by Steven Lang
fifteen
If the predominant feature of the far south coast was trees, forest without apparent end, then Nadgee State Forest, after the Timbillica fire, was its opposite.
They came out amongst its devastation without warning. The road continued on through the blackness, a long ochre ribbon, tracing the curves and undulations of the ridge lines, but the overarching forest they had travelled through was gone. The fire had taken everything. The slopes carried not charred forest but no forest at all, the geography of the place exposed with stark cruelty. The young regrowth with its broad volatile leaves had been too closely bunched together to survive the extreme heat. All that was left were thin bare stalks, and not many of those.
It was what Jessica had wanted them to see.
Their route led them on and out into this black desert, until it was all around them, as far as the eye could see. Above them, like a taunt, was the undisturbed translucent blue of the sky. Jessica’s friends from the Forest Alliance were parked atop the ridge, leaning against a dilapidated yellow Datsun. Below them a vast bowl stretched, at the centre of which one stark leafless tree remained. The woman, Katya, was wearing dark loose clothing, perhaps with the intention of disguising her weight, although, Kelvin thought, quite possibly such considerations never entered her mind. She had a thick mass of curly hair and a harsh turn to her mouth. Perhaps it was just the light. It was still before eight but it was already inordinately bright. The man was a noted botanist but had the appearance of a hippie, bearded and long-haired, shabbily dressed. He laid out maps on the ticking bonnet of Jessica’s Holden, running his fingers along the contours, locating them on their blasted hill.
Kelvin looked out over the valley. He was an appendage, idle and aimless, an hour early for the events of the day, his feeling of uselessness made more acute by a heightened sense of desire for Jessica.The day had produced a new version of her. She was all efficiency, their relationship sidelined. She was articulate, precise, impatient, better presented than her companions.
Besides, he was having other problems with the place. He pushed at the impossibly clean line between the blackened dirt and the gravel of the road with his foot. He could see the nubs of the root boles where the trees had been. New leaves were already poking through, their tips glistening purple against the ash, as if to demonstrate some parable of resilient Nature, Nature the undefeated, even here. Except, Jessica’s friend had explained with a certain doom-laden pleasure, this development was another disaster in the making. The sprouting leaves would give rise not to new trees but to a mass of suckers, not a forest but a dense thicket, fuel for another fire in several years to come. ‘The bastards were so sure of themselves they didn’t even leave the seed trees behind. They had it all worked out,’ he said.
‘You see this sort of shit and you want to put them up against the wall,’ Jessica said.
Two beige Forestry Commission Toyotas came around the hill, a grand plume of dust in their wake. Further back, strung out in dribs and drabs, was a long line of cars.
‘Jesus, look at that would you,’ Katya said. ‘We should have organised a bus.’
There was a moment of confusion with the forestry officers, two of whom were young, while the third, in the slightly more battered vehicle, was an older man with the face of an amiable drinker. Jessica assumed he was in charge, but after a brief introduction he cleared the air.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘I’m the shit-kicker. It’s Mark you want to be talking to.’
The young officers, a man and a woman, shiny in their pressed khaki with their badges sewn on the shoulders, waited while this was sorted out, then came forward to shake hands with the sincerity of Mormons. Mark was even younger than Jessica, with short blond hair and blue eyes hidden behind sunglasses, a jaw whose length was exaggerated by the shortness of his upper lip. When he smiled his top gums were nervously revealed.
‘Good of you to come,’ Jessica said. ‘I’m sure you had better things to do with your Saturday morning.’
He dismissed her attempt at politeness with a brief nod. ‘No problem,’ he said.
The cars disgorged a raggle-taggle of people, several men wearing loose Tshirts, drawstring pants and sandals, some with the customary heavy beards and long hair, but others, too, balding, thin and professorial. Most of the women had something in common with Katya, if not in size then in seriousness, although there was one who was striking, a long slim being with a child on her hip, making the day seem more interesting, the cause more worthwhile, in that seemingly effortless way of beautiful people, just by her presence.
Jessica stood on the raised edge of the road and gathered the crowd together, introducing Mark, offering him the opportunity to speak.
‘It’s great to see so many people interested,’ he said in a hearty we’re-all-in-this-together tone. ‘As you can tell, it’s been pretty serious through here.What we’re hoping to do today is to see how the forest and its inhabitants are responding to it, but we also want to have a look at some sites the fire missed, islands, if you like, that were protected for various reasons.’
The sheer horror of the place and the uninterrupted brightness of the sun had subdued everyone before he’d even begun. They listened to him as they might a tour guide, and he, taking advantage of it, set out to give the impression that this event was organised by the Forestry Commission itself.
‘What we have here is forty-seven thousand hectares of forest, that’s about a hundred thousand acres in the old lingo, bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the Pacific Highway. On November 10, 1981, after several days of strong winds a fire was started in the south-east corner at a place known as Timbillica – ’
‘In one of your bark dumps,’ a man called out.
Mark stopped. He glanced at his companion and pushed his sunglasses further onto his nose. He smiled his peculiar little smile.
