Manna in the Adelaide Hills

The acoustics in our house are fabulous.  Last night Mr Tabubil put on his favorite album - Yanni Live at the Acropolis.  I was in the bathroom, washing my hands and the music washed into the room, lapping and eddying around me in big booming waves of sound.  My feet started tapping and danced me out the door.  Mr Tabubil met me in the living room and caught my hands and we danced a whirling jig around the room and down the hallway and around the house.  Connoisseurs might sniff at Yanni for lacking subtlety and sophistication, but how can you argue with a sound like that?  It's one long sustained shout of happiness!

My parent-in-law are walking the Heysen Trail - twelve hundred kilometers of bush track across the bottom of South Australia. The trail begins down near Victor Harbor, first running along the coast, and gradually sweeping  inland through the Adelaide Hills and up into the Flinders Ranges.  They are walking in it in stages.  They started last year at Cape Jervis, below Victor Harbor, and they are now climbing Mount Lofty, east of Adelaide.

This past weekend Mr Tabubil and I drove down to the city for the weekend to bring up our cache of packing boxes.  On the Saturday, Mr and Mrs Tabubil-in-law took advantage of our being in town to walk a stage of the trail, and a arranged a rendez-vous in the hills.  We would meet them at the end of their day's walk at a cosy hotel* for bowls of hot coffee, and drive them back to where they had parked their car at the starting point of their walk.

We drove up into the hills through a wet fall-colored afternoon: deep green, shot through with sprays of scarlet and rust-red and purple.  We found our hotel on the lip of a hanging valley that looked down over the city. The hotel was part and parcel with the afternoon: warm and fuggy inside, smelling of coffee and wood fires, with crooked floors that squeaked and boomed hollowly under folds of rucked up carpet - it wanted to fold you up in its arms and hold you there all evening, while you drank soup and ate apricot crumble and watched the lights wink on in the city below.

But Mr and Mrs Tabubil-in-law weren't there.  The Heysen Trail official map book had the trail marked wrongly - so we bundled back into our little silver car and headed out through the slant afternoon sun to a new rendezvous, and waited for them at a trail-head at the top of another green valley rimmed with fir plantations and rhododendron bushes. Below us, horses cropped at the grass and we stood and watched the shadows spread across the bowl of the valley and felt the sun set behind the fir trees.  I wished that his parents would be very late - so that I could eat and drink the evening until I was full - manna after the red desert soil of home!

Far too soon (but far too late if you were the ones walking) they appeared in the twilight.  We drove them back to their car that they'd parked at the beginning of their stage, and then wound slowly back down into the city.

Before we drove home on Sunday, we paid a visit to Stepney's Salvage - that mad shop next door to the Adelaide ice rink, with the life size Marilyn Monroe and the twice-life size Uncle Sam leering from the front window. 
The place is an Aladdin's treasure cave of salvage. The front door is a yawning cavern rimmed with not-quite rococo trompe l'eol paintings of Grecian columns. Passing beneath, you tread down a long sloping passage lined with enormous gilt pier mirrors and mounted buffalo heads and second empire consoles with marble tops and delicate inlay mosaic on the drawers. 
Deep underground, the roof soars, cathedral-like: it must, to accommodate the thirty-foot fiberglass great white shark and the five meter pterodactyl that hang from the middle of the ceiling.  Shafts of light from dusty clerestory windows light up a truly horrible limestone fountain five meters high (four tiers of lions, dolphins, cherubs and gryphons) that towers over piles of porcelain hip baths and plaster pineapple pot-plant-stands and -  oddly out of scale - a job lot of mis-painted garden gnomes.

We tend to lose ourselves in the side aisles - and behind a maze of cupboards (behind the cigar-store Indians and the matched sets of arched church doorways- with original stained glass doors and windows still in place) we found a pantry cupboard- THE pantry cupboard of a lifetime.  It is made of a couple of castle doors, with iron strapping and lion head knockers and when you open it, a sepulchral groan that sounds like forgotten tombs.  It is magnificent. 

We can't help but imagine....
"Would our unexpected guest like a cup of tea?"
"Why yes!"
"Grooooaaannnnnnn...."
and the uninvited guest runs quivering into the night.....

I covet.


*An Australian Hotel is a pub.  And generally, a restaurant.  It does not necessarily have hotel rooms.  And if it does, they are probably right above the Karaoke machine.

Drowning in the Blue

We have bought Avatar on BluRay. We popped it into the player this evening, and only twenty minutes in, I am reluctantly forced to face facts:  this movie is completely idiotic.

In the theatre I was seduced by all the 3D pretty, but on the small screen, where the all the gorgeous bioluminescent travel journalism doesn't loom so large over the writing, the movie was suddenly EXACTLY like that boy back in college who had the most INTENSE eyes -

You know the guy.  His eyes looked right THROUGH you, and when he stared deep into your own basic hazel specs he saw right into your SOUL and you just melted.  Positively melted.

And then, four night later, over dinner at Subway, the restaurant he picked out specially for this big date because it had the best cuisine in North America, you found out that he thought Thomas Kinkaide was the world's greatest artist and that Jim Carey was the greatest comedian in the history of cinema - particularly in his seminal work, Ace Ventura Pet Detective.  And he absolutely LOVED being on this date with you because wasn't it COOL to be dating someone foreign - Australia, right?  That's not even in Massachusetts!

