Thirteen — Barking in Nutwood

At lunch, over a big hunk of meat pie, I learned I was to spend the afternoon helping Dick with a project. I hoped the experience would be less confounding than my recent afternoon wrestling truck tires into submission.

I walked to the workshop an hour later, Kelly Dog running circles around me with all the vigor of an escaped convict. Dick, dressed in a singlet, small shorts, and oversize boots, greeted me with that racehorse smile of his.

“I’m yours for the afternoon, Dick. What are we up to?”

The elderly gent’s response carried through the air, entered my ears, and died. The sound waves forwarded by my eardrums were received within my brain the same way a car with a dead battery receives the turn of a key. Nothing, Nada. Zilch. Not even the click of a starter.

“I…ah…didn’t quite catch that, Dick. Come again?”

Dick repeated himself, reveling in my confoundment. Now, a forensic examination of his utterance would’ve revealed that he’d ask me if I was “all finished wrapping your laughing gear around a bit of dog’s eye”. I, alas, hadn’t thought to bring along a professor expert in deciphering Cockney aphorisms wrapped in Ocker brogue, so I was able to offer no more than a blank stare.

The thin man had a chuckle at himself for dishing out slang expressions for eating (‘wrapping your laughing gear around’) and meat pie (‘a Dog’s Eye’) which he knew would be opaque to me. What he didn’t realize was that had he recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America I would have struggled to recognize the familiar lines in his dense regional enunciation.

“So yer ‘ere to give a hand, eh?”

“Yes, Dick. I’m with you. What are we up to this afternoon?”

“Gotta fix’ ‘dem bloody panels, mite. Gotta beat ‘em straight and see that the lugs all match up. We’ll git rid of dem what don’t match and slap some new buggas on the ones what need ‘em, right-o?”

“Right-o.” I smiled weakly and stood waiting for directions, as I had absolutely no idea what the old mechanic was talking about.

Dick started to turn away, but noticing that I hadn’t budged, paused to see whether I might register any brain wave activity. Seeing an expression on my face which must have resembled a Cro-Magnon staring at computer code he stepped closer to the piteous Yank and motioned towards the materials yard, lowering his voice near a whisper.

“Ya know what yard panels are, Dive?”

I nodded vigorously. I did know what yard panels were. Yard panels — we’re doing something with yard panels. Yard panels, yay! Thank you, God! Yard panels!

“Well,” he said slowly, “you jus’ go on over there and pull all da bent ones outa there, Dive, an bring ’em ova here. As ya go, if ya see one with da wrong number o’ lugs,” he paused, perhaps wondering whether he needed to confirm that I was able to count, “set ‘em against that wall, eh? Now go on ova an ‘ave a Cap’n Cook.” He offered a sentimental smile and turned back to his work.

I walked over to the pile to have a look (“a Cap’n Cook”), hoping I could make sense of the old gent’s request. These portable panels, soon to become a stockyard, were eight feet across and six feet high. Each had five rails going across, but what I hadn’t noticed earlier were the pieces on the ends. Each panel end had three small round pipe segments welded to it. On one end, two were grouped closely at the top and a single was about a foot off the ground. These were reversed on the other end, in a way where when two panels would meet end to end the single lug would slip between the pair and the panels could be pinned together. As I looked through the stack, I could see several which were missing a lug. I peeled the panels off one by one, starting a new stack on a different tree, taking the aberrant ones to Dick in the workshop.

He’d set up his welding tanks and the air soon flashed with the light of the sun as he affixed new lugs.

When I’d brought in all the several dozen panels which needed repair Dick swung his welding mask to the top of his head and said, “Dive, I’m runnin’ short o’ pipe. May be we’ve a bit o’ three-quarter pipe out back –  you’ll go ‘ave a quick look. If not, I know you’ll find some in da chook ‘ouse. Used to be some oivie growin’ there. Get me ten foot or so, will ya?”

