Things to do with the kids:
ETA (#1): The Physics Show! Saturday March 10 at 1pm. Yay!
Whale watching! Saturday March 17 at 12 noon.
Elephant seals! Sunday March 18 at 2.30pm.
Sundial Bridge in Redding! Annular eclipse, also in Redding! Sunday May 20 at 6.30pm.
ETA (#2):
ETA (#3):
So glad you asked. Impulsively flew to Arizona for a work thing. Stunning resort, right up against Camelback Mountain, with bunny rabbits hopping adorably around the grounds. Flew home. Drove up to Elk Grove, outside Sacramento, for Magpie’s baby shower. Saw Tina and Pat and Noelle and talked about Jen and missed her very much. Where did the year go? (More to the point, where the hell did Jen go? And could we have her back now please?)
I am writing this on a plane over Utah, more or less. New York, here I come. On Tuesday night I will be home, and then I’ll stay still for a little while; at least until the trip to Florida in mid-February…
When you are young and in possession of a shiny new Arts degree, that single word of advice from the film The Graduate – “Plastics” – seems hilariously inapt. When you have children of your own, it seems in retrospect like reasonably sound advice.
Claire said: “If you take two numbers that are two apart, and multiply them, it’s the same as if you square the number in the middle and subtract one.”
Me: “Really?”
Claire: “Yeah, like nine elevens is 99, which is one less than ten tens.”
Me: “Huh. Four sixes are 24, which is one less than five fives. Five sevens are 35. Six eights are 48. You might be onto something.”
I find paper and scribble:
n(n+2) = (n+1)^2 – 1
n^2 + 2n = n^2 + 2n + 1 – 1
Me: “How about that.”
“Why isn’t this soup spoon design fashionable any more?”
“Don’t ask me. I was raised by wolves.”
“Seems like wolves would have rules about that kind of thing.”
“Oh we weren’t allowed to eat the liver before the alpha. There was a strict hierarchy. We weren’t ANIMALS.”
We’ve been back in Sydney for a week. I’ve been working and trying to get the kids to do their independent study, all while missing my family sorely. We had a few sunny days but lots of blustery windy ones and now, humidity and rain. Hi, Sydney.
Ugh! None of that. Good points of Sydney include the fantastic playground with the huge water feature in Centennial Park, with a cafe right next door; Nielsen Park, which is one of my favourite places in the world; and Rushcutter’s Bay Park, which also has a yummy cafe and a vast playground, and back from which we have just come.
Yesterday I got up early and flew to Melbourne for the inaugural AdaCamp, which was excellent and lots of fun. It’s a feminist unconference with the goal of promoting the participation of women in open tech and culture. The sessions were lively and the women were clever and funny and insightful. Best of all was getting to spend solid time with Skud.
Skud maintains that I am a larval Melburnian. Her argument is cogent. She’d chosen the venue for the conference, Ceres, which is basically Ecotopia and which pushed all my tech-hippie buttons. I want to go to there! Oh wait! I already did.
I flew back to Sydney twelve hours after I flew down. My Kindle was almost out of battery, so I ransacked the terminal’s sadly atrophied bookstore twice before finding, on the bottom shelf, the last copy of Mark Dapin’s new novel, The Spirit House. WIN. It is funnyangry and brilliant and you should all read it.
Today we scattered Ric’s ashes, and I don’t know what to say about that.
…it turns out half the things I think of as My Personality – my taste in sandals, the way I pile my hair on top of my head in a messy bun – turn out to be so generically Australian it is not even funny.
I drove from Barraba to Nana Glen and back, an 11-hour round trip with a sleepover with Jeremy’s Aunt Brenda and Uncle Richard. We had a rest day, then I drove to Sydney in 8 hours.
New South Wales is very, very large and also unbelievably beautiful. I am more tired than I can say.
A thunderstorm boiling up from the west. Ozone smell in the air and rain on the cool breeze. Tea and Christmas cake with Mum and Dad on their screened-in back deck.
