Running away

Blog in the time of the virus

20/3/20

Running away to wilderness

Our plan is to run away to a hideaway in a bay in the Hawkesbury River, a bay that’s a  bite out of the Mugamora National Park, with wilderness all around,  the sun for power and the rain for water because it’s completely off the grid  There are fifteen houses in the bay where most people come for a night or two and go away for weeks, but not to live there. It’s impossible to live there. We have never intended a forever stay. Of course  it’s impossible, there are no roads, no shops. But we have to get away. We count its virtues: there’s a perpetual patch of sorrel to eat, and wild edible spinach clambers everywhere, as long as you boil out the oxalic acid. (I didn’t bother once and yelped with stomach ache for 2 days). I’ve already made a tiny, stuttering vegetable garden with thyme, oregano and mint, that has to manage on its own, sometimes for weeks.  There are many fish in its waters, and crabs in season, and oysters on the rocks which we’ve never prised off. If we run away, this will be the start of my life as a farmer, the start of our new lives as fisheerpeople. This will be the start our life as survivors.

 

We have no choice but to run there. For a start, I’m a danger to everyone including myself. Seven hundred people in Australia are known to have caught the virus already, and they’re probably all around me. The virus spreads by touching surfaces, and I  get the bus from NIDA where I teach back to Darlinghurst, and and touch everything- the seat, the rail, the door, the opal machine. My face. I must not touch my face. I’m not sure why I must not touch my face, but that’s what the warnings say. Do not touch your face. My mouth, yes that makes sense. But my face? Does that mean the authorities  think that I’m an untidy eater, brushing my cheek with a huge slice of pizza that then goes into my mouth? Anyway, thinking about all this, I’ve touched my face.

We’re all in danger. I’ll infect others if I get it. They’ll infect me. I’ve always known this day of disaster would come, ever since I was young and read John Whyndam’s The Day of the Triffids. I always asked – couldn’t those people, those characters,see it coming? And if they did, why didn’t they get out? That was the message I’ve harboured for years. Run. All those years, I’ve always promised I’d run if I saw something was coming- whatever. I didn’t know what – war, pestilence, danger. Then last night I heard with a nightmare thud of familiarity the danger: that the government won’t cancel the Grand Prix race, with 340,000 people squashed near each other, infecting each other. Don’t they care? Doesn’t he care? I heard : run. And I watched our Prime Minister refusing to cancel the football games on the weekend, because, like a little boy, he wants to go to the footie. I want my footie. Doesn’t he care? About us? He’ll cancel gatherings on Monday, when he’s had his fun. When people have infected each other. I heard: run.

 

I get home and say we’ve got to go forever and GG agrees. K didn’t agree yesterday when i suggested it, when there were 300 people sick, but now there are 700, she agrees. She’s hampered by autism that’s sometimes severe,as well as agrophobia,  and lives in a tiny one-bedroom flat. We live 5 floors above her in a tiny one-bedroom flat. I’m up and down all day to her in the lift between us: that lift will soon be virus-lined. She can’t have NDIS helpers for the danger they might be to each other; she’d only have me, running up and down 5 flights of stairs. It’s impossible.

 

Besides, like most of us,  I have a body that’s traitorous.  I have Sjogren’s Syndrome, which gives me a jyper-active immune response to many foods, and to flu injections. If I ignore it, I go lame, and after that, my immune system switches to  catastrophic. So even if they cleverly find a vaccine, it wouldn’t be for me.

 