Now, I gathered that the issue involved the pipe he was cutting into sections to create the new lugs. I discerned that ‘da chook ‘ouse’ was the chicken coop – ‘chook’ being one of my favorite Australian-isms. I noticed that he was working with only a small piece of ¾” pipe, so I set out to scavenge more. Finding nothing useful in the salvage yard I grabbed a hacksaw and set out for the chicken coop.

“Chook, choooOK, choooOOOK, choooOOOOOK,” I called as I neared the birdhouse. When I swung open the gate, the white laying hens bustled to the opposite fence, turning their heads quizzically, half mortified, half fascinated by the odd creature who made such sounds. As I entered the pen the birds scurried about in exaggerated consternation. I saw four lengths of pipe crossing overhead. I dragged an old trough into the henhouse to stand upon. As the realization spread among the little chickens that their nightmares of falling skies were about to come true they careened about the small space with apocalyptic fervor.

I closely examined the structure. I was working more carefully now, after several weeks on the job, paying attention to the mechanics of a situation, staying alert to potential dangers. The pipe I originally thought I would cut turned out to be a part of the structure. I laughed as I imagined Charlie hearing a crash and rushing outside to find me standing on the old trough, hacksaw frozen mid-stroke, the chicken coop a deconstructed heap, traumatized pullets scattering like marbles.

As I searched further I discovered an old trellis (formerly covered in “oivie”) stashed above the coop. I hacked a section off and brought it to Dick, who showed me how to use the pipe cutter. I donned a pair of safety goggles and for the next thirty minutes stood amidst a whirlwind of sparks, cutting metal with stone.

I loved the elemental nature of the conflict. I wasn’t accustomed to dealing with things back home more dramatically matched than bread knife against butter. Here, the stone wheel shrieked and threw fluorescing sparks as it ate through the bare metal, heating it to color. The metal exacted its own toll, wearing the wheel down until it had spent to a nub the whirring disc. I replaced the wheel with fresh meat and watched it bite into the metal with a youthful zest. Christ, I thought, without this machine I could take that same bit of stone and work for ages without making a dent in the pipe. By the blessing of technology I flip a switch, and it eats away at superhuman speed.

I’d then take the three-inch sections out to Dick, where he’d combine oxygen and acetylene to generate 3500 degrees of heat, melting the metal, securing it so that not even a full-grown scrub bull could separate the new bond.

It’s incredible, really, the forces that we’ve captured to create our modern world. Forget the atomic bomb – that kind of power is unfathomable, like the distance of a light year or a twenty trillion-dollar debt. How about simply a stone that eats through inches of metal for a snack, or 3500° of heat in a can? That we modern humans take for granted our ability to marshal such forces, even out here in the farthest reaches of human habitation, speaks to the advancements we’ve made since those days when we were alone, in the same scrub, confronting an indifferent natural world with nothing but the endless potential of human ingenuity to counter insatiable need.

I enjoyed having the industrial world become part of my day. In the comfortable lives of non-industrial man we get to know Elmer’s glue and plastic screws and pop top lids. Most of us deal with nothing but the most rounded corners of technology, user-friendly, FDA-approved, designed for use by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Look what happens to many of us when things are made more complicated. Consider the teeth-gnashing Santa generates when he brings an IKEA desk, with its Slots A and Tabs B, or when we moderns are confronted by a plastic seal and no sharp implements at hand. Think of how confounded some of us become before we discover we simply need to push down in order to unscrew the medicine bottle. No; when left to tooth and claw contemporary man more often than not is defeated before even breeching the packaging on our most basic needs.

Imagine if a group of Park Avenue professionals had to cut pipe into pieces, adhere them permanently to steel, use them to construct a fence which would confine the cattle they had to shoot then butcher by hand, all before they could offer that invite to the big Fourth of July BBQ. How would that work out for any of us? We’d be going hungry, that’s how. And sooner rather than later we’d be turning to men and women such as those found on Bullo River Station to save our dehabilitated kiesters. And what plums might we offer as a ‘thank you’ for their life-sustaining acts? Perhaps a sweet tee time at the Club? Hot stock tips? Front row tickets to see The Eagles?

