The Woman on the Mountain (14 page)

People tell me that ‘voice over internet protocol’ (VoIP) is the coming thing to replace my landline. I will investigate this, although it’s bound to require additional gear or service payments, meaning money that I don’t have.

Just in case things get worse, do they still make carrier pigeons?

While my place can’t actually flood, after heavy rain the hillsides are moving sheets of water, all drainage is inadequate, fountains cascade over banks and steps, slight dirt furrows quickly form ravines for rivers, and the spring gullies become white water rushes, roaring like express trains, pouring over rocks, scouring out holes and banks all the way down to the creek in the valley far below. It’s exciting and worrying at the same time. Will I be able to repair the damage to the track, the drains? Why is the roof suddenly leaking in that spot? Will my telephone junction boxes be flooded? Have my little rainforest trees been smashed by the force of the run-off waters?

The worst storm damage I’ve had was recent, from a really furious hailstorm that arrived accompanied by sharp wind gusts. The greenhouse was wearing its shadecloth cover, but over the years the supporting plastic pipes for that had sagged, so the cloth hung too close to the glass instead of being tautly suspended above. Eight sheets of glass were smashed. One casement window in the house was blown off its catch and back against the wall. Frame as well as glass was broken.

Replacing the glass in the slotted tracks of the greenhouse fixing system was a nightmare, especially on the sloping high roof. A friend helped, poised on a ladder outside, precariously leaning out over glass, while I was inside on a ladder, sliding the sheets in from the ridge, working blind, under tense instructions like, ‘One more millimetre—careful! No, too far!’ and trying not to let go. We had very frayed tempers by the end, but no broken glass or cut fingers.

Not that our rain only comes in storms; like anywhere else it can be heavy, light, constant, intermittent, welcome or unwelcome. The creatures that like it most, no matter what form it takes, are the leeches. Damp forest litter with a warm-blooded creature like me walking slowly about on it—or, better still, stopping—is what constitutes bliss to them. And dinner.

It’s another reason I wear gumboots everywhere, but I have to keep glancing down to see if any are on the move, inching up to go over the top and down into the socks, and thus between the toes. Ugh! The height of the gumboots at least buys me time. National Parks rangers wear short work boots, but rub or spray the tops of the boots, bottoms of trousers, and boyangs, if worn, with insect repellent, as they reckon leeches don’t like it.

Boyangs, by the way, are loose cloth cylinders, elasticised at one end, pulled on over boots, socks and cuffs to keep burrs and grass seeds out. I have made some from old shirtsleeves, so, unlike the sober khaki shop ones, mine are in unlikely colours and patterns.

Leeches aren’t a worry in the garden, but down in my gullies they are plentiful. I know leeches are part of the natural world, but I will never like them, and I am not offering them refuge—or sustenance—in my boots. Possibly my narrow view is a result of childhood trauma.

The year was 1955, a wet one statewide, and our first year on the farm. I’d been mucking about in a clay irrigation ditch, making miniature dams and weirs, releasing and stopping the flows of rainwater. Going across to the house for lunch, I sat down on the top step, on the folded-hessian-bag doormat, to pull off my gumboots. As I did so, I saw something black—and alive—stuck to my leg.

I stamped, screamed in real terror. ‘Mum! Mum! There’s a baby snake biting my leg! It won’t let go!’ Mum came running, but she was no wiser. She tried poking at it with a stick, but it held on fast. I was hysterical. ‘Get it off! Get it off!’

Fortunately a neighbour was visiting. ‘Hold still, ’ he said, and to my even greater terror, took a box of matches from his pocket, struck a match and held the flame to the tail of the creature! Within seconds it shrivelled and fell away, leaving a small hole which soon began to trickle blood. Our nonchalant source of country wisdom said that you could use salt to make them let go too.

‘But what are they?’ we panicked still.

‘Just leeches, ’ he said contemptuously, ‘there’s millions of ’em round here in the wet.
They
won’t hurt yer!’

