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| Wine and fire. Photo by Lily Mason |
I am standing around the fire pit we made, next to Birches Creek at a little reserve 8kms from Clunes. It’s dark. I’m leaning on a shovel, watching the remains of our campfire. I rake the coals. They flicker and glow in ripples as the breeze washes over them.
Above me, the stars are a vast blanket. Individual stars are bright, sure, but the infinite cloud of stars that makes up the Milky Way trails across the sky like dense grey smoke.
*
The Newstead Rd road slopes gently upwards, giving us a view back towards the west and the approaching storm. The bitumen is still warm, even now, two hours after sunset. We sit on it, wary of trucks coming over the hill behind us. The night air is calm but full of energy. Lightning flashes, miles away. Clouds are illuminated, forks of energy spit and arc. Like paparazzi flash-bulbs, lightning pops and strikes every few seconds. This display lasts maybe half an hour, marching closer, but we still feel safe; it still feels “far away”. Then there is a rush of wind. It comes gushing up the hill, as if the air is running in front of the clouds, being pushed along. Is it marching or fleeing? The temperature drops. Then the rain starts. We run inside and suddenly the night is loud. Thunder. Rain hammering on the tin roof.
*
Chaos theory was invented by mathematicians trying to explain the pattern of a dripping tap. Trying to find the formula for the subtly irritating, not-quite-perfect rhythm of its plink plink plink on the basin.
I lie in bed. The shower is dripping. I wait. Each plop of each drop is perfectly expected but always jarring. I get up and twist the tap a half-turn tighter, thinking maybe I should change the washer.
*
Tides follow the rules of twelfths. Wave height is predictably related to the size of the swell and the depth of the water. Plants spiral and branch in accordance with Fibonacci’s sequence. “With enough information we can understand.”
*
I’ve heard it said - I’ve even said it - that the best way to ruin your enjoyment of something is to study it. To study literature is to make reading a chore; to study film is to make it impossible to enjoy cinema; and the best way to ruin a joke is to have to explain it.
*
The giant delta of the Nile, seen from above, looks the same as the tiny rivers, channels, canyons and deltas made on the beach as the tide flows out.
When I first started studying paddling, I was introduced to a new vocabulary: eddies, currents, stoppers, holes, boil lines, V’s, horizon lines, strainers, pillow waves, haystacks, smiling, frowning, recirculating, all providing information about opportunities and threats, places to aim for or stay away from. Suddenly, in a weekend, what had been incomprehensible became something I could read. A trickle running down a gutter follows the same rules as the brown gush down a flood-swollen creek, so I read everything I could, watched and talked to it as if I was trying to learn its language.
So now I can’t remember how it was to look at a river and see an unintelligible mess of white foam and blue-grey, water and rocks and tree-lined dirt. And yet, the scale still holds. At my level of magnification, I still can’t say exactly where any one drop is going to be in five seconds time. I am still bewildered and amazed and transfixed.
*
The history of fertilizer is, in my opinion, incredible. The years of the guano traders were full of slavery, suffering, violence and horror. Scientists discovered oceans of nitrogen in the atmosphere and during the race to get to it they used waterfall-powered turbines to create lightning, then atmospheres of heat and pressure. When Haber solved the puzzle and Bosch scaled it up to mass-production, it meant supply lines to guano didn’t need to be defended, so WWI could start. Then, at the end of WWII, the US had mountains of it left over, fertilizer being the civilian form of ammunition, so they dumped it on farmers and the green revolution took another giant leap.
At the same time, Rudolph Steiner was divining the secrets of the moon and burying cows horns, stirring secret recipes in copper drums, first this way, then that way. And grass was growing around ancient poles in ways that only make sense if you think of grass as being fed by magnetic energy. A mushroom plant is the biggest plant in the world, despite being only one cell thick in some places, its mycelium more fragile than a nerve.
I’m looking at the garden, confused and a little paralyzed by my thin half-knowledge, but the garden itself is in some ways simple. A row of plants. Soil. Rain. Sunshine. The radishes came up first. The carrots hadn’t come on when we left, but they were there. Onions and garlic and potatoes were hiding in another bed. Lettuce were just about ready to eat and the broad beans were thick and leafy.
*
A thin layer of the obvious rests in a broad mulch of all the stuff I don’t understand. I sit in my confusion and watch growth happen. I watch fire lick, clouds roll, water trickle and waves curl and crash, and there is something hugely calming about it all. I cannot grasp the cosmos. I can’t explain it so, fuck it, I allow myself to be awe-struck.
I stir the coals, watch the flicker, and think of water, sand, air, light and life. And nothing much. Confusion ain’t so bad.
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