Love...Under Different Skies (21 page)

As the minutes drag by, I start to fantasise about things I’d rather be doing than sitting here a couple of hundred feet in the air, rocking back and forth in the warm tropical winds. Having elective bowel surgery, for instance. Or inserting my head into a cow. Masturbating with sandpaper. Listening to a Christian rock album. Cleaning corpses in a morgue. Watching an entire season of
Downton Abbey
in one day…

Actually, forget that last one. Now I’m just being silly.

Regardless of what I’d rather be doing, the cold hard fact of the matter is that no matter how much I wish it were not so, I am still trapped in the bubble with my wife and daughter on an inexorable climb into the clear, blue November skies.

“Daddy, come and look at the trees!” Poppy demands.

“I think Daddy would rather just look out of the window at the view, sweetheart,” Laura tells her, picking up on my obvious distress.

Poppy’s eyes go wide. “Are you scared, Daddy?” She clambers over to me, climbs into my lap, and gives me a huge hug. “Don’t be scared, Daddy.” She says this with such genuine compassion that I nearly burst into tears. My daughter’s warm and comforting presence makes the ordeal about a thousand times more bearable. It even gets to the point where I’m able to look down into the trees with her to spot birds without wanting to retch violently and claw my own eyes out.

While I’ve relaxed a bit and am less terrified for my mortal soul, I’m still extremely glad when we reach the first way station and take a ten-minute break from the journey.

“Are you sure you want to carry on?” Laura asks me as I sit down on a convenient—and blessedly solid—bench just outside the station entrance.

“Yeah. I’ll be fine. As long as you’re having a good time, baby.”

“I am. Pops is too.” Laura looks over at where our daughter is attempting to have a conversation with a passing lizard. “But if you’re not happy, we’ll go back.”

“No, no. I’m more or less used to it now.” I offer her a lopsided smile. “It can’t get any worse, can it?”

N
EVER SAY THIS
.

Never, ever say this in any situation
ever
. It will guarantee that things will indeed get worse. Far,
far
worse. I discover just how wrong I am on the second leg of our journey when we hit the Barron Gorge section.

Let’s examine that word
gorge
, shall we? It automatically implies size, doesn’t it? You’ve never heard anything small described as a gorge, have you? It’s a big, round word with a very strong vowel sound, giving you a clear indication that it’s being used to describe an object of considerable volume and depth. Such is most definitely the case here.

I’ve just about got used to sailing above the tree line, so it comes as a dreadful shock when the trees suddenly disappear from view beneath us and we’re propelled out over a drop of such magnitude you could probably fit the Empire State Building in there with headroom left over for Mount Rushmore and the Sears Tower. The river that runs through Barron Gorge cuts its way right through the mountain range, creating a spectacular waterfall that roars over a billion years’ worth of geology before plunging hundreds of feet to the basin below. I have no idea who Barron was, but if he were in front of me right now, I think I’d pull his ears off.

I’m not even able to summon a scream when we fly out over the gorge. My body has frozen solid.

“Wow!” Poppy cries and presses herself up against the window again.

Laura starts snapping away with her camera with equal excitement.

I try very hard not to shit my pants.

The human body is a wonderful thing. When presented with a horrifying situation such as this, it takes steps to thoroughly occupy your mind, thus getting you through the torment without losing your marbles completely. Such is my desire to prevent a repeat of Fajita Night that by the time I’ve wrestled my bowels back under my complete control we’ve passed through the gorge and come out the other side into the relative safety of the rainforest canopy again.

I don’t go so far as kissing the ground when we alight at the Skyrail station in Kuranda, but I do pat the nearest gum tree as I emerge from the bubble into the sun on very shaky legs.

Laura gives me a hug. “Well done, sweetheart. You were very brave.”

“I don’t think you could call it brave, baby. Any time a three-year-old is absolutely fine with something and you’re terrified of it, brave isn’t even in the same post code.”

“Well never mind, we’re here now. Let’s look around for an hour before we go back.”

I groan. I’d temporarily forgotten that you have to go back down on the sodding thing again. I don’t think my sanity or my underpants can take another trip over Barron Gorge today.

