With the bullcatching behind us and another muster about to begin, Charlie called for a rest day, our second day off in the past month. I sat outside doing some amateur leatherwork—making a sheath for the pocketknife Danielle had given me for my birthday—when a vehicle approached the homestead gate. Within minutes a faded green Holden, dusty and road weary, parked alongside the fence surrounding the Henderson home. Out sprang a tall, angular man dressed in skinny black pants and a dark collared shirt. One of his shirtsleeves was empty, folded and pinned neatly at the shoulder. From the passenger side came an owlish woman dressed in a long, full skirt that touched the top of her shoes, a style perfectly at home in Amish country but cartoonish among the sweaty singlets and grimy jeans in vogue at Bullo.
“Good day, mate!” The man called to me with the enthusiasm of a lottery winner. “Are you the man of the house?”
“Well, not exactly. But I can get him for you. What’s the nature of your business?”
“We’re here with some Good News!” said the round-faced woman, with similar enthusiasm.
DefCon 4 alerts immediately crossed my internal antenna, tuned as they were to urban landscapes. Both strangers carried in their hands a thick book, certain to be the Bible. These were proselytizers, folks willing to make a fifty mile drive down a dirt track to inquire as to our familiarity with their “Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!”. Back home I might simply smile, say no thank you, and close the front door gently. Though we can surely learn much from strangers in this life, it’s been my experience that ideologues reciting practiced scripts are poor sources of wisdom or insight, those precious rewards of hard-won and necessarily idiosyncratic life experience. In the current situation, however, a quick dismissal seemed unlikely.
“Ahhh, hold tight a moment. I believe everyone’s resting but let me check.”
I found Sara in her office, doing paperwork. “Sara, I believe we have some Christians outside who would like a word with you. Emphasis on Word. Shall I tell them you’re sleeping?”
“Oh, Christ,” said Sara with a sigh, seemingly unaware of her double-entendre. “We get this lot every now and again. Every time they drive in for the same answer. It’s bloody amazing, really.”
“Shall I just tell them that everyone here is right with the Lord and send them on their way?”
“No, we can’t do that. You’ve got to at least admire their perseverance. I’ll pop out and tell them the same thing I tell them every time they show up; at least they get a friendly goodbye for their 150 km of petrol!”
I walked with Sara back to where the one-armed man and his prairie home companion were waiting to witness.
“Hello, friend!” The man nearly bellowed as we emerged from the back door. “How are you on this beautiful day?” The man was grinning the broad grin of the true believer, similar in luminescence to the smile of the used car salesman, a grin which by itself doesn’t reveal whether one’s faith lies in the Lord above or his ability to convince you of the absolute worthiness of the automobiles he’s tasked with moving. This believer’s dowdy mistress reflected a matching warmth of uncertain provenance.
“G, day. What can I do for you?” said Sara, knowing full well their ideal answer to her question—fall on your knees and in a moment of exquisite epiphany seek repentance from the Lord—was not on her calendar for the day.
“We’ve come to share the good news about Jesus Christ! Have you heard?” asked the man with a touching credulity.
“Oh? I haven’t seen the papers lately. There’s news? Has He returned, then?” Sara said, impishly. This was clearly not the Bullo matron’s first encounter with missionaries.
The heralds were undaunted by Sara’s sarcasm. “No ma’am, not just yet. But He surely will. Have you considered what will happen to you and your loved ones when that happens?”
“Well, I reckon we’ll have a bit of time to think about it then. We’re a bit off the beaten track, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.” This woman was a pro.
“Do you practice a faith, sister? Have you considered these questions?” This was the woman speaking.
“Oh, I have my understandings. They suit me, and they seem to suit the man above. We take care of ourselves out here. We don’t ask much from Him, and He doesn’t seem to expect much from us. Now, if you’d care for a sandwich before your drive out, I’d be happy to offer you one.”
“We would surely appreciate that, ma’am. We’ve come from Sydney to share our story, the story of the Lord himself, with you. And,” the man said, glancing at his wife, “I reckon we’re hungry as a couple o’ black dogs!”
Sara ushered the two itinerant devotees into the kitchen. As she was cutting generous slices of roast beef Charlie wandered in to investigate the visitors.
“What’s your branch? You Mormons?” Charlie asked with his usual brevity.
“No, friend. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses. What’s your name?” asked the tall, slender man, rising from his seat.
“Charlie. Good to meet you. Have a seat; I’m just passing through.”
“Well, Charlie, have you considered what will come of you when your time is finished on this earth?”
