39 Broken gate

Two youngish women were coming to live at number 13. All the men in the valley pretended no interest but listened intently for news. Number 13 had been running down for years. The fences were broken, the gate posts had collapsed and the gate lay on the ground. The water tanks leaked since somebody with a shotgun targeted a nearby kangaroo. Rumour was they paid very little for it.

Neither of them was interested in men. Even Basil couldn’t raise interest. One was an artist, dabbled in pottery and had left a marriage way behind. The other was a teacher. Why did you come, I asked? They told me they were enraptured by the valley and just had to live in it. They loved its colours, moods, aspects, and its wildly swinging weather patterns, but it was still summer. I said it can be tough in winter. They said no problems. All the men were keen to provide assistance in every department. Everybody knows women are quite useless in the bush but surprisingly these ones seemed interested to learn. Consequently with all the willing male hands things went nicely and they were happy. Everybody liked them.

They were taught to split wood for their fire after one of the men, keen to curry favour, had delivered a truck load of quality material. They were lent a pump to move water from the river up the hill to their place and shown how to attach and start it. They were given a TV to help them while away the long evenings. Nothing was too much effort and they responded with enthusiasm and friendship. They bought a couple of sheep with coloured wool so they could spin and do artistic knitting and fixed up a fence with string to keep the sheep corralled.

Interestingly, they didn’t seem to learn the lessons they were taught and designed to help them live comfortably in the bush. They needed lots of demonstrations that gradually petered-out. In response to fading help from neighbours, they progressively down-scaled their lifestyles to avoid the physicality of bush life. Rather than keeping their house warm by building a roaring fire, they piled on more clothes and cuddled up; the wood piles had long since disappeared. They found they couldn’t start the pump down on the river, in part because it always seemed to be dark when they thought of it, so they bought plastic buckets and placed them carefully under their eaves. This became their water supply when it rained and when it didn’t they bought a bottle or two of drinking water in town. They used candles for light and ate meals in town. They had arrived with two cars, but one broke down and couldn’t be repaired. The girls took it in turn to hitch rides. The spinning wheel was still fine but now was unused because the sheep had broken down their flimsy fence and run away. All problems were deftly circumvented and they coped. Moth and rust were ignored.

As time progressed their lives became increasingly green and carbon neural, a beacon for others.

Somehow they faded away until one day they were no longer there. People had different speculations. They had been seen in Bredbo, Cooma, Jindabyne, but always in the distance. Someone else came to live in number 13. They now had their chance to fix the gate. But that’s another story.