October 6 - Day One

I have always been fascinated by people who are brave enough to live alternative lifestyles.

By alternative, I guess I just mean different from the upper middle class suburban existence of my San Francisco Bay Area childhood. It’s not like I naively think that most people have the option of living a stable suburban life but choose not to do so in favor of something “more interesting”; I'm just saying that I yearn to be brave enough to live a somewhat alternative lifestyle even though I have the option of going down the route has been laid out for me.

Australian sunset (my favorite cocktail)

I am hungry to observe and test many different ways of being alive, which is why I am happy with my somewhat eccentric job as a cruise ship singer, through which I meet quirky and adventurous people from all over the world in a unique setting. It was through the suggestions of a couple of these folks that I discovered WWOOF, or Willing Workers of Organic Farms. This organization pairs you up with an organic farm anywhere in the world, and you can volunteer your labor there in exchange for food and shelter. Since I have been yearning recently to help people (singing for spoiled tourists on cruise ships isn’t exactly philanthropic) and since, as I said, I am fascinated with alternative lifestyles, WWOOF sounded like the perfect way for me to spend a little bit of my time in between ship contracts.

When my good friend Caroline announced months ago that she was planning on moving to Australia for a year, I thought about how much I have always wanted to travel to the Land Down Under. In college, I used to fantasize about working on a wildlife preserve there for a couple of months or something so that I could get a feel for what I had long considered to be the highlight of the country: nature (a.k.a. “the bush”). Then, it hit me: I want to help people. I want to observe alternative lifestyles. I want to go to Australia to spend time in nature…

Voilà. I’m going to “WWOOF” there.

Once my mind was made up, I enthusiastically informed Caroline of my idea. We spent months planning, applying for a WWOOF membership, contacting farms until we found hosts, deciding what to pack, etc. Now, finally, we are here.

After a thirty-hour journey involving multiple flights and obscenely long layovers, I arrived in Cairns, Australia at 11pm on Oct. 3, utterly exhausted. Luckily, Caroline and I had scheduled a little bit of recovery time into our itinerary, so we nursed our jet lag for a couple of days in a kitschy “girl’s hostel.” We were planning on meeting our host couple, Ned and Dee, yesterday on Oct. 5, but we had been calling them every couple of hours since the early morning and we weren’t getting an answer.

“Well,” I finally said to Caroline a couple of hours before the bus headed in their direction was to leave, “Let’s just hope they meet us at the bus stop…” After we began our journey to Mareeba, a town about an hour and half inland from Cairns, I sat with my headphones on, writing in my spiffy diary that I bought specifically to record my Australian adventures.

“I am actually feeling really nervous right now,” I wrote. “I have no clue what we are getting ourselves into. The woman behind us on the bus just winced when we told her that we were about to work on a farm and not get paid…is this a bad idea? Is the work going to be hard? What if Ned and Dee turn out to be serial killers?!”

Before I knew it, the bus rolled to a halt, and the driver (who was sitting on the right side of the vehicle, might I mention) called out, “Mareeba!”

I stuffed my diary into my backpack, threw that and my duffel bag over my shoulders, and followed Caroline off the bus. There was only one old woman sitting at the bus stop, and, to our horror, the man stepping off the bus in front of us said, "Hi, Mom!" As the driver opened the luggage compartment underneath the bus to pull out Caroline’s and my large suitcases, we looked around the gray, deserted little town, and I felt my heart sink. “They aren’t coming for us,” I said to myself, panicking, “and the next bus back to Cairns isn’t until tomorrow afternoon…is there even a hotel around here?!

Just as frantic tears were pricking the corners of my eyes, a middle-aged couple somewhat magically appeared from around the back of the bus. I eyed them hopefully. “Ned and Dee?” The woman, who had long, scraggly brown-and-gray hair and crow’s feet around her pale eyes, nodded. Relieved, Caroline and I shook her hand, and then moved to greet her husband. The first thing I noticed about this sinewy man was his incredibly retro 70’s glasses. I could also tell that he was relatively shy—he didn’t speak much, and he appeared awkward when trying to participate in conversation.

The couple helped us hoist our excessive load of possessions into the back of their 4-wheel drive, but Caroline said she didn’t want to leave the town until she had taken pictures of the run-down train station near the bus stop. “This place is so beautiful!” She exclaimed cheerfully, and as she passed me, she whispered, “I love this. I love them.” I wanted to share her enthusiasm, but truthfully, I was terrified. Ned and Dee seemed nice, but a little strange. And I didn't think Mareeba was beautiful...I thought it was, frankly, a shithole. But I tried to swallow my negative impressions, and Caroline soon returned to the car so we could head out of Mareeba.

Over the course of the drive to their remote 300-acre property, I began to feel much more comfortable with the couple. They stopped several times at scenic spots so that Caroline and I could take photos of the sunset, and Dee even pulled out a bottle of sparkling Italian wine at one point and poured each of us a cup (although I suspect that there’s an open container law in this country, I found her behavior amusingly indicative of a certain free-spiritedness). She also told us that she and Ned make their own soap and fruit wines, which I thought was pretty cool.

However, when we pulled up to their dwelling, my nervousness came flooding back. Ned and Dee don’t live in a house. They live in a structure made entirely out of aluminum panels and logs. This structure has no door, hardly any walls, and no screens except for the mosquito netting around the couple’s bed (which is sectioned off by bookshelves into a bedroom of sorts). I was amazed that access to the Internet could exist in a place like this.

“This is where you’ll stay,” Ned said, leading Caroline and I to a nearby trailer. “All of the electricity is solar, so make sure not to leave the light on for too long.” Caroline and I thanked him and entered the tiny space, which Dee and Ned had referred to as “a caravan.” There were two lumpy double beds, one on either side of the dusty trailer, and a couple of built-in drawers that contained a mishmash of objects that seemed to have once belonged to a young girl (we found out later that one of Ned and Dee’s daughters had grown up with the trailer as her bedroom). Caroline sat down on the bed closest to the door, smiling dreamily. “I am obsessed with this.” I wasn’t sure what exactly she was referring to, but it took me a couple of seconds to realize that she wasn’t being sarcastic. Not wanting to acknowledge my feeling of dread and—simultaneously—the fact that there was a shiny black beetle roaming around the comforter behind her, I responded with the handy smile-and-nod.

“Um…want to share a bed?” I croaked. I decided to point out the insect, and I then motioned to the other bed, which looked cleaner. She laughed. “Yeah, that sounds good. That way, we can use this bed for our suitcases…I don’t know where we would put them otherwise!”

After lugging our stuff out of the car, up the trailer steps and onto the bed, Caroline and I stumbled through the dark to Ned and Dee’s “dining room” a few yards away. Dee stood up and began to prepare dinner in the attached kitchen, which miraculously contains a sink and an old-fashioned refrigerator that you have to kick to properly close. “Let me show you the bathroom,” Ned said. “Here is a little torch for each of you.”

