The S-Bend

NORTH TO THE S-BEND

'Hang on. Not right now,”

the father said, as the S-Bend neared.

The quiet white lines and glinting reflective pickets splayed wider apart. Dead ahead, no lights shone at the S-Bend Roadhouse, and a feathery drizzle fell.

The road curved like a bow and slowed to 90 kilometres an hour – it swung in towards the Roadhouse, and then, gracefully loped away from it. A truck's headlights slowed and curved to mirror them on the other side of the southern S-Bend. Each driver seemed courteously aware of the other's hope to not die on the road tonight.

“It's gonna cause some dramas one day, though – mark my words” the son said.

The father ignored him, and slowly spoke;

“I always slow down here. It can be a real worry at the best of times, particularly if they're speeding on the other side of the road.”

They passed the old farmhouse on the left of the highway, tracing around the silent swoop of the northern S-Bend, then sped up again when the road straightened northward across the Greenough flats.

“Yeah, too true. Me too”, the son said.

They both pondered how much water might be beneath the bridge. Both men knew they could not see that water in the darkness – much less stop to have a good look at it – and stoically, neither man mentioned the matter.

On the quiet, straight road, the son said;

“Anyway, though, it depends who owns it. Who's steering the thing.”

On the quiet, straight road, the father said;

“The rich will.”

The father had been reading a book, and a most unusual clarity had built from this. It was a history book about Ned Kelly. The father had begun reading it quite accidentally, and it was a thicker volume that anything he'd yet read in his 71 years of life.

Yesterday, as the son cooked their breakfast, they had discussed the Selectors, and Squatters, and Settlers. Neither man understood these things confidently, but the father – much to his unspoken pleasure – now had a better faculty on these things than his son did.

As the eggs fried, the father had patiently delineated the matter. Settlers owned the land. Squatters didn't own the land, but ran it for business – and, discounting their pride, the Selectors who clawed income from the Squatters' lands were often worse off than townsfolk scrabbling at the margins of livelihood.

“Once they have something to hang on to, they fight with tooth and nail to hang onto it”, the father said, and spoke faster as he grew surer of himself.

“Something gets into them - it makes them greedier, the more they have. That’s how it’s always been. You'd have a very hard time ever changing that.”

The new bridge over the Greenough River approached. The hum of the road thinned and loudened as the ground's gentle incline heightened onto struts that grew higher and higher, over a riverbed that last week was dry, but was now expecting water.

The purple night raced by after the bridge, as it had before the bridge. 

The son said;

“They tend to, but they know – and they know much better than we do - that they'll never be a majority. We will always have the numbers, anywhere this whole world over.”

Bare paddocks studded the dark horizons. The son had heard that these fields had once produced two crops a year - and many years before the son was born, the father had seen the last of those colossal harvests.

Nine months of drought – culminating in a new heat record just shy of 50 degrees Celsius - had starved and brittled the Earth. But since the men had been in Perth, seven days of rain had flooded the gullies around Geraldton, and both men wished that the sun were shining, and they were assessing the awakening Earth.

Some farmers had planted seed in time to catch the rain. Some farmers had thought it too risky to buy seed, when the germinating rains were so unprecedentedly late in coming.

The son spoke;   

“When there are no jobs, and no tax coming in for the hospitals, and there are millions of people who need a minimum wage, something must change. There'll either be a nationalisation of this technology, so that we share the savings, and the profits - or it'll go the other way.”

The old Greenough Hamlet passed. The Settler graveyard passed, as the father gathered his thoughts.

“Well, in the Ned Kelly book, all of the old owners of the land, and the rich people, they were all in Parliament, or they were related to people in Parliament. Or they knew people in Parliament. So they just made the laws that suited them, and everyone else did what they could with what they had. Maybe it'll be like that for you,” the father said, between where the West Bank road turned, and where the Settlers had massacred the Ngaaguja people.

The son bristled, and breathlessly blurted out;

“It's hard enough to make a living, and not many of us musos do make a living from it. It's not even that though. It's the sheer bloody inhumanity of it. No suffering or effort goes into it – no soul. The computer just spits it out. It's not a craft. It's slop. It’s not right.”

“Well maybe, but I just remember the internet coming out. We could have never thought that you could do all of that - just sitting at home! Nobody thought you'd have all of that just sitting at your fingertips. This new stuff might be the same. It's too early to tell”

the father said, and in the back seat, a black, swan-like neck rose.

Devlin Pool passed, and as they slowed where the mobile speed camera always sat, an unmistakable sound tapped, and flapped, and The Dachshund thrashed his long, thin ears from side to side.

“It's early for him to be stirring”, the son said. “We can't even see the silos yet.”