We’ll run this afternoon. No, impossible, the tides are against us. The cupboards in our river house are empty. We need food and stores to get us off to a start, then we’ll learn to live off the land. Tomorrow morning, we’ll run. We’ll stock up on food and house hold things and be gone by midday. We all know that anything could go wrong with this plan; anything could prevent us running away. Nevertheless,  I go out with my grandma shopping trolley at 9AM, and despite the danger, I stop at the post office first to post an urgent package to America. It’s complicated, stickers, permissions, the right envelope, conversations. The man behind the counter is European.I dodge between queues to get served by him because he always calls me Darling in the most courteous way. When you’re running away, you’re so anxious that it helps when someone Darlings you. But that means I don’t get to Aldi till 10 and nothing’s there. No meat, chicken, fish, bananas, avocados, tomatoes. Oh yes, a few droopy zucchini. A curly headed stranger leans dangerously close – but we’re supposed to be 2 metres apart! – and whispers : “Woolworths in the city still have food”. I thank him. A stranger that’s like a conspirator.  But the woman behind him hears and says  loudly: “Not now they don’t”, so it’s no conspiracy.  I thank her. Off to Woolworths  in Kings’ cross. Too late. No food! Coles over the road have more vegetables but only turkey wings, liver, hearts, chicken wings – things I can’t cook but now must. Oh well, my cooking has been stuck in a rut, I only cook what I know.  In the queues, there’s a strange mood, the same as in Aldi- no one’s chatting, non one’s secretly mocking the shopping of the person in front,  everyone’s looking down, trying to see no one, fearful lest a coughing, even a sighing stranger, might be a murderer. By now, it’s mid-afternoon and we still don’t have  enough food for the start of forever. K has multitudinous supplements for autism. They take hours to count out, to check she’s got enough for forever. I hate lists but this afternoon I make five lists. Then GG finds that he’s out of rare painkillers and needs to go to the doctor for a prescription. (He’s due for a shoulder reconstruction in May and has limited use of his right arm, and h’es not right for wilderness living but we must go). He’ll go to the doctor in the morning. We stack the meat i must learn to cook in K’s freezer, and sleep an uneasy night. We fear we won’t get away. While he’s at the doctor’s, I pack the sort of clothes you need for summer’s end, for autumn, for winter. K packs hers. GG comes back late morning with his prescription, I take it to S our friendly chemist, he says that the prescription’s written out wrongly and GG must get another one. I look wild-eyed, he knows we’re running away so he kindly rings a local doctor and explains.

We escape at last at 5PM in our little Skoda Yeti with luggage in the back, between our legs, on our laps, and the pod on top barely shut.

“We’ll be on that black river in the dark,” I say. “Should we wait till the morning?”

“By the morning, there’ll be 1400 people down with it,” says K.

“Let’s give it a go,” says GG.

So we give it a go though we know we might fail.

At 7.15PM We get to the mooring. DB, the boat repair owner, hasn’t gone home for dinner yet. He’s a retired professor of Engineering, stout, pigeon-gray neck-length hair, brown eyed, trousers held up by rope, a salt of the earth, give you the shirt off his back sort of person, and always, except once on a freezing winter day, bare-footed, muddy toed. His brother L has Downs Syndrome, so DB built in his grounds a tiny hole in the wall shop with a crooked sheet of iron for an awning, where you can buy a bottle of soft drink for a dollar. We guess that DB subsidies the shop, but L is a proud business man.  When DB’s got time – he’s always rescuing, often unthanked- other people’s boats- he helps us load up, and he always makes time for it. The load we’ve got could keep me wheelbarrowing down his jetty till midnight if I did it alone. His eyes travel slowly around our loaded car, our pod, our faces anxious in the darkening gloom.

“We’re staying a long time,” GG explains.

“Forever,” I add.

‘I see,” says DB. “Well, let’s get it done then.”

I go to hug him then remember that I mustn’t hug.

B, who lives on a huge boat he’s painstakingly repairing, comes to help, his big bounding puppy almost knocking K over. B  likes to take off his flannelette checked shirt to show off the tatts he got when he was 17, forty years ago. He’s as long and skinny as a pull of toffee, muscular, the body he had on that far-off day when he got those tatts.

With their help, we’re loaded by 8.15, relieved the we’ve made it this far. So far, so good. I greet an acquaintance drinking with his mates on the step-sized deck of his houseboat, moored next to our boat.He’s been painting it bright blue for weeks. I admire his finished work.

“Are you lot spaced two metres apart?” I laughingly ask.

“We’re not making love – yet,” says one of his mates.

‘He thinks that’s funny?” mutters K to B.

“Idiot,” mutters B. He probably drinks with them but doesn’t want to be seen as their friend. He’s old-fashioned about women because he loves his mum.

I’m learning to drive the boat in readiness for the time when GG has his new shoulder. I reverse wildly, just missing one of the boats D’s repairing.

“Sorry,” I yell to him, to everyone.”You think we’ll get there in this dark?”

“You’re probably ok”, B yells back. “Wish I was coming with  you. I’d show you the way. Steer by the shapes of the mountains.”

D needs his dinner but they stand watching us, waving with long out-stretched arms. I wobble our way up The Gut, lots of near-misses but at least they’re misses.GG groans silently. I ought to be better at this. I used to be better in the small old boat but this one is much bigger. it’s like trying to walk in shoes too big for you.

K hands me my new glasses. I don’t see in 3D and the glasses don’t help much. The 3D part of my brain atrophied when I was a kid with a lazy eye that no one noticed because girls didn’t try to catch balls in those days. We just got into trouble for not being able to thread needles in sewing classes but everyone assumed we were just careless. Then 3 yeas ago I ripped my retina and went blind for a bewildering 6 months, till a marvellous eye surgeon stitched my retina up. I couldn’t have glasses till my eyes settled down and stopped changing. The glasses magnify enough for me to be able to see pylons and boats, though i can’t tell if they’re coming towards me or away, or judge distances. (I hate people watching me peg clothes on the line because I haven’t a clue where the line is).   K and G stand beside me in the cockpit, telling me what’s what.
“That one’s racing towards us. Quick, get over to the right.”
“Don’t worry about that one, it’s going our way.”

