Sunday, November 29, 2009

October 10 - Day Five

When Caroline and I begrudgingly rolled out of bed this morning at around 7am—embarrassingly late in Ned-and-Dee Land—we found our hosts sitting at the kitchen table, exceedingly dirty and utterly exhausted. “Wow…you guys have already been hard at work this morning, I take it?” Caroline asked with her cute new British slash Australian inflection. Ned, staring down into the cupper he was nursing, nodded briefly and replied, “The pump’s broke. We’ve gotta go into Mareeba and pick up some parts.” Still half-asleep, it took me a few seconds to process what he was saying.

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?]


Ned then got out of the car to explore a lakeside tree for potential finches, and Caroline and I scrambled out after him. As camera-clad Caroline snapped a few photos, I gazed out at the various birds soaring low over the lake or quietly resting in the trees that rose up from the murky water. “Is this a bird sanctuary or something? A national park?” I asked. “Naw. This is a cattle station,” replied Ned. “A what station?” To my horror, Ned explained to me that some guy uses the lake as a giant trough and bathtub for his herd of cattle. The thought of hundreds of cows barreling into the tranquil water and inevitably destroying several bird habitats in the process made me wince, and my longstanding qualms about the concept of land ownership briefly surfaced.

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.]

A homeless Aboriginal man in Mareeba. Great job, white people!
Anyway, at some point (either when we had gotten our fill of bird watching or we began to notice Dee shifting impatiently in the passenger’s seat, guilt-tripping us with her signature eye roll—I’m not sure which came first), the three of us got back into the car and we rumbled onward. When we finally arrived in Mareeba, Caroline and I asked Ned and Dee if we could go off on our own and then meet up with them in an hour or so. “That should be fine,” Dee nodded. She and Caroline exchanged cell phone numbers, and then her and Ned shuffled off towards the hardware store. Feeling vaguely hungry, Caroline and I decided to hit up a nearby cafĂ©. While we slouched on the plastic chairs waiting for my soup and her sandwich to be ready, I looked at the absurdly clean metal table and linoleum floor and felt an involuntary sigh of relief escape my lips. “You know, I’m embarrassed to admit it, but civilization feels good!” I grinned. “Ohhhh yeah,” Caroline nodded, admiring the gleaming silverware. “But it DOES suck to have to pay for food again.” True. Bloody fair dinkum true.

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.

“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.



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!

Friday, November 13, 2009

I shall not be silenced!

Hello, humans. Sorry I’ve been slacking, but I have a good excuse, I promise. As you may already know, my laptop was stolen from a hostel in Kings Cross, Sydney, on the first of November. The computer was in my backpack, which was carried off ten feet behind my back. I lost my camera, my iPod, and my Bose headphones, too. But the only thing I really cared about losing was my computer. Stupidly, I had never taken the time to back up any of my stuff, so I lost all the photos, documents and music I’ve ever had. Thank the goddess for my 72 Facebook albums!

The last picture of us together...sigh.
I thought maybe I would give up blogging since I lost all the obsessive notes that I had been taking over the course of my Australian adventure, but in the past few of days, the obnoxious voice in my head crying, “Express yourself!” has convinced me otherwise. Thank you, Dearest Caroline, for the use of your laptop in the making of this entry.

I’d like to write down the most significant things I remember from the final days at Ned and Dee's farm. This is good for me as I will preserve my memories in writing as well as get to share them with you, and good for you as you won’t have to indulge me and read through hundreds of extraneous moment-by-moment details anymore (oh, who I am kidding…you’ll probably still have to).

But before I revisit my time at Ned and Dee's, let me first construct a broad overview of everything that has happened since then in case I don’t have time for it later:

Caroline and I took off for Port Douglas, a beach town north of Cairns, the day after we said goodbye to Ned and Dee. The bus ride to the town was gorgeous—we drove past miles of isolated beaches strewn with boulders and palm trees—but as soon as we arrived, we were very unimpressed by Port Douglas’ overt touristy-ness. Caroline thought maybe she would be interested in settling in Port Douglas for the year, but as soon as she set eyes on it, she knew she wanted to be in a place with more of a “local flair.”

