After the Fire

I’m calling this series of posts  After the Fire, although that’s not strictly true. The fires are still burning, and will continue to devour vast swathes of this country, probably for some months yet. For me, it’s a month since fire consumed much of my home town and I’m trying hard to untangle the maelstrom of disordered thoughts drumming inside my head, to make sense of the awfulness. Is such a reflection therapeutic? That remains to be seen. I just know that it’s something I need to do -  to set down some sort of record of my own experience of this life-changing event. Anyway, here goes...

After the Fire - Part 1

This time exactly a month ago I was on a plane home from Perth. I’d spent Christmas with my grown-up kids. As I boarded the flight in Perth, Mallacoota was foremost in my mind. Huge bushfires had been consuming the east coast of Australia for many weeks. A warning for all tourists to leave East Gippsland had been published the previous day. A notification came through, as I caught a ferry across the Swan River, that a fast-moving fire had begun at Wingan, and that the Princes Highway was closed. Too late to leave Mallacoota, it had said. The next day I began my journey “home”- to Mallacoota.

I changed flights in Melbourne under an apocalyptic sky. While I waited to board, the VicEmergency app on my phone beeped. The Wingan fire was expected to impact Mallacoota between 5-6pm. The Genoa-Mallacoota Road had been closed. Mallacoota, at the far end of that road, had been cut off. I sat alone at the airport, sweltering in failed air-con, crying helplessly.

My wonderful friend Jane collected me from Canberra airport with news I already knew: “You can’t go home tomorrow”.

My house is on the Genoa-Mallacoota Road, a couple of kilometres outside town. My next door neighbour sent me a text before she evacuated – what did I want her to do with my chooks? We decided putting them in the house would be best – a place of last resort. Thank you, neighbour – the fact that you even thought of Sybil and Tibbs while you were preparing to leave your own home still amazes me and makes me teary.

The next morning – New Years Eve – I woke early after a night of broken sleep, knowing that my friends and neighbours had probably slept far less, if at all. How the hell do you get to sleep when you know that a monstrous fire is heading straight for you, devouring everything in its path - and that there’s no escape?

The ABC coverage of events on the TV, up and down the south coast of NSW and across the border into East Gippsland, was terrifying, compelling viewing. The fire still hadn’t impacted Mallacoota, but it was bearing down on my home town as “thousands huddled on the beach”, ringed by firefighters determined to save lives first, and whatever they could save of my small, beautiful, remote town, nestled in the bushland by the sea, next.

The world knows how events unfolded, so I don’t need to repeat them. What I can tell you is how I felt, watching and listening to the voices of friends and neighbours being interviewed, hearing that the morning sky had turned blacker than night, that “the sirens just went off”,  that people were preparing to jump into the water if necessary.

There was a knot of anxiety in my chest. I found it hard to draw in a deep breath. I didn’t want to watch or listen, but I couldn’t not. I should’ve been there. I was glad not to be there. I was watching a bigger picture than those in Mallacoota were watching, but from a distance. All they knew was what was right in front of them and coming for them, what they could see and hear and smell and feel. I felt grateful, but oh so guilty for feeling grateful. My imagination will never be able to grasp the reality of that terror, but I can understand every little bit of the helplessness they felt.

What I had in common with those who were there was a sense that my world had changed forever. Like them, I didn’t know whether my house was still there. I was certain that my poor cats had been incinerated in the boarding kennels at Genoa, a beautiful bushland setting where I’d left them 8 days earlier. I imagined their final terrifying moments over and over, the loop playing in my head refusing to be shut off.

It was devastating.

All Thumbs as a New Year Begins

Last year I was sick - so sick that New Year came and went and I'd forgotten to make any resolutions - I was jubilant! At the time I said:

Resolutions are a yearly reminder of my total inability to stick with anything that might improve me as a person. Annually I resolve to be tidier, to lose weight, to exercise, to save more and to drink less - and annually I don't do any of these things. My resolve lasts anything from 10 minutes to about 3 weeks before I inevitably slide back into my shambolic lifestyle, a glass of red in hand and my feet up on the coffee table. If I bother to remove my bike boots I'll notice there are holes in my socks - and I won't even care.

