Dam It

Damn it.

On the Island, things happen when the universe wants them to, and not when you’re trying to get them done.

You may say that this happens everywhere in life – but on KI, when you’re trying to build a house, more so.

We are beside ourselves trying to get Telstra to connect the phone, Andrew to finalise designs for the house, Lawrie to lay concrete, Ron to finish the electricals he started, Luke to get a truck fixed so he can move some rubble.

But yesterday George turned up instead. George has been an islander for about 6 generations, is related to all the other Turners and Bells (and possibly Sheridans and Buicks) who have also been on the island for 6 generations, and he has a 20 ton excavator. Like many other mature-aged, generations-old islanders, he talks slowly, thinks aloud, and is unscrupulously honest.

Having driven past with his excavator to dig a dam at the other end of Gap Rd, he’d noticed we have some piles of dirt in front of our place that we might want flattened. While he’s got his excavator in the area would we like him to flatten them for us, and did we want another dam at all?

We do want another dam. Our current dam, which is a few metres behind the build site, overflows pretty early in winter and is almost dry by the end of summer. It seems like a waste, so we’ve long discussed catching the overflow. George looks at it and says, “Rye grass. You’ve got salt.” So unless we want a salt pan, no second dam. But the dam we have can be made a whole lot deeper and cleaner.

I’m not home for any of this discussion; it’s related to me that afternoon by Stu, who has a tendency to use the word “snot” as a verb to describe the action of an excavator. He suggests I call George back to confirm that yes, we’d like him to “snot” the dirt mound flat, and “snot” out the muck from the dam, and while he’s here, “snot” out a soakage trench for the septic and even “snot” me a small garden bed.

So I call back; snotting is planned for later in the week, though not using that verb with George; and we discuss making the dam bigger. He’s worried because he thinks he’s cut a Telstra cable up the road, which I find inordinately funny in the light of our complete inability to persuade Telstra that it’s possible, and necessary, to get us a landline and ADSL. But that’s another story, too frustrating to blog. Perhaps we should get George to “snot” up another one of their cables just for the fun of it.

George arrives the next day at lunchtime. “Here’s the boss,” he says as I come over – a tried, tested joke that still works every time. He is reticent to shake my hand because his hands are black with grease. I shake his hand anyway.

And within half an hour, the excavator has shuddered its way down Gap Road and up our driveway, and snotted an hour’s worth of hand digging in under a minute for my garden bed; within an hour the dirt mounds are gone; within two hours, the dam is changing shape.

There’s something about excavator work which obliterates your memory of how a landscape used to be. If a tree falls or grows, or a house rises out of a site, the “before” and “after” shots are still accessible in your head. But when a landscape’s reshaped the way an excavator does it, I find I immediately can’t remember what it was like before.

I watch the dirt mounds disappear through the front window because the dust’s blowing my way and I’m holding Poppy. We picked up lots of bits and pieces in a mad rush before the digger arrived, but the collective efforts of chickens, dogs and children in the spread of straw left over from the build mean he’s flattening a treasure-trove of missed bits. I watch helplessly as a slightly battered Tupperware Sandwich Keeper Plus ($28.95) is buried in clay and compacted in. The white clay pile is left intact, because we’re using clay from that pile to render the house.

What I haven’t thought about is the extent to which the boys love the dirt mounds which now no longer exist.

I pick Hamish and Ollie up from the school bus stop at the dusty corner of two dirt roads. They hop off the yellow bus (driven, conveniently, by their daddy) and as we drive back to the farm I tell them (keeping my tone upbeat) that there’s a BIG DIGGER at our house and it’s made the dirt mound flat. There’s a collective wail from two boys. Poppy’s already complaining; school bus pick up has interrupted her second milky afternoon tea. But Ollie’s wail of grief should have a decibel warning attached, and as we bump up the driveway there are three children crying in the back seat.

Ollie is beside himself, a river of snot and tears. His Asperger’s Syndrome seems to be becoming more pronounced at the moment. He isn’t coping with all these changes to routine, and excavator-induced alterations to his landscape make the bottom fall out of his world.

