The Unsilence of the Lambs

(note: it takes a ton of time to upload pictures so I'm uploading only the pertinent ones for now but I have gone in and added captions to most of them)

Sunday, October 16

I am sitting outside of my own little house on Timbo's farm listening to the lambs calling for their mothers (they've been separated out). It's about midnight and there's a full moon in an endless sky as I puff away on a cigar and drink a glass of wine (I've just hauled 7 bottles across Australia).

I guess though that I should skip back to yesterday and work my way forward, which I shall endeavor to do from the porch as my very first Australian spider has dominion in the kitchen. And yes, I took a picture of it.

I arrived in Perth, met by Tim and his awfully cute girlfriend Heidi, took a whirlwind tour through a mall so Heidi could pick up a shirt for the party we were going to later before heading to the Scarborough Beach area to the house of Tim's mate Andrew and his fiancee Sal. Who is utterly endearing and referred to me today as her first international friend.

It was about time for sunset so Tim dropped me off at the beach so I could watch it before we went down to Cottesleigh (sp?) for Sal's 21st birthday party - which is a bit of a deal here, 21st birthdays, that is.

Tim's quite funny in that he talks about Western Australia as if he's a travel brochure and quite often mentions how lucky he is. He actually said, "Quite a lovely safe and clean beach, apart from being famous." It's very sweet.

Anyways, the party was great and there's pictures of all of that as well (as soon as I upload them). I had lovely chats with tons of people in a private function room at a hotel facing Cottsleigh beach and we headed back to the house about midnight to sack out on the couch.

Today, once we all got moving, we had a chook (chicken) lunch with Heidi's friend Emma before Tim and I headed out of Perth to his farm - which is in Brookton Shire.

I'd try to describe all this in better detail but I don't really have the words so I'm hoping that the pictures will speak for themselves.

I'm now inside on the far side of the room from Mr. Big Black Spider. I got about close enough to make sure it wasn't a Redback (ie: the poisonous ones) but that's as far as I'm willing to go. Seriously, that blue dot there? THAT'S BECAUSE I FORGOT TO TURN ON THE RED EYE AND HIS EYE IS SHINING AT ME.



Tim's parents are lovely and the farm is pretty neat - tomorrow is 'shave the sheeps bums' day - of course there IS a word for it that I've forgotten since dinner - so once I'm up and around in the morning I'll be heading down to the sheds for a little slice of farm life.

One thing I have definately learned that I need to do for next time is learn more about my own country. There are too many questions I just couldn't answer about Canada the last few days and frankly, I feel a bit stupid about my own country. Politics is big here, for one, and I don't follow them at all so I can't even vaguely describe or compare "us" vs "them" for anyone.

On the way here we HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, I THINK I'VE JUST PEED MYSELF. I'm sure half the country just heard me scream. I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and not 18 inches away a huge honking ginormous fuck-off spider is running along the windowsill beside me. I think I actually heaved.





Now I've barricaded myself in the bedroom and have just spent a good five minutes shaking the bed out. At least the big black spider looked like something I'm used to but that last one is so utterly ALIEN I don't think I'll be able to sleep. At least not without a light on.

I'm not sure my heart can take this.

I want my mommy.

*deep breath* Okay, sleeping fully clothed tonight, socks and all, I tell you. Where was I? Oh yeah, Tim's provided a ton of information on the way here and we drove through an area that burnt last year. The interesting thing here is that a lot of these plants need fire to pollinate and the eucalypt trees aren't killed by the fire, Tim said it took about two weeks before they were sending out new shoots. It was utterly eerie and amazing to drive through that whole area and it's orchards all along that stretch - the fireman worked quite hard to save the fruit trees at the couple of farms in the area and you can see where the fire basically swept through and *around* the lots of trees . Apparantly, it's not the fire per se that the plants need but some sort of chemical in the smoke and scientists have isolated it and are spraying it about to encourage faster crop growth. All very interesting, yeah?

Tim's warned me that if a fox shows up the dogs will bark and there may be possums running about on the roof so I shouldn't be alarmed. The dogs won't bark for long he says but if they do, I can open up the door and not be shy about yelling, "Shuuuuut up" as the dogs 'understand Canadian'.

