One, I apologize for the novella that was my last entry. I apologize not just to you, my dear friend, but also to me—I would like to focus more on enjoying every moment of this experience instead of on documenting it. But, alas, I know I will continue to write epic blog posts because obsessing over details is what I do best.
Two, something funny I forgot to mention (can you believe I actually forgot to mention something in that monster of a post?!) that Caroline reminded me about—I fed a baby cow with a fake nipple attached to a soda bottle filled with milk on Ned and Dee’s friends’ farm. I am not going to go into more detail than that…except to say that it was disgustingly messy and gloriously adorable. (Also, I have to tell you that the cow was named Sausage. Poor future lunch.)Anyway, please indulge me as I finish up about last night:
When we returned from the river to Ned and Dee’s place yesterday evening, the first thing Caroline and I did was to take turns in the shower while the others enjoyed their “cuppers.” Ned had to “turn on the hot water” for us, whatever that means, and we deeply enjoyed the transformation from dirty to clean…well, let me just say that, out here, clean is relative. As soon as I stepped out of the bathroom structure, my wet flip flops became caked with mud that crept up onto my feet and flicked onto my jeans. But I didn’t care. As I mentioned earlier, I’m embracing the dirt. After all, as we used to sing in elementary school, “dirt made my lunch.”
When George and Sonia said their goodbyes, I was feeling the need for some alone time. Without the presence of the vivacious couple, Ned and Dee seemed more introverted than ever, and I just wanted to sit alone and work on this blog. I popped into their “office,” which is another “room” in their dwelling sectioned off by bookcases and drywall. There was a gecko on the wall and mosquitoes buzzing around my head, but I didn’t bat an eye. (About the mosquitoes, though…I hate to admit that I am being eaten alive. I am applying “Off” religiously, but nevertheless, they find me oh-so-tasty.)
As I was writing, my American computer charger plugged into an Australian converter plugged into an oddly-buzzing extension cord, Ned and Dee made us a meal of rice, homemade mango chutney, homemade zucchini pickles (a new—and delicious—sensation for my taste buds), and curried chicken. Caroline and I complimented them on having the energy to cook after such a full day, and Dee looked mildly shocked. She rolled her eyes at us as if half-expecting us to say that we regularly eat McDonald’s for dinner in the States. “It’s just what we do—we both like to cook. We never serve WWOOFers the same meal twice,” she stated matter-of-factly.
I finished my meal, washed the dishes for Ned and Dee (who don’t thank me for doing them, I’ve noticed; they must expect WWOOFers to do them automatically. Good thing I thought to make it a habit while I’m here…and, frankly, I prefer to wash the dishes myself because all Ned and Dee do is rinse things with cold water. At least I rub a little bit of their homemade soap onto stuff before rinsing), and then headed out towards the various bush accommodations to get ready for bed.
When I burst into the outhouse with my flashlight in hand, I was shocked to see two toads hanging out in there, one on either side of the toilet seat. I coaxed them onto the floor of the outhouse with the back of my flashlight, and after a few moments of gentle prodding, the floor is where they remained—I couldn’t entice them to hop out of there even after stomping my feet several times near their slimy little bodies. Resigned to share the bathroom with two other creatures for the time being, a thought came to my mind: there aren’t only two other creatures in here… I pointed my “torch” down into the hole; sure enough, the beam revealed dozens of cockroaches busily decomposing excrement. I thought, Oh, great. My worst and most unreasonable fear as a child was having something pop out of the toilet and bite my ass while I’m peeing, and now it could actually happen! Taking a deep breath, I did my business as quickly as humanly possible, wishing I hadn’t looked.
***
This morning, Ned and Dee brought us out to the avocado tree orchard and instructed us to build a trench and bury a hose used to carry water to sprinklers underneath each one of the trees. We were all about to bend down and unravel the hose when Dee casually said, “Look, girls—have you ever seen a wallaby before?” Our heads snapped up. Sure enough, a couple hundred feet away from us was what looked like a small kangaroo alternating between grooming himself and staring at us suspiciously. Too bad we didn’t have our cameras at the ready; now we know to carry around our point-and-shoots wherever we go in case of an unexpected animal encounter.