But they did as, apart from the shuddering reality of having some creature clamped onto my flesh and sucking my blood, on me at least they cause large red lumps that itch for weeks afterwards.

In every likely work pocket or bag, I have stashed ex-film-roll containers filled with salt. Sprinkling salt on leeches does make them drop off. It also kills them. Which is wicked for a so-called conservationist, I know, but I consider it a matter of survival. If they broach the barriers, I want to be able to get them off, and quickly, with as little blood loss as possible! So after planting out trees in damp bush, I strip off for a search and a shower. From experience I know it is necessary to search
every
where.

Surprisingly, I wrote a short story about leeches, called ‘B-grade Reality’. Not so surprisingly, it turned out to be a horror story, the only one I have ever written.

Perhaps my original trauma was reinforced by a leech being the cause of my most embarrassing school memory. By the time I was thirteen I was used to our farm creek flooding, when I had to wade barefoot through knee- to thigh-deep water that covered the lower parts of our track and the road to the bus stop, half a mile away. My school shoes and stockings and a little towel were in my Globite school case, balanced on my head with one hand, the other keeping my tunic tucked up into my navy bloomers.

There was first the hurdle of our rickety wooden bridge, which lost at least one of its round logs each flood, the gap hidden beneath milky brown rushing water. It was a matter of inching forward, feeling with my toes for the gap that might drop me through to certain drowning, as the creek was full of bobbing and whirling branches and logs—more than a match for my feeble dogpaddle.

The farmer’s wife at the house next to the bus stop always let me get dressed on her verandah. I’d dry my cold legs and red feet, still tingling from walking on the sharp gravel of the road, and put on my black cotton stockings. Later in this particular flood school morning, I was commanded to the blackboard by the formidable Sister Augustine. I had passed up the aisle between the desks and was halfway across the open space of lino before the blackboard, when Sister’s sharp Irish voice rang out in the slow-rising-then-fast-falling rhythm she used for my name when I was about to get into trouble: ‘Sha-a-a ... ryn
Mun
ro! What on earth is that?’ pointing at the floor near my feet.

Everybody stared at a trail of dark red spots that led from my desk to where I stood and where the spots were forming a small pool of what appeared to be blood. This blood was coming from somewhere up under my tunic, and given that menstruation was in the offing for all of us, she could have been more tactful. I was so ignorant it didn’t occur to me, or I’d have been even more embarrassed.

I was publicly commanded to go and find out what the trouble was. As I slunk out the door, she called, ‘Well at least there’s nothing the matter with your blood; it’s a
lovely
rich red!’ (She also taught biology—and geography, as it was a very small school.) In the toilets I rushed to unclip my suspenders and pull down my stockings. Out rolled a fat, gorged leech, its puncture mark on my thigh, just above where the stockings ended, still steadily oozing blood. It must have been there for hours, as it was now nearly eleven o’clock.

On my return I explained what the cause was, which drew not much more than a general ‘Ugh!’ from the class and a ‘Really!’ from my teacher, who gave me a bandaid and sent me to fetch a mop and bucket to clean up the blood. I had the distinct feeling that I had displayed something too basic, peasant-like, for my superior town classmates.

If they could see me now!

Even though I’m nearing 60, and there are many signs of old age—hair greying, sight and memory failing, joints creaking, flesh drooping and wrinkles deepening—I’m not
old.
I’m still the same me, it’s just that, sometime in the last ten years when I wasn’t looking, my smooth outer shell was exchanged for this cracked and saggy one.

I think that living here keeps me young. I don’t know how long I can stay here as I really do get old, for if I were physically feeble daily life wouldn’t be possible. Contrary to popular mythology, the simple life is not found in the country but in the city, where you simply pay your bills and press a button for everything you need, and you don’t have to know how any of it works or be able to fix it yourself.

Since I live far from the madding crowd—or mechanics—this life is only idyllic so long as nothing goes wrong with my self-sufficiency survival mechanisms. These range from complicated ones like solar power, to water pumping and delivery, cooking, space and water heating, right down to the very basics like sanitation, drains and garbage. All daily involve time, effort, forethought, energy and strength, to varying degrees.

