The Final Days of Ned and Dee - Part I

It's backtracking time!

Even though I returned to the Northern Hemisphere on November 19^th, I still have blogging on the brain. So, I’m going to knock this one out and then call it a day—er—blog because I don’t particularly feel like typing out my diary entries from the third farm Caroline and I visited. I guess those memories are going to remain all my own. 

Due to the theft of my computer, I no longer have the extensive notes I was typing up night after night while WWOOFing at Ned and Dee's. However, the day before I left the Land Down Under, I went through Caroline’s 1,426 Australia photographs (she is officially more of an obsessive documenter than I am), and I’m confident that I can accurately recall much of what happened in the last few days at Ned and Dee's farm. I bet you were hoping that I would spare you the blow-by-blow. Unfortunately, that just ain’t gonna happen.

OCTOBER 11

“Here’s one! Come look!” Ned called out, pointing urgently towards the center of the shallow stream. George, Dee, Caroline and I rushed over to him, and the five of us waited, huddled together on the riverbank, until the object of our interest scurried out from underneath a submerged log. It was a blue crayfish, its brilliant red claws and antennae clearly visible in the pristine water.

To Caroline’s and my delight, Ned and Dee had announced that morning that we were going to spend most of the day adventuring with their friends George and Sonia in the nearby Mount Lewis Rain Forest Reserve, one of the 17 World Heritage sites in Australia. In Ned and Dee's indestructible fat-powered vehicle, we climbed a misty unpaved road leading from the Reserve entrance to the top of the mountain, where we were greeted by lush ferns, a variety of trees draped with thick vines, and a trickling creek (home to aforementioned crayfish. Clearly).

As soon as the car rolled to a stop and we had all filed out, Dee knelt by the stream, filled a little tin pot with water, and began to heat it on a camping stove she had apparently lugged along in her backpack. “Who wants tea?” she asked casually as the water came to a boil. Shocked by this woman’s dedication to her midmorning cupper, I turned down the creek water tea and instead munched on the koala-shaped cookies she had whipped out as well. Caroline did the same. 

As the others sipped their drinks from grimy mugs that ALSO happened to emerge from Dee's bottomless sack, I pictured the tiny mosquito larvae that they were surely slurping down with their tea. The look of apprehension on Caroline’s face suggested that she, too, was envisioning the various water-borne diseases and microscopic creatures that were now entering our companions’ esophagi. Trying to suppress the grimace that was desperately trying to take a hold of my face, I reminded myself that the water I’d been drinking for almost a week was pumped directly from a river. Whether I liked it or not, I’d probably already consumed my fair share of larvae.

When teatime was over, the group was ready to adventure upstream. Ned, Dee, George and Sonia kicked off their thongs and began to wade barefoot, but I decided to keep my hiking boots on and leap from rock to log to rock instead. I was having fun playing “Lava Monster” with myself. Plus, it was a good workout. Caroline, too, tried to conquer the wet jungle obstacle course with her sneakers on, but she quickly threw up her hands, ripped off her shoes, and began to creep gingerly through the water.

The stream eventually seemed to end at a daunting barrier of boulders. I assumed we would turn back, but Ned hoisted himself up onto one of the massive slabs of rock. “The creek might continue a few meters beyond this wall,” he said to no one in particular as he barreled onwards. Ignoring Ned's unyielding curiosity, the rest of the crew stood planted knee-deep in the pooled water and began to make conversation while they rested. But I was intrigued by the idea of the stream’s glorious rebirth on the other side of the wall, so I jumped up onto the nearest boulder and began to follow Ned.

The two of us clambered across boulder after boulder, peering down into the mountain of rocks at times to look for evidence that water was somehow managing to trickle underneath. After several minutes of exploring, however, Ned and I silently acknowledged that we weren’t going to find the other end of the rock barrier any time soon. It was time to turn back. We stopped to catch our breath, and as our panting subsided, my awareness of the rain forest noises around me was suddenly heightened. I stood perfectly still, and Ned seemed to know what I wanted to do. He froze, quiet as a cloud. I closed my eyes to note every bird cry and gust of wind that weaved through the trees, and the corners of my mouth rose into a half-moon smile. I glanced over at Ned, hoping to catch him savoring the sounds with his eyes closed, too. But he was gazing absently into the convoluted depths of the forest, lost in that mysterious, cavernous mind of his. 

