The Woman on the Mountain (17 page)

No, Dad and I had a simpler, outdoor relationship. Next to trees, I like growing vegetables best, and I got that from him.

For market, Dad grew mainly beans. Brown Beauty. I can still remember my sense of importance the first time I was allowed to plant the smooth seeds, like dried kidney beans, walking alongside the furrow, dropping them carefully and evenly. He’d be following behind, walking backwards, hoeing dirt over the seeds.

They grew into neat rows of fragile green bushes bearing vegetables that I loved eating raw, but dreaded once Mum had cooked them according to the practice of the day—long boiled to a greyish green, with salt and bicarbonate of soda added, till even burying them in forkfuls of mashed potato could not disguise their slimy yet sharp texture and horribly familiar taste. She wouldn’t let me eat them raw in a meal; it wasn’t a proper tea without cooked vegetables.

Dad also grew Swede turnips, which I scrubbed clean in the cement laundry tubs before he bagged them, and tomatoes that I picked and sorted, my fingers stained greenish-brown, into green, semi and coloured, and packed into shallow boxes. Making them fit was very satisfying, like a 3D jigsaw.

Summer was bean-picking time. I’d always helped Dad pick and bag, and from the age of twelve, I picked beans in the holidays and on weekends for a neighbouring farmer as well, but for money. I became a fairly fast picker and could put in a full day’s work without too much backache, although I finished some days on my bare knees because I could no longer bend. Then I’d have to decide which was more painful—back or knees—as the latter became too red and tender to shuffle along on the gritty dirt, pushing my square kero tin of beans in front of me.

All the female pickers wore shorts or skirts. Jeans were then only seen in American films, but Mum wouldn’t have let me kneel in them, or slacks, as we called ladies’ trousers, since they’d get dirty. Almost none of us wore hats, but I suppose we had our heads down most of the time.

For me, apart from the delight and pride of receiving a cheque, there was the new experience of talking with grown-ups as an equal. We chatted as we picked along our rows and we chatted at smoko, over strong tea and slabs of fruitcake supplied by the farmer’s wife.

It wasn’t always hot in summer; sometimes it would be raining, but beans don’t wait and nor do markets, so we’d still have to pick. Cold, wet and muddy, with water dripping down my raincoat neck, my nose dripping of its own accord, running a high risk of leech attack, and thoroughly miserable—I can smell wet hessian right now.

Hot or cold, bean-picking was a sobering taste of what being grown-up meant—that some things had to be persevered with, no matter how unpleasant. Most people then seemed to apply the same rule to marriage.

Later, when I was in my senior years at school, I swapped bean-picking for working in a small fruit and vegetable stall cum petrol station, up on the main road. It was more regular money, but I was embarrassed to be seen in daggy work clothes, complete with apron, pumping petrol for carloads of kids my own age who were heading for the beach and a good time.

I learnt how to use a petrol pump, pre-automatic shut-off, pre-self-serve, and only drenched myself with petrol once, face-first, when filling a jerry can; how to operate a cash till, pre-metric, despite my anxiety at the perpetual mental arithmetic required; and how to panic customers, by cutting up a huge pumpkin on the counter in front of them. To stop it sliding about, I’d enfold the convoluted Queensland Blue with one arm, holding a massive knife in the other; I’d make an initial violent central stab, then I’d have to thump the knife handle from behind to force the blade through the tough flesh—towards my stomach.

I also learnt that wooden crates of bananas were my weight-carrying limit over any distance. In fact, like full hessian bags of potatoes, they were probably over my limit, and I wonder I didn’t damage the ‘something’ inside that people always warn about straining. It infuriated me that I had limited strength, when the bantam-sized male owner could carry such things apparently effortlessly.

But it set a high benchmark for my lifting capacity, which came in handy on the many occasions I had to move house in Sydney. It would also have influenced what I was willing to tackle here in my pioneer days, and now. This time round I know the bar’s been considerably lowered, and the strainable ‘something’ may not even be there any longer.

This body is definitely fifteen no more.