Through the hollow of Rudd's Gully, the men smiled their separate smiles. The Dachshund was a sacred thing to them. If The Dachshund was happy, their own sad or pointless moods became much smaller things - and if The Dachshund was upset, their own powerlessness over fate was made smaller by doing what they could to make The Dachshund happy again.

And as the hill plateaued, and streetlights swelled over the dunes, and the old wheat silos took up their familiar positions on the horizon, the men turned their separate thoughts towards coming home, and towards sorry business that would soon have them returning to Perth.

SOUTH OF THE S-BEND

“I've never seen that before. Never seen anything even like it. The Arrowsmith never has water in it. Never. It certainly never breaks its banks,” the son said quietly, as the downpour on the Tarago roof grew louder.

“Once in a hundred years, they reckon it floods. Like the Hill River near Cervantes. That's what they said when we were building that bridge. That's why we built the bridge. It would have been 1976, or 1977”, the father said.

The rains thinned enough to allow some visibility, and both men saw land they could scarcely recognise. The ploughed paddocks had become messes of boggy, brown ravines, and the fallow lands glinted with innumerable deep puddles that flickered with the constant disturbance of raindrops.

The terrible dryness of the banksia and the heath-scrub, however, had not been reprieved. The rains, prodigious as they had been, had come too late to save most of them – or, as the son had just read, to help the critically endangered Carnaby’s Cockatoos that fed on them. The jagged, spiny banksia leaves were bleached to a dull grey; their sodden trunks were ponderously black. Thunder rumbled to the south, and the men carefully continued on their slow, southward trip.

A seagull whinny in the back seat - and the shove of a wet nose into the son's dangling wrist - signalled that The Dachshund felt he had something to contribute. The son looked down into bright eyes, and obligingly lowered his palm to scoop The Dachshund up by his breastbone as pudgy tan feet trampled into mid-air, searching for the son's lap.

The Dachshund pressed his long beak into the window, smudging his familiar trails upon it, while the son pulled back the loose skin around his ears, and rubbed the creature's head absent-mindedly.

“The cockies must be spewing. All of that seed, all water-logged and rotting in the ground. At least, where the hail didn't kill it quicker”, the son said.

“Well, they would be, but they're used to it. They're used to fighting things they can't control. Maybe it'll be a better year next year,” the father said.

Specks of the sky had suddenly opened, and around the straight, wet road, chunks of the country glowed in a muted orange that clashed boldly with the increasingly black horizon they were driving into.

“Some things are matters of God – for want of a better word – and some things are within our control. They can't do much about the weather”, the son said, as The Dachshund's toenails dug curtly into his forearm and thigh.

The Dachshund was transfixed. Huge dark pillars loomed over him, and whizzing shapes caught in the twin mirrors of his eyes, danced rapidly, and then were gone. Like every trip in the car, everything around The Dachshund was wonderfully new - but in that precise moment, this day felt more special than any other day he had known. For the warm car, and the even voices, and the exciting sounds of the sky, made him feel enormously filled with life, and with the need to feel and see and smell everything that he didn't yet know about. The Dachshund puffed his gums with air, and flapped his cheeks, and his stubby feet trampled insistently on the son’s arm.

“It's definitely changing, and getting hotter, but you're still too young to know how it's always been a mystery. It's a wild card. The weather can give a good season, or they’ll have a bad season which ruins everything. It's human actions that are making all these towns shrink and die,” the father said, and continued - 

“You know, your Mum could remember when Mullewa was almost as big as Geraldton. She used to talk about it sometimes. Maybe you remember.”

After a quiet, appreciative pause, the son said;

“Yep. I suppose that back in Nan's day, Arrino and Tenindewa and all of those places were bigger too. They were once full-blown towns, that's what I've heard.”

“Well, I never saw that – that was all before I got here. But it used to be that a lot more people lived on the land. You know, labourers and shearers and stuff, but more than that, there were just a lot more farms back then. Hundreds of little farms, where people actually lived. Enough people to make places like Isseka worth having a school at. Not like now. Just a few big farms now, owned by people who might never have even seen the place,” the father said, and The Dachshund sagely sighed, as though in reluctant affirmation.

“It reminds me of Grapes Of Wrath”, the son said, and the father said nothing for a little while. For he had not read The Grapes Of Wrath – only the Ned Kelly book - and after some thought on how this might prove relevant, he said;

“I suppose it's agri-business now, not so much a matter of communities. Like in the Ned Kelly book. How the Selectors kept buying out smaller farmers, so that they owned all of the land. Same kind of thing, I suppose. Less people on the land.”

A sly smirk stole over the son's face, as he replied; 

“Yeah, well, they reckon this AI stuff is going to help the farmers. Drones for sussing out where the weeds are. Drones for spraying. Self-driving machinery. That's bound to be a positive for these towns, isn't it? For whoever's actually left on the land, I mean. Like you said, maybe it'll be a good thing. We'll just have to wait and see ay?”