I’ll begin with the least complicated system: garbage disposal. I keep only a small lidded compost bin inside. Out on the verandah I have two larger open containers: one for recyclables like those glass and plastic items for which I can’t think of a use; and one for burnables, for my incinerator. Actual garbage is very little, and it goes in the suspended plastic bag bin that the quoll likes—though she checks out the burnables too. She does this in case food has stuck to a sheet of newspaper.

Family save local papers for me, and a friend saves me the ‘Review’ literature section of the Saturday
Australian,
giving them to me in bundles every few months, when I binge on reviews and catch up on cultural news that I missed on Radio National. Occasionally I am also given Sunday tabloids, which contain a lot of ... paper.

I keep an opened-out pile of newspapers on my kitchen bench to catch the scraps from my cutting board. This Handy Household Hint came from my ex-mother-in-law, who’d roll up the scraps in the top sheet and put the parcel in the bin. I tip the scraps into the compost bin and shove the paper into the firebox to start that night’s fire. I always lay these papers right way up so I can read while peeling and chopping, which is how I find out what celebrities and socialites were up to six months ago.

Now and then I take a bag of garbage or recyclables to town to my daughter’s wheelie bins.

My next self-sufficient system is sanitation. I have what is called a ‘long drop’, a big hole in the ground with my old jail’s lidded seat over it and a shelter shed over that. It was originally a metre-cubed hole, dug into bedrock with pick and crowbar in 1978. I’d assumed it would last a few years, but it’s still going. Beside the seat is a lidded enamel canister which officially says SUGAR, but as nobody takes tea there I think it’s safe from confusion with my Texta-scrawled LIME. A sprinkle of the latter now and then is enough to keep the material breaking down, while an evaporation pipe dries it out and reduces the volume.

I always thought I’d build a dry composting toilet one day, but the only real difference from my current one would be that I’d get to use the resulting compost.

A few overly civilised visitors have had difficulty using my sanitation arrangements. I’ve never asked whether this was from the dark pit yawning beneath them or the idea of communal storage, but the ensuing psychosomatic constipation was real. They couldn’t wait—or rather, they could—to get back to a proper flushing loo. I feel sorry for them, so unable to accept that they’re part of the animal world, with the same basic processes necessary for survival. They were possibly also uncomfortable without a door to shut, but the toilet faces away from the house, and they wouldn’t see the birds and trees otherwise.

Having grown up with a pan toilet—a far-too-short drop—I consider mine quite manageably distant and salubrious. That toilet, complete with harsh and unabsorbent newspaper squares impaled on a large nail, was dark and spider-scary because it wasn’t done to leave the door open; and smelly, often maggoty, because it was never emptied soon enough. When Dad worked away from home for a month once, Mum and I had to do it, and I understood why he’d kept putting it off. But that first row of orange trees, in the burial range, had the glossiest, greenest leaves, and the biggest, juiciest fruit, of all the trees in the orchard.

The disadvantage of my toilet is that it’s a fair hike up the hill when you’re in a hurry or it’s raining. If the pit ever does fill up, I’ll build the new toilet on the flat, still outdoors, perhaps reached by a covered walkway. And I’ll plant an orange tree on the old site.

My drainage system? That barely exists, and is an ongoing digging effort, an especially frustrating use of time and knee-power. In our sudden storms, leaves and silt and sticks quickly fill up my too-shallow manually dug drains that are meant to protect my buildings and outdoor access spaces. They’re on the ‘hard’ list for improvements, as is my temporary grey-water system, which is awaiting the permanent bathroom, which is awaiting money, machinery, man-type plumbing knowledge...

Wood-fired systems: how quaintly rustic, and what could be simpler? I have a slow-combustion heater and a slow-combustion stove, for cooking and hot water. To keep these going requires daily housekeeping, the degree based on a gamble on the weather.

