The Woman on the Mountain (16 page)

Far more loftily removed from all the noise and squabble down here—mostly—are the three Wedge-tailed Eagles who lord it over these mountains. Elegantly, lazily, they circle over us on the air currents, barely moving a wing. At times so high as to be mere specks, at others low enough for me to see the colours under their mighty curved wings.

For years I didn’t, or couldn’t, hear their plaintive calls, so didn’t know they spoke, but perhaps it took me a few years to rid my ears and head of the ingrained city-noise and city-ness. Their call doesn’t fit the image of the fierce and mighty hunter. My bird book describes it as ‘pseet-you, pseet-you’; it is a very thin piping. When I first connected it to them I thought one must have been hurt, somewhere in the trees below me, and the other was fretting. Perhaps when I hear it a lot it is actually a young one? Unbecoming as it is, toddler eagles might be whingers too.

If the eagles are kings of the upper reaches of the sky, the magpies have a clear opinion of where their dominion ends, and 6 metres above the treetops is far too close to the border. They are harried noisily and fearlessly away by the magpies, like yapping fox terriers shooing a lumbering bull. Eagles aren’t good at quick evasive action and must manipulate their large wings with unaccustomed frequency to move up and out of this enemy airspace and back into their own thinner air.

I have surprised eagles on the track with their prey. So close, the immense size of their legs is a shock, bringing with it the reality of how much weight they can carry. One day when my daughter was small, her hair blonde like the tussocks and she about the same height, an eagle came so low to investigate that I worried it might think her a plump rabbit, swoop down and pick her up. It easily could have.

But there is an intruder into the airspace of both eagle and magpie before which they are powerless, and so am I—military jets in training, F-111s. I was assured by the military that they only allow this intrusion eight times a year, but that’s still too much.

Living on a mountain, you often find yourself looking down on things that would be more usually looked up to. Like the white sea of mist in the valley, or the moon skulking along behind the downhill trees. But to see these jets zoom past down there is another matter. My bowl feels very frail under the impact as they break the sound barrier. I have to be quick to catch a glimpse of the small dark shapes, usually two of them, one after the other, their lights quick-winking dots as they flash past.

It’s shocking enough when they appear so violently over the top, across the sky’s edge, but it’s worse when I see them so low, often tilted sideways, through the V-shaped chip in the tree rim of my bowl, because then they are against a backdrop of mountainside. I know that out there they are hurtling amongst convoluted peaks and ridges and valleys, trusting their computerised instruments, their remote pilots, their radar, to think and react and steer and veer! They must assume nothing could ever go wrong, yet this year it was on the news that a wheel fell off one just after take-off. High tech, huh?

The army says this area was chosen for training because it is remote and only sparsely populated. Having chosen it myself partly for those reasons, I am not happy to be dismissed as an irrelevant sparse population. Like the indigenous people around Maralinga, where they did the nuclear tests?

But by ‘population’ they only mean people, and therefore don’t take into account how the other inhabitants handle being terrorised by these sudden blasts of unnaturally loud noise. My heart lurches every time, my hands fly to my ears, my face winces, my body involuntarily huddles—even though I know what the noise is. Wallabies scare easily; I’ve heard of them dropping dead from panic and fear. And 15 or 20 metres closer, what must it do to a small bird, or her nestlings?

However, ‘not happy’ is inadequate to describe my feelings when the jets have flown
towards
me. I stood and watched incredulously as the first jet came, nose scooping hard as it appeared from between a fold in the ridge opposite my bowl, heading up the slope towards my V-gap, pointing directly at me, then belly exposed as it sped in, up and over my astonished house and me. It is impossible not to be unnerved as such heavy, fallible metal things zoom
at
me, so low I could see the pilot’s face if the thing was going at a fraction of the speed.

But that leaves 357 days a year of mostly uncivilised and undisturbed sky.

