Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
When the River Died
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
When the river died, its bones ran through a wasteland of our making. House-boats rested on crusts of salt, torched where they lay or stripped to the framework. Weather-beaten jetties jutted over dead ground, stretching for the water that they could never touch again.
And out in the middle of the cracked salty jags, a thin ribbon of red. Still water, tainted with algal blooms and two centuries of superphosphate. All that was left of the mighty Murray River, an artery that once carried steamboats by the hundred, a Nile that flooded and receded as it wished, coating the plains with thick, healthy loam.
When the river died, the pelicans left, and they never came back. If they found fish somewhere else, no-one knows about it.
All that was left of Australia’s fruit bowl, mile on mile of orange groves and vineyards, now dead sticks in dust and waving in the hot winds. Irrigation pipes led down to the salty muck, thick-throated and ultimately thirsty.
When the river died, it killed a hundred towns. Grand old hotels, rotting hulks that were witness to the empty, dusty streets. Cars without the fuel to run them left junked, burnt out. Rows of quaint country shops stood silent, the windows smashed and the doors broken or gone.
The only man left in each town was the statue of the lone Anzac, features nearly worn blank from the acid rain. Most of these stone soldiers faced the river, the old lifeblood, and perhaps it was a kindness that their eyes were worn smooth. “Lest we Forget” each slouch-hatted figure exhorted us, but they’ve been long abandoned. Nothing left but these ghost-soldiers to defend the dead places.
When the river died the arcologies were born, great spires of steel and glass, hiding the children and grandchildren of the evacuees from the murderous sun. A million of these pasty folk, living in a fluorescent hell with each other’s stink, praying that the desal plants will work for one more day.
But if you were to leave that crowded place, and knew the signs, the ways to strain the briny water through ash and stone, you could survive. If you figured on a method to trap the tough little creatures that come out at night, and knew which of the bitter succulants were safe to eat, a whole continent could be yours.
When the river died, a soft nation was finished, but a tough new land was born.
Passage
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Lanterns on a line, dipping low enough to the water that we have to either hug the warehouse wall (with its windows of deeper night where the moon can’t get) or the crumbled concrete shore of the plaza (with its scorched memorials that remind us of too much). Rena tells me to choose which side tonight.
I can’t decide in time; we wind up in the middle. Rena lifts the electric line with the oar while Powell and I paddle with our hands. Slow passage while heat lightning vibrates behind the clouds. Powell doesn’t look at me. He hasn’t hesitated when he got to choose.
Goosebumps up the back of my arms, a chill like a pinch on the back of my neck: we’re in. We don’t paddle, just let the current tug us on. It might not work, might be another wasted night. Only two nights left of the week we paid Rena for.
She clatters around under the woodslat seat, comes up with a cassette tape, plastic case yellow as antique ivory. Clicks it into the openface player, slaps play. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” echoes tiny off the ranks of basalt going up on either side of the water like steps or arena rows. All the tapes in Rena’s shoebox squeak and warble; all are singers who knew what death would take them. We hope to ride some echo of their courage.
We wait.
We wait.
Scaramouche.
Scaramouche.
And the fog does part, and we do go through, into open water, where the moon is like a low ceiling, its reflection like a shivering floor. Night inverts to day and we’re back where we started, but we’re back years before the end.
We climb up uncrumbled stairs to an unruined plaza. Within six hours, one of us will melt like fog back into our future, our life after all this is gone. The other will just melt to nothing, to nowhere.
I look at the stranger crowd, the stores, the shining cars. It’s been twenty years since ice cream.
Behind me a splash, shouts.
Rena drags herself out of the water. Powell oars away.
“I’ll get the boat back,” she says. “I’ll wait for him. If I’m not here, you wait.”
She pulls a soaked roll of old money from her pocket. “Meanwhile, I’m going shopping. Want anything?”
I try to remember which flavor was my favorite.