I forget to keep up the supply of dry kindling at my peril, but picking up sticks from under the trees is easy. It’s the bigger wood that’s my problem, as it not only involves time and physical effort, but courage—and a chainsaw, which is machinery, and thus mysterious. I couldn’t even start our original 1970s Stihl chainsaw. Still perfectly serviceable, it’s all metal, therefore back-breakingly heavy, and has no chain brake for safety. I’d yank on its pull cord until I was exhausted or my wrist screamed ‘Stop!’ but that Beast never started for me.

Once I was on my own, I was dependent on visitors to cut wood for me. My son having moved north for work, he was rarely able to return to the mountain, and then only for brief visits. So the woodcutting fell mainly to my diminutive daughter. This was fine in summer, but in winter the amount of wood needed was beyond occasional help, and my daughter’s back didn’t like the Beast at all. Too often I reverted to rugging up and gritting my teeth, to ‘top and tail’ warm washes rather than hot showers, to save firewood.

Then I had a small financial windfall about the same time that Stihl brought out a new ‘easy start’ chainsaw, with a gentle double recoil. No yanking needed. Mechanical magic! And nearly half the weight of the Beast. For the first dozen times I used it, I had the manual open beside me as I went through the steps. To remember their sequence is like learning nonsense syllables, lacking any understanding of their connection. Except for turning on the fuel—I get that bit.

I am religious about checking the chain oil and the fuel, and cleaning it, just like a man. But, unlike a man, once it’s going I’m scared of it as a lethal tool given to unpredictable behaviour, like kicking and pinching, grabbing and seizing, or so says the manual.

Although I am extremely careful, each time I use it away from the house I make sure I have my mobile with me, to call the ambulance. Even at the woodheap I have vivid flashes of sudden slips, of gashes, slashes, slices, gushes, of red blood and white bone. I think about how I would find, pick up and pack the cut-off bits, of dragging myself to the phone, of which I should do first; I try to recall my first aid—but did we do bleeding stumps of limbs? I’m a nervous wreck by the time I have a wheelbarrow full, every time. Phew! Survived one more load.

My little old Suzuki Sierra and I head out now and then to find an accessible log: old, dry, and hopefully splittable later. Woodcutting’s not as easy as you might think from watching blokes, who nonchalantly stop the log from rolling with one foot and cut right beside it—they clearly have no imagination. I must keep propping and restraining the log so I can saw it up without blunting the chain on the ground, and without abbreviating my gumboots.

When my arms begin to ache, I stop. I load the wood into the back of the Suzi, being wary of scorpions, spiders, ants or ticks. When I get home, I unload, being similarly watchful. Any bits too long for the firebox, but too short to be cut safely by anyone but a mad steel-toed male, I place in a sort of wedge made from two pairs of star posts, banged crisscross into the ground. This neat idea for sawing up smaller pieces came from a friend, but because he’s a bloke he banks up and cuts through about ten times the amount that I do in one go.

Then I have a shower to wash off general sawdust and dirt plus any ticks that have hitched a ride, or leeches that have got into my boots.

When my arms have recovered, I can take the splitter, a sort of axe with a heavy fat head, and forestall some of that incipient upper-arm flab by breaking the cut logs into burnable slabs. When I’m missing the log more often than I’m hitting it, and liable to hit my boot instead, I know it’s time to give up for this session. Some logs have interlocked grain that won’t let go and require ten times the effort to split. Others are not splittable—or not by me; the splitter just bounces off, jarring my wrists and threatening to knock me out on the recoil. Such logs have to be left for the heater, which has a bigger firebox than the stove.

One of Nanna’s most enduring sources of pleasure and pride, before failing eyesight forced her to give it up in her eighties, was being able to ‘splitta bitta deal’ for kindling for her fuel stove. While my hardwood is far more obstinate than the packing case ‘deal’ or pine she used, the activity itself always reminds me of her. Perhaps there’s a ‘tough old lady’ gene? I’d be proud to have hers.