It'll be a nice quiet couple of days here before Yeti's back in town to show me around and I may even be flying out to the mine for a day when he goes back to work next week, which will be ultra cool.

All I need to do is be able to get a little more used to these bloody spiders and I'll be a happy girl. Although I keep hearing noises in the kitchen so I'm sure they're amassing an army to swarm me as soon as I fall asleep - they're trying to be quiet out there, I think, but they're not fooling me.

I wonder if Tim's parents would find it strange if I crawled into bed with them.

Gah.

A Moment In Real Time

Tuesday, October 25 at 5 pm

In case you're wondering WHERE I am actually at this moment.... it's the Dunsborough Beach House.

There'll be one post every 12 - 24 hours until I'm all caught up.

Cheers.

Quiet Day on the Farm

Monday, October 17

Had a bit of a hike today and a long chat with Tim's mom but really just a pretty quiet day. Out and about the farm, reading my book, looking at maps.

Apparantly the big spider from last night was a rain spider because yanno, it comes out when it rains. Or, a huntsman, if you want to get technical.

I forgot to mention earlier that pretty much everyone here calls me Jenny, which is fine but normally it's only my family that calls me that and it sounds sort of unnatural when other people do it. Well, when they do it in Canada. Here, with quite young people calling me Jenny it seems right and I sort of even feel like a Jenny.

Whatever that is. A younger, gentler version of myself I guess.

Tim always introduces me as Jen but, as he explains, Australians don't seem to like one-syllable names so Tim becomes Timbo and Jen becomes Jenny. He put it in an interesting way - Jen isn't self-completing.

What other little bits have I got in lieu of anything exciting? I got an email from Matt yesterday, which was weird since I was in his city at the time. In fact, the whole thing is a bit strange and a little sad. The old Jen, she would call him and see him because she misses his companionship and a little would be better than none but this Jen that I am now knows it would only cause more pain.

I just tried to explain that in about 10 different ways and I can't so the best I've got is - I don't want to put myself in a position where I can see just how much he doesn't care. Or, if I'm being gentle with myself, just how much he refuses to. But whatever way it's put - the crux of it remains that I wasn't to him what he was to me.

There's just no getting around that one simple fact.

Will we run into him at some point? I guess it's possible and it would be fine I think and I say I think just for the simple fact that I really don't know how it would be unless it happened. I'm sure however, that if I said to whoever I was with that I had to leave, then we'd leave and that is really all I need to know.

I'm inside hiding at the moment from my entourage of flies - there's about 15 that have followed me all day - crawling in my eyes and up my nose and it's actually quite insane-making. They're not big flies but it's the crawly they've just walked through sheep-shit factor that's the most disturbing. Along, of course, with never beeing able to get away from them.

It's funny how all the tourism stuff never mentions the FLIES THE ENDLESS FLIES GAHHH, isn't it?

Reflection

Monday, October 17, night

It's interesting to find that I am the one here whom everyone is interested in because I'm the one here who is different..

I tire of myself though - I don't want to hear the stories I already know. I want to hear the ones I haven't heard - the ones that will show me the way... where? Show me the way into and out of myself. Show me the right way, the good way, the direction I am to go.

The point here is not to emulate other lives or wear their clothes and maybe not even try their shoes ON for any amount of time. The point is to find sense. To find a way to solidify my own beliefs by gorging myself on all the other truths I can find.

To not just see the unseen doors, not just open them but to blow them right off their hinges.

In moments like this one, right now, I think that maybe what to believe exactly may not turn out to be more important as the daring act of belief itself.

Is it more important to believe you can do anything and yet do nothing? Or is the magic in not believing you can do something but suddenly finding yourself doing exactly that?

I guess that most people would say that there's a balance there to find and some may even say that the finding of the balance is the important thing. I don't disagree with that - my life has been one long struggle to find a balance - but there is a part of me that whispers deep down inside that the crucial moments come under the heading of willingness.

