Ditches

John and I wake, once again this antipodean spring, in a scraggly grove of young gum trees. The small trees are patiently peeling their bark skins and scattering them over the sandy soil. There is also a multitude of sticks, just your ordinary twigs which lost their moorings. And many fire-darkened tree stumplets, small and hard to see in the brush. The sky is flat and hard to see through the glare, and the air smells of eucalyptus perfume. There may also be some spring flowers, the joker card of tourist brochures which herald their profuse seasonal blossomness in Western Australia but they are so well hidden in all this brushy stickiness it takes an overwhelming faith in remote possibilities to drag our cameras out.

When it comes to such abiding faith in spite of all indications to the contrary, John just shines and grows to be eight foot tall. Maybe taller. He extracts his tripod, puts together an intricate combination of a lens, a tilt and only John knows what else, and goes to work in the nearest ditch. And unless there is a pronounced reason to stop, he may continue his quest for a long time. He can, I know, also drop it all if need be, grab any camera and run to capture something happening NOW. But this is what most photographers can do, including myself, and it is his intense focus on possibilities and the stubborn pursuit of them which often takes my breath away.

Once he gets intrigued by his idea of a picture, John can stand riveted to one place for hours. If the flowers are too widely spaced, he may just bring them gently together and persuade them to stay put. If their planes of focus differ too much to render them all sharp, he takes many exposures and combine them. If the light goes all to hell, he waits for it to improve. If he needs to pee, he ignores it.

It is different for me. I need clear impulses, visual upheavals, sudden prompts of emotions and naked jolts of beauty or drama. I need nature to speak to me and not the other way around. Speak, damn you. Yell, if need be. Drag me out and into this dry, sticky and thoroughly nondescript place, and I may switch into my usual photographic mode: driven, careless, and prone to mistakes. I just need a glimmer of hidden surprises and my adrenaline will surge and do its erratic best.

Right now I am ashamed of my passive wait: all I have to do is kick myself into our well practiced "ditch" mode. We are both good at stopping along an un-busy ribbon of a road to explore its ditch riches. A leaf here, a rock there. A clump of ferns over yonder. And once, a lone hitchhiker.

So I go and sniff around; good dog. More broken sticks. More hidden flowers. More bushy plants made of grey dust. Nothing. But wait! What are these corrugated balls, as hard as iron? I touch them and try to figure their biological function. 

Giant seed pouches, as in tree testicles? Hidden fruit for jaws made of titanium? To investigate further, I try to twist one of them off, then another, but they seem welded to the branches they grow on, and the branches (I do try to break one, too) are as hard as marble. Iron, titanium, marble? What the hell?

And I suddenly remember an Aboriginal painting at the National Art Gallery in Canberra we saw recently with John's nephew, Dave. Textures, dust and lines. Points. Dry dry dry. Both the painting and these hard orbs emerge straight from nature and share the same unforgiving hardness and its mystery.

Eventually we leave our scraggly sticks and near a coastal lake we spot paper bark tea trees dangling over calm water. Named Melaleuca quinquenerviain Latin, they have thinly layered trunks and pale paper-thin bark peeling like mad, neatly stacked and ironed by time.

Like this, maybe?

We drive down to the coast to the place called Little Beach. We first saw it nine years ago after another photographer directed us this way, and at that time it was infused with light and color. But today is overcast and dull, and the usual aquamarine sea is dark and nearly flat.

I walk and discover a narrow gap between giant boulders and a white sand pocket which will vanish once the tide comes in. The sea will fill this space with its powerful milky presence of many bubbles. Only the rocks will stick out, darkly.

Like this?

© Yva Momatiuk

always look ahead

Graham -- all 6'-5" of his lean tanned self -- is striding toward us across the short dry grass. We hug him, then Rel. We have not seen him or her, John's first cousin and his wife, for eight years, but he does not waste time.

"You must know it right away and then we do not need to talk about it," he says. "When you walk around here, always look six or eight feet ahead of you. Do not just walk and look up at a bird: stop first, look at the ground, and then at your bird. Never the other way around."

Queensland, Australia, has been baking in high temps for some days now, piling them on top of several years of hard drought. But this is September and early spring, and even here in semi-tropics most snakes should be hibernating just a bit longer.  Yet they are not.  And -- according to Graham and Rel -- they are all out by now, driven out of their dens and tree hollows by heat. Hungry and active. Aggressive.

"Let me tell you what you do when you meet one," Graham continues. "You stop. Then you reach, very slowly, for your hat. Take it off and toss it between you and the snake. Not at the snake; this will only annoy him. Toss it on the ground between you and him. He will concentrate on your hat, and you back off. Slowly."

Got it. But what about their dogs? We already know they have two, Billie Jean and Roger. Do the dogs just walk, too, and stop and look?  No: they run. And Rel, who talked to a local vet after they settled on this hilltop two years ago, knows that one day the dogs may also run out of luck.

To double check, I ask if all local snakes are venomous and turns out they are, except for some pythons and tree snakes. And if I want their names, common and otherwise, Graham is ready with a list of the species which frequent his short grass yard and his and Rel's flower and veg gardens. There is Death alder with its stubby tail, and glossy Small-eyed snake, and pretty Red-naped snake, and aggressive and ever ready Tiger snake, and deadly Coastal taipan, and Red-bellied black snake, and Eastern brown snake and Rough-scaled snake. The last one is nocturnal which is not very helpful if you want to stroll around after the heat releases its grip and the stars nail the night sky.

I love snakes and want to hold one who will love me back just a little. Hard call: the best I can hope for is a Carpet python which resides at a nearby reptile oasis and can be handled. We pile in the new shiny family ute with Rel at the wheel, and drive a mile down the road. For her, Graham and John, this is purely a friendly gesture to please one crazy Pole.

The snake I am allowed to hold -- named Joe -- has already eaten and is used to crazy people. He is long and thick, with pronounced olive markings, longitudinal stripes and a cream belly. And he feels like a lovely cold compress around my neck. I imagine he may -- in return -- like the high temps of my overheated body. I stand in the shimmering shade of a wattle tree, smell his smooth scales and feel his head slithering back and forth across my left shoulder blade. I let him slither as long as he likes.

And then we drive home across dusty groves of avocado, macadamia nut and mango trees, greet the dogs, open a bunch of passionfruit globes full of sun, and wait for the night.

©Yva Momatiuk