‘Well, there’s some evidence to suggest that’s the case but we’re still not certain, we’re waiting for the results of an enquiry.’
‘A whitewash. It was you lot did this.’ He was a tall man with long naturally curly hair and a nervous way of speaking. Even though he had the audience behind him his heckling came out as a kind of petulance.
‘I think,’ Jessica said, stepping in, ‘we should let Mark speak.’
‘No, I think the gentleman has a point,’ Mark said, in control of things; they must have trained him for such eventualities. ‘I think there are big lessons here for forest managers. I’d go as far as to say that I think mistakes were made. When we started clearing here we were working on a two thousand acre front …’
Kelvin had hoped to get close to the woman with the child on her hip but found himself instead on the edge of the group beside Katya and the botanist, who, in what seemed an uncharacteristic gesture, spat onto the black dirt. ‘He’s a sap,’ he said. ‘The guy knows nothing. They move staff around every two or three years just so’s no one’s responsible.’
His gob of spit sat on the ash, unabsorbed, milky and thick.
‘What the fuck is a two thousand acre front?’ Katya said, louder, turning some heads. ‘What is that, eh? It doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s fucking garbage.’
Kelvin turned his back on the crowd. In the wide curve of the valley the remains of an old road could just be discerned. It followed a contour of the bowl ending in a flat circular area perhaps halfway between the top of the hill and the base. Below it a small creek began its meander downwards, its banks delineated by a thicket of white stalks, the only variation from black in the whole vista.
His father had worked the boats out of Eden. Nev had been saving up for his own licence, but when the quota system came in, limiting the number of fishermen, he’d missed out. He put the money down on a rig instead and started hauling for the mill. It paid well and the work was steady.There were a lot of trees, even cutting at that rate. Within a few years there had been five log trucks with McIntyre Haulage, Eden on the doors in gold lettering.
Not that Kelvin knew much about it. During one of his mum’s bad spells Nev hooked up with Daphne from the pub. His mum and he had had to do by themselves after that. There wasn’t any money but there weren’t, also, the fights.
It was years before Nev, probably at Daphne’s instigation, started picking Kelvin up and taking him over to his new home. Their kitchen had tiles on the walls, an electric stove and a fridge, running hot water. There was a bathroom and even, wonder of wonders, a television. Daphne, a thin, pretty, frail woman with no children of her own, made biscuits for him and tried her best to be whatever it was she thought a stepmother should be. None of it made any difference. He didn’t want to be there.
Once Nev turned up in the big Kenworth. A driver was sick and he was on for the day so he thought he’d take his boy along as offsider. Kelvin climbed up in the cabin and perched there with the motor thrumming beneath him, unsure what to say, convinced that whatever he did would be wrong, sitting in the noise and the smells, that complex mix of oily rags, interior plastic seating, cigarettes and sweat. Nev held the edge of the wide wheel with his belly as he drove, winding up and down between the gears. He reached over and tweaked Kelvin’s arm, nodding at the road ahead and laughing – there was no possibility of conversation anyway because of the noise – showing his white teeth at the pleasure he felt in the great truck roaring beneath them, the air breaks screaming out their wind like injured whales. Kelvin had never seen him so happy.
The team was working a coupe of old forest south of the town. There was a D9 pulling the logs up to the dump, and a Volvo snigger, one of those four-wheeled machines with an articulated waist and a great pair of horizontally opposed tongs on the front, a thing like an enormous demented yellow ant, which stripped them of their bark and loaded them onto the truck. There were five or six men on the site, two or three in the forest with their Stihls, felling and cutting, the different notes of the saws screaming their woe, the trees falling one after another with a strange ease that never lost its ferocity.
The dozer driver let him run out the chain which wasn’t a chain at all but a wire rope which he dragged out behind the machine and looped around the trunk of the fallen tree, getting down on his knees amongst the crushed leaves and branches and the smell of new-sawn log, to push the heavy hook under, then standing aside to watch the machine winch it out of the gully regardless of all obstacles, dragging it up to the bark dump, leaving a curved muddy slick in its wake. The whole operation imbued with a wonderful casual brutality, a great show of might. He would have worked there all day for nothing, just to be part of it, but a forestry officer came down and told Nev to get the boy out of it.
‘He’s my boy,’ Nev said.
‘And?’
‘He’s right with me.’ Pausing. ‘I’m Nev McIntyre.’
The officer looked at Nev and then at the door of the truck and back again.
‘Don’t care who you are,’ he said. ‘Get the boy out of here.’
So he was made to sit in the cabin again, feeling it shudder and rock as each log was loaded, listening to the warning horn on the snigger bleat as it backed to and fro. After that, just as he knew he would be, Kelvin was always in the way, useless, a bloody nuisance. He’d been thirteen years old, he’d forgotten that, forgotten that the outing had been his father’s concession to his birthday, delivered several days late and without notice, and had also been the last time he’d seen him.