I look up as much as I look down. The highest mountain opposite me, to the north, is over 1600 metres. As much part of the sky as the land, it has a great affinity with clouds, so I am treated to a perpetually changing visual feast. Clouds may keep passing by over all the rest of the sky, but one will often hook on this high peak and slew sideways, so that it billows anew on the eastern flank, streaming out and airbrushed smooth by the currents flowing over the top, sculpted into a white extension of the mountain itself.

If I’m lucky there’ll be a pile-up of clouds there at sunset, so high that it reflects the glow from the ‘real’ western sunset opposite, even though the land below has already lost the light of day. Then I get a double spectacular. The clouds transmute the bold west’s reds and oranges, yellows and purples, hot pinks and bright bronzes, into a subtler beauty, of puffs and streaks of pale gold, soft pinks and lilacs like the insides of shells, and rare blues of intense purity, like those in the background skies of early Italian paintings.

I look from one to the other, not wanting to miss the fleeting variations in either effect.

When the higher northern show has faded to dusky grey, I can turn undistracted to the west to see the last act of the drama, the darker stages of deeply bruised purple flags of clouds, brilliantly lit and edged with gold from below, streaming out across a sky that shades in colour from apricot to vermilion at the world’s edge, behind the black filigree of my gum-tree edging.

Talk about food for the soul.

So far from artificial lights, my night sky is unsullied, the moving lights of distant planes less common than falling stars. I literally reel from the starry dome above on moonless nights, and it’s one reason why I’d never want an indoor toilet. Blokes get to stargaze when they wander outside to water the grass. They do this naturally, but ladies need encouragement—like no choice!

Even indoors, from my bedside windows, stars rule. After I turn out my reading light, I don’t close my eyes until they have adjusted to the darkness and the stars become visible. When I see so many that there is no blackness in between, only degrees of more distant, fainter stars, I can sleep, heart-eased with the renewed knowledge that wonders still exist that are unspoilt by man. I ignore the niggling pessimism of the voice in my head that says, ‘Give him time.’

Yet I’m equally taken with the mystery of my bowl under the pale bright beauty of a full moon. It’s hard to close my eyes then for, as the night progresses, the moon and its shadows transform every shrub and tree, call to brilliance each white flower, and strike silver from any pool or bowl of water. I wake at intervals to see what magic is going on out there, and I’d never be surprised at strange shapes slipping by.

I prefer to close my curtains only in winter, to keep the night’s cold out and the fire’s heat in.

Starlight or moonlight? I can’t choose, but the horses seem to prefer the nights around the full moon, when they stand in the open and moonbathe, silently soaking it up, statue-still for hours. Or have they been bewitched?

Once I thought I’d seen a sort of magic. My partner and I were sitting on the verandah after dinner, sipping port. Far down in the steep gully below, we saw a bobbing light approaching, like someone running uphill with a torch. As it got closer it clearly wasn’t a person, since we couldn’t see anything but the light, which was quite big and bright, flashing on and off. Despite our pursuing torch beams, its source remained elusive as it danced all around the garden. We didn’t
really
believe we had a fairy at the bottom of the garden, but were unable to come up with a rational explanation.

We thought of a firefly, but dismissed it as too small. Neither of us had ever seen one, and imagined a tiny dot of light, the size of a fly Thinking ours might be a giant phosphorescent moth, whose light fluctuated with the pumping of its wings, we passed on the query to an entomologist friend. The dry reply came back: ‘If it wasn’t fireflies, I don’t know what caused the light they saw, but whatever it was, it needs diluting!’

Slightly offended—we didn’t drink all
that
much—we accepted it must have been a firefly. I’ve since seen small groups of them come up from that gully and it’s always a treat, although never quite the same wonder of that first solitary visit. I have still never seen the actual insect in whose tiny body this magic resides.

