We’re going to Mareeba? Wait a minute… I thought to myself. Mareeba means freedom! My mind began to race. Why wait until Wednesday? Caroline and I could get out of here today. Now!
But when I seriously contemplated packing up all our stuff in a matter of minutes, making up some kind of last-minute lie to Ned and Dee, and hurriedly figuring out the bus schedule back into Cairns, leaving today seemed ridiculous. And it wasn’t only practical considerations causing me to dismiss my initial reaction—my heart was telling me that it wasn’t ready to leave; that this experience here at Ned and Dee's wasn’t over just yet. I WANT to be here until Wednesday, I realized. I was pleasantly surprised—and glad—to know that I felt this way.As Ned and Dee disappeared into their bedroom to throw on clean, town-appropriate attire, Caroline and I attempted to wash our faces and brush our teeth. But the faucet refused to cooperate, and I put two and two together. Oh, right. The pump is broken. Dee seemed to know that we were awkwardly staring at the sink, not sure what to do, because she suddenly swooped in with a bucket full of river water from their storage tank. She was now neatly dressed, and I thought to myself that I hadn’t even seen her leave her room, let alone head outside with a bucket. The woman somehow manages to do everything at superhuman speed.
Spooning water out of a bucket is not the most enticing way to freshen up in the morning, and I have to admit that I really started to miss working on cruise ships at that moment. Ships bring travel and adventure (albeit often environmentally irresponsible and overly-touristy adventure), AND they’re clean! I wasn’t contemplating ending my Australia experience early and rushing back to sea or anything—I was merely allowing myself to get excited at the prospect of returning to ships on December 2nd. But I quickly curbed the nostalgia. You have the Present to experience, I reminded myself.
When everyone was ready to go, we clambered into the car and began winding our way through Ned and Dee's property. In the morning light, the ghostly gums (a type of eucalyptus with off-white bark and pale green slivers for leaves) looked more beautiful than ever, and when we turned onto the paved road into town, I appreciatively noticed the hills, ablaze with rust-colored grasses and littered with lumpy termite mounds. I was so captivated by all this beauty that I hardly noticed when Ned began to slow down. Suddenly, he turned the car onto an unfamiliar dirt track, and I was shaken out of my dreamy stupor. “Where are we going?” I asked, slightly disappointed not to be able to stare at the trees and the hills anymore. “We want to show you something,” Dee said, turning around in the passenger seat (which is on the left hand side…I just can’t get used to it) and smiling mischievously at us.
In a matter of minutes, my disappointment melted away: a swampy lake seemed to magically materialize on either side of the dirt road; it felt as if we were enacting a sleepy version of the Israelites-passing-through-the-Red-Sea story. Ned slowly stopped the car once we had traveled about halfway across the track. “There are lots of bird species here, and we thought you might want to take some pictures,” he said. He scanned the algae-covered water to our right, and his eyes lit up. “Look down there!” I craned my neck out the window and, to my delight, saw a small bird with stilts for legs carefully making its way across the lake using a series of lily pads as stepping-stones. “It’s called a ‘Jesus Christ bird,’” said Ned with a grin, “because it looks like it’s walking on water.” [...Wow. I just noticed that there have been not one but TWO biblical references in this paragraph. Who would have thunk it?]
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Sure, the notion of possessing a section of the earth is nothing new for us Westerners, but when you really stop and think about it, it’s pretty disturbing how many delicate ecosystems have been ravaged by greedy capitalists. And who decides that they have the authority to “sell” a piece of land in the first place? The first (white) person who steps foot on it slash manages to obliterate all native, nature-cooperative inhabitants?! [Cue: “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas.]
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| A homeless Aboriginal man in Mareeba. Great job, white people! |
After we finished our overpriced meals (which couldn’t even begin to compare to Ned and Dee's delicious concoctions. Gotta love home cooking), Caroline and I, like bloodhounds on the hunt, managed to sniff out the one Internet place that miraculously existed in the dusty little town. Granted, accessing the World Wide Web was going to cost us three Australian dollars for just half an hour, but Caroline and I were not about to pass up the opportunity. I had rather inconveniently lugged my laptop along for this very occasion, and as I sat plunking out part of a blog post, Caroline hunched over a public computer and checked her email. All too quickly, her cell began buzzing. Ned and Dee were waiting for us. Grumbling in frustration, we grabbed our things and trudged down the street until we found our hosts. Neither Caroline nor I mentioned to them what we had been doing (it would have been slightly humiliating to admit that we were THAT obsessed with the Internet), and they didn’t ask any questions.