Alongside my existential musings I used the opportunity to ask Dick about himself. When I raised the issue of family he paused, mentioned a woman and a child then looked away. I wanted to question him further, to find out what drives a man to the kind of isolation he’d found for himself for the past fifteen years at Bullo. But with his entire mien intimating at sad circumstance I demurred, not wanting to violate this sanctuary he’d found for himself from exactly these kind of questions.

Australia’s Top End is, for some folks, an isle in the castaway’s archipelago, a refuge for people with a past either they want to forget, or others won’t. In a place where an innocent can get their face broken for pointing a camera the wrong way live people who expect to see their lives reflected nowhere except the bottom of their beer glass. The Northern Territory of Australia has the highest per capita alcohol consumption on earth, a taciturn population of solo nomads calibrating their bearings in dusty and unadorned beer halls.

Uncle Dick did become animated when talking about the mischief he’d gotten into with and–mostly–at the expense of former cronies. His wide mouth split his face like a muppet as he told me of the day he’d welded his buddy’s favorite coffee cup to the beam they were working on, or how he’d once epoxied another mate’s distinctive work boots to the floor in a bathroom stall, turning him by all appearances into a permanent resident of that commode. By the time we wrapped up our task he’d transformed himself before my eyes into a wonderfully likable old man. By allowing him to lead the conversation wherever he wanted a charmingly amiable side revealed itself. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the sun was well up by this point. I’d already discovered that Uncle Dick didn’t like mornings–a distaste he and I shared with a gourmand’s passion.

 

The next day found me greeting the sunrise in Nutwood Paddock, adjacent to Bull Rush and the final contained space before the open and endless bush. Peter, Bundy, and I had headed out with a chainsaw and two axes and the directive to “cut us some fence posts.” We’d brought two vehicles, the Toyota – dubbed the King – and the antique old red flatbed truck. Peter drove us into a stand of Bloodwoods–so named for the viscous red syrup that pours out of them when they’re felled. Peter strode off with the chainsaw, leaving Bundy and I with a moment’s pause before beginning the time-consuming debarking process.

 

With Peter sawing in the near distance, I seized the idle time to satisfy some of my curiosities about my indigenous workmate.

“Say Bundy, you mind if I ask how old you are?” I put him in his mid-thirties.

“I dunno, Dave. Hadn’t really kept count.”

“Really? No idea?”

“Naw. But I’m not dead yet, I know that. Apart from that, the number doesn’t much matter, does it?”

I had no ready answer. “Did you grow up in the bush?”

“Yeah, some of the time. I mostly grew up near Kunnunarra, at Bulla Camp.”

“What’s Bulla Camp? You don’t mean here on the station?”

“Naw, Bulla Camp. It’s the black fella’s camp. It’s away from town. We run it; don’t no whites come into it.”

“What about the police? Don’t they have to do their business?”

“Police stay away from Bulla Camp. We have our own.”

“So you can live in the bush? I mean, survive for a long time without food or water – you know, I mean, like, normal food or water?” I grimaced, wishing I’d have written my questions down beforehand had I known I was gonna sound this stupid.

Bundy didn’t fail to be amused by my fumblings; his one good eye sparkled, and he smiled his signature smile — the wry, knowing smile of a fox who’d been invited into the hen-house.

“Water’s the same in town as out, pretty much. And there’s plenty food to be had around.”

“Right now? Just around us here?” I asked, eager for a demonstration. I caught myself channeling Grape-Nut pitchman Euell Gibbons, famous for asking the question “did you ever eat a pine tree?”

Bundy looked slowly around us. “Naw, nothing much good.”

“Anything at all?” I asked, a Tenderfoot Scout on his first campout.