Then, Ned demonstrated how to use the tool we were to use (which resembled a pick ax). He made it look so easy, even with a bad back; smoothly, he lifted the tool above his head and brought it down swiftly into the soil, cutting out a sizeable section of earth that he then scooped to the side with his hand. Caroline opted to be the first to dig while I would trail behind her, scooping away. As Ned and Dee looked on, she clumsily clawed at the earth, bringing up much less dirt than Ned had. “You made it look so easy!” she exclaimed in his direction while staring bleakly at the chop job in the ground beneath her. But she quickly got the hang of it, and the couple left to go work on other projects around the farm.
When it was my turn to handle the pick ax thingy, I gave the trench digging all the strength I had, tearing into the soil ferociously and managing to dig up some pretty big chunks. This gave me the pathetic illusion that I’m stronger than I actually am—as it turns out, my vigor was foolish. It quickly resulted in exhaustion slash blisters on the palms of my hands slash a stabbing pain in my right arm muscle.
Although the task was arduous (on more than one occasion, I eyed the length of hose we had yet to bury and gave out a little moan), Caroline and I enjoyed digging more than the weeding and log lugging from the day before. As Caroline put it, the chore was a whole-body workout that had the power to distract us from focusing on anything but the present moment. That got me thinking about how it must be rewarding for some people to work full-time as a gardener or “farm boy” (Princess Bride!)…but probably not for me. I was dizzy—and exceeding sore—when we finally decided to call it quits after burying ¾ of the hose. But I really did enjoy the activity in a masochistic, “self-improvement” kind of way…
At around 10:00am, we took a break for a cupper and some cheese & crackers, and Ned mentioned to us, “By the way, I noticed that you girls were digging pretty deep. You can make it easier on yourselves tomorrow and make the trench shallower; there’s no need for it to be so deep.” Well, thanks for coming over and telling us that while we were slaving away out there, Ned, I thought. Ai, ai, ai. However, Caroline and I took it as a backhanded compliment, and we were secretly proud that we were working “too hard.” We were also relieved to hear that the work would be easier and would probably go a lot faster the next day when we weren’t trying to gouge out a mini-moat in the avocado orchard.
After lunch, we helped Dee transport a bit more timber, and then we had the rest of the day to veg out. Caroline sat in the hammock (apparently they DO have a hammock here! Good news!) rereading Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist,” which I had purchased in the Auckland airport. I wrote more, of course, and Dee did some laundry in their ancient washing machine that evidently becomes the habitat for mosquito populations when left full of water for too long.
In the late afternoon, Ned and Dee brought us along to the pump they use to extract water from the river on their property. Ned told us that he built the engine himself, and that the system carries about 80,000 liters of water a day to the various plants on their farm. “He’s going to have to replace that engine soon with one from an old car our friends gave us—this one’s about 30 years old!” Dee said, motioning to the rusty, rattling device in front of us. Caroline and I were of course amazed by all of this information. “How do you know how to do stuff like this, Ned?” I asked, incredulous. “Did someone teach you?” He shook his head and looked bashful. “Naw, I guess I just taught me-self. I’ve always been interested in machines.”
He proceeded to tell me about something of his dad’s that he took apart as a kid, but I couldn’t really understand what he was saying because he mumbles when he speaks sometimes (I cannot imagine how non-English speakers survive at Ned and Dee’s because Ned’s mumbling and both of their thick accents cause even Caroline and I to frequently ask them to pretty please repeat themselves). Anyway, Caroline and I just kept shaking our heads in disbelief at Ned’s handiness, and Dee squinted at us as if trying to figure out what planet we were from. To her, knowing how to be self-sufficient is a necessity of life. So, of course, she rolled her eyes.
Later, back in the privacy of our caravan, I finally approached the subject of Dee’s sarcasm with Caroline. “Has it been bothering you, the way Dee’s been treating us?” I asked. “Well, to be honest, I do feel a little bit uncomfortable about all the eye rolling that she does,” Caroline responded. “Yes! I have been getting annoyed by that, too!” I said, relieved that Caroline felt the same way. Caroline is a remarkably patient and nonjudgmental person, so when she becomes irritated with someone, you know there’s a problem.