I felt grateful for the intimate moment I was unexpectedly sharing with Ned. It was rare and precious; something all our own, and borne out of a quiet understanding and appreciation. 

A few hours afterward, the whole crew was back in the car and winding further up the mountain looking for a spot to each lunch. At the very end of the foggy road, we found a three-sided tin hut that Ned and Dee guessed was a deserted ranger’s shed. We all helped cart food, blankets and pillows from the trunk of the car into the empty building, and as Dee quickly threw together some sandwiches and boiled water for tea (surprise, surprise), Caroline and I spread out the blankets and I plopped down onto a pillow. Grabbing chips from the pile of grocery bags and backpacks that had accumulated on the concrete floor, Caroline joined me on the pillow and ripped open the bag. Her and I then began tucking into it, devouring the sinfully salty snacks. 

As soon as Ned and Dee sat down on the blanket, however, I suddenly realized that Caroline and I had eaten a LOT of chips (well, those bags are, like, a third air, right? Maybe the damage hadn’t been as bad as I had thought…), so I passed the bag over to them and hoped they wouldn’t notice.

Only about a minute went by, though, before Caroline asked if she could please have more chips. Dee and Ned didn’t respond, and I was nervous about handing Caroline the bag because I thought maybe we had been rude by hogging it at first. But I didn’t want to ignore Caroline, so I gingerly picked up the bag with my thumb and forefinger and lifted it towards Caroline like a toy crane machine. But as Caroline was reaching her hand into the bag to nab another handful, Dee snapped, “I haven’t even had any yet!” I winced.


Caroline, well-accustomed to Dee's random moments of grouchiness, continued to grab a couple of chips for herself but then immediately handed the bag back over with a smile. She didn’t ask for it again.

Later, when we were all having one more romp in the river before heading back home, Caroline bowed out of the creek crawl early because she was getting cold and wet and wanted to sit in the car. George, Sonia and I didn’t know that she had left, though, and at one point I asked, “Where did Caroline go?!” George laughed. “Eating potato chips, no doubt!” Sonia, Ned and Dee cackled. I forced an awkward grin, trying not to show that I felt vaguely offended.

“Greaaaaat,” I said to myself. “We have officially managed to confirm the stereotype of Americans as greedy grease-guzzlers…”

Upon returning to the farm and saying goodbye to Sonia and George, Dee and Ned told us that they needed help shoveling sand out of the riverbed. “We’ve gotta have a deeper ditch so that our pump has access to more water,” Ned explained. I utilized the trusty smile-and-nod, secretly thinking that shoveling sand sounded about as appealing as chewing rubber. But I sucked it up and slipped on my Teva’s. The four of us grabbed shovels from the tool shed and then walked past the outhouse through the bush until we came to a ravine (dry now, but it’ll apparently hold a roaring river come flood season). The only liquid visible was in a tiny pond in the deepest part of the trench, where Ned had inserted a pipe and motor to suck up the groundwater.

We hopped into the ravine with our shovels in hand. Ned and Dee kicked off their flip-flops and immediately began digging furiously. I realized that they had the right idea about the no-shoes thing—my Teva’s were filling up with sand every time I took a step—so I ripped apart the Velcro straps and tossed the sandals aside. Immediately, though, as I stepped into the murky little pond, I stepped on a sharp stick jutting upwards in the sand and cut the bottom of my foot. Sigh. It would have never happened to Ned or Dee with their presumably rock-hard feet, but even my calloused stompers are far too yuppitastic for my own good. I should’ve trained for WWOOFing in advance by walking on a bed of hot coals or two.