Flashlights in hand, the three of us walked outside (not that we weren’t basically outside while in their house) and Ned walked us over to a building that looked like an over-sized shed. He opened the door, revealing a shower in a battered red tub. “The hot water comes from our stove,” he stated proudly. “Cool!” I responded, trying to participate. “And where does the water come from?” “It’s piped in from the river,” he replied matter-of-factly. I innocently assumed that it was then somehow filtered before touching the heads of showerers...

“And down that way is the outhouse,” Ned gestured. I was expecting them to have an outhouse, so I wasn’t phased by this information. “Come down there with me, Caroline,” I said as Ned returned to the house. “Let’s find it.” Gripping each other’s arms, we trudged down the path, the dim light from my flashlight guiding the way. Suddenly, something moved in the brush near our feet.

"AAAAAHHHHH!" Caroline yelped, leaping backwards. "What was that?!” (Let me just interrupt here to inform you that, over the past few weeks, Caroline has done an unnecessarily large amount of research on the many dangerous and/or poisonous creatures that call Australia home, so I knew she was jumpy about being attacked by a funnel web spider, taipan, irukandji, crocodile, or cassowary. Death by Koala—
--> they're aggressive when provoked!) I shined my torch up and down the path, and the culprit of the disturbance was revealed: toad.
Back in the house, we sat down at the table as Dee was putting dinner (called “tea” here) on the table. We ate a delicious dinner of chicken, stuffing, vegetables and potatoes au gratin off of what looked like clean plates, and I was relieved by these details. I ate until full and then asked Dee what to do with the excess food; she told me to scoop it into a little bowl kept by the sink. “It’s for compost,” she said, and I was impressed. “That’s so wonderful that you have a compost pile,” I replied cheerfully. “I have been trying to get my mom to start one, but she’s scared of attracting rats.” Dee scoffed. "There are no rats in compost piles!"

I ignored her oddly condescending tone and scraped my food into the container as instructed. I then leaned over the sink to wash my dish, and as I turned on the faucet, light brown water come spewing out. Well, I guess I was wrong about the water filtration thing, I noted. (Later, Caroline, who had already noticed the slightly dirty kitchen water, told me to refill my water bottle at the tap outside. “It looks clear.”) I ignored the brownish tint and washed my plate, telling myself that a little dirt never hurt anybody. In fact, I had had a lot of fun embracing dirtiness a year and a half ago on a college spring break camping trip to the Grand Canyon. This is like that. It’s like camping, I assured myself.

Caroline, who was exhausted due to jet lag, started to get ready for bed by brushing her teeth at the tap outside, and I sat talking to Dee and Ned for a bit. Dee seemed a little uncomfortable, and she finally asked me, “So, what exactly were you expecting coming here? Were you expecting something like this?” Maybe she could tell I was secretly shocked, or maybe she was simply aware that Caroline and I are spoiled suburbanites. I laughed and responded, truthfully, “I wasn’t expecting anything, really. I didn’t know what to expect.” Then, out of the blue, Ned threw in: "My father-in law says he wouldn't want to live in a place like this..."

I didn't know what to say to that.

After chatting with them a little while longer and concluding that they are both considerate but introverted and rather reclusive people, I excused myself and met Caroline in our caravan. We collapsed on the bed together, and after a pause, I giggled. “All I have to say is…can you imagine if our moms saw this?” We both screeched with laughter, the stress and exhaustion of the day reducing us to delirium.

As I fell asleep, I couldn’t help wondering why Ned and Dee live the way they do. I respected them very much for their "rustic" lifestyle, but what was their motivation? Do they want to live closely with the land...or do they simply not have the financial means to live differently?

***

This morning, I slowly emerged from sleep as the bluish sunlight poked through the blinds on the trailer windows. I tried to nudge Caroline awake, but she was sound asleep. The clock read 5:50am. I could hear Ned and Dee moving around close by, so I got up and started to put on my working clothes—sports bra, long-sleeved cotton shirt, t-shirt, long yoga pants, socks, hiking boots, hat—as the sunlight peeping under the blinds became brighter. When I pushed open the trailer door, beautiful daylight and the sound of tropical birds streamed into the room. The air felt fresh against my skin, and I was immediately struck with a feeling of optimism. The whole situation felt way less nerve-wracking by the light of day, and I began to feel embarrassed about my anxiety the previous day. I told myself to really make an effort to learn from the way these people live, and I reminded myself that part of the reason why I am here is to observe alternative lifestyles. Once this mentality set in, I began to enjoy myself.

When Caroline woke up and got dressed, we walked into the house and sat down at the table, ready to eat. I didn’t mind that the tablecloth was dirty and that the cement floor of the structure was sprinkled with leaves and dirt; in fact, I looked around the place—noticing details I had missed—and I was actually charmed by wind chimes enveloped in cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and the fact that there was a tiny bat clinging to a rafter.

After a breakfast of muesli, fruit and tea, the four of us walked out into a patch of ginger plants that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness of the night before, and I grew excited thinking about how many different parts of this property Caroline and I had to explore in the next week or so—Ned and Dee grow tapioca plants, bananas, jackfruit, cashews, mangos, papayas and more, and they also own a huge portion of untouched rain forest. (The foliage here looks so tropical, by the way; the leaves on some of the trees are gorgeously large and green, for one. It reminds me of French Polynesia or Hawaii.) Dee and Ned bent down with us in the ginger patch and showed us which green stalks were the ginger plants. “Please pull up all the others, as they are weeds,” Dee said, and we began to tear the invaders from the ground.

I found it oddly satisfying to hear the ripping sound of the roots being yanked from the soil, and when I mentioned this to Caroline, she said, “That’s funny you should say that because I know a woman who thinks weeding is the most soothing activity of all time—she thinks it’s better than meditation!”

After a little while, Ned and Dee had to stop because they both have ruptured discs in their backs from years of physical labor, and Caroline and I continued the task, avoiding red ants—thank goodness for the gardening gloves we thought to bring—and wishing we had knee-pads as we knelt in the mulch (the couple spreads a hay mulch around their plants to try to prevent weeds from growing; it blocks out sunlight from the soil). It’s funny—Ned and Dee walk around doing their chores barehanded and in shorts and flip-flops, and Caroline and I were covered from head to toe. It’s slightly embarrassing how over-prepared we are, but frankly, I’m happy about it.

By 8, 8:30, it was getting surprisingly hot, and every time I stood up to find a new area to weed, I felt myself getting kind of lightheaded. I acknowledged to myself that I was probably wearing too much clothing and was overheating. (After a little while, I ditched the t-shirt and simply went with the long-sleeved cotton shirt.) At one point, I said to myself, “I gain satisfaction from hearing the ripping sound as I pull up the weed, yes, but overall weeding just isn’t my favorite task of all time…” I then thought about all of us wimpy “city people," and I had to laugh over our inability to deal well with physical labor. I also kept thinking, If only my friends could see me now!