Somewhere in
War and Peace
Tolstoy called the body ‘a machine for living’. If I think of it that way I oughtn’t to have been surprised when, six years ago, my body let me down. Seized up, wouldn’t run.

Although I still had a partner, I did the outdoor work except for getting firewood. Suddenly I could do nothing. Because of my afflicted knees, I couldn’t bend, kneel or dig; and because of my similarly afflicted thumb joints, I couldn’t use a trowel or secateurs or grasp weeds to pull them out. Nor could I knead bread or manage my heavy cast-iron pans, or work the computer mouse and keyboard for long, or even hold a book open to read in bed.

The thumb joints had been bothering me for some time, but I’d put that down to RSI from the computer. It was more of a shock when my knees became so swollen and sore that I couldn’t bend them to climb steps—I could barely walk.

My GP eventually sent me to a knee specialist, who surprised me by first looking at my fingers, which had a few bumpy joints but were not at all sore. ‘Aha!’ he said, ‘Heberdens nodes!’ and diagnosed osteoarthritis of an inherited sort. He offered anti-inflammatories, which I declined, thinking of the ulcerous side-effects, and predicted such a rapid decline that I’d be looking at knee replacements well before I was out of my fifties.

I was utterly depressed. Arthritis. A death sentence for my mountain life. Spare parts already!

The usual ‘Why me?’ My father had only developed slight arthritis in his late seventies; my mother’s reiteration that
she
had none clearly implied some fault on my part. It must have skipped a generation.

I turned for rescue to herbalist Pat Collins, of the Total Health & Education Centre in Muswellbrook, whom I’d first seen about my early menopause. This had followed a hysterectomy at 45, after a cancer scare, and because of massive uterine fibroids and endometriosis. I’d been a literal bloody mess before, and quickly became a figurative one after. As I’d never had noticeable PMT, I was unprepared for the hormone takeover that ensued.

This was like being force fed a drug; I was not myself in mind or body. I’d heard about hot flushes, but not about chilli-footed ants crawling all over my face, nor about senses being heightened to unbearable levels, so an everyday noise, like shutting a cupboard door, actually hurt my ears. It took months for me to realise that the noise was at a normal level—it was me who wasn’t. My partner was very patient, but often his only option was to stay out of my way, spend longer hours in the workshop.

What biological purpose such disruption serves I cannot imagine.

He convinced me to seek help, and for two years I was very successfully treated with Chinese herbs, by Anna at Balmain Chinese Herbal Centre, seeing her almost every month, but then I developed an inexplicable, ongoing and apparently unique reaction to that treatment. Just my luck.

At the same time I was hit by a barrage of illnesses that turned my life upside-down. My body began malfunctioning like the most obstinately mysterious machine of all.

I started to have what turned out to be anxiety attacks, including several acute ones where my limbs stiffened as if they were filling with ice and I thought I was dying, would die when the ice reached my heart. All the casualty doctor could advise was to avoid stress, and when I said that was impossible at present, he asked me if I wanted Valium, adding that females were prone to this sort of thing!

These attacks continued in various frightening degrees for months, until I sought help from my much-missed Sydney GP. On enquiring after my family, and hearing just a brief summary of my worries about them, she suggested that, unwittingly, perhaps I was sighing a lot, getting too much oxygen. She told me how to redress the CO2 imbalance with the first aid trick of either holding my breath, or breathing into a paper bag, for 30 seconds. It may take a few goes, she said, but it works. It did, it does—bless her. Shouldn’t all doctors know this?

I also became unpredictably subject to prolonged bouts of heart palpitations, thumping my whole body about, or so it felt, and leaving me so exhausted I would crumple wherever I was, even in the dust. Tests could not tell me why.

To top it off, I had a severe recurrence of irritable bowel syndrome, which, having been linked to the endometriosis, I’d assumed had been solved by the hysterectomy, and so it had seemed for the two years since. Because my body couldn’t get the benefit of the food I was eating, I became extremely debilitated.

These three all hit me together, only months after I’d taken on new and public responsibilities, which I had no choice but to abrogate, despite feeling pathetic about doing so. But my body was no longer a reliable carrier. I was terribly weak, and the palpitations would occur at any time. The mind cannot function when the body is overwhelmed. My partner was as supportive as possible, but I was getting worse.