“Dem berries there. You can eat them at the right time of year. When they’re red.” He nodded towards a shrub in the near distance. I didn’t see any berries, but when we walked closer he pointed out the buds of what would become bush tucker.

My initiation into the mysteries of Aboriginal life paused as Peter make the final cut on a large Bloodwood. It tottered and fell to the ground with an impressive thump. Bundy and I retrieved our axes and joined Peter, who was stepping off a nine-foot section of the trunk, which he then cleanly severed. He then made another cut, right below where the crown of branches sprouted upwards. Bundy and I began whacking at the tree bark with the backs of our axes while Peter set off in search of another suitable victim. For several minutes the only sound in the broad valley was the reverberation of ax head against wood, for a beat or two in tandem, then dissonant with each other.

Though the morning was still cool I soon worked up a full sweat. I removed my shirt, enjoying feeling the crystalline sunlight as it warmed my skin. I worked my way down the first log, denuding about a five-inch-wide strip, sending chunks of moist green bark flying in all directions. The wood underneath glistened a warm vanilla color. When I reached the end, I rolled the log slightly, setting up another portion of its surface to be stripped clean. As I did so, I saw a tennis ball sized glob of beautiful scarlet sap pooling on the ground. The newly cross-cut surface of the tree was streaked with incarnadine tears. I asked Bundy if the material had any bush use.

“Not much. You can put it on cuts and sores, a bit.” I was disappointed at his answer. It was too lovely, this radiant ruby in its pastel world, to fancy it not being a treasure.

By the time I’d stripped the log clean Peter’d sliced up five additional trees, all within 200 yards of where Bundy and I were working. I contemplated the barking to come, then looked at my hands, They were burning with hot spots from my exertions, the soft flesh flushed and damp. Blisters I’d already earned were now floppy tags of dead skin scattered about my palms. I explored with my thumb and found several spots on each hand which promised to soon become blisters themselves.

Bundy looked up from his labors. The older man swung his ax more deliberately, with a slower, more measured rhythm than mine. I was proud of myself for finishing my log before he’d finished his, but I think he approached the job with a clearer realization that we were running a marathon, not a sprint.

When he was through, we walked together to the next felled tree. It had crushed a stout termite mound in its fall. I watched the dumpy gelatinous insects drag their abdomens back into the darkness with what must have been a pace as near as they could muster to panic. The mound in cross section was honeycombed, very much unlike those ants I’d ever known make their digs. Ants in my world carve little pinholes into the earth, as if sewing coarse fabric with a fine thread. These Aussie “white ants” mound dirt above ground in impressive constructions, then carve it with coral-like tunnels which leave paper-thin walls winding between broad channels. Thin as these walls were, they were deceptively sturdy, offering resistance to my touch. The smooth outer surface of the hill was rock hard – as I’d discovered the first time I surrendered to the impulse to kick one over.

The ants, Bundy told me, could actually eat into any material found on a station, other than metal. A truck that had been parked in the same spot for a while would suddenly one day blow a tire, the tread having been penetrated by inquisitive — and presumably regretful — termites.

“So what can you do with something like this?” I asked my new friend, gesturing towards the shattered mound. I was eager to restart my how-to-survive-in-the-outback-like-a-native seminar.

“Dat one too old,” he said, dismissively.

“Why too old? Too old for what?”

“Too old to eat, for sick stomach.”

I looked at the termites scurrying all about. It was easy to imagine that nibbling on those doughy sprinkles would make a belly ache. But, if they were younger, a different result?

“You mean, these termites are too old; it’s important to only eat, what, teenaged termites?”

“No, it’s not the ants you eat. It’s the hill.”

I was quite uncertain at that moment whether things were becoming more or less clear. So it wasn’t necessary to ask individual termites for ID before consuming them, apparently, but the condominium in which they live makes a tasty nosh?

“Bundy, I truly have no idea what you’re telling me.”

“New ant hills. We eat them for sick stomach, diarrhea. Woman eat them when she pregnant. Make you strong.”