When we had finished the ginger patch as well as the nearby tapioca patch, Dee came out and fetched us. “Would you like a cupper, girls?” Having figured out at breakfast that this meant a cup of tea, we agreed and followed her into the house structure. We sat down at the table, sipping the tea and nibbling on biscuits (the English kind, so a.k.a. graham cracker-like cookies) when I felt myself grow overwhelmingly tired. Working in the sun for an hour and a half had really sucked up my energy. Ned and Dee told us that their friends were coming over to help them cut up a fallen tree—Ned can’t operate a chain saw anymore because of his bad back—and when the couple arrived, I took the opportunity to steal away into the caravan for a half-hour nap. (I slept on the floor so as not to get the bed filthy.)

After about half an hour, Caroline came into the trailer to tell me that Ned and Dee’s friend George was going to start chain-sawing the tree pretty soon and that we were supposed to help load the pieces onto a truck. She handed me a little water to revive me, and before long I was feeling much better. We grabbed earplugs and the handkerchiefs we had dorkily packed and stomped down the path past the outhouse until we reached a very dry area of dead trees; there had been a fire there a while back, Dee told us. This patch of yellows and browns starkly contrasted the beautiful green plants close by.

As we approached, wearing protective gear from head to toe including our hankies around our noses to protect us from the tiny pieces of sawdust flying from the chainsaw blade, George’s wife Sonia shouted, “BANDITS!” and then began to laugh hysterically. Again, I felt slightly self-conscious about our over-preparation, but I was extremely glad for the earplugs when the machinery started grinding, for the long-sleeved shirt when we started to haul prickly pieces of cut wood onto the truck, and for my heavy-duty hiking boots when I nearly dropped a large piece of tree on my toe.

After a few hours of loading pieces of wood (to be used next June—winter in Oz—for firewood) into the pick-up, Caroline and I sat in the open bed of the vehicle while Dee drove it back up towards the house, and then Dee, Caroline, Sonia and I unloaded the wood and stacked it near the house.

Caroline and I were really enjoying ourselves because it was a great work-out, and when everything was done, we had Ned and Dee take pictures of us standing proudly next to the pile. While walking back into the house to wash our hands before lunch, Caroline quipped, “Look at us, covered in sweat, sunscreen and sawdust: the three things that make up a real woman!”

Then, Caroline turned to me and said, “Janel, there is no where I would rather be in the world than here in Australia WWOOFing with you.” I took her hand and smiled. “I know, girl. This is exactly what I’ve been needing to do.”

Sitting down to lunch was such a treat after the hard work, and I finally understood these people’s lack of concern about dirt. Dirt and being dirty is just a part of life here, and I am so happy to be experiencing it.

Participating in a conversation with six people as opposed to four was a nice change because George and Sonia were both vibrant and talkative, and I found myself wondering if you have to be kind of introverted like Ned and Dee to be happy living such an isolated life. (George and Sonia are not bush dwellers; they live in a "caravan pack" close to Sydney.)

After a delicious corned beef “supper,” the men stood and began to do something with large metal barrels over near the bathroom building. Curious, Caroline and I followed them to find out what they were doing, and Ned told us that he was double-straining grease from a fish-and-chips restaurant. I didn’t register the meaning of what he said until I saw a piece of denim cut from old jeans secured over the rim of an empty bucket like a saggy drum head; a pool of liquid fat with small chunks of food in it was draining through the cloth.

“Why in the world…?!” I said, flabbergasted.

“Oh, we use it for fuel.” Ned told me.

“Excuse me, but what?”

Dee, who had joined us, informed me, “The liquid fat powers our car—it’s been running on grease for eleven months now! We even did a long road trip through the Outback with it and everything was just fine.” Ned then explained that they pick up barrels of used grease from restaurants every year and use it for all of their machines. “The engine that pumps water out of the river takes solid fat, but our car uses double-strained liquid fat.”

I was absolutely dumbfounded at this information. How Ned and Dee figured out that they could do this was beyond me. “I wonder why more people don’t know about this…are the oil companies keeping the fact that fish-and-chips grease can power cars a secret?” I thought aloud. Caroline, also incredulous, said, “Wow. You guys are the most self-sufficient people I’ve ever met!” Dee looked at Caroline for a moment, taking in what she had said, and then she rolled her eyes.

At that moment, I realized the answer to my question from the night before: Ned and Dee are not self-sufficient because they aspire to be progressive and eco-conscious like us guilt-tripping yuppies. They simply want to live removed from the outside world because they like the bush and because they want to save money. They are self-sufficient out of necessity. To confirm this, I asked Ned innocently, “Why do you choose to use grease as fuel?” He shrugged. “So as to not have to buy gas, I suppose.”

Soon after, we hopped into Ned and Dee’s grease-powered car and headed down to a nearby river to swim per Ned’s suggestion. The river’s water level was low, and the massive granite boulders that it revealed were absolutely stunning. I felt like I was exploring the face of the moon. Years and years of water pressure had carved interesting holes and pools into some of the huge slabs of rock, and all of us had fun exploring the boulders as well as splashing around in the river.

 Under the influence of outgoing George and Sonia, Dee was much more goofy, sarcastic and relaxed than I had seen her up until that point, and I decided that I liked her. And, at one point when I was examining a now-empty pool set into one of the slabs of granite, Ned approached me and gently began explaining how the flooding of the river shapes the rocks. I decided definitively that I liked him then, too; I admire his quiet knowledge and the way he looks right into your eyes when he speaks to you. I like how easy-going he is, and I think his awkwardness is cute (for instance, when he can tell that Caroline and I are excited about something, he tries to act excited, too, even though it’s clearly outside of his nature).

After a little while, I wandered off by myself and stood on top of a boulder, looking out at the river. I took a deep breath while a gust of wind cooled my skin, warm from the hot afternoon sun, and I said to myself, You are in Australia, and you are WWOOFing. You did it. Feeling very pleased with myself, I hopped from one boulder to another playfully until I spied Caroline, who was wet and muddy from just having frolicked in the water, laying next to the river. I climbed down from the boulder and joined her on the slippery granite protruding from the water. She turned her head towards me and grinned the dreamy Caroline grin that I love so much.

“Um—we’re in Australia right now!” She exclaimed. “I was just thinking that, Caroline!” I gasped, and we began to giggle. The two of us continued to lie there for a while, overcome with the satisfaction that can only come from the realization of a dream.

October 7 - Day Two

Two things, first and foremost.

One, I apologize for the novella that was my last entry. I apologize not just to you, my dear friend, but also to me—I would like to focus more on enjoying every moment of this experience instead of on documenting it. But, alas, I know I will continue to write epic blog posts because obsessing over details is what I do best.

Two, something funny I forgot to mention (can you believe I actually forgot to mention something in that monster of a post?!) that Caroline reminded me about—I fed a baby cow with a fake nipple attached to a soda bottle filled with milk on Ned and Dee’s friends’ farm. I am not going to go into more detail than that…except to say that it was disgustingly messy and gloriously adorable. (Also, I have to tell you that the cow was named Sausage. Poor future lunch.)

Anyway, please indulge me as I finish up about last night:

When we returned from the river to Ned and Dee’s place yesterday evening, the first thing Caroline and I did was to take turns in the shower while the others enjoyed their “cuppers.” Ned had to “turn on the hot water” for us, whatever that means, and we deeply enjoyed the transformation from dirty to clean…well, let me just say that, out here, clean is relative. As soon as I stepped out of the bathroom structure, my wet flip flops became caked with mud that crept up onto my feet and flicked onto my jeans. But I didn’t care. As I mentioned earlier, I’m embracing the dirt. After all, as we used to sing in elementary school, “dirt made my lunch.”