After just one day there, I was missing Ned and Dee and wishing that we had not left early; I couldn’t help thinking of them as my newly-adopted grandparents (although Dee is younger than both my parents). Caroline and I bought a bottle of red wine and sat on the beach sipping, talking, and admiring the stars shimmering on the water, but I couldn’t relax—and not just because mosquitoes were devouring my exposed feet. “I really feel like I should be WWOOFing right now,” I admitted to Caroline. “That’s what I came to Australia to do, primarily, so why waste time in this tourist-trap of a town?” Caroline, the sweetheart that she is, decided to humor me. “Well, you’re only here until the November 19th, so I’ll do whatever you want to do!”

The following morning, I hurriedly looked up a few farms in the Port Douglas area in the WWOOF book and began the cold calls. As I had expected, three or four people refused when I asked apologetically if they needed WWOOFers as early as say, tomorrow? But one guy I called, a man named Julian, said that, yes, he could use a couple of people to help him out for the weekend at his farm in Julatten—an area ridiculously close to Ned and Dee's—and that he was passing through Port Douglas TODAY and could pick us up. I looked at Caroline for approval, and she nodded hesitantly; I think we both felt a little overwhelmed by the idea of getting whisked away to another farm that very afternoon. But I was so excited to have another WWOOFing experience that I tried not to care.

As soon as we saw the guy, however, both of our hearts sank. He rolled up in a dirty ute and stepped out sporting filthy khaki clothes and a severely overgrown beard. But it wasn’t just his appearance that bugged us, I realize now—we could sense that something was off about him. But Caroline and I didn’t admit our hesitation to each other at first; I think we both tried to convince ourselves that our reaction to him was simply because of the way he looked. “Don’t be shallow!” I had silently chided myself. But as we made the drive from Port Douglas to Julatten, it became clear that Caroline and I indeed had a few things to be nervous about.

First of all, Julian's ad in the WWOOF books says that the farm belongs to “Julian and Maggie,” but that’s only technically true; Julian’s wife apparently hates the farm and never goes there. The thought of Caroline and I hanging out in the middle of nowhere with this burly middle-aged man made me pretty uncomfortable, but I tried to tell myself it was going to be fine…until he started to tell us about the “bitch” who keeps throwing rocks on his lawn to get revenge on him for yelling at her in an act of road rage.

“I hope her cars plummets over a cliff with her in it. I hope her house burns down while she is asleep. I hope she breaks her arm, over and over again every week…” I prayed that he would shut up, but he just kept coming up with fantastically horrible karmic incidents that he hoped would punish the woman for her egregious crime of littering his yard with stones. I also knew that he was losing major brownie points with Caroline as the only thing she hates more than a vengeful man is the word “bitch.” I wasn’t able to ignore my panicky feelings anymore.

Things only continued to get progressively worse. At his farm (which is actually his personal “retreat” and not a farm at all; he only grows things for his own consumption, and he doesn’t even use organic methods. The outrage!), we noticed immediately that the structure that acts as his bedroom also contains an extra bed that he expected us to sleep in. 

It was positioned perpendicularly and less than two feet away from the foot of his bed (which we found disconcerting at best), and besides the mosquito nets draped over both beds, we were basically going to be sleeping exposed-to-the-elements style—the bedroom structure consisted of four supporting beams, a roof, and tarp “walls” on two sides.
 
I was excited, though, that there was a running stream about ten meters away from our bed. I happily imagined how peaceful it was going to feel to fall asleep to the sound of gently gurgling water. 

(As it turns out, this didn't happen. I was forced to wear earplugs because of Julian’s obscenely loud snoring.)

As we toured the property, I noticed a beautiful circle of stained glass set into a wall in Julian’s kitchen/living room structure—also a "pole house"—that depicted a nude woman sitting in the grass and playfully blowing flower petals out of her hand. When I asked about the image, Julian told me that it was Gaia-the-earth-goddess, and that he had commissioned a female artisan to make the stained glass. Impressed, I asked, “Wow! So, are you interested in mythology or something?” “Naw,” Julian replied, “I just wanted to be able to look at a nice pair of tits.”