Tuesday: Horton Falls. It was miles further on dirt road than I thought it would be. I had visions of crashing the car and Jeremy and the girls having to walk out of there with a single bottle of water in 40 degree Celsius heat. In the end, of course, it’s a ten minute stroll down to the creek, and one of the most beautiful places either of my girls have ever seen. No sign of humans whatsoever. A forested ravine with a wild river running through it, fearless enormous skinks, cicada song in the trees. “This is paradise,” said Claire. “I want to live here forever,” said Julia. We made it home alive, by the skin of our teeth. My country family find the whole thing hilarious and wonder aloud whether we were even out of cellphone range. “We would have sent someone to get you,” says my sister. “I think Arnie lives five minutes from there…”
Today was a rest day, meaning I spent the morning homeschooling the kids and catching up on work email, and the afternoon running errands. We did make it to the Clay Pan to see an exhibition of Rupert Richardson’s paintings. He was a childhood friend of Ric’s and you can see the same deep impulses in their work: the love of space and light.
Al left this morning, but I did get to follow him all the way out to Cobbadah, which made me feel a bit less like crying. Mum and Jeremy and I were on our way to Upper Horton and the last day of the big New Year’s campdraft.
I had no idea what the rules are, but a really nice lady named Jen explained that each competitor cuts out a head of cattle from a herd of seven or eight in a small corral called the “camp.” Then they ask for the gate to be opened, and they race the cow (sorry, “beast”) out into the big arena, where they chase it around a figure eight and through a gate marked with road cones. (Not actually cones; it’s the tall cylindrical ones that Google says are called traffic delineators, but Sarah says if I use the word delineator in my blog it makes me a major wanker. Such are the perils of blogging at my sister’s house.)
Campdrafting? Is awesome. The horses are all compact little stock horses, with big butts but built uphill, light in front and high head carriage. When you see them working cows, you see why. They sink back onto their hocks and pirouette left, pirouette right. They keep the beast in that big high eye of theirs. Then when the gate opens, they take off like a rocket after the sprinting cow. The riders sit them like centaurs, riding in plain snaffles, and the horses pull up short when the rider so much as thinks about stopping.
Did I mention that this is awesome? It’s really, really cool to watch. You lean on the fence, while ten feet away the horses lock intensely onto the cows, and the cows spin and run. Mum and Jeremy enjoyed it, and I could have watched it for hours, except that I got hungry. We had sausage sandwiches and cups of tea. We’d watched this one epic run early on, a big guy on a lovely chestnut with a baldy face, and I was beyond thrilled when they packed up during lunch and presented awards, and my favourite chestnut walked away with the grand prize. Then we drove home the back way, which was SPECTACULARLY BEAUTIFUL, like a huge park; like you imagine the grounds of Pemberley.
There was a dead fox on the road which because I am my father’s daughter I felt obliged to move. (He frets when carrion birds are killed on the roadkill carcases they are eating.) Poor little fox; it was quite fresh. Not fresh enough, as we discovered when I got back in the rental car with a boot reeking of decomposing fox. I washed it with water from a bottle, and also stopped at the next river to wade around. These are my favourite Frye boots! I guess at least they’ve been blooded. I offered Mum the brush, but she politely declined.
Got back to Sarah’s to find that the children had had three bowls of Cocoa Bombs and were watching cartoons. It’s the best day ever.
We didn’t watch the fireworks last night because Claire accidently gave Julia a nosebleed. Instead we washed everyone off and put them to bed. I chatted to Skud while Melbourne set fire to its spire and Jeremy worked on his LED Nyancat project.
Alain and Sarah and Ross joined us at breakfast. We had a long chat about many things, then we left Sarah playing Fluxx with Claire while Jeremy, Alain, Ross, Julia and I walked down to the Manilla River.
Today it looked like this. We took off our shoes and paddled in the cool water. Ross and Alain skipped stones across the water. Two months ago, after huge rains, the river was almost up to the roadway.
The flood exposed a new wall of rock – mixed serpentine and sandstone, I think. I climbed up to inspect it more closely and got a lot of scratches for my pains. Fifteen feet high, laid down over how many millions of years? Why do we have geologists but not geologians, theologians but not theologists? I think something ought to be done.
When I watch Alain with his nephew and nieces it hurts my heart. He’s brilliant with children and they flock to him like settlers. Saying goodbye is always a wrench. It’s that old should-I-have-moved-so-far-away thing. San Francisco is my delight. And this is my home and my family. I’ll never be all in one piece again. Are other people all in one piece? I don’t even know.
We had a long delicious lunch at the Playhouse, and then we swam at Barraba Station, and then we went to Sarah’s to cuddle the kittens and play mah jongg. Alain’s trip is nearly over. He will go back to Brisbane tomorrow, which is impossible. The years knock me over like a wall of water. Time is a river.