I watch the moon and the stars on our arching nightly passing, but can name only a few. I bought a star chart, but it’s one of those things I may not get around to doing more than feeling mildly guilty about. I can’t read by starlight, and the thought of juggling a torch and the book, perhaps binoculars or a telescope, taking my reading glasses off and on, always seems too hard. Slack, I know. But the book’s there for me to study if ever I undergo a long convalescence or similar period of immobility. Perhaps I’m thinking of old age as a time for guiltless lolling about and reading, when the knees have given up, the trees are all planted, and the lists all crossed off—my last chapter.

By day my north-facing skybowl is full of sunshine—when it’s not full of cloud, that is. Summer is over-the-top solar power time, but I get sun nearly all day in winter too, ideal for my vegetables and my comfort as well as my power generation. And I much prefer that winter sun.

Summer once meant glorious, golden sunshine, for outdoor playing and swimming, from sunup to sundown if we could wangle it. Painful sunburn and peeling skin was inevitable, every year, for everyone except those with foreign—that is, not English, Irish or Scottish—skin. We soothed the burns by dabbing with vinegar or cut tomatoes, picked at the dry skin as it peeled, and drew satisfaction from extra long strips removed. Noses and shoulders were always the worst and most frequently burnt. As new freckles appeared we joked about ‘sunkisses’. I could count mine then.

By my fifteenth year it was all about sunbaking in bikinis, a race to ‘get a tan’ quickest, grilling our bodies like skinny sausages, assisted by a coconut oil baste. This ritual was interrupted only by an occasional stroll to the water, mainly to see and be seen by the unattainable golden boys with their goods on show in Speedos. As our costumes shrank to four brief triangles, soft and virginal bands of flesh burnt so badly the pink turned livid, yellowish, and school uniforms and seats could hardly be borne on Mondays. But we persevered, for white skin had the connotation of slugs, not porcelain. Not that I’d ever have the choice again, having by now acquired a permanent shawl of sunkisses.

Fifteen years later, summer meant the annual angst in front of unfriendly mirrors and lying saleswomen over whether we could still get away with wearing a two-piece costume. It was spent supervising sandcastles and shell collections, soggy towels and gritty kids, with hardly a minute to ourselves for sunbaking. As we still did, with suntan lotion overall, zinc cream or sunscreen only applied to acknowledged vulnerable bits. We did wear hats.

These days summer brings danger. Sunbaking, suntanning, sunkisses—such antiquated words, such tragic innocence. Forget sunscreen; with the hole we’ve made in the ozone layer, we need sunblock. Slip, slop, slap. Kids are growing up with sunblock as their second skin; they swim in neck-to-knee Lycra and aren’t allowed to play outside at school without a hat. They are taught to be as afraid of our once-beneficent sun as of strangers. It’s like science fiction come horribly true. I dread the announcement that constant exposure to sunscreen has been found to be carcinogenic, but I won’t be surprised.

My swimsuit mostly functions as a relic of my past, to be found scrunched in the back of a drawer along with lace handkerchiefs, suspender belts, French knickers and tired g-strings. Summer glare and heat are too savage for me to want to be outdoors at all. Instead of exposing winter flesh, I cover up more, never leaving my verandah without throwing on my sun-faded Akubra hat and the long-sleeved cotton shirt, usually a man’s work shirt, second-hand, that will be hanging there.

Too many threatening spots and lumps have already been removed, after hiding amongst the thousands of freckles of my inappropriate Celtic skin. I go to my skin cancer clinic every six months for a check-up. The doctor, genetically brown-skinned and unfreckle-able, shakes his head at the mottled map of my youth each time I take off my shirt.

I am in awe of the powers of the sun in more positive ways too, for without its electricity generation I could not work from here, and living would be much less convenient. I could manage, since I am not dependent on as many electrical aids as some people must be, judging by the range offered in the glossy catalogues that fall from my donated newspapers. Bread maker, sandwich maker, pie maker, pizza maker, coffee maker, rice cooker, slow cooker ... of course I do have all those things, but it’s a sort of combination machine—me!