“You’ve broken my whole heart,” he sobs with impressive (but distressing) melodrama. “I want to give that man a big, big, big, big, big, big scold.” He goes to sit on the remaining dirt mound to groan and wail and beat his little chest. There’s nothing I can do. My heart aches.

But by the time Stuart gets home from his bus run there’s a distinct lack of wailing from the mound. “Hello, Daddy!” calls Ollie. “I LOVE what that man made for us. It’s a desert, and look! The white cliffs of Dover!”

At twilight the digger stops and Ollie runs across the mud by the dam shouting to George, “I love what you’ve done to the dirt mounds! It’s the white cliffs of Dover!”

The next day, George enlarges the dam, scooping up great splotches of wet clay like plasticine in Bob the Builder, and splattering them on the top of the bank. He carefully digs down past the current depth, leaving a little wall of clay to hold the water where it is.

The boys’ raft floats idly, metres from the digging.

I made the raft this time last year from a palette and a whole lot of old distilled water bottles. We launched the vessel, labelled in texta by Hamish the “Titanik Minee Raft”, in the far from distilled sludge of the dam.

It’s since voyaged the dam thousands of times, pulled by a rope, rowed with ineffectual child-made oars, or blown around by the wind. Even Charlie the kelpie likes to swim out and ride it around. The boys haven’t used it much lately because the dragonfly nymphs creep out of the water onto it, shed their skin and fly away, leaving a creepy-looking, translucent bug shells attached to the coarse timber. Also because the dam is seriously sludgy at the moment, and rafting inevitably involves a swim, whether inadvertent or deliberate.

So as I watch George break his little dam wall and allow the grey-brown water to tumble into the deeper dam extension, I hope against hope that the Titanik Minee Raft survives. And it does, riding the great khaki wave like the paddle boat in Fitzcarraldo (unforgettable movie.)

When George finishes, the dam looks just the same only bigger and deeper and with less grass. It feels a bit like an optical illusion. Same landscape, same dam, but all somehow on a slightly more epic scale. It feels like I’ve shrunk rather than the dam’s grown.

I hope our frogs have survived. As evening falls and I write this post, I find myself listening hopefully to the ringing of crickets in our beautiful farmland silence. I’m waiting for the resonant creak that tells me that there's at least one frog that hasn’t been snotted along with the dam banks and the dirt mounds.

Where to start

I’m sitting in the middle back seat of a four wheel drive, going along a dirt road we don’t usually travel.

To my left in a baby seat is a little girl who’s seven weeks old. The vigorous corrugations on the road are making her cheek fat wobble and she reacts to the potholes by spreading out her tiny toes. She’s sleeping, with a little frown and pursed lips.

On my right, and leaning into me precariously, is a five year old boy with a sweaty mop of blonde hair, one sandal and ninety-six mosquito bites (not including the eight on his face). The unwieldy lean into my armpit is because he “wants mummy time”. He’s on his way into a warm doze too, but with more of a gape than a frown.

The front passenger seat’s taken up by a young red kelpie, and a border collie with alarmingly pale blue eyes. They’re jostling for position; if Charlie the kelpie lounges, Diesel has to stand; if Diesel relaxes, Charlie is perched in her toes on a tiny postage stamp of seat. She periodically falls asleep standing up with her head hanging, then collapses onto the handbrake.

My husband is driving, fully aware of the comical nature of his passenger load.

The road is unfamiliar because we’re doing a detour around a bushfire which is still smouldering along the tree-lined verges of our usual route. And I’m in the back because little Poppy was squalling as we left, which turned out to be because she was tired, so two kilometres of vigorously hand-expressing breast milk into a bottle to feed her on the road wasn’t needed after all. And the dogs aren’t in the back because there are groceries there, and dogs eat groceries. Diesel has fallen asleep in disgust, with his head lolling under the dashboard and his body on the seat. We’re running two hours late for dinner at Mum’s, a heinous crime when Ollie’s bedtime is two hours after dinner.