***
Back at home, Caroline and I suited ourselves up in preparation for more mulching madness—this time, however, we would be spreading hay around the leaf-strewn bases of the avocado trees. Dee wheeled a red “trolley” out of the shed and handed it over to us, and as Caroline and I walked over to where the hay was stacked, I had to resist the childish urge to tell her to jump on it so I could push her wildly around the tapioca patch. Try to look like a competent worker and not like a total buffoon, I reminded myself.
We laboriously lifted up two bales of the stiff alfalfa hay, laid them onto the deliciously tempting trolley, and plodded over to the first tree. Caroline used a small sickle-looking tool (which Dee had purportedly handed to her while I was fantasizing about playing with the cart) to cut the tight pink strings that kept the bales together, and after we had pulled the strings away, the hay fell apart into convenient little “biscuits.” We grabbed these squares two at a time and began to rip them into clumps, which we dropped in sweeping spirals from the base of the tree out to the drip line. Despite the fact that we were being overly-careful about spreading the hay evenly and placing it as far out as the end of every branch, Caroline and I were moving pretty quickly; in just one hour, we had managed to mulch all six avocado trees.
Feeling rather thrilled with ourselves, we strolled back into the house to announce that we’d finished. Ned and Dee, who had finished fixing the pump and were now reading and resting at the kitchen table, looked up in surprise. “Done? Already?” Dee asked us, furrowing her eyebrows. “Yep!” I said proudly. “All done.”
Caroline, wisely understanding that Ned and Dee have a very realistic notion of just how long it takes her and me to accomplish any given task, could tell that something was up. “Um…wait. Were we supposed to mulch only the avocado trees?” Dee shook her head. “No, no, no. Mulch ALL the trees out there.”
Walking back out to the orchard, I felt like a death row inmate staring at an electric chair as he approached it from 100 yards away. The avo's were only a small section of the two long lines of trees that awaited mulching, and I didn’t know how on earth we were going to do it all in one day. [In retrospect, there were only about twenty trees total, but at the time, the rows appeared never-ending.] Nevertheless, we put on our happy faces and got to it.
As I crouched beneath the third non-avocado tree—I believe it was some kind of citrus?—with two hay biscuits in my arms, I looked down at the patch of leaves where I was about to place a few tufts and noticed a slew of green ants scuttling about. Hasta la vista, suckers! I said to myself. But I was admittedly feeling kind of guilty about the avalanche I was about to unleash upon them, so I gently laid strands of hay on top of the critters until they disappeared from sight. I wondered if being bombarded by clumps of hay was going to kill the little guys. “Hey, Caroline,” I joked, “Do you think this is like Pompeii for the ants right now?”
When our laughter had subsided, we began to mulch in focused silence, the sun moving lazily overhead. We repeated the same ritual over and over: we pulled and tossed clumps of hay from the biscuits in our arms until empty-handed, stood up, headed over to the trolley, grabbed two more biscuits, walked back to the tree, crouched down, and pulled and tossed some more. When this process became monotonous and my hamstrings were really starting to feel the burn, I decided I was going to need to entertain myself to pass the time. I started humming “Part of Your World,” and before we knew it, Caroline and I were enjoying a veritable Disney sing-along. (If only one of us had thought to burst into song with, “Whistle While You Work.” It clearly would have been an appropriate choice.)
After finishing tree #11 without yet having taken a break, my legs and back were aching from all the bending and squatting, and I was yearning to rest for a bit. Wordlessly, I plopped down in between the two rows, my arms and legs sprawled, and gazed up at the clouds. Caroline, who had taken a break a few minutes before, eyed me enviously. Finally, she threw up her hands and joined me on the ground.