Charlie, who’d already taken a few steps away from the encounter, stopped, and after a pause, turned and with matter-of-fact directness said, “I reckon I’ll become fertilizer.” With that, the big man turned and strode through the rear door.
Sara similarly parried the rest of the missionaries’ questions as they finished their lunch, and within thirty minutes were again on their way. I didn’t engage with the pious couple, figuring the dry well they hit with the Henderson clan was trouble enough on this afternoon. Though I have tremendous appreciation for the structured understandings of right and wrong codified in religion, and believe that the impulse to understand the ethereal is a virtual biological necessity, I have problems with Jehovah’s Witnesses specifically. Never mind their unwillingness to celebrate birthdays or other cultural holidays; anyone has the right to be joyless, I suppose. My problem with Jehovah’s Witnesses is that they hew to a strict pacifism which spills over into unethical practices by my reckoning. Context is everything in the world of ethics.
Their unwillingness to swear fealty to any authority other than God caused problems for Witnesses living in Germany in the 1930s. This resistance to Nazi doctrine certainly accrues to their credit; having the Nazis as enemies would count as a virtue, by any reckoning. Their devotion was such that they joined the Jews, Gypsies, and gays in the concentration camps of that hellish era. Once there, however, the Nazis took advantage of the Witnesses’ pacifism and employed them as personal servants—housekeepers, nannies, barbers. A religion which sees itself as doing God’s will yet asks its adherents who find themselves holding a straight razor against the jugular vein of the worst monsters to ever walk the face of the earth, yet feel their loving God prohibits them from decapitating said monsters – well, that’s not a moral voice which calls to me. How the right of the Auschwitz Commandant to get a clean shave unmolested trumps the rights of the thousands of inmates under his malignant thumb to enjoy even a moment’s victory is beyond my comprehension, and doesn’t strike me as among the dimmest understanding of the desires of a good God.
Change again swept Bullo River as we began reconstituting the yard in Bull Creek. By now the routine was rote within our small cadre. There wasn’t a great deal of talk or strategizing required when unloading, then assembling, the constituent parts. As large a task as it was, it unfolded with inexorable progress if everyone worked steadily throughout the day.
You’ll notice that last sentence contains an “if”. Denny had become increasingly withdrawn over the several weeks he’d been with us. His general malaise was occasionally punctuated by episodes of peppy chatter and ribald humor, but a quiet surliness had become the norm. Much as I tried to accommodate his lassitude by focusing on my own work, I was unable to ignore the fact I was doing considerably more work than he, and the job was taking longer than it otherwise would. The issue came to a head one morning at Bull Creek.
We were an hour into our day. The cool August mornings had us starting our work wearing a sweatshirt. As the sun rose and our muscles limbered, we’d shed this outer layer. Denny, Eddie, and I were carting and linking panels when I paused to pull my jumper off. I tossed it in the cab of the truck and got back to work. Denny used the occasion to wander off and find a seat in the shade, where he would hand roll a smoke. Eddie and I continued working while he relaxed under the gum tree.
“Hey Dave! Bring us the jug of water, will ya?”
I dropped my hands to my side and stared at my laggard coworker in disbelief. “Excuse me?”
“The water. Bring it over here for me, won’t you matey?”
The first word which came to my mind was likely unfamiliar to the majority of Australians, but is commonly used back home among my Jewish friends—chutzpah. That Denny would have the unmitigated temerity to ask me to stop doing the work he himself was supposed to be helping with in order to service his unearned thirst was more than my temperament, gentle though it may be, could bear.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? You’d like me to save you the trouble of getting off your ass and getting your own drink? I mean, literally, are you actually out of your fucking mind?”
I left my less-than-rhetorical question to hang in the air as I returned to my work.
“Well, bloody hell, mate. You bloody Americans don’t know the first damn thing about being a mate,” the older man looked genuinely taken aback. “What makes you think you can talk to me like that, you bastard?”
“Denny, we have a shit-ton of work to be done here. Unless this enterprise is being sponsored by Drum goddamn Tobacco, you’re not doing anything to help. If you want to spend half the day sitting on your backside smoking cigarettes, well, I guess I don’t have anything to say about that. But don’t ask me to cater to your lazy ass in the meantime!”
The older man mumbled some manner of oath concerning Americans and equine backsides, then returned to his brooding immobility. Eddie looked squarely at me for several moments, then returned to his labors. I could read in his eyes neither approval nor disapproval of what I’d said, a fact I credited as a failing on his part. Given that Eddie’s burdens were increased to the same degree as mine by Denny’s indolent ways, I might have hoped for some endorsement of my stance. Instead, I was met with an inscrutable stare, and a disconcerting silence.