If I have visitors who can back a trailer, which I can’t despite many attempts to learn, we might take the Suzi and my small trailer to get a bigger load. Not too big, as she might strain something. Backing a trailer is something I admire, but I see it as a gift rather than a skill. Otherwise I’d be able to do it, wouldn’t I?

Like everything here, the wood provisioning can involve unforeseen complications. Take the other week when, busy on a writing job, I’d let my indoor woodpile run very low. I thought I’d better split a wheelbarrow full, since rain was forecast. It should only take ten minutes.

But my 25-year-old wheelbarrow chose that moment to snap the last rusty threads of its axle bolt. I knocked the broken bolt out with difficulty and went poking about in the shed for the right length, right diameter bolt. After much to-ing and fro-ing, which intensely annoyed my quoll, I admitted I didn’t have one. I’d need to file the metal hole bigger. That took quite a while.

The wheelbarrow and I rattled up to the woodheap. There were really only the unsplittable rejects left. To save time, I decided to drive over to my son’s cabin and pick up the last of his building off-cuts. I found the pile overgrown with tall bracken and interlaced with rotting chipboard sheets. Sorting through it, with an eye out for snakes, took quite a while.

Loading the wood into the back of the Suzi took quite a while too. With wood that’s been on the ground like that I have to turn over each piece in case some small creature has already claimed it as habitat, in which case I put it back.

I did beat the rain, but when I finally stumbled inside with my armfuls of wood, I realised it had taken nearly three hours to fill that wheelbarrow.

Yet wood gathering is only part of the wood system. Despite avoiding damp or green wood where possible, I have to clean the flues regularly—a filthy job, but creosoted flues and blocked dampers catch fire, usually when it’s dark and raining, and climbing on the roof in a panic, dragging a running hose, slipping and cursing, is no fun. In fact, it’s another way in which I could maim or kill myself here.

And then there’s the actual wood-burning units, composed of loose bits of metal and firebrick that occasionally fall out and won’t say where from. The stove is particularly good at this, and appears to be held together with screws of an infinite variety of sizes that don’t fit any of the increasing number of visible holes. Without taking the whole heavy cast-iron unit apart, I can’t access the parts that are supposed to move to see why they no longer do. It also has nastily disintegrating asbestos seals that will have to be replaced at some stage. Clearly neither the stove nor the heater was designed by women.

They both do a great job. I am warm, my water gets hot, my bread tastes great, I can slow simmer soups and stews beautifully—but simple, they are not.

And I’m not even going to talk about the highly esoteric hot-water system, devised and built by my ex-partner. I can see that the 44-gallon drum that kneels quaintly askew on my roof is rusting through, and I try not to think about what’s going on in there around the copper inner tank, nor what I will do when it needs replacing.

Hot water comes from cold water and that cold water comes from my big dam a few gullies away. For over 25 years a faithful duo—my Lister diesel engine and its Ajax pump—have been squatting there, ready to pump water 60 metres up, but longer in actual distance, to the cement tanks on top of the ridge. Even when I was 30, I couldn’t crank that pump engine fast enough to start it. To do so demands a ridiculously ferocious burst of effort for a short time—the perfect heart-stopper. I have seen all but the biggest of males just about ‘bust their boilers’ in trying, but they manage in the end.

It remains impossible for myself and my daughter, and we are both strong. It is not a human-friendly pump, let alone a female-friendly one. A small drinking water tank on the house means I’m never actually waterless, but pressured water is factored into all systems and is essential in the fire season. Having to count on my rare male visitors for this was hardly self-sufficiency.

Invariably the shanghai-ed male would give it one rapid burst of cranking and away she’d go—puff, puff, chugga, chugga—and slowly but surely the water would rise up the pipeline. I would leave it doing this overnight, as I had to make the most of that male’s effort; who knew when the next one might turn up? I had fleeting fantasies of Sirens on the island in the dam, drawing passing men to me and my pump. Only I can’t sing, and it might be months before anyone at all passed.