Only later did I fully understand that this physical breakdown was stress-induced as well as stress-exacerbated. The stress was from several family sources, including death and dying and related emotional manipulation, but the worst involved my best-loved ones defiantly heading for pain and destruction, while I tried unsuccessfully to stop them—sighing.

So I dragged myself to Pat. She helped me back to running order, thereafter manageable through my diet, breathing tactics, and awareness of causes. When symptoms recur, I can keep them at low levels. Maintenance works.

Never since have I underestimated the power of stress, nor the reality of the physical illnesses it causes, and the wreck it can make of a life if ongoing.

This crisis time, to ease the acute inflammation in my joints, Pat immediately took me off all members of the nightshade family, the
Solanums,
which included some of my most frequently used ingredients: tomatoes, eggplants, capsicums, chillies and potatoes. My heart sank—goodbye to my beloved Mediterranean dishes. But she said that once the pain and swelling had gone I could re-introduce those foods one at a time, for a fortnight, and if there was no reaction I could keep them in my diet.

She also gave me a list of beneficial foods and herbs to include in a fresh daily juice to be based on celery and carrots, to which I add a large spoonful of flaxseed oil, the vegetarian’s Omega 3 source. All we needed to find was a plant equivalent to the undeniably effective anti-inflammatory natural treatment Glucosamine, since that was derived from fish. Pat sourced a plant called
Boswellia serrata,
an Indian herb whose bark resin had been well tested and proven in clinical trials in Germany and India.

Under this regime, within weeks I was walking without pain. I then found out, from X-rays taken by Chris, the chiropractor to whom I had gone for a sore neck, that I also had arthritis in my spine and neck and shoulders—spurs everywhere. Chris helped with the immediate problem and prescribed a permanent set of daily exercises.

In a few months I had no pain anywhere and could see that my physical life would be possible here, although limited. The depression flew off to await the next setback; the sun shone once more. It wasn’t time for me to be forced off my mountain yet, but I had to become a different sort of mountain woman. No more over-revving of this machine and no skipping on its regular services. Or else!

So I can’t do long bursts of any knee-demanding activity or keep them in one position too long, but I can do fairly lengthy bushwalks, so long as any steep sections are short, and I can stand from a squatting position—no hands—and that would have been unimaginable before! For my thumb joints, I bought a different computer mouse and worked out alternative ways of kneading bread and carrying heavy pans and performing many other manual tasks; and where finer grasps, such as in holding even a large needle, are required, I do it only for short spells.

I’ve never been game to go back to eating those nightshade foods as daily items; the memory of my incapacity and pain is too strong. And whenever I’ve thought of doing a ‘scientific’ trial, there are too many activity variables in my life for the results to be trustworthy. It’s not as if I’m allergic to them—I eat any of the ‘bad’ items without fuss if there’s no choice when dining out or at people’s places. After all, it’s hard enough on most people to cater for a vegetarian, let alone a restricted diet as well.

And that’s the other question I’m often asked, apart from why I live way out here: why are you a vegetarian? In essence, my answer is the same: ‘Why not?’

After my first child was born, I followed my lifelong inclination—I ‘went vegetarian’. Growing up, I’d always preferred rissoles or thin sausages to chops or roasts because the origins were less recognisable. I’d quelled that squeamishness at uni, in my desperate search for peer approval. My ex-husband later complained that I became too ‘cocky’ after having our children; if that means I gained confidence it may be why I was finally game to ‘come out’ of my fake carnivore shell.

In 1973 vegetarianism was for weirdos, who were sentenced to the side salad and chips at restaurants, and macaroni cheese at private dinner tables.

The initial critical moment came one morning after I’d bathed my new baby in his inflated plastic bath. As I lay him on the towel-covered kitchen bench beside it, stretching out his arms and legs to dry those creases and hollows, his little pink body suddenly strongly reminded me of the skinned rabbit I had bought and cut up, right here, just months ago, for a Robert Carrier ragôut. The two images merged and I felt sick that I could ever have done that. Never again, I vowed.

