THE THICK OF IT

I have made my peace with the giant huntsmen; with the bird that throws itself against the window of the cabin as I write; with the thing that rustles each night in the wood basket; and the resident wallaby, Robert, who, overcome by the smell of a barbecue or perhaps our heavily lactating guest, baled us up one eventful lunch. I can greet a possum sitting on the couch in the family room eating an immaculately peeled banana at midnight, with something close to equanimity.  I have, five months into living in Lovett Bay, learned a lot. As have friends, managing to envelop a stray kookaburra in a blanket and gently usher it out; manoeuvre a bush turkey with a fondness for organic strawberries out of a kitchen window. I have learnt to leave plenty of leeway between myself and red-bellied black snakes, tree snakes, the mating pair of Bandy Bandy snakes which greeted us on the garden path when we returned home very late one night across a silver expanse of moon-lit water. Our first, tentative crossing in the dark. I have been brave.  Braver than I ever imagined. Every Buddhist precept put to the test. And not just with animals. Something of a reclusive writer, I have learned to open up, met with kindness, generosity, genuine interest. I suspect I may have met my tribe–the people I might perhaps grow old, or older with. And think of the years we have missed, and then that we only arrive at Valhalla when we are ready; when the gates are opened up to receive us.

I have done my best to fit in:  joined the choir, as a good Welshwoman–drifted on a barge across in the dusk to Church Point, wearing a silly hat. Walked home along a rutted road in the impenetrable dark under the stars after a fireshed dinner, unafraid. As so many, I have gone to the other side, only to return for forgotten keys, wallet, phone. Battered across the pounding white-caps of a strong nor-easter (having only recently come to know my norths from my souths), learning to drive the tinnie. Every time we come home across water I feel the twin pleasures of leaving and homecoming. And never fail to think of all the other stretches of water that have opened up behind me, watching the churning wake of our small commuter boat. There is something melancholic to be found in the passage of water. And something uplifting to the soul.

Did I mention the foundling Tawny Frogmouth I spent days handfeeding, bringing back from the dead? Put on notice, after barely a week, that far from removing myself from life, far from distancing myself from its awkward realities, I had found myself in the squawking, creeping, pounding, quaking thick of it. In the embrace of this serpentine beast, water, on a mythic journey of my own. Looking across the bay to Tarrangaua, I think of Dorothea Mackellar and the noisy singing that was said to sometimes come from the house at night. I, too, sing, loudly and off-key, as I write to music with my headphones on. Perhaps there have always been madwomen in this bay. And men, too. Some call it the Bay of Broken dreams, the many half-abandoned, half-finished boats, the sinkers that refuse to sink.

There are no whales in Pittwater. Researching a book I’m presently writing about whaling at the turn of the century, last year I spent a summer’s residency on Fogo Island, in Newfoundland, learned stories of the lost indigenous peoples, the Beothuk, of errant polar bears, saw caribou and coyotes, and their cunningly concealed lairs. It comes to me, as I write, that remote places surrounded by water have a plethora of stories. Are haunted places. Tap into something primal, the rising and falling levels of seas, tides, fears. Nothing I feared on Fogo Island, eventuated. Everything unimagined, did.

I have a new fascination with water. With its fleeting moods and changeability; it reminds me that there is little time left, less for impatience, bad temper, resentments. It’s hard to be petty, come face to face with something that has endured so much. At our hand, and at nature’s. It’s the stuff of life. Broken into shards of light. Tremulous, deep green, languid in the half-moon bay beside our house. I’m reminded by the sulphurous smell of mangroves of compulsively reading, as an adolescent, Anya Seton–how I thrilled to the word ‘bayou’. And, with a glance from our bedroom window through the drooping fronds of a banana tree, am transported to the South Pacific. I have never lived so many lives, so many places in one, as in this house. Across the bay, a volcano smokes after rain and the mist creeps down the gulley; and the largest of the great stand of spotted gums beside the house spills water, as surprising as if a rock had split open and gushed.

Wood floats on water. Random branches, planks, sometimes an entire log washes up. And the miscellany of boats in the bay, peeling and faded and weather-beaten, weather-formed and shaped and blistered with barnacles, stealthily vanish from their moorings only to appear once more, without apparent movement. If only I could catch them at it. I daily hear the sound of a houseboat being built, the tinker of building on water, the repairs, the hands that find injury, solace, exasperation in their work. That suddenly fall still, perhaps reminded by the seductive stillness all around them of something, or someone. Water seems a natural aide-memoire, perhaps it’s the shifting nature of it that jogs the memory. Only to swallow it again with its very beauty. There are wrinkles, small smoothed-out patches, a large sinuous path right through the middle of the bay, as if some monstrous snake had passed. The kraken wakes? Here, anything seems possible.