Before I was on my own I treated the solar power shed, like all the sheds, as exclusively male. It held an array of machines and metal boxes with coloured lights and LED displays and dials and switches and buttons and leads and plugs and dangerous substances that blurped behind my back when I thought I was alone. I only ever went in there because that’s also where I store my out-of-season clothes and my fabric pieces, in four waist-high, lidded and critter-proof cardboard drums that declare they once held bulk powdered milk.

My partner had understood it all; he could talk the language with Dave from Sunrise Solar, who designed and set it up for us. It was pure magic to me. The sun shone on the solar panels, which were patterned with circles in squares like giant board games, and in doing so, somehow became something that could run down thin wires and be turned into something that lurked in the dark liquid depths of the linked rows of batteries and then ran through thicker wires, partly to the house as 24 volt for our small bar fridge and the halogen lights, and partly to the invertor which turned it into 240 volt for all the power points in house and workshop. I knew 24 volt wouldn’t kill me, but 240 volt would, just like in any suburban house.

How or why any of this was possible, I could not fathom, despite reading about it, any more than reading about radio waves made me see how and why radios worked.

There was also a battery charger and a back-up generator in this shed—
more
machines and manuals to deal with by myself, and tasks to be done ... or else! I cannot afford to replace any of this ageing equipment; it must be looked after to last as long as possible.

If I had a problem I could ring Dave, as his after-sale service seems to last forever, but I’d exhaust all my own resources first. As men tell me the magic spells for the starting and maintenance of any machine, I write them down in a little indexed notebook, left over from one of my Sydney jobs. So under ‘B’ I find Basins, Bidets, Bath materials, and Brass, to which I have added Brushcutter, and Batteries.

I follow these rules rather as I used to follow the Ten Commandments. I don’t know why I must obey except that I believe the consequences will be terrible if I don’t. I hate blind obedience and I hate my own ignorance in these matters.

It may have something to do with my inability to relate to numbers; I don’t remember them and I can’t manipulate them. Sister Augustine, exasperated at my continued B’s in maths despite A’s in everything else, verbally exploded one day. ‘Sha-aa ... ryn
Mun
ro! You are de-
lib
erately being obtuse about maths! There is no
need
for this blind spot in your intelligence!’ But it wasn’t in my control, and the blind spot remains for both mathematics and machines.

And then there’s the generator. It’s supposed to be able to be started and stopped by pressing a button in the house or by a key on the generator—electric start. Unfortunately the electric start works off a little battery of the generator’s own. I discovered that this battery goes flat if I don’t run the generator much. With my ample sunlight and moderate power use, I rarely
need
to use the generator. So I have a ludicrous system where I must run the generator for no other reason than to keep the generator battery charged so it can start the generator if I do need it. Talk about unsustainable design!

A friend has recently suggested a trickle charge set-up from the invertor to solve this, so the solar would be keeping the generator going, which is a funny concept. I’ve put that on the ‘fairly urgent but daunting’ list.

For six months I faithfully marked on the calendar each time I went through this idiotic, noisy, wasteful, but apparently necessary, ritual every fortnight for twenty minutes or more. Not once did I actually need the generator for power. Then we had a week of rain and I did
need
to use the generator. Perversely, it wouldn’t start, yet it had started straight off the week before.

I got out the manual and checked what I could find, although as usual the models in the diagrams were just different enough from my machine to confuse me. I ruled out the battery, given my diligence. Remembering my success with the pump engine, I thought I’d change the oil—but I couldn’t undo the drain plug. A male friend was coming to stay in a few days; it would have to wait till then.

My friend and I changed the oil; it made no difference. ‘Never mind, ’ I said, ‘the sun’s out now.’

After he’d gone, the generator being too big to take to town, I rang my son-in-law for advice. The spark plug was once more named as the likely culprit. I couldn’t find it.

So a few more weeks went by until he came up and showed me its hiding place under a black cover at the back. How clever of them to make it both invisible and inaccessible. He had to use a screwdriver to turn the spark plug spanner in there. Next time I was in town I bought a new plug.