Walking back out to the orchard, I felt like a death row inmate staring at an electric chair as he approached it from 100 yards away. The avo's were only a small section of the two long lines of trees that awaited mulching, and I didn’t know how on earth we were going to do it all in one day. [In retrospect, there were only about twenty trees total, but at the time, the rows appeared never-ending.] Nevertheless, we put on our happy faces and got to it.
As I crouched beneath the third non-avocado tree—I believe it was some kind of citrus?—with two hay biscuits in my arms, I looked down at the patch of leaves where I was about to place a few tufts and noticed a slew of green ants scuttling about. Hasta la vista, suckers! I said to myself. But I was admittedly feeling kind of guilty about the avalanche I was about to unleash upon them, so I gently laid strands of hay on top of the critters until they disappeared from sight. I wondered if being bombarded by clumps of hay was going to kill the little guys. “Hey, Caroline,” I joked, “Do you think this is like Pompeii for the ants right now?”
When our laughter had subsided, we began to mulch in focused silence, the sun moving lazily overhead. We repeated the same ritual over and over: we pulled and tossed clumps of hay from the biscuits in our arms until empty-handed, stood up, headed over to the trolley, grabbed two more biscuits, walked back to the tree, crouched down, and pulled and tossed some more. When this process became monotonous and my hamstrings were really starting to feel the burn, I decided I was going to need to entertain myself to pass the time. I started humming “Part of Your World,” and before we knew it, Caroline and I were enjoying a veritable Disney sing-along. (If only one of us had thought to burst into song with, “Whistle While You Work.” It clearly would have been an appropriate choice.)After finishing tree #11 without yet having taken a break, my legs and back were aching from all the bending and squatting, and I was yearning to rest for a bit. Wordlessly, I plopped down in between the two rows, my arms and legs sprawled, and gazed up at the clouds. Caroline, who had taken a break a few minutes before, eyed me enviously. Finally, she threw up her hands and joined me on the ground.
“Ooh, look at that one!” She said after a minute or two, pointing up at a fluffy cloud drifting above us. “Yeah, it looks like a pterodactyl!” I laughed. “Hmm…well, now it’s changing…into…a PELICAN.” Caroline pointed to the expanding size of the imaginary creature’s beak. “But look, now it’s a woodpecker!” I responded.
But before Caroline could decide what shape the cloud was taking on next, we heard something that made me wince. “Sleeping on the job, eh?” Dee was looking down at us. We immediately sat up, me with an uneasy smile plastered on my face. Dee didn’t look angry or indignant, but I saw her solemnly eye the numerous trees we still had left to do. “Ned thought you two would have been nearly done by now…” I didn’t know how to respond to this statement, and I vaguely wished I could crawl under the hay alongside the inundated ants. But Caroline heartily said, “Ned was wrong! In fact, we might not be able to finish them all today. There are a lot of trees here.” I held my breath, but Dee just shrugged. “Well, come in for a cupper.”
When Caroline and I had washed up as best as we could (we were still plastered with dirt and fragments of alfalfa regardless of our efforts), we joined the couple for tea at the kitchen table. I surreptitiously studied Dee's face to gauge if she was pissed off or not, and to my surprise, she seemed totally relaxed. Relieved, I helped myself to the koala-shaped cookies Dee had placed on the table and dunked one vigorously in my tea until it became perfectly soft. After devouring it, I took a long sip of tea, and the sweet, milky liquid felt wonderful as it gushed down my throat. “You know, I am really going to miss all these cuppers we’ve been enjoying here!” I said, and Caroline nodded happily in agreement. “Tea is so comforting! And I think it helped me get better,” she said, referring to the cough she had started out with at the beginning of our trip.
When the four of us had eaten our fair share of koalas and the mugs were all empty, I stood up determinedly. “Let’s do two more bales-worth of mulching, Caroline!” Dee didn’t stop us, and so (after washing the mugs, of course) the two of us slipped on our gardening gloves and headed back out to the orchard. We refilled the trolley, cut the strings holding the hay biscuits together, and then began to mulch again. The break must have revived us—or perhaps we had simply stopped worrying about being quite so precise—because we managed to mulch the remaining nine trees in under an hour.
