It couldn’t be better hands<\/em>, we say, almost together.<\/p>\nHis assistant, long stretched-out Billy, has suddenly abandoned him. Billy was funny, smart, ingenious, acrobatic, strong and not a man you’d want to cross. We all feel the loss of Billy, but Billy has been disappearing into alcohol all year. He lived at DB’s on a cousins’ huge old steel boat he’d promised to fix: but he hasn’t done any fixing for a year. The boat has a great gaping hole in its bottom you could could drive a truck through, says DB, so it couldn’t float: Billy lived on the boat but on DB’s slips. DB needed his slips back for other boats and asked Billy to move it off, and so Billy left.<\/p>\n
Now DB doesn’t know what to do with Billy’s boat.<\/p>\n
We wave him goodbye. With the careening, the journey takes us only 50 minutes. We slide into our jetty. GG goes upstairs and I begin to load the flying fox. And immediately the bay comes to meet me.<\/p>\n
My friend J is walking along the track with Andy, and Trippy barking out in front showing everyone the way.<\/p>\n
We’re going to pick up our new house numbers<\/em>, calls I.Annie’s got them. Want us to pick up yours?<\/em><\/p>\nThe council has newly ordained that we have numbers as if we’re on a street, not a creek.<\/p>\n
I call back that i’ll join them, delighted to be included. i’ve only got one more load. Ad hears us and comes out of his house and joins them.<\/p>\n
I catch them up on the track talking to our two new neighbours, C and M, who are leaning \u00a0over their porch, eating out of bowls. I feel I could hug them all. After the city so silent, so engrossed, so indifferent to me. In the talk, someone mentions that most of us are baby-boomers.<\/p>\n
Except you two<\/em>, I say to C and M. I joke that they are our “youngies”.<\/p>\nThey seem pleased. They’ve probably been worrying about getting old. I always was. Soon after I turned 20, I felt blighted by age.<\/p>\n
We’re generation Y,<\/em> says C.<\/p>\nAt Annie’s, the business about house numbers becomes a discussion about fire safety. Annie was in a fire further upriver, and without water, they fought it with only wet hessian bags, as my Dad did, all those years ago \u00a0when we lived-in the Blue Mountains.<\/p>\n
We need a plan<\/em>, she says.<\/p>\nWritten down<\/em>, I add. I remind them of our generator fire. When it burst into flames, we panicked and ran around as if we’d never heard of fire.<\/p>\nDY adds that a plan to escape in our boats is no plan at all, for the tide might be out.<\/p>\n
We go over and over our need for a plan, and eventually we part, agreeing that we’ll \u00a0train as a group. None of us wear masks. We trust each other- was that wise? I feel if I wore a mask, it’d be suggesting that someone had been careless….not sure what to do.<\/p>\n
Back home, I find that C, Gr’s wife who seldom comes to the bay, has visited. I go to her place and we stand admiring the cliffs so close to their house, and talk abut fire-safe clearing. \u00a0 Gr, a trained mechanic, has found a tiny bush orchid \u00a0on a fallen tree and glued it to his rock with super glue. We laugh, marvelling that that’s possible. \u00a0A flight of fifty to a hundred cockatoos fly over, and we talk favourite birds. C has seen a goshawk. We look up goshawks in their field guide. After a life-time of feeling shy , out of place and tongue-tied, here i feel accepted.<\/p>\n
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