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’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.
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?”
“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.