‘Aha!’ I hear you say, ‘Clearly a case of post-natal something or other.’

Well, if so, 33 years is a long ‘post’.

From then on, if I looked at a piece of steak I saw it as the bloody slice missing on the living cow—it was that vivid. Still is.

For a year longer I was comfortable eating ‘white meat’—fillets of fish and chicken—and then it struck me how hypocritical that was. Just because those creatures didn’t have voices to cry out when killed, or didn’t bleed like cows or sheep or pigs. Just because they were less like us.

No. No more slices of dead bodies for me—red or white.

I admit I found it difficult to give up tinned anchovies. A small casuistic voice kept tempting me to that irreplaceable salty flavour: ‘But they’re hardly big enough to count as bodies!’

‘Tell that to the anchovies!’ I’d force myself to reply.

While I’ve never tried to convert others, some seem to need me to defend my ‘position’, starting arguments about carrots silently screaming when pulled from the ground, or pointing accusingly at my leather shoes, etc., etc. No use, because I act from a totally personal ‘gut feeling’, not a rational position. It’s what
feels
right to me.

As these ‘debates’ are usually initiated during meals, I use more abstract terms than ‘slices of dead bodies’. I explain that I can’t kill an animal, and I could no longer allow others to do it for me, out of sight and mind; that I know it’s unnecessary for any animal to die for me to live well, eat well, for health, taste and variety. I might condone killing for defence, for survival, but not just because I ‘like the taste’. I daresay cannibals would say they like the taste!

Recently I met a vegan, who assured me that I’d inevitably progress from vegetarianism and stop eating
any
animal products. I didn’t admit that I haven’t progressed for a long time, but I’m very aware that there are worse things than killing done under the practices of modern ‘factory farming’. One day I may well get a ‘gut feeling’ strong enough to take me to veganism.

Eggs will go before cheese does, as I’ve often wavered about them.

I once innocently took my courthouse playgroup on an excursion to a battery hen egg farm, and was so shocked at the appalling conditions that I’ve never bought any eggs other than free range since. Unfortunately most people haven’t seen inside such a place, so buy their eggs unaware.

Let me just briefly describe the accommodation set-up. Don’t worry, I’ll omit the gruesome details of what the stress and frustration does to the birds. I trust your imagination.

Picture a 440-square-millimetre cage made of steel mesh, including the floor, and in this cage are squashed four or five chooks. The cage is so cramped that each chook has the space of less than an A4 sheet of paper in which to ‘live’ its whole life, unable even to spread its wings or move about. Now picture five-storey stacks of such cages. Food and water in, shit and eggs out.

Imagine keeping a pet like that and not being prosecuted for animal cruelty.

There’s a big fuss in the Australian industry at present because laws are being introduced to increase the cage size. To 550 square millimetres. How kind. More civilised countries, like those in the European Union, are phasing cages out altogether.

They cage the hens like this because it saves labour costs and increases profits, so they can charge less for the eggs, capture the main market and keep the whole vicious cycle turning.

When I see people standing in front of the egg section in supermarkets, looking understandably confused, I have to bite my tongue, for I want to say, ‘Ignore all the blurbs about what they feed the hens—multi-grain, organic; look for how the hens are kept!’

‘Caged’ or ‘Battery’ is bad. Unbelievably cruel.

‘Barn laid’ is better, much less cruel, because it means the hens are uncaged, can move around, and have nests, perches, and litter to scratch about in. But they still spend their lives indoors.

‘Free range’ is best, because it includes all that barn hens get, plus they spend a certain number of hours a day outside. It’s more natural, and a nicer connotation—warm sunshine, rich yellow egg yolks for that breakfast dip-in egg.

Still not much of a life compared to that enjoyed by smaller farmyard flocks, which lucky people may be able to support at farmers’ markets, but for most of us paying a few cents more to buy free range is the best we can do. Well, actually it’s the
least
we can do.

I recall the punch line of an old advertising campaign—perhaps for Carnation tinned milk? – ‘From contented cows’. Whether it was true or not, we’d all rather think of our food as coming from contented animals. Happier hens would be a start!