But then Caroline shrugged. “She might not mean to offend us—eye-rolling might just be one of those little unconscious habits she has. Don’t let it get to you.” She fell silent for a moment, seeming to contemplate something. “Or, Dee could feel insecure because we seem rich in comparison to them.” I protested, “But nothing about us screams ‘rich,’” (besides our Macs…and my Bose headphones…and the fact that we each have two cameras…and Caroline’s iPhone…) “and it’s not like they don’t have nice things—they have a brand new laptop!” Caroline looked me dead in the eye. “Honey, to these people, we are rich. We grew up in the suburbs. IN AN ENCLOSED HOUSE. Maybe Dee thinks we’re judging the way they live.”
It’s true that the contrast between how Caroline and I grew up and how Ned and Dee did is vast. Both of them were raised in the bush. They don’t have a college education, nor do they even have high school diplomas; both of them dropped out of school when they were 14—the minimum age you had to stay in school until back then—to work. They probably didn’t have the luxury of mooching off of their parents until their early twenties like we did. Dee had her first baby at 18 and her last at 24 (just a year older than Caroline and I, which we, of course, couldn’t fathom).
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| Ned, Dee, George and Caroline |
But Dee is wrong if she thinks that we are secretly turning up our noses at their lifestyle. I like the way they live in many ways. I like the way they don’t mind dirt and don’t care about appearances. I like how in-touch with the earth they are. I like the way they work for a few hours in the morning, tending to their plants and doing other chores, and then play (swim, hike, read, etc.) in the afternoon. They have a healthy balance of leisure and work; even though it might not be the most “efficient” lifestyle, it’s certainly better than slaving away at a desk for six months just to take your kids on a two-week vacation to DisneyWorld.
I was feeling restless, though, because I hadn’t been very active since the morning; because I was frustrated with Dee; and because I was really missing my boyfriend, Tony. However, Dee distracted me from my little slump just before dinner when she announced that I should come with her to feed the sheep. “Sheep? You have sheep?!” I sputtered. “Yeah!” She cried, “Haven’t you heard them? They are in a pen just behind your caravan!” Sure enough, we trudged a few hundred feet through the bush behind the trailer that is Caroline’s and my bedroom and found a small enclosure containing four beautiful sheep.
They didn’t look like ordinary sheep with their toned bodies, slender faces and sleek black horns, and Dee told us that they are a South African breed called Demara or something like that. Ned and Dee had originally purchased them to eat the weeds in the mango orchard, but the animals ended up sucking at that task—they only ate one type of weed, so other kinds began to flourish. Now, Ned and Dee are keeping them for their valuable wool…but the problem is that the sheep are extremely nervous around people. In fact, Dee told me that her and Ned had to wrestle the creatures to the ground and hog-tie them in order to transport them from the mango orchard to the holding pen. The image of Dee rolling around in the dirt trying to hog-tie a sheep nearly made me laugh out loud, but I decided to stifle the urge.
When we walked back to the house, we saw that there was a dusty white van in front, and Dee announced, “Ah, our neighbors are here!” Around the back of the house, a scruffy man with dreads in his hair and beard and wearing a faded blue jumpsuit was pushing what looked like a motor mounted on a flat square platform out of Ned and Dee’s shed; a thin, thirty-something woman with crooked teeth, a shell necklace and an elephant-themed handkerchief for a top looked on.
The couple stood up, brushed off their hands, and approached Caroline and me to introduce themselves. Their names were Colin and Cathy, they said. “We’re Ned and Dee’s renters,” explained the woman, her accent clearly French, “we live in another pole house about a kilometer down the road.” “Where are you from? And what do you need the generator for?!” I asked. The woman laughed. “Well, I am from Quebec, first of all. And, about the generator…we are using it for a catamaran we’re building.” I didn’t understand what she said because of her thick accent, and so I turned to Dee with a confused look on my face. Dee leaned towards me with a grin on her face, her eyes wide. “They’re building a yacht to sail to India!”