I got it in. Still no response. It had to be the ungrateful bloody battery. It was raining again and looked as if it was set in, so I might well need to run the generator. I decided to try the pull cord start, which had rarely been used. In doing so, because of the location of the generator, pegged to the ground close by the wall where the exhaust pipe goes out, I bashed my elbow into the wall frame—Ow-ww!—and knocked the good (and expensive) hydrometer off, which shattered on the cement floor. I swept up the glass shards.

Then I inched the very heavy generator around slightly, turning it on the peg to gain a little more room, and tried again, with my throbbing elbow pleading for mercy. No go.

‘It’s no use, ’ I snivelled pitifully as I backed away, nursing my elbow, ‘I could never start these things, not with my wrists.’ Leaning against the doorway, I cursed the generator—‘And as for you, you stupid battery!—and then I noticed that the key switch on the generator was turned to OFF, not ON. Having switched it to ON, I yanked the pull cord twice, and the generator leapt into life. Oh, you stupid woman!

I haven’t admitted that episode to anyone before; it’s so typically what males expect of women that I cringe at fitting the bill so well. How many times have I seen red, when, after describing my problem with a domestic machine to a technician, he says, ‘Have you checked if it’s turned on at the wall, luv?’

I’m claiming a deteriorating mental condition called old age.

I must be learning a little from the disasters I keep having, but it doesn’t feel like it. The brushcutter is the current machine that won’t work. I couldn’t even bear to look for its spark plug—if it has one; I wasn’t feeling strong enough. Instead I put it back in the shed, gnashed my teeth and did its intended job by hand. One day another male will visit and be only too pleased to start it. First go, I expect. It’ll be something simple that I’ve overlooked.

But recently I was given a precious piece of knowledge that men have been withholding from me for decades. I had bought a connection for using a smaller LPG gas bottle with my old camping stove. It fitted at the stove end, but not at the bottle end. It would not screw on; was it a metric/imperial problem?

Not wanting to strip the thread—which, like ripping pool table felt, is another of those things men think women are likely to do—I took it back to the shop, with the bottle this time, when next I went to town. He had clearly sold me the wrong fitting.

The man heard me out, smiled, and took the items from me. He gave me
that
look—pitying, knowing—and screwed the fitting on with no trouble. ‘Reverse thread, luv.’

I threw up my hands and went into a rave about why weren’t they all standardised and how was anyone supposed to know which way was on or off if they kept changing it ... but his raised eyebrows halted me. He jabbed his finger at the brass top piece.

‘See that nick?’ he said.

I saw it.

‘That means it’s reverse.’

I could have kissed him, I was so grateful for being let in on the secret.

I wonder, if I’d been a boy, would my dad have taught me about things mechanical? Only once did he ask me to help with a machine, when I was about twelve. The little Austin panel van had broken down in an awkward spot on the track and he’d got the tractor into position to tow the van out backwards. I can’t remember why I was to drive the tractor instead of steering the van.

We went through the procedure a dozen times—‘Take it slowly, ease off the clutch, slowly, slowly...’—until I thought I had it right.

Feet balanced on the pedals, palms sweating, I waited for the signal.

‘Right!’ he yelled. The tractor and I lurched forward down the track, pulling the back doors clean off the Austin like the wings off a fly. We stalled shortly after. Dad was such a gentle man that he didn’t even swear, or not so I heard. But he never let me near anything more mechanical than a hoe after that.

Not that he was especially gifted that way himself. I mean, why had he tied the towrope to the doors? The one time he tried to use a more-than-manual farming method, it was a disaster; in fact, a tragedy of epic proportions to nine-year-old me. Going broke fast with the oranges and vegetables, Dad had a go at raising chickens. Built a small shed, strewed sawdust on the ground, and installed a special kerosene contraption in the centre, that from memory was supposed to not only keep the hundreds of cheeping yellow balls of fluff warm, but feed and water them. It blew up, burnt the shed down and fried the chickens to small crispy debts.