Month: May 2025

It was a grey bow shackle closed with a yellow pin, horseshoe shaped about the size of my hand. 

Important part of my recovery gear and as it turned out, provocateur to consider the limits of behaviour of an inanimate object.  

Arriving we were barely able to reach the clearing.

An ancient river gum had toppled, its root ball big and ugly as a truck, claw roots baked with dirt hung in the air just where I was thinking of negotiating the edges of the car.  Worse was it tore up the track itself and left  it hanging in the air, a deep hole where the ruts used to be. The other side was close up against the river. 

Took an hour to pack the hole with branches and dirt. This held the weight of the fully loaded vehicle driven very tentatively in low range. 

Next morning we rode the bikes, had to push them through the flooded anabranch, which explained the water we heard gurgling behind us overnight in broken dreams.

We rode for hours inland past long black lagoons and billabongs using abandoned forestry tracks where goitred river red gums stood rotting slowly and clung to life in suspended animation for centuries, then for centuries more lay big as sheds after they fell with a shuddering jolt to the ground. 

The warmer afternoon was the time to lay low. The river was fifty metres wide and drew most of our thoughts, a quiet and internal power, there were flecks of sharp silver on the current, while I lolled in comfort, and the edges of the waves caught sage green glimpses of trees. Occasionally came a slap which was a fish heard reentering the water but never seen.

Was still a little  worried about getting out next day on that track.

Decided with the balmy afternoon ahead, to lay out my recovery gear across the large circular clearing.

The sort of distracted task that would accompany an aesthetic reverie.

I enjoyed the ordered preparation of safety checks on days like this far more than anxious hours wasted in a remote place throwing wits against an intractable problem.

I stretched the winch out from a black wattle toward the car, the bow shackle in my hand, deciding I would pull the car to the tree as a test.

Dropped it there while I went to the car to attach the hook to the tow point.

When I came back the shackle was gone.

I had a clear image of where I saw it land a few seconds before.

On top of the attenuated yellow leaves. That carpeted our clearing.

Was I shocked? For some reason no.

But I was ready to learn. With eyes and mind suddenly wide open.

This day represented one of my happiest types of situation.

I would embark when I lost the shackle, on a slow step by step tour of the campsite, as I felt anyone should, considering something had been lost. Touch the table, touch the car, touch the trailer.

My reverie replaced by these intrigued sharp thoughts. Fair swap.

The shackle could be easily replaced.

I might have another with my tools. This was not the problem. The disturbed equilibrium of my secure world view was at risk but so be it.

Next minute I was on my knees. Not praying. The ground was as flat as tiles, there was nowhere for a bow shackle to hide here.

Invoking another of the senses. Seek a second opinion. I scraped and touched at the flat leaves on the ground with my fingers barely raising them up verifying that nothing could possibly be concealed underneath.

Then I stood to my full height.

It was there.

Exactly where I left it. Resting now at my feet on top of the carpet of leaves.

Were there rogue atoms I wondered as I held it firmly? 

In nature do events always flow into other natural events or sometimes not?

Can atoms misbehave, can they hide in their millions? 

Can an object be removed then returned? 

The man from the brothel fixed me with an arched eyebrow on first joining me in the cab then announced he was in personal contact with the supernatural. He sweltered for a while in his penumbral space before deciding to ply his trade on the nearest person at his disposal.

But in fact the hard headed driver was already on high alert. Years later this man would be charged with murdering his solicitor, better him than me, oversized head all gnome all sweltering brain, a small sculpture in my memory that whispered in the lubricious dark. I still remember this profound bearded gaze that tried to frisk the feeble ingenue he thought I was.

Fifty loose envelopes stacked up in the room at home collapsed impossibly when the wind blew, from on top of my wooden filing boxes neatly as if all of a piece into a leather satchel that devoured them, and whose tongue now lolled  with front strap hung open to become in front of me a waking vision of a long tongued ogling satan!

To make this happen the envelopes had been pushed by the gust which I heard slam a door at the far end of the house and which then sped along the corridor to my room. These elemental gusts which instead of dispersing the envelopes like birds now caused the leather satchel to look up directly at me from the floor as though it might attack me with its teeth.

Hand eye coordinated events linked by a power at the back.

Beast the symbol of grief wrong and all error in myself and outside.

Some sort of remote perhaps now dead power.

Protected me when it could over events that happened such as that half hour spent driving through the rain with satan.

I saw them doing the landcare work where the apple orchard had been extirpated decades earlier when the markets failed.

Came back years later and saw a forest growing there.

I could still visualize the coloured hats of the volunteers from that time stooped in the sun fitting plant guards where now was an untidy landscape typical of the manna gums, the tall white barked trees that shed bark in rusty curling straps that drape from forks toward the ground, then further down get caught in wattle and blackwood or finally litter the tussock grass where I was stepping if they make it that far.

I was breaking the fallen strips of bark as I made my path among the spider webs that caught the filtered sun when something occurred to me.

If I had not been an eyewitness on that distant day when I saw the workers in the sun, would I not believe I was standing here in virgin bushland?

You would think this forest had been here forever in a wild and natural balance unless you happened to have the ‘privileged’ knowledge of an eyewitness like myself.

This particular forest had been created piece by piece following a plan then watered and nurtured till it was established and was fit to continue unsupervised.

How would any poor soul tell the difference now from what was in front of them?

So here were the competing models of the universe.

Physicists as eyewitness know enough to tell, if they surpass intellectual cowardice and no longer squib this vital truth that they know, that our universe also was carefully conceived and tended at its beginning.

Who will be brave enough to tell the history of this our widest landscape knowing it is the key to the true nature of reality?