The poisoned atmosphere persisted through the day, with a glowering quiet between Denny and I and a noncommittal indifference on the part of Eddie.
“Charlie, I gotta tell you. Denny is driving me absolutely nuts,” I complained to the big man that evening, “There’s just not much getting done with him around.”
“Just do your work, Dave. Just do your work. I don’t think Denny is long for this place. It’s not worth getting in a blue around it.”
The next morning, I approached Eddie privately to get his thoughts.
“You didn’t seem too excited by how I spoke to Denny yesterday,” I said by way of opening.
“It’s not my matter. You talk to Denny. There is trouble,” came the aboriginal man’s cryptic reply.
“Damn right there’s trouble. You and I are doing the bulk of the work and it’s taking us longer than it should. That’s a big problem!”
“No, not that trouble. Other trouble.”
“Other trouble? What other trouble?” I was hoping at this point that I’d not done something to offend Eddie. I needed an ally out in the bush.
“Not to talk about,” the dark ringer said as he turned away.
My mind was in a muddle for the rest of the day. The atmosphere between the three of us mirrored the gauzy skies above, bruised and cloudy. A full, humid wind began blowing in the morning and continued throughout the day. We silently bumped our way back home under a muted sunset, its glory lost amid the viscid, roiling murk of the cold and cloudy skies.
As we approached the house, Sara emerged from the back door, wiping her hands on her apron. She waved us down, then peered into the cab, her head in the open window.
“Eddie, will you come up after you’ve set your gear down. There’s something we need to share with you.” Sara typically spoke in a gentle tone, but this request was conveyed in a funereal hush.
I deposited the two men at the stock quarters, then drove back up to the homestead. Within a few minutes, Eddie was standing at the rear doorway.
“Oh, please come in,” said Sara solicitously. As the stock hand drew closer, she said, “I received a call today. I’m afraid I have some bad news.” She paused to gauge the look on Eddie’s face. He maintained the stoicism which had been bothering me in the bush.
“I know,” he said quietly.
“You… You know about the accident?” Sara said in confusion.
“No. I know about the trouble.”
“So,” Sara said cautiously, unsure of exactly where she stood. “So you know that your father has been injured and, apparently, your brother Walter has been killed?”
“Yes. Now I know,” the gentle man paused, then said, “I must go.”
“Of course,” said Sara. “I’m so sorry. Let me take a look at the bus schedules. You need to go down to Alice?” Eddie nodded. “Well, let’s see when the next bus comes by and we’ll drive you out.”
“We’ll be sorry to see you go, Eddie. We appreciate what you’ve done here.” Charlie stood behind Sara’s shoulder. “See us in the morning; we’ll pay you out.”
The indigenous bushman lowered his head, offered a quiet thanks, and turned to walk to the stock quarters. I hesitated for a moment, then joined him on the walk. To walk alone with such news fresh on the mind struck me as an added insult.
“Goodness, Eddie. I’m so very sorry to hear about this.” Suddenly, I recalled his puzzling remark about ‘other trouble’ from the previous day. “Was this the trouble you were speaking of?”
“Yes,” Eddie said simply.
I stared at the good man who was at that moment both beside me and a universe away, residing in a world where reason, as I might ever understand it, had no purchase.
We Westerners get quite caught up in our gadgets and gizmos, so proud of the distances we’ve breached, our ability to connect electronically with loved ones over the horizon. Eddie had availed himself of none of our technologies for his knowing, however. Neither radio phone nor posted letter nor word-of-mouth had brought this news to him. Somehow, using senses less than latent within myself, he had been made aware of this tear in the fabric of his world before it arrived via our electronica.
To all external appearances, he was only marginally different from me. He wore trousers and a hat, had two ears and thirty-two teeth. He was born into a family, had cultivated loves and suffered disappointments. Yet somewhere within his slight if sturdy frame—or perhaps without—existed an accumulated legacy which made his experience on this planet profoundly different from mine. In the same way that, say, my resonance with the hero’s journey embodied in St. George and the Dragon, a cultural axiom gifted to me from time beyond memory and, by now, absorbed into the Western DNA, so had Eddie been endowed with a caliber of understanding which transcends the individual human body, and spirit.
I wonder if the Information Age will eventually disintegrate such differences by funneling the totality of human experience into a single shared narrative. If, by that mechanism, all residents of planet Earth circa 5000A.D. share a homogenized legacy, they’ll be poorer for not having the opportunity to stand next to a man with an organic yet seemingly impossible knowing such as Eddie’s.
