Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe
Page 14
The skies have cleared, the lakes and puddles out on the paddocks have drained away and dried, the creek trickles past at the end of the garden, returned to its former size. Though the fertile silt washed up all around looks like a gardener’s dream, I haven’t bothered to replant my vegetables nor do any of the things I had planned to do when the weather finally cleared. The smell of the earth after so much rain is a strange and intoxicating thing; I’ve been content most days just to stand at my door and draw it languorously into my nostrils. Since the rain stopped and my story was finished I’ve done very little else, though I’ve managed to re-bury most of the junk I’d collected back in the hole in the hill. That took me a week, in a slow-moving dream; I barely had the strength to lift the shovel. For three days I anguished over what to do with the tangle of barbed wire in the corner; in the end I dumped it unceremoniously back into the creek. Most of the things in the house are packed, my bundle of papers in a cardboard box. Today I went to the top of the hill to take one last look over old ur and saw the bulldozers trundling towards me in the distance. The freeway was coming again. It will be a sharp turn to head west from here, I thought, and in the years to come the drivers encountering it on their way to Haranhope will mutter a low curse at such shoddy planning. And yes, in the end old ur will perhaps only be remembered as a dangerous bend in the freeway north of Melbourne, just where it crosses a dry creek bed before turning sharply left towards the new estate in the west. Patterson arrived in the afternoon—his last benevolent gesture—to help tow my car from the bog. I spent the remaining daylight hours packing the last of my things. There was little to do then but sit and think—it’s a pleasant pastime, that. About Michael, Jodie, my neighbours, all gone, and the sometimes silly things that happen in this life and that so soon pass into the obscurity of history. It was only an experiment, I thought, built too far out in the wrong direction, favoured or flawed by its own possibility. Should someone dig it all up again one day I’m sure they’d make a damned sight more sense of it than me. I had my bundle of papers, certainly, and sometime, somewhere, on an evening like this, they might bring me a little comfort and take the sting out of that day’s particular disillusionment. But I would not be setting sail on them, hat on head and jar in hand. No, that nonsense is over, my days here are done, tomorrow I leave for Haranhope where a barrow of bricks lies waiting. This time I’ll start from the bottom up and see what comes of that.