Kitty’s lived with  my bad eyes all her life but Gordon still groans under his breath at every near miss.

We’re heading 9 km up river to our meandering old fibro house, a hideaway to write novels and plays, on the mudflats of a creek off the Hawkesbury. It was the country of Sarah Wallace, an aboriginal woman who in the early years of Sydney’s settlement brought her white husband here, a young deserter-soldier who was sent out here as a convict. They had many children, and I think her peaceful spirit pervades it still.  We bought it 2 decades ago for very little, in Sydney terms,  from an fisherman who’d got too old and stiff to manage. He’d been trying to sell it for years. It’s the sort of place only artists and writers would buy – completely impractical,  entirely loveable. He left behind everything, his toothbrush, his bottles of sauce, his collection of beer mugs, his beds, his blankets, his plates, his cutlery. He wept as he sailed away.
It’s that sort of place. You weep as you leave.

 

Often we haven’t been able to get in  across the mud flats because we’ve come on the wrong tide, the ice-cream melting while we wait. Wading through the mud, ice-cream held high, is impossible because you sink thigh-high, like the quick sand I thought only existed in Phantom comics.

I steer by the shapes of the mountains, barely discernible but I know them well. I have my favourites, one shaped like a head, one like a woman’s breast- it even has a nipple. At 8.30PM we’re at the mouth of our bay. We’re going to make it! Pitch black night, but deep water. Suddenly theres’ a bump, the boat slews, the engine screams and the boat judders to a stop. The engine’s silent.
‘We’re not going to make it,” I say.

‘You must’ve hit the tree. I thought you weren’t far out enough.”

Two weeks ago wild storms brought trees, logs, boats, sheets of iron, even a fridge hurtling down the creek.

GG takes the wheel. He switches the motor off, on, off, on. It suddenly comes good. We all cheer, surely a disturbing sound to the bush animals out there in the blackness.

Now we’re in our bay, knowing from years of experience to steer away from the invisible oyster leases which we know are there and which could rip our hull. Although we’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s light industrial, it grows many of Sydney’s oysters. But where is our house in the dark? There’s only two houses out of the dozen or so with lights on- F and S’s and friends I sadly can no longer call friends. There’s only a few weak solar lights in our garden because the cheap ones are always dying. But two houses away is a  house which has always been painted pink since it was built in the Depression, when black people with long ancestry lived here. You could always get a feed from the river. Other houses have been done up but the owner only ever repairs hers, not renovates it, and only ever paints it pink. We call her Pink House S. Now it’s glowing pink in the moonless night, pink enough to steer by. I love that pink glowing house.

Despite only one good shoulder and arm, GG knows exactly when to cut the motor, so he nestles us softly beside our pontoon. I can only smash and bounce in, having no clear idea where I am in space, so I’m full of silent admiration. K has brought from her freezer a home-cooked, frozen dinner. I tell her to take it up and her two suitcases – she’s the only one strong enough to carry them up the 40 steps- and one-armed GG takes as many bags as his good shoulder can carry. Most people have mountain-side slopes of shoulders but his are completely square. You could fit him perfectly into the corner of a window frame, if it wasn’t for his head. it was one of the things I fell in love with, the squareness of his shoulders.

I start loading the flying fox, a blue plastic box attached half way along the jetty, with the food that’s the start of our new life. The flying  fox rides on ropes to the top deck, the main house, and is powered by the sun.

 

GG and K work it from the top deck, and unload each screeching, sputtering  boxful, K devouring her dinner with one hand and storing food away with the other, into the freezer of the fridge and a box fridge bought from Aldi before all this started, Gg sending the flying fox back to me. I’m on the jetty loading it, receiving it empty, loading it again. Suddenly it trembles to a stop and hangs in the air, caught in the branches of a peach tree. Is this mission going to fail after all? Then it breaks itself free, and we breathe easily again. At 11.30Pm, I leave non-perishables on the pontoon and call it a night.

GG, in between loads, has boiled spaghetti with the simple sauce we always make- tinned tomatoes simmered with an onion and butter and salt, and slathered with parmesan shavings. We eat it on the desk in the moonlight and marvel at our escape. We made it, we keep telling each other. We made it.

“Do you think it’ll be forever?” I ask.

“Depends.”

We know what it depends on. Good packing, good use of water, good rain, good use of gas, good sun, good farming, good fishing, good fortune. And the virus.

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