We moderns have a tenuous relationship with the concept of impossibility. This fact was brought home to me as I staggered through the Himalaya Mountains on a previous trip abroad. I arrived in Nepal, fit and fired up, ready to tackle the world’s tallest mountains with all the gusto of a bronc-buster. In Kathmandu I bought a large backpack and stuffed it full of every need and most wants I fancied taking on my two-week trek to Everest base camp. I intended to bulldoze those mountains flat, all while sleeping in luxury, reading amply, and eating only the finest trail fare.
At the end of the first half-day, spent climbing the equivalent of a spiral staircase taller than Jack’s beanstalk, behind me lay a trail of jettisoned camping gear including a tent, all my cookware, food, sunblock, sleeping pad, and the Scattered Writings of Paul Theroux. I was down to a sleeping bag, a single change of clothing, a down parka, and a small bottle of water. I caught myself contemplating whether the weight of my sunglasses made them worth toting up the soul-sapping rises and jarring descents inescapable in Nepal. I was not nearly man enough to confront the Himalayas unladen, much less so with fifty pounds of gear on my back.
As I sat trail-side, gasping, reviewing in my mind every blighted life decision I’d made which brought me to that moment, my attention gradually moved to the human activity around me, lives which had thus far been no more than appropriately exotic backdrop to my own internal experience. Children danced and played in front of simple homes, women worked handmade implements in sharply stepped fields, and, most notably, men, women, and children all traversed the time-worn trails between villages, those same trails which had evaporated all but a wisp of my life-force in three hours of hiking.
And no one walked empty-handed. As I looked closer at the loads the Rai and Chhetri and Tamang people carried I began to assess their contents. One slight man carried five cases of beer, with a large sack of onions atop. A quick calculation put that weight over one hundred pounds. Another had three fifty-ponds sacks of rice, an astonishing burden. I spiraled into incredulity as the enormity of what these people were accomplishing, as a matter of rote, became clear to me.
And how these loads were carried! Rather than in our familiar backpacks with shoulder straps, Nepalis carry their loads in broad baskets on their back, suspended only by a single wide strap which sits atop the head. These diminutive people set their basket on a low ledge, move the strap atop their head, bend forward at the waist so the enormous load sits in line with their spine, and begin walking.
In that precarious manner, these stalwart souls carry loads typically weighing more than their own body weight up and down the tallest mountains in the world.
My disbelief blew its containment vessel when a man came around the corner, stepping slowly but steadily, carrying four full-sized sheets of three-quarter inch plywood. I know something of plywood, having spent time on construction crews. Each sheet weighs between sixty and seventy pounds, putting this man’s load at an otherworldly 240 pounds, minimum. By way of comparison; many of us have lifted a five gallon jug of bottled water, may have wrestled one atop a water cooler. It’s an act which requires bracing oneself, and feels a bit of an accomplishment, the hero of the office, perhaps. Well, stud, each of those bottles weighs just over forty pounds. So imagine how impressed the secretarial pool would be if you picked up, not one, not two, but six of those bottles at once, somehow suspended them from your head, then walked all the way home.
It’s not gonna happen, is it? I know when I pull a sheet of ply off a stack and carry it to the second floor I feel manly; carrying four at a time up then down a 150 story building in a day, then again the next, six days a week, as a career, is by every rational standard an absolute impossibility, beyond conception. Fewer than ten percent of American men can lay on their backs and move 200 pounds eighteen inches in a bench press, never mind hoist four fifty pound plates onto their heads and go hiking.
Yet I was seeing exactly that take place before my own eyes. These men, and women, were stepping past me, five feet away, coming from the trail below and disappearing above, doing something which I would not have thought humanly possible, outside, perhaps, broadcast-worthy demonstrations of superhuman strength. But these weren’t superhumans; they were average folk, going about their business.
And as I watched them it occurred to me that, were they not doing what they were doing, living the lives they were living, it would not be thought possible. Should roads someday make their way deep into the Himalaya, and generations of motorized transport relegate today’s porters to the mists of time, the people appearing before my eyes will have evolved into legend, superheroes from an apocryphal past, residents of the age of miracles. No member of that future age will ever say, “hey, I think I’ll take this 200 pound load of rice, put it on my head, and walk the thirty miles to Namche Bazaar.”
My point isn’t that someone might ask “Why would you do that?”, but rather that they’d declare “It’s not possible to do that.” Just as my example of the office worker making his daily commute on foot, carrying six bottles of Sparklets water from his head, every day, as routine, stands as an evident absurdity, so would anyone in my hypothetical future who proposed doing what Nepali porters do today be similarly regarded. It’s not that the act would become an impracticality, but rather, an absurdity. And by that, it will have moved out of reach within the quiver of human possibility.