In the next hour, Laura buys a series of tacky souvenirs for the folks back home, including two didgeridoos, several fridge magnets, four tea towels, and a key fob made from kangaroo testicles. Poppy gets her hands on a stuffed koala bear that she may not let go of again until she hits twenty-one. I spend the entire time sourcing local taxi firms.

There’s no way I’m getting back on that cable car, even if it means spending an extortionate amount of money on a cab. There are perfectly serviceable roads between me and the base of the mountain, so I see no reason to risk brown trousers again on this excursion.

I kiss both wife and child before waving to them as I watch the hateful green bubble rise into the trees again. Never in my life have I been so glad to be separated from my family.

While the taxi journey doesn’t have the horror of severe vertigo, it does feature a lengthy conversation with my friendly Aborigine taxi driver about the state of his bathroom. I usually hate getting into small talk with cab drivers but am more than happy to listen to Terry’s U-bend woes as he drives me back to sea level. Anything beats having your arsehole pucker more times than a trumpet player’s lips during a jazz solo.

Back at the main station Poppy sees me waiting by the exit, squeals with her customary level of happiness, and runs over with the koala bear still clamped firmly in her grasp. “We spent most of the ride down coming up with a name for it,” Laura says as I gather our daughter into my arms.

“And what did you decide?” I ask Poppy.

“Pumbaa,” she replies.

“Isn’t Pumbaa a warthog?”

“Not this Pumbaa. This Pumbaa is a koala bear.”

Having been put in my place, we make our way to the car and drive back to Palm Cove and the dinner I’ve arranged on the beach for my wife’s birthday. All that fearing for my life at a great height has made me ravenous, so I’m looking forward to a relaxed evening in the company of my two favourite women.

So far today I’ve been scared by a spider and terrified by a cable car, but the day is rapidly coming to an end. So it can’t get any worse, can it?

The setup on the beach is fantastic. It bloody well should be—it cost me enough. Under a collection of neat, straight palm trees that stand just in front of the hotel and at the edge of the beach is a square glass table covered by an expensive cloth and three comfy chairs.

“Thank you very much,” Laura says as the waiter holds out her chair to let her sit down. “This is incredible, Jamie,” she says to me with an enchanted expression on her face.

I have to agree. I’ve done alright here, folks, and no mistake. If the food is anywhere near as good as the view, it’s likely to be the best meal we’ve ever had.

I’m feeling decidedly pleased with myself as the waiter returns with the menus. My organisational skills are usually blunter than a cheap set of steak knives, so the fact that I’ve managed to pull all this off in one day is an achievement of no small proportions on my part.

The food on offer does indeed look wonderful, with a selection of dishes that all sound mouthwatering. I spot one particular main course and look up at the waiter. “Crocodile steaks?”

“Yeah. They’re great. Taste fantastic. Made from crocs locally sourced.”

I knew this area had wild crocodiles, but I didn’t know the residents caught and ate them too.

“Eewww!” Poppy exclaims. “You can’t eat a croccy.”

“Pops is right, Jamie. You can’t eat a crocodile.”

This of course makes my mind up for me. “Oh no?” I look back at my waiter friend. “I’ll have the crocodile please, mate.”

“Jamie!”

“Daddy!”

I do love to wind up my womenfolk sometimes.

Laura elects to keep it simple with braised beef, and Pops chooses the chicken nuggets from the children’s menu. We really are going to have to modify that girl’s diet at some point.

The food arrives, and my crocodile steak is everything the waiter promised me it would be. It’s delicious—kind of a cross between chicken and fish taste-wise. It shouldn’t work judging from that description, but, by golly, it does anyway.

The belch that erupts from my stomach at the meal’s conclusion is testament to how much I enjoyed it. Poppy giggles. I waggle my eyebrows at her.

“Snappy tasted really nice, Pops.”

“You named your meal?” Laura asks with a roll of her eyes over her last bite of beef.

“Yeah. Snappy tasted wonderful, so I only thought it fair to give it a name as a tribute.”

“Can I have a stuffed crocodile called Snappy?” my daughter asks.

“Of course you can, gorgeous.”

All three of us barely have room for dessert, but we force the chocolate ice cream sundaes down us with remarkable fortitude. Laura and I can do little else other than sit back and puff our cheeks out when the plates are taken away, but Poppy—who has the typical constitution of someone rapidly approaching the age of four—is up and building sandcastles down in the surf before the after-dinner drinks arrive.