It felt weird to finish working so late in the afternoon because we had grown accustomed to completing all our tasks before lunchtime, but the trip to Mareeba had swallowed our morning. As I headed into the bathroom shed for my now-routine early evening shower, I heard Ned call out to Caroline, who was busy composing an email on her computer in the caravan, “Caroline! Do you want to watch me make pasta?” I thought to myself, What’s so interesting about making pasta?! I pictured Caroline oohing and ahhing over a pot of boiling hot water as Ned ceremoniously dumped in a box of rigatoni. But when I stepped out of the shed fifteen minutes later, scrubbed and redressed, I found Ned, Dee and Caroline in the kitchen threading dough through some kind of old-fashioned, hand-powered flattening device. Of course, I thought. Of course when Ned and Dee say that they are making pasta, they are MAKING PASTA. Their self-sufficiency never ceases to blow my mind.
When the flattening process was apparently done, Dee took the now extremely long strip of dough—which looked like a massive boa constrictor in her arms—and continuously fed it into Ned's hands while he cut it into smaller pieces with a thin square of plastic. He then took the soft rectangles one by one and stuffed them into the other end of the pasta-making device while cranking the lever with his free hand. Shredded noodles slithered out onto the cutting board.
Watching Ned and Dee make pasta was so cool—I had never seen anyone making homemade noodles before in my life. And while observing them working together, I thought about what a good team the two of them are. They truly enjoy the same things—being outside, hiking, cooking, reading—and they always seem to have unspoken agreements about who should take on which roles in order to get a job done (OK, so gender probably has a lot to do with these "unspoken agreements," but still...Ned and Dee are an effective pair). Ned drives, perhaps so that Dee can manage the in-drive beverage service (wine, anyone?). They take turns making meals, or work together to do so. If Dee is uprooting plants with a shovel, Ned is wordlessly replanting them in their new spots. If Ned is cranking out freshly made noodles, Dee is scooping them up and tossing them into boiling water.
But before Caroline could decide what shape the cloud was taking on next, we heard something that made me wince. “Sleeping on the job, eh?” Dee was looking down at us. We immediately sat up, me with an uneasy smile plastered on my face. Dee didn’t look angry or indignant, but I saw her solemnly eye the numerous trees we still had left to do. “Ned thought you two would have been nearly done by now…” I didn’t know how to respond to this statement, and I vaguely wished I could crawl under the hay alongside the inundated ants. But Caroline heartily said, “Ned was wrong! In fact, we might not be able to finish them all today. There are a lot of trees here.” I held my breath, but Dee just shrugged. “Well, come in for a cupper.”
When Caroline and I had washed up as best as we could (we were still plastered with dirt and fragments of alfalfa regardless of our efforts), we joined the couple for tea at the kitchen table. I surreptitiously studied Dee's face to gauge if she was pissed off or not, and to my surprise, she seemed totally relaxed. Relieved, I helped myself to the koala-shaped cookies Dee had placed on the table and dunked one vigorously in my tea until it became perfectly soft. After devouring it, I took a long sip of tea, and the sweet, milky liquid felt wonderful as it gushed down my throat. “You know, I am really going to miss all these cuppers we’ve been enjoying here!” I said, and Caroline nodded happily in agreement. “Tea is so comforting! And I think it helped me get better,” she said, referring to the cough she had started out with at the beginning of our trip.
When the four of us had eaten our fair share of koalas and the mugs were all empty, I stood up determinedly. “Let’s do two more bales-worth of mulching, Caroline!” Dee didn’t stop us, and so (after washing the mugs, of course) the two of us slipped on our gardening gloves and headed back out to the orchard. We refilled the trolley, cut the strings holding the hay biscuits together, and then began to mulch again. The break must have revived us—or perhaps we had simply stopped worrying about being quite so precise—because we managed to mulch the remaining nine trees in under an hour.