And so, in this manner, Eneabba hurtled by the Dachshund's eager eyes, though what thoughts he might have had were kept to himself.

The son thought of his mother. “Blink and you'll miss it” was her description of Eneabba. She'd had a keen sense of humour, one that was simultaneously dorky and dry. He missed her dearly, and felt her absence in the pit of his stomach after this fleeting recollection had passed.

 The father thought of work he'd done at Eneabba - before the son was born, when the mineral sands mine had been in full swing, and before the town had slowly burned out.

Before they’d passed the Lake Indoon turn-off, this tranquillity was suddenly – and very violently – broken by an onslaught of hail.

The men had read about hail down here - but even after Geraldton's recent inundation, neither man had seen hail since the son was a child. Both men shot bolt-upright in their seats as the father slowed the car dramatically, and from ancient impulse, scanned the windscreen for rocks flicking up from the road that might ordinarily produce such sounds.

“That's - Christ, that's hail!”, the son almost shrieked, as The Dachshund recoiled in alarm from a string of short, sharp cracks overhead.

“It must be. We need to find some cover”, the father boomed above the intensifying din on the car roof.   

And so it was, after a spread of tense, unspeaking kilometres that felt like both a year and a minute, they pulled into Warradarge Roadhouse.

Mercifully, the hail had just stopped. However, as both men got out of the car to inspect the damage, a new and deeply dreadful noise met them.

There was squealing in the wind, and there was death on the Earth.

It took several heartbeats for either man to understand what they were perceiving. The high, thin keening whistles and wails that echoed over each-other in their dozens – the fluttering splotches of writhing, smashed things that were black and white and red, and seemed to both reach desperately towards them, and uselessly try to burrow away from the men into the icy coffee-rock.

“Jesus. They're cockatoos, Dad. They're Carnabys” the son said softly, and stepped closer.

A River Red Gum the soaked birds had used as shelter from the ferocious hail was freshly split down the middle by lightning strike. One huge limb crushed the dead banksia-scrub beneath it, and crushed cockatoos lucky enough to be killed outright in the calamity.

Spread in a halo beneath the other half of the tree, the agony of the birds continued, and the son – who, to his chagrin, had always been given to crying easily – started to weep as he trod amongst them.

“They’re - they're suffering. Oh, what do we DO? We can't leave them like this!” he yelped, in strains that rang strangely with a wild, aimless anger. 

The father came up behind his son, and awkwardly put his wide, brown hand on the son's shoulder. He’d never been an emotionally expressive person. It was only very recently – after his ex-wife had died, and his son had found her body – that he'd first told his son that he loved him. Just that morning before their drive south - for funeral business neither had wanted to discuss - he had asked for advice from his son on how to, likewise, let his daughters in Perth know that he loved them. His son's advice had been to treat them more like how he treated The Dachshund, and they had both laughed.

“We have to leave them. We have to let somebody know, who can come and save any that are still alive,” the father said, as the son bent down to pick up the nearest battered black body.

“But they're hurting! This one looks alright. Look, it's little more than a chick – it's still moulting. Oh, you poor thing. You poor bloody thing” the son sobbed, hugging the screeching bird to his chest.

The frightened, bedraggled creature then began to make its baby sounds. It cried, and gurgled, and cried, and gurgled – the effect was eerily similar to a human infant crying for food – in bursts it had once made to its parents when hungry, and the son instinctively cradled and rocked the wailing bird.   

“Take that one then, and we'll call for help. We'll tell the Roadhouse. We'll tell the people in Badgingarra. You can ring DPaW. We have to keep moving though. We can't miss the funeral,” the father said gently, and turned back for the Tarago.

In the back seat of the car, The Dachshund's huge feelings had swelled and spilled over, so that he was shaking like jelly from ten thousand thoughts when the son approached with the ugly, yowling cockatoo in his arms.

The father was about to sound caution - for The Dachshund was infamous for savaging Bobtails, mice and anything else foolish enough to be smaller than he was - when something enormously unexpected happened.

The Dachshund craned out his head, and licked the bird's neck.

The cockatoo stopped crying, and The Dachshund stopped shaking as he licked it again – tenderly, gently, with a deliberate and soothing slowness.

“Well, that's bizarre. Maybe he knows something that we don't” the father murmured, as the son delicately lowered the bird onto the seat. The Dachshund protectively encircled the cockatoo with his long, shiny body, and lay his head with great benevolence upon its wet, feathery back.

And as the car re-commenced its voyage, The Dachshund's mind was very present, and concentrated on new, fatherly thoughts of love - of nurturing, rather than being nurtured.

The son thought about the future, and the father thought about the past, and the hail did not fall again.