The willingness to participate in life. To experience the color red. To be part of sunlight. To feel a moment as a tree. To agree to enter into a conspiracy of sorts with life itself - on behalf of joy and fear, both the predator and the prey - in order to come away changed.

Isn't that, after all, the whole point?

Learning Curve

Tuesday, October 18

Wow, what can I tell you about today? Shaving the sheeps bums is actually called 'crutching'. Okay, that's it.

hee hee

This is Timbo crutching, see? the sheep looks like a happy happy sheepy! (these pictures can all be seen bigger in the 'visual logs' section)



Okay, so maybe not. We did sheepy things all day - checked the paddocks for flyblown sheep. Used the three dogs to round up the sheep and drive them in. Every time I blew my nose - hopefully last day-of-the-cold-nose-running - it was BLACK from the dust.

Once the sheep are in they have to shear the fly-blown ones - and you'll thank me without even knowing you should thank me that I didn't take any pictures of them... ick. Then they spray them all with "rid' - a fly killer thingy before driving them all back out to their paddocks again. The good thing is they don't usually lose many of them - it's not really as bad as PETA says it is.

I learned about hay and oats and barley and planting and crop rotation, the best time to shear sheep and wisteria's so old and huge that they'll pull your house down around you.



I watched a sheep with a back leg so badly broken that it dangled and flopped and swung madly about as the poor thing ran home on three legs to it's paddock.

I took a skip when Tim went back out to shoot it.

I can now smell a dead sheep driving through a paddock in the dark and tell you what direction it lies in.

I learned that when you split one of the 8 million types of ecualyptus trunks they smell just like vinegar.

I learned about 'black boys' (the more PC modern term is 'grass plants') and how they only grow one foot every hundred years - think how old this one is...



I learned that the sandwich has a recorded history 28 years LONGER than 'Australia'.

I learned that euclayptus trees with the big fat round leaves suddenly lose their bark, get lighter skins and thin leaves between the time they are 9 and 10 years old. You'd never know they were the same tree.

I learned that this plant.....



Is where 10-80 poison comes from (our rat poison is one of the things it's used in) but that the indigenous species here can eat it and it doesn't harm them. Although one tiny bush - 1/2 the size of the one above - will kill about a 100 sheep (being a non-indigenous species).

I hopped up on this post here on the left and took a climb up a tree, perched quite comfortably and happily watching Tim spray sheep below me when I felt a little nip on my hand and looked down to see an ant biting so hard that his little body was all clenched up with the effort. Scrambling up to give myself a shake, I noticed a little black spider beside me - and that, right there - was the end of my tree-climbing efforts.

Although, to my credit (I think), I refused the days before to let Tim's mom spray for spiders - mainly because, although I agree with you Philly - I just have to get used to them.



I had a wool broker insist on giving me a calculator with his name and address engraved on it so I would always remember Brookton Shire.

Later, with the power out and the boys out bringing the rest of the sheep into the sheds, I searched for candles, lit the fire and answered the phone, "Evans' Farm" to a big long pause before that same broker says, "Is that Jen?"

Which tickled me pink. Even more so when Tim told me later that out in the sheds he'd asked my name three times and then written it on his hand so that pause would have been him flipping his hand over to remember my name.

About 10 pm Tim and I touqued up and headed out to look for some roos. Tim thought we'd see maybe one, but we actually found five.

Picture this.... bouncing around in the truck in the dark, Tim switching gears and driving like a madman, holding the spotlight out the window while I yell "Giv'er Tim!!" and we try and get close enough for a picture.

Not only would that seem an impossibility, you may understand how even more difficult it is when I refuse to do anything but point the camera and press the button - I hate those moments when you're so busy trying to get the picture that you miss the experience.

The last one we saw was about 15 feet in front of the truck when Tim says, "Kay, we're coming up to the fence so he'll hop-hop-jump over it..... wait for it , wait for it....."

The kangaroo decided at the very last second he didn't have enough momentum, turned towards us on my side of the truck, hop-hop and JUMP about five feet from me, framed perfectly in the flash of my camera...

...as I took a picture in the opposite direction.

So, although this is the worst picture EVER of a kangaroo....



oh, good lord, I wish you could see what it looks like in my head.