It felt weird to finish working so late in the afternoon because we had grown accustomed to completing all our tasks before lunchtime, but the trip to Mareeba had swallowed our morning. As I headed into the bathroom shed for my now-routine early evening shower, I heard Ned call out to Caroline, who was busy composing an email on her computer in the caravan, “Caroline! Do you want to watch me make pasta?” I thought to myself, What’s so interesting about making pasta?! I pictured Caroline oohing and ahhing over a pot of boiling hot water as Ned ceremoniously dumped in a box of rigatoni. But when I stepped out of the shed fifteen minutes later, scrubbed and redressed, I found Ned, Dee and Caroline in the kitchen threading dough through some kind of old-fashioned, hand-powered flattening device. Of course, I thought. Of course when Ned and Dee say that they are making pasta, they are MAKING PASTA. Their self-sufficiency never ceases to blow my mind.
When the flattening process was apparently done, Dee took the now extremely long strip of dough—which looked like a massive boa constrictor in her arms—and continuously fed it into Ned's hands while he cut it into smaller pieces with a thin square of plastic. He then took the soft rectangles one by one and stuffed them into the other end of the pasta-making device while cranking the lever with his free hand. Shredded noodles slithered out onto the cutting board.
Watching Ned and Dee make pasta was so cool—I had never seen anyone making homemade noodles before in my life. And while observing them working together, I thought about what a good team the two of them are. They truly enjoy the same things—being outside, hiking, cooking, reading—and they always seem to have unspoken agreements about who should take on which roles in order to get a job done (OK, so gender probably has a lot to do with these "unspoken agreements," but still...Ned and Dee are an effective pair). Ned drives, perhaps so that Dee can manage the in-drive beverage service (wine, anyone?). They take turns making meals, or work together to do so. If Dee is uprooting plants with a shovel, Ned is wordlessly replanting them in their new spots. If Ned is cranking out freshly made noodles, Dee is scooping them up and tossing them into boiling water.
During all of this, Caroline—a major foodie—was going nuts. I don’t think a single minute passed without her saying, “Wow!” at least once. To every exclamation, Dee would cheerfully retort, “It’s NORMAL! Come on!” “Normal for you, but not for me!” Caroline would reply, her eyes wide and fixed on the pasta shredder. Dee then would—you guessed it—roll her eyes. “You are just impressed by everything.” But the smile on her face betrayed the pleasure she took in our fascination and amazement. In her own dismissive way, she was proud.
A couple of hours later, a large bowl of Asian stir-fry noodles complete with chicken, prawns, peanuts, and bean sprouts (which Ned and Dee had germinated in a jar over the past few days) sat steaming on the table. It was absolutely scrumptious—it could have come straight from a five-star Chinese restaurant. However, to be honest, I couldn’t find a major taste difference between the homemade noodles and the boxed spaghetti I’ve eaten countless times in the past. I’ve got to work on refining my pasta palate.
Later, stuffed and content, Caroline and I were slipping into our pajamas in the caravan when she mentioned that she might consider coming back to Ned and Dee's place sometime in the next year while she’s in Australia. “If I start running out of money or need a temporary place to stay down the line, I could easily come WWOOF here again,” Caroline explained. “I mean, the work is reasonable, the food is great…and they’re great.” I could tell that Caroline, too, wasn’t quite ready for our experience at Ned and Dee's to be over. It seems that both of us have silently acknowledged to ourselves that Dee really isn’t half bad.
As I whipped out my laptop to take some last minute notes on the day’s events, Caroline crawled into bed with the Bill Bryson book. After a few minutes of silence except for the humming of the solar-powered light bulb and the tapping of my fingers flying furiously across the keyboard, Caroline let out a gasp that almost sent my laptop plummeting to the trailer floor. “Listen to this!” She insisted excitedly. “This explains SO much…” She proceeded to read me a passage from the book that describes Queenslanders as a uniquely sarcastic and even cold breed of Australian. Whereas the stereotypical Aussie is warm and friendly, Bryson says, Queenslanders have been known to be aloof at best. This claim was backed up with a testimonial told to Bryson about a man who asked a waitress in a Queensland restaurant if he could get a side salad in addition to the meat-and-potato dish she had dropped on the table in front of him. Allegedly, she turned around haughtily and—to the entire restaurant—complained, “What does he think it is, Christmas?”
Ah...so that's why Dee is such a downer. It's all Queensland's fault!