When George and Sonia said their goodbyes, I was feeling the need for some alone time. Without the presence of the vivacious couple, Ned and Dee seemed more introverted than ever, and I just wanted to sit alone and work on this blog. I popped into their “office,” which is another “room” in their dwelling sectioned off by bookcases and drywall. There was a gecko on the wall and mosquitoes buzzing around my head, but I didn’t bat an eye. (About the mosquitoes, though…I hate to admit that I am being eaten alive. I am applying “Off” religiously, but nevertheless, they find me oh-so-tasty.)

As I was writing, my American computer charger plugged into an Australian converter plugged into an oddly-buzzing extension cord, Ned and Dee made us a meal of rice, homemade mango chutney, homemade zucchini pickles (a new—and delicious—sensation for my taste buds), and curried chicken. Caroline and I complimented them on having the energy to cook after such a full day, and Dee looked mildly shocked. She rolled her eyes at us as if half-expecting us to say that we regularly eat McDonald’s for dinner in the States. “It’s just what we do—we both like to cook. We never serve WWOOFers the same meal twice,” she stated matter-of-factly.

I finished my meal, washed the dishes for Ned and Dee (who don’t thank me for doing them, I’ve noticed; they must expect WWOOFers to do them automatically. Good thing I thought to make it a habit while I’m here…and, frankly, I prefer to wash the dishes myself because all Ned and Dee do is rinse things with cold water. At least I rub a little bit of their homemade soap onto stuff before rinsing), and then headed out towards the various bush accommodations to get ready for bed.

When I burst into the outhouse with my flashlight in hand, I was shocked to see two toads hanging out in there, one on either side of the toilet seat. I coaxed them onto the floor of the outhouse with the back of my flashlight, and after a few moments of gentle prodding, the floor is where they remained—I couldn’t entice them to hop out of there even after stomping my feet several times near their slimy little bodies. Resigned to share the bathroom with two other creatures for the time being, a thought came to my mind: there aren’t only two other creatures in here… I pointed my “torch” down into the hole; sure enough, the beam revealed dozens of cockroaches busily decomposing excrement. I thought, Oh, great. My worst and most unreasonable fear as a child was having something pop out of the toilet and bite my ass while I’m peeing, and now it could actually happen! Taking a deep breath, I did my business as quickly as humanly possible, wishing I hadn’t looked.

***

This morning, Ned and Dee brought us out to the avocado tree orchard and instructed us to build a trench and bury a hose used to carry water to sprinklers underneath each one of the trees. We were all about to bend down and unravel the hose when Dee casually said, “Look, girls—have you ever seen a wallaby before?” Our heads snapped up. Sure enough, a couple hundred feet away from us was what looked like a small kangaroo alternating between grooming himself and staring at us suspiciously. Too bad we didn’t have our cameras at the ready; now we know to carry around our point-and-shoots wherever we go in case of an unexpected animal encounter.

Then, Ned demonstrated how to use the tool we were to use (which resembled a pick ax). He made it look so easy, even with a bad back; smoothly, he lifted the tool above his head and brought it down swiftly into the soil, cutting out a sizeable section of earth that he then scooped to the side with his hand. Caroline opted to be the first to dig while I would trail behind her, scooping away. As Ned and Dee looked on, she clumsily clawed at the earth, bringing up much less dirt than Ned had. “You made it look so easy!” she exclaimed in his direction while staring bleakly at the chop job in the ground beneath her. But she quickly got the hang of it, and the couple left to go work on other projects around the farm.

When it was my turn to handle the pick ax thingy, I gave the trench digging all the strength I had, tearing into the soil ferociously and managing to dig up some pretty big chunks. This gave me the pathetic illusion that I’m stronger than I actually am—as it turns out, my vigor was foolish. It quickly resulted in exhaustion slash blisters on the palms of my hands slash a stabbing pain in my right arm muscle.

Although the task was arduous (on more than one occasion, I eyed the length of hose we had yet to bury and gave out a little moan), Caroline and I enjoyed digging more than the weeding and log lugging from the day before. As Caroline put it, the chore was a whole-body workout that had the power to distract us from focusing on anything but the present moment. That got me thinking about how it must be rewarding for some people to work full-time as a gardener or “farm boy” (Princess Bride!)…but probably not for me. I was dizzy—and exceeding sore—when we finally decided to call it quits after burying ¾ of the hose. But I really did enjoy the activity in a masochistic, “self-improvement” kind of way…



At around 10:00am, we took a break for a cupper and some cheese & crackers, and Ned mentioned to us, “By the way, I noticed that you girls were digging pretty deep. You can make it easier on yourselves tomorrow and make the trench shallower; there’s no need for it to be so deep.” Well, thanks for coming over and telling us that while we were slaving away out there, Ned, I thought. Ai, ai, ai. However, Caroline and I took it as a backhanded compliment, and we were secretly proud that we were working “too hard.” We were also relieved to hear that the work would be easier and would probably go a lot faster the next day when we weren’t trying to gouge out a mini-moat in the avocado orchard.

After lunch, we helped Dee transport a bit more timber, and then we had the rest of the day to veg out. Caroline sat in the hammock (apparently they DO have a hammock here! Good news!) rereading Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist,” which I had purchased in the Auckland airport. I wrote more, of course, and Dee did some laundry in their ancient washing machine that evidently becomes the habitat for mosquito populations when left full of water for too long.

Eventually, I helped her pin up the clothes on rope strung between two trees, and as a gust of wind enticed the wet shirts and pants to gently billow, I happily imagined that I was living out a scene from “The Little House on the Prairie.” Until I noticed the unusually large yellow-and-green ants marching across the line and onto my fingertips. I began violently shaking my hands to knock those suckers off of me, and Dee noticed. “Don’t worry about those,” she said nonchalantly. “They won’t hurt you, and they are not poisonous. We used to eat their bellies when I was a kid.” I pictured the only form of insect consumption I’ve ever heard about, which involves creepy crawlies dipped in chocolate and served as a gourmet treat. But I had a feeling that this was not the same concept.

In the late afternoon, Ned and Dee brought us along to the pump they use to extract water from the river on their property. Ned told us that he built the engine himself, and that the system carries about 80,000 liters of water a day to the various plants on their farm. “He’s going to have to replace that engine soon with one from an old car our friends gave us—this one’s about 30 years old!” Dee said, motioning to the rusty, rattling device in front of us. Caroline and I were of course amazed by all of this information. “How do you know how to do stuff like this, Ned?” I asked, incredulous. “Did someone teach you?” He shook his head and looked bashful. “Naw, I guess I just taught me-self. I’ve always been interested in machines.”