Behind him Mark was talking up the Forestry’s new environmentalism: small coupe sizes and a patchwork system of allocation, strict guidelines for contractors and heavy penalties for infringement; spelling out these changes as if the Forestry hadn’t fought against them at every turn. First you oppose something with all your might and then, when you’re defeated, you make out it was your choice. Perhaps it had always been that way, Kelvin didn’t know, he didn’t seem to know very much really, except that this was the place he had come to with his father, this bowl or somewhere very like it, and that he’d loved the experience, at least the first part, and yet here, eight or nine years on, was the result. He was adrift on a sea of contradictory positions. He’d only come there because of Jessica, his feelings for the place were no more than his feelings for her. Or had been.
The group started to move off but he was fixed where he was. He stared into the valley. Jessica waved at him to come but he ignored her. She left the crowd and went to him, wanting him to walk with her, a little impatient, angry at all of Mark’s bullshit, her mind in five places at once, talking over the top of anything Kelvin might have thought to say.
‘… as if they aren’t doing the same sort of shit right now …’Tugging on his sleeve. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I’ve been here before,’ Kelvin said.
‘Haven’t we all.’
Barely listening.
‘No, I mean here, before it was like this.’
He had no idea why he should want to tell her this, his most closely guarded secret.
‘I came here with my father.’
‘On holiday?’
She was already moving away, the crowd were fifty metres off, that was where she was supposed to be, where she, in fact, wanted to be. She didn’t need to know these things at all – it was still possible to retract, a tiny lie would do it, just the word yes would suffice.
‘No, I came here with my dad, he was hauling for the mill and he took me along with him. It was my birthday.’
Jessica was never very good at covering up feelings, her face was like a constantly shifting weather map of her moods. A moment before, it had shown a certain serious officiousness, an expression which included several states of mind – efficiency, an understanding of the gravity of the situation, a certain self-importance, but also a measure of irritation that she should be dragged away from the main event – all of which was, in an instant, overlaid by confusion.
‘You told me your father was a bookseller in Sydney.’
‘Not that father, my real father. I grew up round here.’
‘But you told me …’ She stopped. She swung her head around to see where the others had gone, perhaps to see if anyone could hear them, then brought herself back around. ‘I don’t get it. Is all the other stuff bullshit?’
She’d missed the point. This wasn’t about that. It was about being here, in this place, where everything had been stripped away. On the ridge, on the edge of the road, his shoe black with dust, with the sun rendering everything flat and hard and difficult.
‘No,’ he said.
She didn’t let him say anything more. ‘Don’t bullshit me, Kelvin. Whatever you do, don’t do that.’ She started to walk away. ‘I haven’t got time for this now. We’ll talk about it later.’ Dismissing him as if she was his mother or his schoolteacher and he was stupid; getting further away from him. ‘I have to look after these people.’ So that he was doubly abandoned, his attempt to reach out slapped down. He was a stupid child, stupid for telling the truth, stupid for lying in the first place, stupid for thinking anyone cared.
sixteen
In the car on the way to the beach – part of a convoy – Jessica refused any attempt at conversation, the air between them as thick as the fog of dust from the cars ahead. She drove with intense concentration, only breaking her silence to swear at the slowness of the pace. Kelvin confined himself to staring out the side window. The passage of cars along the road had, over time, coated each and every individual leaf on every single tree on both sides with the fine white dust. He wondered how they survived.
At Saltwater the protesters, their work done for the day, were preparing to swim, to eat lunch, to have a smoke and sleep off the afternoon. Jessica slammed her door and walked off towards the beach.
Kelvin noted and followed, but slowly. Clearly it was a day for remembering. He’d been to this place too. Pre-Rick and the twins he’d guess, just him and his mum, camping at Christmas down here at the beach. Over to the left there was an inlet, it would come into view in a moment, an almost-freshwater l
agoon where they’d fished and swum – his mum running into the water in a tiny bikini shrieking with exaggerated laughter, trying to get him to come in too.
Jessica came back to him.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said. ‘Will you come?’
Several people were already setting up. Jim and Andy were tossing a frisbee and threw it to Kelvin as he passed. He caught it and spun it back, finding that even in that short space of time Jessica had got ahead of him. He sprinted to catch up with her.
‘What’s he doing here?’ she said without even glancing back.
‘Who?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Andy? He wanted to see Nadgee, I guess, see what you’re on about.’
Again she let it hang.
‘He doesn’t like the chipmill any more than you do,’ he said. ‘It’s true, I’ve talked about it with him.’
‘In a pig’s arse.’
The fire hadn’t made it down this far. They were on a strip of sand bordered on one side by thick bush and on the other by the great, the wondrous ocean, prussian blue, iridescent green, clean white where the waves broke. Jessica was walking fast on the hard sand close to the edge, aiming for a small avalanche of water-washed boulders and a craggy headland of red dirt rock. Captain Cook, when he visited in the late eighteenth century, had named this place Disaster Bay, the larger thing, not just this little beach.The volcanic nature of its geology was everywhere evident, the sharp bubbles of rock softened by the ages, not eradicated. A wide horizontal shelf skirted the headland, creating a kind of groin where deep water lurched. Jessica stood on its edge, a sea-wind lifting her hair.