Actually, we’re staying at Mum’s, because of a domino effect of causalities, at the centre of which is the fact that the house which we intended to have built by sometime in 2011 is, in early 2013, a levelled site. The shed, however, is about a fortnight away from being habitable; so we hope to move in in a couple of days, gaping walls and waterless kitchen notwithstanding. There is a toilet. All will be well.

This scenario has led me to believe that we’re eccentric enough for me to need to start a blog. Perhaps to justify the unconventional situations in which we find ourselves; perhaps so later, we can remember; or perhaps to give other people the opportunity to laugh at us as much as we laugh at ourselves.

I am 38, large-ish, and I have two sons, a baby girl, three dogs, a cat, ten chickens and gallstones. Stuart is 6 feet of energy, commitment and slight eccentricity, and has the same white-blue eyes as the dog. Early on in our relationship we worked out we could do far more together than either of us could do apart – no, wait, we could do more as a pair than the sum of what each of us could do… this is getting unwieldy. Suffice to say we discovered neither of us could live with the ordinary, and neither of us could see any good reason not to follow paths of ridiculous audacity and financial recklessness. This spirit of adventure has landed us on 206 acres of breathtaking Kangaroo Island hillside, with three children, three dogs, a cat, ten chickens and an almost completed straw bale shed.

The dogs sit up and look with herding-dog eagerness out the window as we enter my parents’ road. Charlie pricks one ear – the other ear tries to prick, but has a rakish fold. “Are you looking for playmates?” asks my husband. “Hoppy bouncy playmates?” As roos scatter in front of the car, her muscles quiver and she puts her paws on the dash. At least this time she doesn’t try to run through the windscreen.

It’s hard to know when this journey started. In 2010, when I was idly scanning realestate.com and I came across a sweet little acreage just out of Kingscote, and the idea of giving up on Adelaide and moving to the island first occurred to us? Later that year, when after re-applying for my own beloved teaching position and failing to win it, the decision was sealed and we made an offer on a far bigger and wilder 206 acres of land in the hills south of Emu Bay? Or did it begin way back in 1998 when my parents, holidaying on the island, spotted their own 130 acres of heaven on the banks of Pelican Lagoon, and started our extended family’s step by step migration south?

The heavily corrugated road winds through farmland and scrub. Half way along, an old piece of asbestos is propped against a rock, painted with a faintly aggressive SLOW DOWN. We’ve always wanted to follow that up with another plank saying RELAX but we’ve never got around to it. We’re supposed to SLOW DOWN for the benefit of the kangaroos, whole families of them, who turn and look at the car, and if it’s too close, turn and hop away, usually in completely the wrong direction so you end up panicking them as you chase them up the track. After some close-set coastal scrub, the road reaches a hilltop and with the kind of view of the lagoon which at this time of evening is so beautiful it leaves you short of breath, you enter Mum and Dad’s driveway. The house’s skillion rising out of Mum’s garden 800 metres away on the hillside, a valley forested with 12 years of revegetation, the shell-grit beach where Stu and I were married, and the island-dotted lagoon reflecting the peach-coloured sky.

It’s no wonder we got tired of Adelaide.

Dinner is reheated. Hamish, 7 years old and a depressingly talented talker about inconsequential topics, has been showered and pyjamad by Mum. He is as always is very loud and full of information about storm troopers and droids and the millennium falcon. He and his 5 year old brother Ollie immediately begin to fight over a lego light sabre, an inch of plastic that can cause intra-familial world war three. Little Poppy wants a feed, my milk supply is struggling to keep up with her growth spurt, and Dad is already being tasked with the dishes although we’re still trying to eat. And the sun is setting magnificently over a vista of lagoon.

Tomorrow at dawn my parents are flying out - evacuating and leaving the house to us. But it’s 40 minutes drive (and about $20 of petrol) to school for the kids, or to our farm and the building work that needs to be done; and it’s about an hour away from the spot where the yellow school bus that Stu drives each morning is parked at the end of its run. We can’t sustain this. So insects, heat and lack of running water notwithstanding, we’re on the verge of moving into our unfinished straw bale shed.