Regardless, I wanted to be a good sport, so I continued to shovel away without complaint. In case you didn’t know, heaving mounds of wet sand is no easy feat, and I was forced to invent various methods of transporting the sand from around my feet to the outskirts of the watering hole. My arm muscles weren’t strong enough for repeated use of the simple lift-and-throw method, so I quickly resorted to a new strategy: I'd dig into the ground to fill up the bed of the shovel, balance the tool on my knee, and then catapult its contents a few feet to my right. Slightly embarrassing, but very effective.

I looked over at Ned and Dee after about fifteen minutes, and I couldn’t help wondering why the hell they were shoveling when they both have bad backs. As if she could read my mind, Dee let out an exasperated groan, dropped her shovel, and hobbled up and over to the side of the hole. She collapsed onto one of my particularly impressive sand piles, holding her back and wincing. She then yelled at Ned to stop. “Ned! Do you want to be stuck in bed for two weeks again?!” 

Ned didn’t acknowledge her; he kept shoveling diligently, his impressively toned arm muscles flexed. I was shocked by the information that Super Ned had been bed-written for weeks because of his back, so I, too, began to plead for him to stop. “Let Caroline and I do it!” But Ned just kept on going, stopping only when he, Caroline and I were completely exhausted—both from the shoveling (definitely the most physically challenging task we did at Dee and Ned's...well, besides ditch-digging) and from Dee's barrage of frustrated sighs and eye rolls. Hey, at least this time they were aimed at Ned and not and Caroline and me!

The Final Days of Ned and Dee - Part II

OCTOBER 12

I think our most fun task happened on this day. Using what looked like a small pitchfork, Caroline and I had to uproot galangal plants (spicy ginger roots that sprout huge leafy stalks) from a sumptuously muddy patch in order to replant them in another location. Here was the procedure we followed once we had yanked the large plants from the soil:

1) Cut away the leafy stalks so that only the galangal bulbs remain.

2) Rinse the mud from the roots of the bulbs.

3) Because the bulbs grow in large clumps, break them apart into sections into order to…

4) Replant the smaller pieces in another area.

The idea was that the smaller replanted bulbs will grow and multiply, yielding a considerably larger number of galangal plants for Ned and Dee to eventually harvest.

After the first round of this, Caroline and I decided to split up to maximize our efficiency (the reason being that “efficiency” is not on either of our lists of Cardinal Traits, and we were looking to be as productive as possible): I uprooted, hosed, cut and carted the sectioned galangal bulbs over to Caroline in a grimy plastic wheelbarrow, and she dutifully replanted the pieces in a new patch of ground. I was having an absolute blast carrying out my part of the job thanks to how ridiculously wet and filthy I was getting. “Muddy” is not an adjective I often get to use to describe my condition, so I decided to throw cleanliness out the window and dirty myself with reckless abandon—just for fun. Go big or go home, right?

At one point, I was about to dig up a particularly large plant when my eyes suddenly focused in on a terrifying spider mere inches from my face. The brown and white creature was sprawled out behind an “x” pattern woven into its web, which was spread across several galangal stalks. I knew that if I even so much as bumped one of the tall stalks, the spider could come crashing down on me. The prospect was far from inviting. I backed away, trying to remain calm, and called Caroline over to check it out.

Caroline took one look at the spider and took off running to find Ned. “We’ve gotta find out if that thing is poisonous!” She yelled out to me as she barreled towards the house. A minute or two later, her and Ned were moving speedily in my direction. When they reached the galangal patch, the three of us slowly crept up to the web-clad plant. “Oh, that’s just a St. Andrew’s Cross spider,” Ned said matter-of-factly, the look of concern on his face melting away. “They’re named for that ‘x’ they spin into their web.”

“So…it’s not dangerous?” Caroline asked skeptically. “Naw, she’s all right.” Ned, ever the nature aficionado, told us about how the St. Andrew’s Cross disguises itself by clumping its legs together and hiding behind the “x” pattern in the web. “It helps her fool her prey,” he explained. Upon learning that it was harmless (to humans, at least), I became interested in getting up close and personal with the frightening arachnid. I went into the house, grabbed Caroline’s point-and-shoot from the dusty kitchen table, and came back to snap photos.