“And…what do…anthills…taste like?” asked the flummoxed schoolboy inhabiting my body.

“Taste like chicken,” answered the dark man with a massive smile.

Alrighty, then…class dismissed…

 

I was, at that moment, a poor candidate for operating sharp implements, yet duty beckoned. We set upon two new posts laying amidst the tangle of its trimmed bower. Peter had cut the trunk into fence posts but had also formed a slender log twelve feet long from one of its primary branches. This was to be a new rail, Bundy said, replacing the one recently broken in the round pen during the horse branding. Fifteen minutes later I’d stripped it clean.

The sun by now was an imposing presence overhead. My hands were radiant with the heat of friction, though I didn’t notice the discomfort so much when I was swinging the ax. But as I walked from one log to the next my hands tingled and flushed, as though I’d just pulled them off the surface of a warmed motor.

After three hours a dozen denuded trees lay scattered about the eucalyptus stand. Peter joined us in the debarking after felling the trees. Peter had turned all but one into either eight-foot strainer posts, or twelve-foot rails. One fat tree, however, had been made into a single long post. This tree was thicker than the rest–perhaps twenty inches thick at its base–and only a little less at its top a full ten feet away.

“Christ, Peter! What’s this for?” I asked, “Are we building a wharf somewhere?”

“That’s for the round yard. One of the primary gateposts is about rotten,” Peter answered, “It’s not likely to last much longer.”

“It’ll be great fun wrestling this beast into place,” I murmured to myself.

Before any of our new posts could be set into their new homes we needed to load the logs onto the old red flatbed. Bundy’d been called away by Charlie after lunch to help Dick in the workshop, so Peter and I were left with only our wits and muscles to load the heavy posts. Most we could lift between the two of us and drop it into the King with a solid crash. The posts were two- to three-hundred pounds apiece, making each one a chore to lift and a joy to release to its spot in the truck. The rails were slender and light; these we easily tossed aboard.

We ceased our loading when a careful eye on the rear leaf springs told us our ute was maxed out. Then we’d drive the load to the red truck, which we’d left that morning parked on the main track. With an equal mixture of straining and ingenuity – ok;  perhaps it was ninety-five percent straining and five percent ingenuity — we moved the logs from the back of the pickup onto the flatbed truck. This was strenuous work – a “real physical grunt” in Peter’s words.

He was as easy to work with as ever, with his humor and collegial spirit. “You know,” he said at one point, “we need this laneway we’ll be building in order to do our thing. We have to run the cattle to survive, right? So we have to cut this fence out of the ground in order to stick it back in where we need it. It’s like us against nature, sort of. You know what I mean?” he asked, a thoughtful expression on his face. “It’s like, it’s the right material, but in the wrong place, and we’ve gotta straighten out God’s handiwork.”

It might have been the unexpectedly spiritual nature of the remark, or the unabashed guilelessness emanating from my customarily wry workmate, but I couldn’t resist ribbing him. “Damn Peter, you’re a regular country philosopher – the Will Rogers of the outback.”

“Yeah, the only philosopher trained at Agricultural College – by correspondence, yet!”

“But I do get your point. I’ve been thinking about that myself,” I said, “You don’t do things out here because you want to, or avoid things because you don’t want to do ‘em. Things just need to be done. So you do them. There’s no choice, really. There’s no end to things which need fixing. And there’s no looking at the watch to know when they’ll be finished, no whistle to say ‘okay that’s enough; now you can go home and there’ll be plenty of food in the fridge and the lights will be on. All’s well; your paycheck cleared.’

I continued. “Here, we don’t have dinner unless we shoot a bullock when we need to, and no lights if we don’t know how to keep a generator running.” I was on a roll. “It makes life easier in a way, to be free from choosing what to do, how to spend your time. Simpler, more focused. Do what’s needed, and enjoy the gratification of seeing your handiwork, solving an issue. Don’t do what needs doing, and that Nature you speak of battling will soon reclaim your body and put it to its own needs. Most likely as worm food.”