I laughed momentarily because I thought he was kidding, but when I noticed that he was completely serious, I choked on my chuckles. I glanced at Caroline, whose cheeks were flushed. Oh, crap... I thought. She officially hates this man now…

The rest of the afternoon was relatively uneventful, though. Julian asked us to pick some cherry tomatoes from his garden, and he began to prepare pasta (boxed, not homemade like at Ned and Dee’s...we were so spoiled there) and salad in the wall-less kitchen, which overlooks a beautiful watering hole and is apparently home to a male platypus. When the sun began to set, Julian turned on the generator, and as we ate the relatively bland food (by the way, Julian at first protested Caroline putting salt on her plate of pasta, which I found strangely possessive), it grew pitch black except for the light bulb dangling above us.

Then, suddenly, the hum of the generator died, and we were plunged into total darkness. 

For a few seconds, the silence was deafening, and I felt Caroline’s hand grope for mine on the table. “What’s going on?!” I demanded, my voice wavering. The horrifying thought that Julian had planned the blackout raced through my mind, and my whole body tensed. I tried to suppress the image of Hannibal Lecter wearing those night-vision goggles as he slowly—and, dare I say it, hungrily?—crept up on Julianne Moore.

“Oh, it’s the generator,” Julian replied nonchalantly. “It goes out sometimes. I just have to go flip it off and then on again.” “Turn on a flashlight!” I shrieked, completely forgetting that they call flashlights “torches” here. I watched his glow-in-the-dark watch carefully to make sure that his hand was reaching towards the end of the table, where three or so flashlights of various sizes huddled dutifully, and not coming towards us...

As you can probably guess, Julian ended up grabbing a torch, stumbling over to the generator, and rebooting the power. The moment of imagined drama was over almost as soon as it had started…but it left me feeling pretty shaken. After that, I couldn’t help looking back on the negative feelings I first had for Dee and thinking how silly I had been for wanting to leave Ned and Dee's early because of something as harmless as Dee's cold personality. Now, I was dealing with a WWOOF host who I legitimately did not trust.

Soon after, Julian went to bed, and when Caroline and I finally entered the “bedroom,” he was clearly sound asleep (i.e. thunderous snores). She and I got into our bed, spread the dangling mosquito netting over us, and—after a few seconds of pretending to be little princesses in a draping canopy bed to lighten the mood—tried to fall asleep.

The following morning, Julian brought us out to an enormous, rectangular patch (it had to have been at least 50 feet long) of mammoth weeds and told us to pull up everything but the young trees. I gave the veritable landing strip a once-over, and all I could see were huge tufts of coarse grass and alarmingly spiky plants; Caroline and I stared at them hesitantly. Sensing our confusion, Julian had to walk through the patch and physically point out each and every dwarfed sapling so that Caroline and I would know which plants NOT to uproot. When Julian walked away to leave us to our task, Caroline and I grumbled about how the patch had clearly not been weeded since the Jurassic Era. But we began to work nevertheless, Julian’s obscenely hyper puppy irritating us all the while. (By the way, the dog’s name is “Cha-lee.” Not “Charlie,” mind you—Julian told us to pronounce the dog’s name in a Chinese accent. Wow. Deciding not to stoop to his racism, Caroline and I chose to call the creature “Spawn,” as in Spawn of Satan, instead.)

After three hours or so, we had barely finished a third of the weeding, and I was getting extraordinarily thirsty. When Julian finally rolled up on his red ATV to check on us, Caroline said, “Julian, we are going to need to stop for a water break now.” “Well, just weed for half an hour more, and then we can break for lunch,” instructed Julian. I didn’t say anything (I was too busy fantasizing about how Ned and Dee used to call us in for a “cupper” before we had even scratched the surface of a task), but Caroline insisted that we needed water RIGHT NOW. Julian finally agreed to fill up my metal water bottle and bring it back to us to share, and as he zoomed away on the ATV, we agreed to get the hell out of there the following day. “Let’s call Ned and Dee and have them take us to Port Douglas with them since they said they are visiting their daughter there tomorrow,” I suggested. (I guess we’ve begun to establish a tradition of flaking out on our WWOOF hosts early…I hope it doesn’t happen on our third and final farm.)