Caroline decidedly stayed as far away from the spider as possible.

Incidentally, it seemed to have been Emergence of Terrifying Creatures Day in Queensland—not long afterwards, the black snake we had seen while raking a few days before made a second appearance. Caroline, Ned, Dee and I were spread out in the new galangal patch busily replanting bulbs, and Ned called out, “Watch out for the snake.” His tone of voice was so unexcited that he could have been commenting on the digestion process of the dung beetle, so we thought he was pulling our leg. Until we looked up to see a snake slithering rapidly towards Caroline. Shrieking, Caroline bounded away in the opposite direction, and Ned ran to bludgeon the reptile to death with the back of a shovel.

Afterwards, Ned told us that he felt badly about killing the snake because he wasn’t sure if it had been poisonous or not. “Also, it’s illegal to kill snakes in Queensland. But I had to do it. If it’d been poisonous, it could’a killed one of the dogs.” “Or one of us!” Caroline motioned frantically around at the four of us, seemingly flabbergasted that the first lives Ned considered were those of his two pets. (She happened to be very pleased about the snake’s death.)

Later that afternoon, Dee and Ned showed Caroline and I how to make soap. They didn’t actually need more bars of soap; they did it just for us. “We thought you would like to see how it’s made,” Dee said with a rare smile.

I’ve completely forgotten which ingredients they used (I had them all typed up on my stolen computer…mehhh…), so I’ll just summarize: they poured a bunch of liquids together into a large tub and told Caroline and I to stir the thick concoction with a wooden spoon for ten minutes. When the ten minutes were up, there were two results: 1) My arm was sore. 2) It was time to add fragrance. Ned selected a little canister of “Essence of Sandalwood” from a cupboard in the shed—where its neighbors were about fifty bottles of homemade fruit wine—and measured out a tiny bit to add to the mix.

After we stirred the oil in well, Ned produced three long plastic tubes. “We’ll let the soap set in these for a couple of days,” he explained. He requested Caroline’s help with pouring the liquid into the cylinders, and as Dee and Caroline lifted and slowly tilted the heavy plastic bin over the tubes, Ned held the tubes steady underneath so that the cream-colored mixture would glide into them smoothly.

However, a drop or two made it onto his hands, and he began to curse under his breath while shaking his arm violently. “What happened?!” I asked, bewildered, as he ran to the sink. “The soap mixture is highly caustic,” Dee explained as we watched Ned furiously scrub his hands under the faucet. “It can burn your skin. The bars are only safe to use after setting for at least five weeks.”

So, Caroline and I weren’t going to get to try out the soap that we had helped make (…well, VAGUELY helped. Besides stirring the mixture and then cutting up the hardened cylinders of soap into bars two days later, we didn’t really do much in the way of contributing…). But as a consolation prize, Ned gave us other scented soaps that had been “setting” in the shower shed for months: frankincense, tea tree and cinnamon—oh my!

The Final Days of Ned and Dee - Part III

OCTOBER 13

Because it was our last day at Ned and Dee's, they decided to treat us to a day off—and we spent it well. That morning, the four of us embarked on possibly the most magical adventure that Caroline and I had experienced up to that point.

Ned drove us to the top of nearby Mount Carbine, which was littered with lumpy termite mounds and boulders and carpeted with red soil. Thousands of scraggly eucalyptus trees twisted up towards the sky, and an occasional kangaroo leapt down the mountainside (Ned and Dee even saw a roo with a joey in her pocket, but I didn’t notice the baby because I was trying too hard to get a picture of its mom. The photo, of course, didn’t even turn out. Blast! This is where the quotation, “When taking pictures, you see the world through only one eye,” comes in).

As we ascended the mountain, the car kept bouncing and jerking on the bumpy dirt road, and I commented on how painful it was. Dee scoffed. “You think this is bad? Look at how the road USED to look before the government came in here and smoothed it out a little!” She pointed to an abandoned part of the road that veered off and abruptly stopped after a few meters or so, and my mouth fell open. It looked more like a dried-up mudslide than a pathway meant for vehicular traffic.