As it turns out, Colin and Cathy have the most romantic life ever. Cathy left Quebec with her three-year-old daughter after she broke it off with her daughter’s dad and decided to bike around the entire Australian continent, her kid riding in a little seat on the back. She didn’t get very far on her bicycle, however; she met Colin after only a few weeks and stayed in Queensland (the state I’m currently in, which is ALSO called “The Sunshine State”…copycats!) to be with him. Now, her daughter is in Canada with her dad, and Colin and Cathy live here on Ned and Dee’s property with their seven-year-old son, who goes to school in the nearest town (just because they live in a “pole house” in the middle of the bush doesn’t mean that they can’t raise a child properly). And they are indeed building a boat in order to sail to India. “I hope to have it in the water by April,” Colin said.
Meeting the couple was such a pleasure because hearing about their life reminded me that all kinds of lives are possible, even with kids. Thoreau said, “live the life you’ve imagined,” (Caroline taught me that great quotation the other day), and Colin and Cathy are certainly doing just that.
As the sun was setting, Caroline and I sat down with Ned and Dee for dinner, and the four of us ended up talking for hours—until 9:30pm (bedtime), in fact. For the first time, I felt that Ned and Dee were comfortably engaging in and enjoying conversation with us. They seemed more dynamic and open that usual, and I had a great time chatting with them. Ned even showed us some pictures he’d taken over the years. (Caroline and him kind of bonded—as much as anyone can bond with Ned—over the fact that they both consider themselves photographers). Most of them were generic landscape shots, but one unique photo caught my eye—it was a picture taken looking down at a cup of water, which contained a ripple captured in mid-movement from the middle out. “Ooh, that reminds me of ‘Jurassic Park’!” Caroline said approvingly to Ned. Dee, as you might expect, rolled her eyes. “Oh, Ned takes some weird ones sometimes…” But I liked it. I really liked it. It was unusual, and it showed that Ned happened to be both creative and observant. Through that simple photograph, I felt that I suddenly had a glimpse into his guarded soul.
At one point in the conversation, I asked them to tell us about the worst WWOOFers they’ve ever had, and to my surprise, Dee described a whole slew of people who didn’t meet her expectations. There was the fat, lazy British woman in her 70s who hardly lifted a finger; an Estonian man with a creepy stare; a couple that fought viciously to the point that they would emerge from the caravan in the mornings with scratches on their faces (and, apparently, Dee found the girl crying naked outside one night after a particularly violent argument), etc. I guess I should have known that she would be critical of her WWOOFers, but it made me wonder again what in the hell she thought of us.
Dee also mentioned that her and Ned don’t like to leave some WWOOFers alone in their house because they’re afraid that the WWOOFers will steal something. But they keep their computer, their gems—which they’ve mined themselves—and other valuables locked in a filing cabinet at all times, so I’m not sure what it is that people would steal from Ned and Dee. Maybe someone could fancy their copy of “The Encyclopedia of Australian Spiders”? Their numerous boxes of mosquito coils? Or perhaps just one of their abundant canisters of Australia’s Number One Long Life Deep Frying Fry-Tol Edible Animal Oil?
Well, I’ve reached the sixth page of the Word document in which I’m formulating this post, so I guess it’s time for me to wrap it up. There will probably be a few days in between each one of my blog entries because it takes me so damn long to describe everything and because Dee is sensitive about us using the Internet too much, so bear with me!
As a closing statement, I would just like to share with you a hilarious and true detail from one of Caroline’s mass “Australian update” emails that she forwarded to me. Since I didn’t include much of a description of the inside of Ned and Dee’s “shower shed” in my first post, I’m happy that she took the time to write about it:
“The trickle of sweat, sunscreen, and sawdust makes a shower sound reallllly appealing. So off to the shower I go… but this isn’t just any shower. Oh no, no my friend. This is a low red bathtub, with a tall spicket above. And while there is no glass or curtain surrounding it, there ARE about 18 cans of deep fat lard, one enormous 50 lb. bag of Pedigree dog kibble, and three racks of homemade soap… just chilling with you while you shower. Not to mention the stacks of fruit packing boxes and several sweet potatoes rolling around in a bin nearby. I vaguely muse that the soap is rather handy, if you should ever run out mid-shower. Fancy feeding the dogs mid-shampoo? No sweat. And if you’re hungry, have a sweet potato. Brilliant.”Aaaannnnnd scene.