Caroline and I decided that Julian obviously wasn’t too much of a creeper since he hadn’t done anything vastly inappropriate the night before, but he was rude and—frankly—just a total hick. After experiencing just a couple of weeks in Queensland, Caroline and I were beginning to get the feeling that we were in Alabama...TROPICAL Alabama.

Finally, after nearly seven hours of exhausting work, Caroline and I were finished. Caroline pointed out a disastrous ovular sunburn on my lower back from where my shirt had rolled up and my pants had sagged, but beside the burn, sore leg muscles and a slightly bitter feeling towards Julian, I was OK. Caroline, on the other hand, was fed up and furious with the man; during our lunch break, she barely spoke a word to him (which is unusual because normally she is the queen of making conversation in uncomfortable situations).

When the three of us had eaten our sandwiches, I went to the bathroom (which is a really cool structure, actually; it borders his private river and has walls on only three sides so that it feels like you are literally showering in the rain forest next to a trickling creek. PLUS, there is a real toilet in there! Ten points!), and Julian apparently had the nerve to suggest to Caroline that we go collect all the weeds we’d just uprooted and put them in a pile near his tool shed. Caroline, who had silently recalled that WWOOFers are only required to work from four to six hours a day, told me that she simply said to him, “I think what’s really gotta happen is a swim!” Brilliant.

So, Caroline and I grabbed our bathing suits and proceeded to lock ourselves in the bathroom to change. When I emerged, Julian was sitting at the kitchen table. “Going for a swim?” He said. I looked at him a little impatiently, thinking that, based on my outfit, my intentions were rather obvious. Julian then responded, “Naked?”

I was immediately overcome with shock and rage. What, was this guy hoping to watch me as I skinny dipped in his watering hole?! I opened my mouth to protest his extremely inappropriate comment as he hurriedly added, “You’ll know you’re alive!” 

“ABSOLUTELY NOT!” I practically yelled, and I hurried over to the bathroom to whisper to Caroline about what had just happened. Her mouth fell open. “We are SO out of here.”

Coincidentally, Julian announced only minutes later that he had to go into town to pick up a few supplies, and after he had hopped into his ute and driven away, Caroline and I rushed to the phone. We called Ned and Dee to tell them our predicament, and they graciously agreed to come pick us up in the morning. “Do you need us to get you right now?” Ned asked worriedly. “No, no,” I answered, “Thanks, though. Caroline and I need to make up some kind of excuse to Julian since ‘we just don’t like you’ isn’t really going to cut it.” “Well, if he does anything to make you uncomfortable again, you just call us! We can easily come pick you up tonight,” Dee told me. Oh, Grandma…how we love thee.

When Julian returned home, I told him that I had developed an infection (??) and needed to go back to Port Douglas the following day, Sunday, instead of on Monday as we had originally planned. “Our previous WWOOF hosts are going to pick us up in the morning,” I explained truthfully.

Luckily, Julian didn’t seem to mind one bit. Caroline and I were overwhelmingly relieved—not just because we were going to be outta there in the morning, but also because the only two local people who cared about our well-being knew exactly where we were in case something went wrong.

We tried to relax and enjoy the rest of the afternoon and night, and it wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. While preparing a Chinese stir-fry dinner, Julian blasted great music (Alanis Morissette, Fleetwood Mac, etc.) on the incredible sound system he just happens to have in the middle of the bush. Amazing. And after eating, the three of us lounged on lawn chairs close to the watering hole to keep our eyes peeled for the platypus (which, sadly, we never saw). I mostly just admired the huge gum trees that grew along the edge of the river—their pale bark seemed to glow in the moonlight, and I imagined that they were a thousand years old. I wondered what kinds of stories they could have told me about the forest in years past...