I brought my sights down from the heavens to see Peter staring at me, a wide smile on his face. “Damn, who’s the bush philosopher now? You didn’t tell me you went to Ag School too!”

By midafternoon we’d stacked two dozen logs on the antique flatbed sitting knee-deep in spinifex grass along the main road. The only posts still laying in the woods were a half dozen which I took to be too heavy for Peter and me to lift by ourselves.

That’s not to say Peter and I didn’t have to lift them by ourselves. This was our job to finish, so we just had to find a way to get it done.  We decided to back the Toyota up to one end of the fatties. Then Peter and I would lift together to stand the post on end. Braced strategically against the dead weight we would tip it as gently as we could on to the back of the ute, then slide it completely aboard. This technique worked well enough until we reached Big Mama, the beefy ten-footer destined to be the new gatepost. When Peter and I tried to lift it on end its massive weight fought us hard. We only managed to raise it to waist height, unable to get underneath and tip it up on one end.

We dropped the monster and reverted to Plan B. We raised the one end to waist height, then, leaving the log braced on Peter’s leg, I dashed to King’s driver seat and carefully reversed the tailgate underneath the raised end. Somehow I managed to do this before my sinewy companion’s femur snapped. By continuing to back slowly the log was lifted, until Peter was able to teeter-totter the beast to bed height, then shimmy and roll the log onto the truck. It was a good feeling; the two of us, physically inferior to the quarter-ton log, bending it to our wishes with an application of ingenuity, persistence, and man-made technology.

And what great fun it was to be sweating – fully, shamelessly, way, way beyond anything Arrid Extra Dry had to say about it. And it occurred to me that this was finally and fully the work I’d come to Australia to do – both at Bullo itself, yes, but in my life generally.

How so? It’s simply this; I’d read at an impressionable age Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a story which imprinted upon my adolescent mind the idea that hard physical labor is the purest manifestation of integrity. Young architect Howard Roark, the book’s protagonist, refused to compromise his aesthetic principles in the slightest detail, principles based on the idea that the form of a structure must arise only and ever out of its function, that rococo curlicues or faux ornamental columns were violations against the nature of beauty itself. This iconoclastic caliber of stubborn didn’t go over well as he sought commissions straight out of architecture school, so he committed himself to a life of grinding labor rather than compromise his sense of right and wrong. When the world didn’t offer work on his terms, he chose to work in a stone quarry, swinging a pick all day in exchange for the honest if spartan comforts of a laborer’s life. He dedicated himself to working there until he could fund the opportunity to search the world, seeking clients who would resonate with his vision of artistic cohesiveness.

So I had Howard Roark in mind the day I set out looking for my first adult job, nineteen years old, committed to the idea there could be no job too physically demanding to serve as the starting line on my personal quest for an integrated self. Standing on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, California, I randomly pointed my feet west and began walking through the front door of every gritty commercial enterprise in this neighborhood of auto body shops and arc welders and galvanized plating facilities. Wherever sparks flew or metal clanked a hope arose within me that this might be the place where shards and grit and metal dust would sandpaper the soft edges of my suburban self, grind me down until I might discover what manner of steel formed my own elemental self.

Somewhere in the first midday of my quest I came upon an unassuming asphalt lot stacked to the sky with split firewood.

“This is it!” I thought to myself. “This is the place for me to begin. This looks like hard work. This will be my stone quarry. This will be the place from which I sort out the frauds and the fakers and the compromisers of this world from the doers of deeds, the crystal visionaries, the agents of change rather than guardians of an ossified status quo. I’ll be in the background, sure, but I’ll watch, learn, grow. I won’t be paying the rent selling shabby timeshares in some boiler room operation. Nay, I’ll be sweating a good honest sweat, working with wood — splinters of raw Nature! — and I’ll stack and deliver firewood forty honest hours each week, distributing a thousand points of light, scattered from Malibu to Mt. Baldy, from Pearblossom to Poway. Then, once I’m the best firewood stacker the world has ever known, then…then…Oh hell, I don’t know what then, exactly. That part’s a little fuzzy; I’ll figure it out when I get there. But for now, I wanna be the best damn firewood stacker these folks have ever seen!”