He proceeded to tell me about something of his dad’s that he took apart as a kid, but I couldn’t really understand what he was saying because he mumbles when he speaks sometimes (I cannot imagine how non-English speakers survive at Ned and Dee’s because Ned’s mumbling and both of their thick accents cause even Caroline and I to frequently ask them to pretty please repeat themselves). Anyway, Caroline and I just kept shaking our heads in disbelief at Ned’s handiness, and Dee squinted at us as if trying to figure out what planet we were from. To her, knowing how to be self-sufficient is a necessity of life. So, of course, she rolled her eyes.

Later, back in the privacy of our caravan, I finally approached the subject of Dee’s sarcasm with Caroline. “Has it been bothering you, the way Dee’s been treating us?” I asked. “Well, to be honest, I do feel a little bit uncomfortable about all the eye rolling that she does,” Caroline responded. “Yes! I have been getting annoyed by that, too!” I said, relieved that Caroline felt the same way. Caroline is a remarkably patient and nonjudgmental person, so when she becomes irritated with someone, you know there’s a problem.

But then Caroline shrugged. “She might not mean to offend us—eye-rolling might just be one of those little unconscious habits she has. Don’t let it get to you.” She fell silent for a moment, seeming to contemplate something. “Or, Dee could feel insecure because we seem rich in comparison to them.” I protested, “But nothing about us screams ‘rich,’” (besides our Macs…and my Bose headphones…and the fact that we each have two cameras…and Caroline’s iPhone…) “and it’s not like they don’t have nice things—they have a brand new laptop!” Caroline looked me dead in the eye. “Honey, to these people, we are rich. We grew up in the suburbs. IN AN ENCLOSED HOUSE. Maybe Dee thinks we’re judging the way they live.”

It’s true that the contrast between how Caroline and I grew up and how Ned and Dee did is vast. Both of them were raised in the bush. They don’t have a college education, nor do they even have high school diplomas; both of them dropped out of school when they were 14—the minimum age you had to stay in school until back then—to work. They probably didn’t have the luxury of mooching off of their parents until their early twenties like we did. Dee had her first baby at 18 and her last at 24 (just a year older than Caroline and I, which we, of course, couldn’t fathom).

Ned, Dee, George and Caroline

But Dee is wrong if she thinks that we are secretly turning up our noses at their lifestyle. I like the way they live in many ways. I like the way they don’t mind dirt and don’t care about appearances. I like how in-touch with the earth they are. I like the way they work for a few hours in the morning, tending to their plants and doing other chores, and then play (swim, hike, read, etc.) in the afternoon. They have a healthy balance of leisure and work; even though it might not be the most “efficient” lifestyle, it’s certainly better than slaving away at a desk for six months just to take your kids on a two-week vacation to DisneyWorld.

I was feeling restless, though, because I hadn’t been very active since the morning; because I was frustrated with Dee; and because I was really missing my boyfriend, Tony. However, Dee distracted me from my little slump just before dinner when she announced that I should come with her to feed the sheep. “Sheep? You have sheep?!” I sputtered. “Yeah!” She cried, “Haven’t you heard them? They are in a pen just behind your caravan!” Sure enough, we trudged a few hundred feet through the bush behind the trailer that is Caroline’s and my bedroom and found a small enclosure containing four beautiful sheep.

They didn’t look like ordinary sheep with their toned bodies, slender faces and sleek black horns, and Dee told us that they are a South African breed called Demara or something like that. Ned and Dee had originally purchased them to eat the weeds in the mango orchard, but the animals ended up sucking at that task—they only ate one type of weed, so other kinds began to flourish. Now, Ned and Dee are keeping them for their valuable wool…but the problem is that the sheep are extremely nervous around people. In fact, Dee told me that her and Ned had to wrestle the creatures to the ground and hog-tie them in order to transport them from the mango orchard to the holding pen. The image of Dee rolling around in the dirt trying to hog-tie a sheep nearly made me laugh out loud, but I decided to stifle the urge.

When we walked back to the house, we saw that there was a dusty white van in front, and Dee announced, “Ah, our neighbors are here!” Around the back of the house, a scruffy man with dreads in his hair and beard and wearing a faded blue jumpsuit was pushing what looked like a motor mounted on a flat square platform out of Ned and Dee’s shed; a thin, thirty-something woman with crooked teeth, a shell necklace and an elephant-themed handkerchief for a top looked on.

Suddenly, Ned appeared riding a gigantic, rust-coated tractor (I am absolutely not exaggerating when I say that the wheels were five feet tall) and wearing orange earmuffs; he backed the noisy tractor up towards the shed, and the fabulously hippie couple began to attach the motor thingy to the back of it. “It’s a generator,” Dee yelled over the din, pointing to the device. “And, by the way, that tractor is 70 years old!” I watched, my mouth agape, as Ned lugged the generator away on his antique machine.

The couple stood up, brushed off their hands, and approached Caroline and me to introduce themselves. Their names were Colin and Cathy, they said. “We’re Ned and Dee’s renters,” explained the woman, her accent clearly French, “we live in another pole house about a kilometer down the road.” “Where are you from? And what do you need the generator for?!” I asked. The woman laughed. “Well, I am from Quebec, first of all. And, about the generator…we are using it for a catamaran we’re building.” I didn’t understand what she said because of her thick accent, and so I turned to Dee with a confused look on my face. Dee leaned towards me with a grin on her face, her eyes wide. “They’re building a yacht to sail to India!”

As it turns out, Colin and Cathy have the most romantic life ever. Cathy left Quebec with her three-year-old daughter after she broke it off with her daughter’s dad and decided to bike around the entire Australian continent, her kid riding in a little seat on the back. She didn’t get very far on her bicycle, however; she met Colin after only a few weeks and stayed in Queensland (the state I’m currently in, which is ALSO called “The Sunshine State”…copycats!) to be with him. Now, her daughter is in Canada with her dad, and Colin and Cathy live here on Ned and Dee’s property with their seven-year-old son, who goes to school in the nearest town (just because they live in a “pole house” in the middle of the bush doesn’t mean that they can’t raise a child properly). And they are indeed building a boat in order to sail to India. “I hope to have it in the water by April,” Colin said.

Meeting the couple was such a pleasure because hearing about their life reminded me that all kinds of lives are possible, even with kids. Thoreau said, “live the life you’ve imagined,” (Caroline taught me that great quotation the other day), and Colin and Cathy are certainly doing just that.

As the sun was setting, Caroline and I sat down with Ned and Dee for dinner, and the four of us ended up talking for hours—until 9:30pm (bedtime), in fact. For the first time, I felt that Ned and Dee were comfortably engaging in and enjoying conversation with us. They seemed more dynamic and open that usual, and I had a great time chatting with them. Ned even showed us some pictures he’d taken over the years. (Caroline and him kind of bonded—as much as anyone can bond with Ned—over the fact that they both consider themselves photographers). Most of them were generic landscape shots, but one unique photo caught my eye—it was a picture taken looking down at a cup of water, which contained a ripple captured in mid-movement from the middle out. “Ooh, that reminds me of ‘Jurassic Park’!” Caroline said approvingly to Ned. Dee, as you might expect, rolled her eyes. “Oh, Ned takes some weird ones sometimes…” But I liked it. I really liked it. It was unusual, and it showed that Ned happened to be both creative and observant. Through that simple photograph, I felt that I suddenly had a glimpse into his guarded soul.