Delia Falconer’s Sydney is, I think, the best book I have ever read about my hometown, and an excellent short introduction to Why I Am So Fucked Up. Recommended!
A reread: Seven Little Australians, which has aged amazingly well. The shock for me was realizing that Yarrahappini, Esther’s home “on the edge of the Never-never,” is… just outside Gunnedah, and closer to Sydney than my parents’ place.
We swim at the pool at Haddon’s homestead. Cobalt tiles and sandstone. The children are real swimmers now; Julia can swim across the pool; Claire can swim its length. Sunlight through the water. No sound but birdsong.
Driving home, the shadows of clouds across the green hills.
At night, leaving my sister’s house: ten times as many stars.
Blogging with a kitten crashed out on my lap. Pics to come. It’s okay. I don’t find him cute at all. Not the tabby streaks from his eyes, or his tiny purple nose, or the fearless way he pounces on the dogs’ tails. We’re good here.
The last leg to my sister’s house runs through this for about an hour. I was making that dry-throat noise you make to express the concept: I WISH I HAD BEEN BORN A SHEIKH SO I COULD OWN THIS LOVELY LAND AND ALL THESE BEAUTIFUL HORSES. Well, *you* probably don’t make that noise but *I* do.
And then Tamworth, which is cheery, and then more wide green hills (the drought broke, so everything’s hock-deep in lucerne) and then: BARRABA. And the fam. The cousins have glommed into a single, cousinoid gestalt-entity. The Playhouse Hotel remains superbly Wodehousian: this year there are skydivers.
Back at Henry Street, Sarah got the entire run of Doctor Who for Christmas, so we joined in at The Empty Child/ The Doctor Dances. I had the kittens on my lap. Tell Bebe she’s fired.
A day that started pretty rough then improved enormously. Went to bed last night feeling sketchy – heartburn – and woke this morning feeling worse – sinus-y and coughing again and irritable and tired. Had to decide whether to drive seven hours to get to Barraba in one go, or split the journey. Felt very guilty about not pushing myself – apart from anything else, I really want to see Mum and Dad and the Marretts – but here we are in Scone checked into a motel after a fairly relaxed drive, and it is so clearly the right decision that I cannot repine. I’m still vaguely flu-ey but much less cross and sad.
The most surprising thing about the drive is how fast we got from Redfern (where Jan’s apartment is) to Wahroonga (where the freeway splits out from the Pacific Highway.) That drive connects the lovely cockroachey boho beVictorianterraced inner-city of my teens and twenties to the red-roofed and megachurched northern suburbs of my childhood. It traces the entire landscape of my fucked-up psychodrama. In my head, it’s hundreds and hundreds of miles, but in the real world, it’s just under 26km.
You could fit two of it into my regular drive down to the barn.
Once you get out of the city you’re in Kur-ring-gai National Park, the land of the Kameraigal people. I love that bush more than words can say. It’s where I rode Alfie. My eyes feel rested when they look at it. It’s what land is supposed to look like.
“I know,” said Jeremy.
Then you swoop down between sandstone cuttings to the Hawkesbury River, then you climb Peat’s Ridge, then you turn left and take a long winding back way down into the Hunter Valley through Wollombi, an achingly pretentious little yuppie enclave with sculpture gardens on its verdant slopes. A woman with bleach-blonde helmet hair tried urgently to sell us on the place – “The elementary school has fourteen children now! And it’s only ninety minutes to Chatswood…” Further down the highway (two lanes of patchwork blacktop, then one lane, then a half-mile of gravel) it gradually became clear from the proliferation of protest signs that AGL is threatening to start fracking the place, and half the population is trying to offload its achingly pretentious yuppie property.
Very sad. The Wollombi Valley is staggeringly beautiful, like the Anderson Valley in California, but half the distance from the city. And much horsier. “They look happy,” Jeremy said, as we passed another red pony nose-deep in clover. Further along, our route joined the Putty Road and the Hunter Valley started looking more like I remembered from visiting it with Mum: broad and flattish and ringed with faraway hills. Like California’s Central Valley, down to the Toyota dealerships. Further north there are monstrous open-cut coal mines like moonscapes, and huge power stations with cooling towers letting off steam. We talked to Claire for a long time about primary industries, power generation, exporting minerals to China, and importing manufactured goods to the Port of Oakland.