“Yeah, we used to have to drive up and down that,” Dee continued. “One time, we were driving down the mountain in the ute with our kids and our friend—who was expecting—sitting in the back, and the ute flipped over! Luckily, everyone was OK.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her story. I felt like asking, “So, what made you think that driving down a treacherous mountain road with your children and a pregnant woman sitting unsecured in the truck bed was a good idea in the first place?!” But I kept my mouth shut.

When the road ended, we pulled up to a lookout point to gaze across the valley below, and I figured that the adventure would end there. But no—Ned put the car in four-wheel drive mode and began off-roading through the bush. As the vehicle violently made its way over rocks and shrubs, barely missing tree trunks along the way, Ned yelled out to Caroline and I that he was taking us to see a waterfall. Little did I know what they had in store for us.

A few gripping-onto-my-seat-for-dear-life minutes later, I suddenly jerked forward as Ned screeched to a halt next to what looked like a Martian colony—literally hundreds of small termite mounds pimpled the ground. Awed, Caroline and I took several pictures before we noticed that Ned and Dee were already marching off into the wilderness. We hadn’t known that we were going to be bush walking, but we scurried after them. After stumbling through patches of fallen leaves, tripping over tree roots and trying awkwardly to climb over boulders, however, Caroline and I were cursing our sandaled feet and wishing that Ned and Dee had told us that we were going to be doing some hiking. Just because THEY could run a marathon in flip-flops doesn’t mean that everyone is as talented…

Although the terrain became more dense and harder to navigate as we headed east along a river, it became increasingly more and more beautiful—the landscape changed from arid, red and rocky to lush. Beams of sunlight danced on the water, and white, twisted river gums lined the creek, their thick roots splayed out in every direction (one tree, which Neil deemed his favorite, had several boulders cradled tightly in its roots. Absolutely gorgeous). Bouquets of grass shot up in and around the river. Moss carpeted the ground. I felt like I had entered a sacred fairytale dreamland.

“Wow,” I breathed, “are we in Eden?” Ned smiled, his eyes shifting from me to Caroline. “Well, let’s hope not,” he joked, “There was a snake in Eden.” Caroline, who had been lost in thought, was suddenly smacked back into reality by the mention of her least favorite animal. She stopped dead in her tracks. “Snake? Where?!”

***

Eventually, Eden gave way to a beautiful waterfall cascading down cliffs of smooth rock. But Ned and Dee told us that we weren’t going to stop just yet. “Leave your backpacks down here at the bottom. We’re going to climb up to the top pool,” Ned said.

As we began to ascend the slippery slopes, Ned explained that he, Dee and their daughters had discovered a secluded top pool years ago when scaling the walls around the waterfall “just for fun.” Slightly alarmed by the thought of how easily someone could slip to their death while attempting the climb, I panted, “How old were your kids at that point?” Ned thought for a moment, and then hopped from one slab of rock to another. “The youngest was probably two.”

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Let me repeat that—Ned and Dee brought their TWO-YEAR-OLD rock climbing.

(Why-oh-why am I not surprised?)

As I wondered whether the children who grew up with Dee and Ned’s—er—unusual parenting had been scarred for life or if they’d actually grown up to be the most kick-ass women in the world, I hoisted myself up onto the next ridge…and my thoughts suddenly scattered. The elusive top pool, shaded by an amphitheater of rock and fed by the thundering waterfall, lay before us. It was cool and cerulean; wide and deep and round as a coin. It was magnificent.

Caroline and I simultaneously gasped with delight, and our approval left Ned and Dee beaming with satisfaction. We jumped into the frigid water, squealing on impact, and swam towards a small island of rock that jutted up from the bottom of the pool. After briefly laying on it and pretending to be sunbathing mermaids, we turned back around to see Dee and Ned sitting on the rock ledge. “Don’t you want to come in?” I called out happily. “It feels great!” “Naw, we’ll just sit here, thanks,” Ned answered. He then leaned over to Dee and said something quietly in her ear, and both of them looked at us with grins on their faces. At that moment, I sensed a certain fondness in their body language, almost as if they were two proud parents enjoying their kids’ enjoyment. I smiled. I felt fondness for them right back.