At one point in the evening, I glanced at Julian’s old-fashioned teal-and-white stove, his banged-up tea kettle, and then at him, and I suddenly felt as if Caroline and I were in the process of making a documentary about farmers of the Australian Northeast—except that we had no film crew around to act as a buffer between us and him; to provide us with a sense of security. It was just Caroline and I, thrown into an environment with a man we would have never met if it hadn’t been for the “documentary” (a.k.a. WWOOF Australia and the documentary that is my LIFE. So deep). Even though I knew that staying with Julian and ignoring our instincts had been, frankly, kind of stupid, I was suddenly proud of Caroline and I for being adventurous and doggedly stubborn and daring by spending a weekend with this man from a completely different walk of life.

In the morning, Julian squeezed a little more work out of Caroline and I before Ned and Dee came a-callin’; he told one of us to drive the ATV—now saddled with a huge tub of Roundup—slowly around the property while he sprayed weeds. As you can imagine, there were many more invader plants littering his property than just the ones that Caroline and I had plucked the previous day; this man clearly doesn’t take care of his land. Caroline was horrified that he even suggested that we help him work with chemicals. “In the WWOOF book, it says we are not supposed to do that!” she said indignantly. But I comforted her by telling her that I would help him, and not to worry about it. “I don't mind. Have fun; take some pictures of the place!” 

I wasn’t trying to be a martyr or anything…I just really wanted to drive the ATV.

A few hours later, Grandpa Ned and Grandma Dee saved the day by rumbling up in their mighty metal steed to whisk us away. They seemed happy to see us, and Dee was acting positively warm. I was so glad to see two faces I knew and trusted. 


As if they hadn’t taken Caroline and I on enough incredible adventures when we were their actual WWOOFers, they decided to throw in a couple more right after fetching us—we visited a lake, went to see a gargantuan curtain fig tree, and stopped at a river where Aboriginal and other local families were swimming (much to my confusion, I might add, as a bright yellow sign warning, “Crocodiles are known to inhabit this area. Encountering one could result in serious injury or death” stood conspicuously on the bank).

All too quickly, it was time for us to say goodbye to Ned and Dee for the second and final time, and Caroline and I were on our own once more—now in a town near Port Douglas called Mossman. The following day, she and I went on an incredible rain forest tour led by an Aboriginal man…but I don’t feel like writing about because my “broad overview” has, not surprisingly, turned into an epic saga. But here is a snippet from one of Caroline’s hilarious mass emails describing the event:

“We had a man named Bill aka ‘Saltwater Crocodile’ show us how sarsaparilla leaves can be crushed with water to create soap, and the branches can be used to help with joint pain. And for all you fisherman out there, the sarsaparilla soap also can double as a fish-sedater. I learned about how rattan can be used to make ‘bayan’ (sp? no clue) aka huts that look like little non-icy igloos. Only 4-5 hours to create a home... and if you want to waterproof it... welp, all you gotta do is crush up one of the handy-dandy termite mounds that abound in this part of the world, and add water to create a paste to insulate your hut. Dear God. I would be one dead duck if I had to live off the land back in the day. These people are so mind-bogglingly brilliant for figuring all this stuff out. And that termite paste? You can not only use it to insulate your house, but you can also preserve food with it. So if you kill a kangaroo and wrap it in banana leaves and then use the termite paste, you can insulate it from bacteria and insects. Like a little mini-fridge in the middle of the rain forest. If the termite paste was sold nowadays in supermarkets, you can betcha that ‘DUAL PURPOSE’ would assault you in neon yellow lettering, probably accompanied by a personified termite with a dazzling smile.

Plus, the women gave birth in the river. That sounded a lot more appealing than the men's initiation rites. The twelve-year-old boys were tied to the trees at night to learn to brave the dark (which happened to be filled with killer snakes, spiders, and crocodiles). If I were a 12-year-old boy back in the day, I would be petrified at best. Then, they got their teeth punched out and their chests scarred.”

All part of growing up, eh?

