and low enough to separate the timber well below ground level. I have previously axed and Des has chain-sawed an orange tree. There remains only the callamundin/cumquat (the small fruits make excellent marmalade) in this area and a lemon tree in a poor location next to the carport. The 2001 flood has dumped a few tonnes of rich loam here and raised the ground levels around the trees. The trees no longer bear much fruit and the bower birds very efficiently make raiding sorties to remove the best fruit in endless attacks every winter. And, last but not least, I expect to see again the views that diminished and disappeared in those bygone days when the citrus trees thrived and grew up and vanquished the upstream views of the river and progressively cut the light on this north-east section of Big Lawn so that there are now groundcovers (tradescantia) and tropical chickweed thriving where grass would be much more acceptable.

I dig for about two hours. Leif saws. I am joined by a cautions grey shrike thrush search among the destroyed trees. He sings cheerily as he bounces around the battlefield. The astute reader will quickly see that all of the hitherto Unused Muscles, as moderately healthy if stringy leftovers from other jobs will now be in play. Gardeners, young or old, cannot succeed in digging even half-m deep pits from the vertical position without their having also to get down into the pits and to kneel in them to clean the stumps or trunks of trees to be cut below ground level (silty or sandy soil damages chainsaws). Picture yourself, crammed into a kneeling fetal-like position with hand trowel, wire brush and an old dry hand brush, cleaning away loam and cranky centipedes: then reversing this cramped posture so as to stand once again without screaming. Standing up straight again is a great difficulty unless you’re a teenager bursting with rude health.

I also make another attempt to recover a BIG lomandra plant from the bottom of the river where it has lain underwater since the last flood. It takes a lot to remove a lomandra from a growing position on the riverbank: they have fibrous root systems and cling like limpets. A grapple utilizing my claw cultivator has failed to budge the big plant. I change into shorts and old tennis shoes and enter the cold river and succeed in getting the plant up onto the bedrock. Then I offer to share it with the neighbours. Pleased with myself I return to the area of the now vanished citrus trees. Leif has removed four or five trailer loads of dismembered trunks and branches. The area is open again. The views from the house, downstairs and upstairs are of the upstream river: I can see, again, two further bends! The shrike thrush is still picking over the site and warbling now and then.

Sunday, July 24 2011. I get up early again on a cold morning, have breakfast and start the cold car and head for the Coast: Coffs Harbour and Park Beach Plaza to do my shopping. I seldom go out on Sundays but I’m in the middle of everything and short of time.

I get home in time to have a sit in the sun and start to read the book I have just purchased: Cormack McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, having put aside for a while, The Catcher in the Rye. At 14:00 hours Doug and Mandy arrive with their tools. We dismember the poor old lomandra (it may be considerably old; we can only guess its age) and remove all the large portions from the riverbank to high ground where the barrow awaits. The revetment fails to claim any further casualties.

Monday, July 25 2011. I get up early again and disconnect the computer, pack it carefully into position with a car seatbelt and travel to Moonee Beach beyond Coffs. The landscape has been devastated to make way for highway extensions. The countryside is so changed that I’m disorientated and I almost miss the turnoff. I meet my friends Kerry and Sue. Kerry checks the Mac. All is well. I return home in brilliant sunshine and sneak a little sunshiny read at lunchtime. Blood Meridian is un-put-down-able, not because of the unsettling violence in the narrative, but because of the majestic prose. The book describes the Indian Wars and travels in Texas in the 1850s. As much as I want to quote some of the writing I’d best not because I don’t have permission. The author uses unusual prose that some readers may have some difficulties with. A Spanish dictionary is useful. I have a copy of Home Ground. Language for an American Landscape (Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (Eds) which helps—but no other book is essential. Blood Meridian is a masterpiece.

As I walk around looking at my improved upriver views (accompanied by the shrike thrush) I appreciate the light that now shines there. In ten minutes I rake loam back into the tree pits. The stumps were poisoned and won’t grow again. I’ve put aside the lomandra sections. In a day or so when I have more time, I’ll separate and then plant them.

I remember, more or less, an old Eastern saying from long ago: Since my house has burned down I now have a better view of the rising moon.

Everything changes.

DDD July 27 2011.