At one point in the conversation, I asked them to tell us about the worst WWOOFers they’ve ever had, and to my surprise, Dee described a whole slew of people who didn’t meet her expectations. There was the fat, lazy British woman in her 70s who hardly lifted a finger; an Estonian man with a creepy stare; a couple that fought viciously to the point that they would emerge from the caravan in the mornings with scratches on their faces (and, apparently, Dee found the girl crying naked outside one night after a particularly violent argument), etc. I guess I should have known that she would be critical of her WWOOFers, but it made me wonder again what in the hell she thought of us.

Dee also mentioned that her and Ned don’t like to leave some WWOOFers alone in their house because they’re afraid that the WWOOFers will steal something. But they keep their computer, their gems—which they’ve mined themselves—and other valuables locked in a filing cabinet at all times, so I’m not sure what it is that people would steal from Ned and Dee. Maybe someone could fancy their copy of “The Encyclopedia of Australian Spiders”? Their numerous boxes of mosquito coils? Or perhaps just one of their abundant canisters of Australia’s Number One Long Life Deep Frying Fry-Tol Edible Animal Oil?

Well, I’ve reached the sixth page of the Word document in which I’m formulating this post, so I guess it’s time for me to wrap it up. There will probably be a few days in between each one of my blog entries because it takes me so damn long to describe everything and because Dee is sensitive about us using the Internet too much, so bear with me!

As a closing statement, I would just like to share with you a hilarious and true detail from one of Caroline’s mass “Australian update” emails that she forwarded to me. Since I didn’t include much of a description of the inside of Ned and Dee’s “shower shed” in my first post, I’m happy that she took the time to write about it:

“The trickle of sweat, sunscreen, and sawdust makes a shower sound reallllly appealing. So off to the shower I go… but this isn’t just any shower. Oh no, no my friend. This is a low red bathtub, with a tall spicket above. And while there is no glass or curtain surrounding it, there ARE about 18 cans of deep fat lard, one enormous 50 lb. bag of Pedigree dog kibble, and three racks of homemade soap… just chilling with you while you shower. Not to mention the stacks of fruit packing boxes and several sweet potatoes rolling around in a bin nearby. I vaguely muse that the soap is rather handy, if you should ever run out mid-shower. Fancy feeding the dogs mid-shampoo? No sweat. And if you’re hungry, have a sweet potato. Brilliant.”


Aaaannnnnd scene.

October 9 - Day Four

6:00am. Sigh. I have to admit that it’s getting harder and harder to feel good in the mornings now that we are getting fully accustomed to the time change. It had been so easy to wake up at the crack of dawn when our circadian rhythms were still seventeen hours behind; for a few mornings there, we were able to trick our bodies into thinking that it was noon the previous day. I threw on a sleeveless t-shirt, deciding that I would risk having sunburned arms today if it meant staying a little cooler—the long-sleeved cotton shirt I had been wearing for the previous few days was light, but it nevertheless managed to make me feel like a small child trapped in an overheating car. (Sorry for the sadistic image there, but it just works.)

When I trudged into the kitchen area, Caroline at my heels, Dee said, “Morning, girls! Ready for your cupper?” I immediately noticed that she was acting more calm and gentle towards us today than she had been for the past couple of days, and I guessed it was because of the confrontation slash conversation with her the day before. She had probably gleaned that Caroline and I are both pretty sensitive humans...or maybe she respected that we had been able to communicate our way through an uncomfortable situation. Whatever the reason, I was extremely happy for the change in tone.

After breakfast, Dee told us that we would be going over to their friends’ house later that afternoon to help them put up a patio roof. “So, why don’t you just work for a couple of hours, then take the rest of the morning off?” She suggested. “Ned and I will help rake so you’s can compost the rest of the avocado trees.”

With Ned and Dee helping us, huge piles of eucalyptus leaves materialized in minutes. I was grateful for their help—they really are more far more efficient at outdoor tasks than Caroline and I (which makes sense, of course, as the closest thing to a “physical task” I’d ever previously accomplished was cranking out 45 minutes on a gym elliptical). At one point during the raking frenzy, Ned called out to Caroline and I. We turned around to see him and Dee crouched down, staring intently at something underneath an overturned log. We hurried over, and Ned said, “Have you ever seen a barking spider before?”

There, curled up in the soil, was a brown, thumb-sized spider. “Wow, it looks a lot like a tarantula!” I said, referring to the creature’s fuzzy appearance. “This is just a baby,” Ned said. “The adults are much bigger, especially the females. We’ve seen them out in the garden with thousands of tiny babies on their backs.” “And Ned's been bitten by one before,” Dee added. “The hospital had to call a museum to find out how to treat the bite because they had no idea!”

I looked over at Caroline to gauge her reaction to this, and she was eyeing the spider and the surrounding area warily. Seeing as the spider was hanging out in almost the exact same spot as had the black snake from the day before, I could tell what she was thinking: Can I rake somewhere else?!

After amassing quite a few piles, the four of us began to scoop leaves up in our arms and toss them into the back of ute. By the time the truck bed was filled to the brim, Caroline, Ned and I were all scratching our arms furiously. I noticed that the undersides of my arms were sprouting little red dots. “Ned, what’s going on?” I asked, confused as to why we were suddenly rash-ridden. “Oh, it’s from hairy caterpillars,” he replied. “Their hairs sometimes fall into the leaves, and they can irritate your skin.” Super, I thought. Of course this would be the day I choose to wear a sleeveless t-shirt—the day we happen to lather our arms with discarded caterpillar hairs.

I suppose I will take this opportunity to tell you that my skin is in the worst condition of LIFE—and I find it positively hilarious. I’m bruised and bitten, splotchy and pimply (my spoiled pores are not used to being caked daily with dirt! But what’s the difference between this and a mud bath?! Really now, pores...). I could compare my body to an old, beat-up car—the paint’s peeling and the number of dents is steadily increasing, but it’s running just fine!


Out in the bush, one’s exterior is merely a protective shield for the interior. I guess appearance has come to matter so much to people in the suburbs and cities because we don’t tend to participate in activities that mar our skin on a day-to-day basis. But here, they do. It’s no wonder Ned and Dee don’t own a decently sized mirror. (Which, frankly, I love.)

Anyway, trying to ignore our itchy arms, Caroline and I drove over to the avocado orchard and proceeded to unload the entire ute-load of leaves onto two or three avocado trees, spreading the mulch all the way out to the drip lines as previously instructed. When the truck bed was nearly empty, the wind started to pick up, and as Caroline walked away from the ute with the last big pile in her arms, several crisp leaves flew of her grasp and spun momentarily behind her like a dizzy flock of birds. I really wish I had my camera ready at that moment; it might have been a great photograph—Caroline-the-leaf-bearer, illuminated by the hot morning sun, trailed by brown and red slivers suspended in midair behind her.