All right, so, since this and the events of the next couple of weeks have nothing to do with WWOOFing—which my blog is purportedly about—I am really going to keep it short now, I promise. 

I spent the following five days learning how to SCUBA dive. I did an Open Water Course, while Caroline became a Rescue Diver in hopes of eventually becoming a Dive Master. We spent three days and two nights on a live-aboard vessel, admiring coral and trying not to die of lung over-expansion. The whole experience was amazing—I mean, c’mon, it’s the Great Barrier Reef. I am not going to say anything else about diving except for the fact that every sea creature in existence seems to be out and about, ready to start the day, at 6:30am; on my early morning dives, I was astounded by how many fish were bustling about the “bommies” (Autralian slang for clumps of coral). As I looked on, I was inspired to sing that “Bonjour! Good day!” song from Beauty and the Beast…but I couldn't because there was a regulator in my mouth.

Then, I spent about a week traveling down the east coast of Australia to meet up with my boyfriend Tony—who is currently working on the ship that I will join on December 2nd—in a few ports. We spent time together in Cairns, Brisbane, and Sydney; unfortunately, our Sydney experience was marred by my stolen backpack situation.

It’s ironic that my stuff got stolen when it did, though. Just days before, I had experienced a mild freak-out about the ridiculousness of consumerism and material possessions. The day before Tony’s ship arrived in Brisbane, I decided to spend the afternoon by myself at Surfer’s Paradise, which I had heard was a fantastic beach town on the famous Gold Coast of Australia. When I arrived, it was cold and raining—just my luck—so I was forced to forego the beach and putter about the mall. Well, Surfer’s Paradise is just about the most touristy, fake, plastic place in the universe, and I ended up feeling depressed by the idiocy of it all—of which, I recognize, I am completely and utterly a part. (It probably didn’t help that I had just finished a mesmerizing book called “Ghost Fox” about a white female settler captured by Native Americans in the 1700s who chooses the indigenous peoples’ close-to-nature lifestyle over that of the settlers in the end.) 

Even seeing fish trapped in an aquarium upset me that afternoon because I was feeling suddenly outraged by how disrespectful and intentionally removed our culture is when it comes to nature. I began to personify Western society as a greedy, blundering idiot; a rotund, lazy being with no knowledge of how to perceive the rhythms of nature or cooperate with the land in order to survive. I wrote in my journal about how I really believe I need to try living on some sort of commune/intentional community at some point in my life; my fascination with “self-sufficient” lifestyles is what brought me to WWOOFing in the first place.

So, it seems only fitting that my electronics were taken from me. And actually, it’s been nice not having the option of being wedded to them. Maybe the theft was a sign that I am indeed supposed to try living an earthy, organic life in the near future. However, it’s back to cruise ships first as I've already accepted a contract that lasts until January of 2010. (Ships couldn't be further from “earthy” and “organic," I know…but I really enjoy my job for now.)

*** 

On November 2nd, the day that Tony’s ship sailed away from Sydney and off into the Pacific, Caroline flew in from Cairns to meet up with me, cherub that she is. “While you are in Australia, I want to be with you!” She had said while purchasing her place flight from Queensland to New South Wales months ago. 

The two of us spent the next week hanging out with various Australian friends my dad made years ago in San Francisco. The first couple we stayed with was my dad’s former next-door neighbors, David and Sue, who now live in a beautiful Sydney apartment just off the water. After a few days with them, we then traveled to Canberra to meet Willy (Wilhelmina), the woman who had been the live-in nanny to Sue and David’s kids when they lived next door to my dad. She and her family were delightfully sweet, and Willy told us fascinating stories about the Aboriginal community in the Northern territory where she once worked for a year as a nurse.

Caroline and I are now at our third and final farm in St. Albans, New South Wales (two and a half hours northwest of Sydney), and I am recording the goings-on diligently in my journal. Perhaps, when I return to the States, I will type them up and post them. Until then, feel free to check for a “Final Days of Ned and Dee” entry. (I really have no idea why I chose to write out of order. Scholars have debated it for centuries...)

Thank you, and good night.