Eventually I had places to go and had to head home. On the way back I thought about how hard it is to find my centre and then stay there in the face of external pressures. That place where I’m mentally settled. Calm and able to cope with whatever is thrown at me by family, friends and horses without being drawn into the drama. Biting the hook. Meditation seems to help and so does lowering my expectations. I find it very hard to do.
The places I had to go were Trial Bay Gaol, north of here on the coast, with mum, Noah, Rob and Sue. A family outing with a picnic – the best kind. To get there we drove through flat floodplains with houses and sheds raised up on mounds to protect them from the seasonal floods. Emma has been writing to me from Pennsylvania, telling tales of big, old, beautiful barns and Amish communities and for some reason it helped me look at the farms as we passed by with different eyes. They probably weren’t as beautiful as the Amish farms but there was a definite charm to some of the old wooden farmhouses, silos and sheds.
Trial Bay Gaol is perched on a granite headland by the sea, with hazy blue hills stretching far up the coast to the north. It was a warm day so we had our picnic in the shade next to the beach. Beautiful. After lunch Noah and I went down to the sand and made a sand turtle while the adults did whatever it is that adults do. We drove up to the gaol entrance, on the way stopping when we saw whales out to sea, blowholes and breaching, migrating south.
The gaol was both good and bad. I’ve never been to a gaol without feeling sad for the people incarcerated in them. But this one was quite beautiful. It was the stonework I think – hard, local, granite carved into rough blocks that showed off both the texture and composition of the stone. I had an interesting time with Noah, explaining what a gaol is.
On the way home I knew we would be passing very close to a confluence point, the intersection between lines of longitude and latitude. There’s crazy people in the world who go to these places, record their journeys and post them on the Degree Confluence Project Website. People like Emma and me. I like confluence points because they are like a global transect, giving a snapshot of what our planet is really like, without just concentrating on the picturesque, the dramatic or the stunning. A bit like that quality of meditation where you give up expectations and accept what is.
So with a bemused crew and GPS in hand we headed towards Gladstone, driving slowly, making turns in response to the GPS numbers climbing and falling, getting ever closer to 31S 153E. Eventually we were right on the latitude and just needed a right turn so we could gain the few extra hundred metres to the east we needed. And there it was, Fairweathers Lane. A little country lane through low-lying cow paddocks. We drove down for about half a kilometre until we were as close as we were going to get in the car. It was just starting to get dark, mainly due to the storm clouds, building and throwing big bolts of lightning. I jumped the fence and walked the last hundred metres, through the mud, across a swale drain, and amongst the cows. Hooray! Hopefully it will be posted here soon.
In Gladstone I chased up a lead for some Indian Runner ducks. I can get other ducks but Indian Runners are just so very cute, and cute is worth paying attention to. My contact is just incubating some eggs now so I think I’ll be heading back that way again in a few months. I’m sure Emma will be jealous that I’ve been confluence pointing without her and will be keen to go and see it. As we finally headed home it began to rain – gentle, hard and then hail. Ice piled up on the sides of the road like snow; hail the size of macadamia nuts bashing the car.
“I’m grateful that we stopped and see the whales.”
(Confused? Look)
No comments:
Post a Comment