We hopped into the ute when it came time for a refill, and I noticed that Caroline was getting really good at dealing with the glow plug and starting up the old clunker quickly. We were also much faster at raking today, even once Ned and Dee had moved on to other tasks—by 9:30am, Caroline and I had filled and unloaded the ute two more times all by ourselves.

When the two of us finally meandered into the house, having successfully mulched all six avocado trees, I noticed just how much the muscles in my right arm were killing me. My arm had been bugging me while we were raking, but now that I was sitting at the kitchen table relaxing, I was unfortunately able to fixate on the pain. I mentally solved a relevant equation: two days of pick axing + two days of raking = bad short term effects on weak arms. Luckily, when I mentioned my cramping muscles to Dee, she pulled a jar of horse liniment out of the cupboard and a pack of frozen spinach from the freezer to use as an ice pack. Caroline clandestinely pointed out that the liniment was labeled, “NOT FOR HUMAN USE,” but I decided to ignore that.

I rested my arm, now lathered with the pungent jelly, over the next few hours of vegging. I sat taking notes on what had happened so far during the day (blogtastic!) while Caroline lounged in Ned and Dee's hammock reading Bill Bryson’s “In a Sunburned Country,” a travel book packed with tales of Bryson’s Australian adventures. Evidently, it’s bloody hilarious—Caroline seemed to squeal with laughter every five minutes over one of the guy’s anecdotes. Dee, who was trying to immerse herself in a steamy romance novel, finally looked up. “We’ve got ourselves a resident hyena, eh?”

But I just giggled every time I heard Caroline guffaw, despite the fact that I didn’t know what she found so funny. Something I love about Caroline is that she eats up life loudly and openly, and I wasn’t about to hold it against her.

After one particularly enthusiastic bout of laughter, she called out, “Dee, listen to this!” Dee rolled her eyes playfully but put down her book. Caroline, who could barely speak because she was laughing so hard, proceeded to read a paragraph about how Australians downplay the severity of the numerous dangerous creatures in their country while, in the same breath, recall stories about the elderly uncle who was bit in the scrotum by a poisonous snake and had to go on life support. “But he’s off it now, so it’s OK!” Finished Bryson’s Australian impression. Caroline could hardly breathe. “It’s…just…so…TRUE!”

Dee said, “Er—yeah, that’s normal!” She didn’t really seem to get the joke. Understandably so, as this is a woman who nonchalantly told us that, as a child, she regularly had to brush redbacks (comparable to North America’s black widow spiders) off of the outhouse toilet seat before she sat down.

A little while later, when she was no longer able to focus on her book, Dee's eyes lit up. “Would you like to try a couple of the fruit wines that Ned and I made three years ago?” She asked me, looking excited. “Sure!” I said, wondering what on earth had suddenly inspired her to host a spontaneous afternoon wine tasting. But I didn’t fight it. She led me to the shed, where she reached under a shelf and pulled out what looked like two very dusty bottles of rum. But before I could tell her that I didn’t particularly want a hard-A appetizer, she explained that her and Ned fermented their wines in old alcohol containers.

It being the first time I was ever about to consume years-old fruit wine from rum bottles with broken seals, I was more than a little intrigued. “But don’t you need to vacuum-seal wine or something?” I asked as we walked back to the kitchen. She looked confused. “No…” Seeing as I actually know nothing about wine production, I decided to shut up.

She took two cups out of the cupboard and poured me little tasters of both of the wines she held in her hand. “This one is cherry, and this one is plum,” she said, pointing first at the burgundy-colored liquid in one cup and then at the slightly darker wine in the other. I tasted one and then the other, smacked my lips, and announced that I liked the cherry one a bit better. Although I would probably never sit around sipping these weird wines for pleasure (they both tasted like bitter sherry), I mentally congratulated them for their efforts. Ten points!

During lunch a couple of hours later, I casually asked Dee what subjects her three adult daughters liked when they were in school. This innocent question unexpectedly became a full-blown discussion about education, to my dismay—I couldn’t easily forget the brief child-rearing conversation we’d had in the car the afternoon before, during which the phrase “children should be seen and not heard” was actually uttered. Caroline asked Ned and Dee if they knew what Montessori education was; shockingly enough, they didn’t. She proceeded to tell them about how great it is, and that the method encourages educators to focus on each individual child’s needs and skills. “Children are allowed to choose their learning schedule based on the subjects they enjoy,” she said approvingly.

I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. I knew that such an alternative, child-centered method of educating kids would be lost on Dee and Ned, and sure enough, they were gazing at her a little blankly by the end of her spiel. There was a painful pause, and I was frantically thinking of something to say that would burst the bubble of awkwardness. That’s when Ned said, “Back when I was at school, we were hit with wooden sticks or leather whips. Once, I was called into the principal’s office for something I didn’t do, and I received such a shock when I was whipped that I pissed me’self.” Oh, boy.

A change of subject was dangerously in order. “Um…Ned and Dee…?” I asked tentatively, clearing my throat. “Are you gonna go back to Mareeba again on Monday?” Dee shook her head and consulted the calendar hanging next to the table. “We’ll be there for a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday, though.” “Well, could we head back into town on that day with you?” I asked, gaining confidence. “We’re going to explore Port Douglas for a few days, I think.” To my relief, Ned and Dee just nodded, appearing totally OK with the idea. I was ecstatic that my proposition wasn’t a problem, and I was immediately filled with excitement at the prospect of gaining a different learning experience somehow, somewhere, starting Wednesday.

[Looking back, I should have been more patient and stayed the originally-planned two weeks with them. I should have focused more on my current learning experience instead of looking ahead to another one… but I’ll elaborate on this in a future entry.]

At around 4:00pm, Ned and Dee told us to hurry up and get ready to go to their friends’ house. Dee wanted us to change out of our dirty work clothes and into something slightly more presentable, so Caroline and I quickly threw on some jeans. As I was getting into the car, Ned, who was still in the house, called me over to him. “Yes?” I asked as I approached. “Do you want to lock up your laptop in the filing cabinet?” He was motioning towards my computer, which sat snuggled in its soft black case on the table. “Um…why?” I responded. The last thing I was worried about at Ned and Dee's was theft. What, is a mischievous wombat going to waddle off with my laptop balanced on its back? Ned shrugged. “I dunno, just to be safe, I guess.” “Well, sure, why not? Thanks, Ned,” I said as I handed him the computer. He took it gently out of my hands and proceeded to lock in the bottom drawer of the cabinet, alongside their rather impressive opal collection.

When the four of us arrived at the property of David and Robin—Ned and Dee's close friends—Caroline and I were absolutely amazed by the number of creatures living there. David and Robin have three dogs, including an adorable tan-and-white puppy named Lou; countless cockatiels in an aviary (their chirps sounded exactly like men whistling at a pretty woman), a pig named Ellis that carefully peels mandarin oranges with its mouth before devouring the juicy insides; and numerous types of chickens (a.k.a. “chooks”), one of which looked like it was wearing a white fur coat and a matching white Russian fur hat. There was also a resident male peacock, its vibrantly colored feathers splayed in hopes of gaining the affections of one of the three females strolling around the yard. Unfortunately for him, he was not getting much attention. Robin later told us, “He’s getting so desperate that he’s started showing off to coconuts and the tool shed!"