“Shall we go for a walk as the sun goes down then, sweetheart?” I suggest to Laura.

“That’d be lovely.” She takes my hand. “Today has been wonderful, Jamie. Thank you so much.”

“My pleasure.”

I couldn’t be smugger right now if I’d had lessons from Simon Cowell.

We give it another twenty minutes, during which I savour my third seven-dollar cocktail. It’s called a Sin City and is a coffee lover’s idea of heaven, a perfect mix of strong liquor and equally strong java. It’s got quite the kick as well, so I’m feeling a distinctly pleasurable buzz by the time we stand up and amble down to where Poppy is still playing near the shoreline.

“C’mon Pops. We’re going for a walk up the beach.”

“Oh Daddy, I’m building castles!”

“Yes, I know, we watched you, but there might be even better sand up there along the beach.”

Poppy gives me another one of her most disbelieving looks. Nevertheless she’s quite happy to clamber up onto my shoulders as we begin to walk along Palm Cove beach. If we had a mind we could hike a good four kilometres along the crescent shore all the way to Kewarra Beach in the south, but this is more a light bit of exercise to walk off the thousand calories we’ve just consumed than an expedition, so I doubt we’ll make it much farther than the creek that divides Palm Cove from Clifton Beach about half a mile away away.

My smugness reaches a hitherto uncharted altitude as we stroll along, given that the timing couldn’t be better. The sun is going down in a glorious shade of orange and red that blazes its way across the azure sky, and the warm sea is gently lapping at our feet.

Seriously, this is what they mean when they talk about a picture-postcard moment. I’m so full of myself I’m amazed there’s any room for the meal I’ve just eaten.

“Daddy, look at the wa’er!”

“
Water
, Poppy, not
wa’er
.”

My daughter climbs down from her perch on my shoulders and runs over to where the creek flows out over the sand and into the ocean. There are many of these creeks all the way along northern Queensland, running down from the mountains to the west. They tend to be slow moving and lined with mangrove trees for the most part, unless it’s the rainy season, when they can become proper rivers that carve out large, impassable runnels in the sand as they empty out into the sea.

This is November, so the rains haven’t yet arrived and the water in this creek is barely more than a trickle by the time it reaches the surf. Poppy is already throwing sticks into it by the time we catch up with her. Laura and I are both in whimsical moods, so instead of telling Poppy off, we join her in her stick-throwing fun.

Then I spot some coconut husks sitting in the roots of a palm tree. In my happy drunken haze they look positively
designed
for being thrown into creek water. The tree hangs right out over the creek, but I’m pretty sure I can gather up a couple of the husks without getting more than my flip-flop-wearing feet wet.

“What are you doing?” Laura asks as I make my way around the creek and grab the trunk of the palm tree.

“Getting a coconut. I just need to reach down a bit and I should be able to grab one of these—
urk
!”

I lose my grip and fall into the water with a tremendous splash. Luckily it’s only about three feet deep, so I’m all laughs and spluttering coughs as I stand up.

“Oh, Jamie,” Laura says in a long-suffering manner and crosses her arms.

Poppy is beside herself. She’s laughing so hard her shrieks of hilarity carry right across the beach. It’s incredibly infectious, and I find myself joining in as I start to wade my way back to them, a coconut husk clasped under one arm. Laura is laughing hard now as well, doubled over with her hands over her belly.

“Yeah, yeah. Very funny,” I say, looking up into my wife’s smiling face. She doesn’t really need the amazing sunset behind her to highlight how beautiful she is, but it’s happy to add the effect anyway.

Laura looks up just behind me and her expression immediately changes from one of hilarity to wide-eyed terror.

“What?” I ask and turn to follow her gaze.

There’s no easy way of saying this, people. And there’s no way of saying it without swearing, I’m afraid. On the creek bank beyond the palm tree I’ve just fallen off is a fucking crocodile.

Let me repeat: On the creek bank beyond the palm tree I’ve just fallen off is a
FUCKING CROCODILE
. If I thought my run-ins with the spider and the Skyrail were scary, they completely pale in insignificance alongside finding myself less than ten feet from one of nature’s most aggressive and deadly predators. It’s not the biggest crocodile in the world—probably only about four feet long—but by Christ that’s big enough for panic stations, thank you so very much.