Julia was, perhaps wisely, asleep.
Where numbers of humans are concerned, NSW long-tails like a mother. Sydney has nearly 5 million people – a quarter of all people living in Australia. The next big town we drove through was Muswellbrook, population 10k. Singleton is a little bigger, at around 14k. Scone, where we have stopped for the night, doesn’t crack 5k. Tomorrow we will pass through Tamworth (a metropolis! almost 50k people) to my parents’ tiny town (just over 1000 souls.)
Claire and Julia are bouncing on the beds and watching TV and getting overexcited about room service breakfasts, just as J and I both did when we stayed with our families in identical country motels at exactly those kinds of ages. Continuity.
As we came in to land at Kingsford Smith I saw Wattamolla and the Shire, Kurnell and Botany Bay. For the first time ever flying into Sydney I felt… nothing. No anxious desire to prove that I have turned out well. No satisfaction at feeling I have nothing to prove. I felt nothing at all.
I’d had a similar moment of clarity looking at myself in the plane’s bathroom mirror, and seeing in my granny-glasses and messy bun the little old lady I am going to be. Sydney is just the place I grew up, and I am just Rachel.
Me: Oh my God. Oh my God!
Jeremy: Mmm?
Me: My travelling companion! Is nine years old! She’s the child of my first marriage!
Claire: What?
Me: It’s a song I’ve been singing for about twenty years, and today, for the first time, IT IS TRUE.
J: We’re going to Auckland, Auckland…
EVERYONE ELSE IN THE SECURITY QUEUE smiles and shakes their head.
(In other news: New Zealanders. SO NICE. And the quality of showjumping instruction is excellent. I WANT TO GO TO HERE.)
Kiva and Partners in Health still get four stars on Charity Navigator. Hey! So does Donors Choose!
Why are you not already a card-carrying member of EFF? Everyone who works there is ridiculously funny and charming, they throw the best parties OH AND THEY KEEP SAVING THE INTERNET. So there’s that.
You will receive no tax relief for donating to TB Friends or the Ada Initiative, but you will leave the world better than you found it.
Merry happy! Now I abandon your Northern winters for the pleasures of Southern summers, where Christmas is correct!
Since we last spoke about riding in a frame, I have tried the same technique on Archie and Jackson. (Dudley, Bella, Louie, Archie, Jackson, Mattie, Ruth, Verina, Oliver: why yes, our barn is actually a Montessori preschool in Pacific Heights.) They’re much more difficult than Dudley and harder even than Louie and Bella to get moving off my leg. Dez is right: it takes WAY more leg than you think, and slightly more leg than I actually have. My thighs shake after a serious session at this.
But even with Archie, and more so with Jackson who started the ride completely inverted and did a 180, I managed a few steps of fluid softness. I itch to ride more. The feeling is so extraordinary. The resistance goes away. Freely forward.
When I’ve had enough to drink, I talk about godshatter, an idea I have stolen from Vernor Vinge. I think consciousness is a shard of a mirror, and that our chosen family, our jati (an idea I stole from Kim Stanley Robinson, who stole it from Hindu), is composed of the pieces near us in the jigsaw, so that together we make up a bigger piece of what for the sake of argument let’s call God. (Getting this far takes several drinks.) Obviously I think horses are conscious too. When I ride well, I am part of a bigger and more splendid thing.
Taken all together, that’s what we are. That’s why we love. The idea that we are not all on the same team is the first and most pernicious illusion, but it can be dispelled. (Of course the idea that we ARE all on the same team is another illusion, exploited by the oligarchy for political gain, but that is another ranty for another time.)
This is mainly for my Northern Hemispherical peeps, but in any case:
This was a hard year for so many of the people I love. For two of them, it was the last year. For the luckiest of my personfolk, it’s been a year of often-painful transformation. For others, it was a year of suffering and loss.
I just want to say: it is already over. We have turned the corner. Tomorrow morning the first light of dawn will shine into the 5000-year-old corbel-vaulted room at the heart of Newgrange. (Unless there’s cloud cover. NEVERTHELESS.) Much-longed-for new life is on its way. I will never not miss them, but my Uncle Arthur and Auntie Ruth will have a great-grandchild. Jen will have a grand-niece.
And that is why I love this time of year. This is NOT sentimentality. Nothing supernatural is involved. This is just the winter solstice. It’s physics.
preoccupations