So it is with Eddie, and his ability to communicate over the horizon without benefit of satellites and micro-chips. He draws from a well as thoroughly hidden to my eyes as that which nourishes those Nepali porters. They doing that which is impossible in my world; well, our world, yet a world I share with them incompletely. Being ‘human’ means something different to them than it does to me.
I, as a fellow resident of earth, am made more whole by their continued presence. That highways will likely never penetrate the near-vertical Himalaya is a blessing, in that regard. Nepali super-men and women will persist as an example well into the future. Likewise, the fact that Eddie’s people have been engineering their ethereal network for fifty millennia gives me hope that it has an inertia which will carry it into the future.
We humans are a better lot for having such mysteries breathe among us.
“I’ll be heading out, myself,” said Denny when he heard the news of Eddie’s departure. “I reckon I’ve had my fill of life around here.” He averted his eyes as he reached for his tobacco pouch, but I felt his opprobrium focused upon me.
“Look, Denny, you’re a good man. Your music moves me. I hate that it got difficult between us. I just… I just feel like there’s a lot to do around here, and I want to be busy getting it done. I really enjoy hanging out with you. But when we’re working, I’m working. That’s it.”
The bearded man slowly rotated skeptical eyes my direction.
“It makes me antsy to stop,” I continued. “These people have been very kind to me. I want to do right by them.”
“Well Dave,” he sighed dismissively, “I reckon you’re just a company man. And that’s all right for you. But it’s not me. I’m not a company man, I’m a free man. It’s all about the journey, mate. If you can’t take a minute along the way to have a smoke with a mate, well, that’s your call. But I’ll take my time, thanks. I’ll enjoy a good smoke and a cold piss and a yarn with good mate. I guess that’s the difference between me and you.”
His re-framing stung. I understood the difference between him and I as within the realm of conscientiousness, sense of duty. Unlike the galactic chasm between Eddie and myself, my disconnect with Denny surrounded execution, not paradigm. I was willing to work hard. He wasn’t.
Some of our disjoint have been cultural. The Australian work ethos don’t value striving the same way we do in America, with our Puritan underpinnings. That’s not to say no one works hard in Australia; the notion is absurd. But there exists a group dynamic in which men modulate their efforts in order to not show up their friends. I’d heard it referred to as the Tall Poppy Syndrome, where the fellow who thinks himself better than his mates needs to be cut down to size. Gaudy displays of excessive exertion or ambition within the group context are not rewarded here the way they are in America.
This might seem a criticism, but that’s not my intent. Americans sacrifice much with their unrelenting drive—family, community, health, often. The Australian inclination to relax and share a cold beer with a mate at a moment’s notice has its charms in a demanding world.
But Denny’s suggestion I was not friend material hurt, coming from a man whose music revealed a gentle and honorable soul.
“Come on, Denny. You and I have more in common than we do that’s different. That’s why we hit it off right away. And your music, man, I tell you; your music moves my soul, brother. I see you in there, and I’m right there with you.”
Regardless of the offense he’d taken at my manner in the field there’s nothing closer to a musician’s heart than his muse, and finding a resonant audience for his music. Within thirty minutes I was sitting in Denny’s room, playing and singing and talking under a single dim bulb. I nodded along as he sang, and listened as he spoke, hesitantly at first, then in full voice, about family.
Denny’s son had a congenital condition which caused him to lose first his sight, then his hearing, before his third birthday. The cruelty of this circumstance struck me in the solar plexus. The impossibility of sharing with his son the thing most precious to Denny would have leached the joy out of fatherhood, visions of shared musical experience fading with his baby’s faculties.
Perhaps Denny numbed the sorrow with excessive alcohol, perhaps in his state of compromised humanity he lashed out physically. I don’t know; that part of the story he swallowed with the long draws of cigarette smoke which punctuated the telling. Denny’s wife in short order left him, filed for custody, secured a restraining order. Denny hadn’t seen his son in the decade since the day a judge granted her request.
In his softly spoken tale, as in his music, he laid bare that which most mattered — his muse, bruised and tattered. In the dim light I saw within a well of timeless anguish the reflection of the man before me; an itinerant troubadour, ever running from the relentless stare of his mind’s eye, it filled with visions of what will never be, what, in a finer world, would never have been. And I listened as he cried out for a peace to be found nowhere except that place where he, and his muse, are no longer welcome—the family hearth, whose dying embers yet inspire melancholy notes from among the charred remains of extinguished possibility.
Barking in Nutwood 