I found the manager and made my best pitch, laid out for him my vision of firewood stacking as portal to personal wholeness.

I fear Rodrigo may have missed some of my key selling points, however; his command of English was not particularly nuanced. “Not is looking helping,” said the slight Latino man with a look equal parts confused and concerned.

Several doors later, I entered a nondescript storefront underneath a Pepsi sign with plain block letters spelling out ‘Studio Grill’. After a brief if earnest conversation with the manager I was hired to repaint the interior walls of the unexpectedly swank restaurant. Within a week the painting job segued into busboy and, several years later, I found myself waiting tables at the blue-nose Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills. One night during dinner service a man offered me a job driving hoi poloi around town in his limousine, which, in turn, several years later led to me looking in my rearview mirror and saying, “Your Highness, we’ve arrived at Van Cleef & Arpels.”

Then one evening I looked in the mirror in my dinky Hollywood apartment and discovered that the man in my reflection could not hold my gaze. His belly was flabby, his ample butt fitted to the contours of cushy car seats. His pallid skin flushed with only a suggestion of vitality within.

I nodded and pursed my lips at the stranger, the perfunctory greeting of two people who won’t get past discussing the weather in their acquaintance. As I confronted the truth that he and I were one it came with the realization that I’d taken my hand off the rudder, that I’d become a passenger in my own life. I was drifting from experience to experience, my amorphous aspirations slowly morphing into even more gossamer dreams, those dreams becoming images on someone else’s screen, some interesting other’s life, someone other than that chubby guy looking back at me from the mirror. Any inner steel I possessed lay hidden behind layers of accumulated lard, an adipose shroud between the man I’d become and the man I’d intended to be.

You might discern at this point in my narrative that I’d never formed a clear picture of what precisely I wanted from life, what exact profession I wanted to pursue. Your sense is correct; I’d always known with what markers I intended to guide my life but never set a precise destination for the journey. I knew how I wanted to do my life’s work – with integrity and commitment and intensity of experience – but I didn’t know what I wanted to do professionally. I wasn’t that kid who knew at the age of four he wanted to be an astronaut, or a fireman. I’d moved through childhood and adolescence from vision to vision, unwilling to confine my ambitions under a single hat. I navigated my way capriciously, steering according to the particular adventure tale or biography or history yarn inflaming my fancy at any given moment.

So I found myself that night earning big money carting about her Royal Rumpness but watching my dreams of doing significant things with a monolithic integrity — worldly, willing, bold – fast becoming celluloid illusions casting their fractured light upon an audience of a single lonely soul.

Within a month I’d booked a ticket to Australia, where I soon met a family friend who knew of a fellow American, a naval aviator from World War II, who owned a cattle ranch in Australia’s remote Northern Territory. He, his Australian wife, and their three daughters ran the place, and invitations for friends to visit had never been refused. So I hoisted my backpack on my shoulder and caught a bus to the Top End.

Now I found myself standing on a log in Nutwood Paddock in the boundless solitude of the Australian outback, knocking bark off with deft blows, wrestling massive logs into submission, focused by obligation, freed by agency, sweaty, fit, my every sense very much alive. It had taken a while, but I’d found my stone quarry.

“It’s a bloody grunt, eh, Dave?” Peter was leaning on a felled pillar, exhausted, grinning.

I smiled to my anatomy’s limit – a proper Peter Clarke smile – and answered, “What, barking in Nutwood? Yeah, it’s a bloody grunt, Peter. It sure as hell is.” I paused as we both gazed upon the scene before us. “And mate, I’ll tell ya what. There’s not a place in this world I’d rather be, or a damned thing I’d rather be doing.”