After taking a ton of pictures of the animals, Caroline and I finally introduced ourselves to the resident humans, Robin and David. I asked them when we were going to start putting up the roof, but Dee responded before they could. “It’s too windy to do any work—it would be too dangerous. So, Robin and David won you girls only two hours of work today, eh?” I thought, Well, actually the WIND won us only two hours of work today…it’s not like it could have been controlled… (I never know what she means by such statements. I am starting to get used to her pointed jokes and sarcasm, though. I am trying to just let them roll off of me.)

Since there was no work to do, we all sat in a circle of lawn chairs in the backyard, idly chatting as the sun set. I was impressed by the view from their yard—golden brown fields gave way to rainforest-covered mountains in the distance. At first, I found the conversation rather dull, and a part of me was tempted to label these people as uncreative and uninteresting. But I immediately chastised myself for thinking that way. Once I had managed to clear my head of biases, I began to notice just how much Robin and David (and Ned and Dee, for that matter) are comfortable with silence. And I don’t simply mean that they are at ease with lulls in conversation. I mean that they live enshrouded in something that is sadly foreign to me: peace. They have peace of mind, a peaceful lifestyle, and peace of heart. They all seem content with the life choices they have made thus far, as well as with the way they are currently living. I thought to myself, Wow—it would be nice if I could live like that.

It’s not that I am unhappy with the direction my life is going; I’m proud of the things I have accomplished, seen and learned thus far, and I know there is much more knowledge out there for me to gain. It’s just that I feel anxious about all the things I COULD do in my life. I was blessed with the agency to choose how I want to live, and I’m grateful for the number of open doors in front of me…yet, it’s a terrifying thought to walk through one and shut all the others.

Maybe Ned, Dee, Robin and David did not have many options, and they had to “settle” for their current lifestyle. This is typically a horrifying and tragic concept to upper-middle and upper class-ians, at least from what I’ve gleaned in my 22.9 years of Californian suburban existence. But we don’t seem to have many people who balance their time well between work and play in the Silicon Valley. We might not have a whole lot of folks living with humility and tranquility of the spirit in the wealthy pockets of Los Angeles or Santa Barbara. For such individuals, a taste of rural living could be a helpful lesson on how to lead a calm, grounded and peaceful life. It’s proving to be one for me.

All in all, I am glad to be living what I believe is an “examined life”…but it would be nice to feel like I didn’t have to examine or analyze it once in a while. It would be nice to accept life as a mysterious river—its twists, turns and rapids uncharted—and float contentedly along on a polka dotted tube.

***

Later that evening, once everyone was filled to the brim with barbequed sausages and beer, conversation inevitably became a little more easy and a lot more interesting. At one point, Robin bluntly asked Caroline and I if we were religious. “Well, we’re not your stereotypical American Jesus fanatics, if that’s what you are trying to get at!” I replied. Robin looked relieved. “Thank GOD!” She said, and I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of her exclamation. “I just can’t stand those American evangelists on the tele.”

“You can watch American televangelists here?” Caroline asked incredulously. (Fun fact: Caroline’s vocal inflection is already starting to sound British/Australian when she asks questions. It’s hilarious. I can’t wait to find out how bad it’s gonna be when she returns to the States next fall.)

Robin went on to explain that a few Southern televangelists actually have followers in Australia. “But I don’t know why anyone would send those people their hard-earned money,” she said, shaking her head. “They wear flashy suits and gold rings—it makes you wonder where all those donations go, eh? They’d seem a lot more credible if they just looked normal!” “But maybe they have the right idea, charging for religion,” Dee piped up. “We should start up a cult out here!” Robin screeched with laughter. “Yeah, right. And what are we going to call it—mango-ology?!”

As the guffaws subsided, a teenaged girl trudged into the backyard from inside the house. “Ah…hello, mate!” exclaimed Robin, smiling at the girl. (Caroline and I later admitted to each other how surprised we had been to hear a woman refer to her daughter as “mate.” But it was kind of cute.) The girl bent down, whispered something in her mom’s ear, and then took off again, ignoring everyone else. She looked exhausted and was wearing a uniform polo shirt, so I guessed that she was just now returning from work.

“What does your daughter do?” I asked Robin. “Clare? She works at a hardware store in Mareeba,” Robin said. “Oh, OK,” I said. “Is that her after-school job?” “Naw,” replied Robin, “She’s been working there since she graduated from high school last year.” Robin said this as though she had absolutely no qualms about her daughter’s career choice. I thought of my own parents, and how disturbed they would have surely been if I had forgone attending the University of Southern California in favor of stocking shelves with screwdrivers and socket wrenches. Caroline, obviously thinking the same thing as me, asked, “So, is she thinking about going to college?” Robin shook her head. “She isn’t interested in uni, and neither is Davie.” (Davie, their son, is a first-year in high school).

I was shocked that Robin didn’t seem to care whether her kids went to college or not, although it was kind of refreshing to meet someone who’s all right with letting her kids choose their own destinies after high school. But I thought, Maybe there are financial reasons behind her apathy, or maybe SHE didn’t go to college and therefore doesn’t see the value in it. Still…how can someone not want their kids to get the most education possible?  Then, to my chagrin, Dee announced, “Davie should go to a trade school. You can make way more money coming out of a trade school than from going to college!”

Toto, we’re not in the Bay Area anymore.

After a few more minutes of banter, the group began to dissipate—Robin and Dee went into the house to check on Davie and his friends, who were allegedly having a PlayStation rage fest, and David began to gather wood for the fire pit. I realized that it was getting late (9:00pm…Heavens to Betsy!), and I felt myself losing steam. I was really enjoying being outside, though, as there were no mosquitoes to be found—the wind must have banished them for the night. It was also warm without being humid, which is a miracle for Queensland, and David was starting up a cozy little fire (which wasn’t really necessary, but still felt nice). I looked up, and I was immediately awe-struck by the stars; they seemed to dust the sky like confectioner’s sugar on a rich cake. Stargazing is a definite plus of being 60 kilometers outside of the closest town, I noted.

Caroline followed my gaze and began to admire the stars, as well. After a minute or two, she asked, “Ned? You like astronomy, right?” Ned, who had been lost in thought, snapped to attention. “Er…yes. How did you know?” “Well, back at the house, I noticed your collection of astronomy magazines,” Caroline said with a grin. “Could you show me where the Southern Cross is?”

I furrowed my brow. “What in the blazes is that? A constellation?!” “Yeah. It’s only found in the Southern Hemisphere,” Caroline responded distractedly, her eyes searching the sky. “We may have to stand over there to get an unobstructed view of it,” Ned said, pointing to the nearest field. The two of them walked away, engrossed in an impromptu astronomy discussion, and I heard the restless rustling of leaves—the wind was beginning to pick up again. I sunk low in my chair so that my neck was nestled comfortably in the cloth backrest, and I felt my eyelids grow heavy. As the fire warmed my toes, I slowly drifted off, lulled to sleep by silver clouds racing across the face of the moon.

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 café. 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!