Later, back at the house, the four of us ate our last supper together. Caroline and I would have normally headed into the caravan afterwards to read or write, but we wanted to sit and hang out with Ned and Dee as much as possible on our final night as their WWOOFers. Ned seemed to sense this, as he ceremoniously whipped out the dusty banjo he hadn’t played in two years (ever since he had casually mentioned to me that he used to dabble in banjo, I’d been harassing him for days to play us a tune or two). He clumsily strummed his way through a few songs, and I tried to sing along to what was supposedly CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising.”

It started to feel like a real party when Dee produced a bottle of apple liqueur, kept for special occasions, and poured us all shots. As I politely sipped the saccharine stuff—which looked alarmingly toxic—I asked Ned how he learned to play the banjo in the first place. “Um…well, I taught me’self,” he distractedly mumbled while picking at a couple of strings, “years ago.” Go figure. Seeing as self-sufficiency is Dee and Ned's absolute strongest suit, this tidbit of information didn’t shock me in the least.

When Ned had depleted his diminutive song database and there was no more music to hold the four of us together at the table, Dee came to the rescue: she placed a dusty old photo album in front of Caroline and me and invited us to take a look. Her and Ned stood peering over our shoulders while we ooh’ed and ah’ed our way through their decades together.

I was amazed by the album’s breadth but lack of depth—it seemed to contain only a picture or two from every stage of NedandDee. There was a photograph depicting them as a young couple, just starting to date, with their arms around each other; one showing their three girls as toddlers sitting by a river; one picture of the whole family picking papayas (which used to be their main crop before they switched to mangoes) when the kids were teens; a couple photos from their daughters’ weddings; etc.

Flipping through a lifetime in a matter of minutes felt strange, and I studied our hosts’ faces to see if the viewing session had made them nostalgic. (Judging by their glazed-over expressions, I’d say it had.) I couldn’t help feeling that the album had cheated Ned and Dee of their time on earth by compacting the years into one quick montage of scenes.

At the time, I’d felt saddened by how few pictures our hosts owned that documented their lives. Now that I no longer have photos to my name due to my computer situation, however, I am absurdly jealous. Like most people of my generation, I create thousands of images every year—yet I never print them out. I store them away on electronic devices that crash or (sigh) get stolen. Then again, hard copies fade and eventually disappear, too. And what are pictures but snippets of memories from a fleeting life that will most likely be forgotten in three or four generations’ time?

But I don’t really think that way. I’ve gotta start printing out my pictures.

After we’d closed the photo album and Ned and Dee had returned to their seats, there was a momentary lull in conversation. We all stared absently at the spotty tablecloth. No one wanted to move, but there didn’t seem to be anything left to share.

Dee sighed. “Well, we aren’t going to have any WWOOFers for a while now, eh? It’s just going to be you and me around here again,” she said to Ned, playfully patting his arm. “Oh—you aren’t planning on taking any more WWOOFers in the next couple of months?” I asked. “Well, summer’s almost here, so it’s gonna be too hot for ‘em,” Dee replied, rolling those beady eyes of hers. “We usually have to hire seasonal workers to help us harvest the mangos.” She paused, and her weathered face suddenly drooped. “You know, the dogs are going to be depressed when you girls leave. They love having other people around…”

Right then, a warm realization dawned on me: it wasn't just the dogs who were going to be sad to see us go. Ned and Dee were going to miss our presence. They were going to miss us. And I was going to miss them. I thought about how much the whole situation had evolved from Day One to Day Eight; the fact that we’d all learned to get along—and, what’s more, genuinely like and appreciate each other—in just over a week felt like an incredible achievement.

Looking back, I don’t need pictures to remember Ned and Dee or how they influenced me. Maybe the details will become fuzzy with time, but the powerful self-reliance, adventurousness, and eye rolls will stay with me for the rest of my life.