No such nifty resolution-avoiding excuses this year - I am disgustingly healthy - but I decided to be sparing with my resolutions anyway, in the hope I might actually keep them. I ended up making just one - but it turned out to be the wrong one.

'Worry Less', I said.

It should've been Cook Less.

Why? Well.... after the excesses of this holiday season I have regained a little of the blubber I lost in my '7kgs competition' with my mate Lucy, down at the Fun Factory. But that's not why I should've resolved to cook less.

In order to kick-start the return to weight loss competitiveness, and to clean out my system after all those daiquiris and barbecued sausages I decided to make a giant pot of that

fabulous
fat-burning
fart-making
detoxing
delicious
super duper
special cabbage soup - and that was the problem.

I knew I should've resolved to cook less.

Cooking is a health hazard. The knife slipped as I was chopping the cabbage and I sliced into the tip of my thumb, through skin and nail, and I don't even know how deeply I cut coz it looks gross and I didn't want to be poking about at it with all that blood running out anyway. I couldn't see any bits of thumb in the pile of chopped cabbage, though - and I didn't even bleed on the cabbage, so the soup was safe!

I rinsed it and rinsed it and poured iodine over it (my thumb, not the cabbage) and it didn't make me scream, so I figured it wasn't as bad as it looked, didn't warrant a trip to the emergency room with something nasty in a bag of ice, and would probably be ok.

See? I'm already worrying less!

Happy New Year!
PS The soup is delicious - look out, Lucy - I'm going to kick butt in the 7kg comp!
PPS My thumb hurts.

Ambling Irresolutely into 09

I have had about 50 New Year's eves in my life. Some of them have been memorable. There have been - in no special order of importance, frequency or chronological correctness - drunken frolics, wild parties, city celebrations, quiet nights at home, abstemiously pregnant early nights, kisses, misses, broken resolutions, falling asleep on public transport nights, arguments about driving too fast, and once even a looong walk home in fancy dress after being thrown out of the car by the person whose too-fast driving I had complained about. That one was kind of embarrassing. Even more embarrassing was the fact that I still went through with the wedding, even after such humiliation. I should've known better...

Then there was the night that was supposed to bring in the much talked-about y2K disaster... what a fizzer that was, although I must confess to a certain amount of relief. I watched the New Year's eve telecasts from around the world, and when the New Zealand one didn't go dead at their stroke of midnight, two hours ahead of Canberra's, I went into the garage and looked at my understocked y2K cupboard with a faint sneer.

"I knew it wouldn't happen all along," I said to fourteen tins of baked beans and a packet of celery seeds.

There was no fanfare this year. Just aches and pains, lots of green stuff and a killer sore throat. I spent the entire day and night of New Year's eve in my bed, moaning and groaning and being woken occasionally by the arrival of cheery text messages from hordes of other people who weren't being misery gutses and wallowing in their own mucous. Eeeew, now there's a mental picture!

This morning, as the aches and pains and the tide of snot recede, I remember that I forgot, in my enfeebled state, to make any New Year's resolutions. This is immensely cheering.

Resolutions are a yearly reminder of my total inability to stick with anything that might improve me as a person. Annually I resolve to be tidier, to lose weight, to exercise, to save more and to drink less - and annually I don't do any of these things. My resolve lasts anything from 10 minutes to about 3 weeks before I inevitably slide back into my shambolic lifestyle, a glass of red in hand and my feet up on the coffee table. If I bother to remove my bike boots I'll notice there are holes in my socks - and I won't even care.

So.... this year I may have missed the fun, but I've also avoided the failure! Wheeeeeeeeee! Now.... out to the bike shed to wish The Bomber a Happy New Year and to decide where to ride my messy flabby badly dressed (but contented) self to today?