And as he leaned in to kiss you over the remains of your tuna melt, you looked into those magical  eyes and you realized, with dawning horror, that there was nothing behind them looking back at you.  Just air.  And you knew inside your soul that there was never going to be a third date; there might not even be the remains of this second date because as he kissed you, you felt nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

That's what Avatar is like.  With even worse dialogue.

Australian Horror Story

An Australian horror story:

Mum was perusing the main floor of David Jones (an Australian department store) when behind her, she heard a woman yell.  She turned  and saw a petite Korean woman revving up a bad case of screaming hysterics.  It was quite clear why. A huge, black spider - about two and a half inches across, with a fat juicy abdomen the size and shape of a large pulsating grape, had delicately picked its way out of her purse and was walking across the counter. 
            "Kill it!" the lady screamed.  "My God, Kill It!"
            The strapping Australian male behind the counter turned to Mum and said "May I borrow your sandal, Madam?"  Mum gave him her sandal, and he squashed the horror flat with her shoe.
            The spider was dead but the hysterics didn't stop - the poor woman was in mortal terror of her handbag. She begged the man to go through it for her looking for more spider.
            Nothing doing.  Nuh, huh.  Mr Virile Australian Male was scared stiff.
            If it'd been Mum or I, we'd probably have run to the nearest ladies room and emptied the bag out all over the floor and picked things up afterward, but this lady wasn't exactly in a thoughtful frame of mind.
            Mum suggested that the woman look to her wallet - that was the top item in the purse, and the spider seemed to have come from that direction -
                        Very gingerly, the woman picked up her wallet - and across the front of it was stretched a thick mat of white webbing.
            Slowly, the woman turned the wallet over.  The other side of it had become a densely woven spider nest.
            "Three days I've been in this country! Three days! I used that purse last night!"
            The screaming moved into a higher gear, and telling the story, Mum shrugged helplessly.             "There wasn't anything I could do, so I left.  She could see the eggs."

The Alternative

Our new home in Whyalla might have been a construction disaster, but it could have been so much worse.  The new houses haven't caught up with the ancient rent-a-wrecks just yet.  Our friend J arrived in town during the worst of the rental crisis, and found herself a two-bedroom bungalow at the east end of town.  So, okay, ants were parading in through wide cracks in the walls and the bathroom was thirty-years overdue for a good scrub-up (or a bonfire, choose your poison) but it had all the necessary bits, yeah?
            Mostly.  Her front door didn't have a lock, so her first night in the place she locked herself into her bedroom, just in case. In the morning, she climbed out of bed, walked over to the door, turned the door lock - and the door handle fell off in her hand. She was locked in.  Her cell phone was on the other side of the door, and she was reluctant to holler out to her neighbors at six-thirty in the morning.
"Were you worried?" I asked her.
J shrugged.  "I was a little bit worried at first, but I looked around my room and noticed that the window had fallen out.  So I climbed out that way and walked around to the front door in my pajamas."

Spiders Redux

The exterminator was only a stopgap measure. We quickly learned that any spider intrepid enough to make it past the film of diatomaceous earth on the outside walls would be welcomed by our house with cries of "Doors are open, Darlings! Last one inside's a Daddy-Long-Legs!"
            Example: Last night we took out the rubbish and met a very large Redback with a very large egg sac in a very new web strung right across the laundry door.  We watched it scuttle into a wide crack between the door frame and the brick wall that should have been filled with grouting - but wasn't.  
             The construction of this house is not exactly quite up to reasonable par - or building code. Big city developers are buying up old housing trust homes, knocking them down and putting up rows of cookie-cutter ranch houses on sub-divided lots the size of domestic postage stamps.  They're doing it fast and cheap and lousy.  Our house is only eighteen months old, but our walls are full of cracks, our corners are no longer quite square, and the grout and window seals never seem to have happened at all.  Door are hung off plumb and let the desert in as creeping dunes of red sand. The insulation in the roof is made out of crumpled cotton wool and sea-mist, and when you open the windows, they fall right out of the frames and into your arms.
            It's really something. Last week our friend the Architect and his fiancée Zoe drove up from Adelaide to spend a weekend with us in Whyalla.  Bouncing out of the car, the Architect hugged me absently and bellowed "Bloody Hell!  It's like someone hit copy+paste all the way along your street!"
            We gave them the grand tour. We pointed out the hole in the soffit over the front door- where a builder had tried stuffing paint-stirring sticks into the gap and forgotten about them half-way through the job.  We let them open windows and giggled politely when their arms suddenly became unexpectedly full of window panes.  We pointed out our budget sized portico, with the Grand Column twenty seven inches from the front door and the Unitex Dado Rail stapled to the wall.              
            We even showed them the big banana - the party trick. Our garage has three doors - a door from the kitchen and a roller door on both ends: one to the street and one to the back yard, so that the garage can double as a shed and an entertainment space on wet or hot days. It is all very functional and sensibly planned out - except for one teeny tiny design flaw: the kitchen door is placed exactly underneath the backyard-side roller door, and when that roller door rolls up, the roll extends twelve inches out over the door to the kitchen and barricades it shut.  An easy mistake to make and a deadly one never to fix - twelve inches of lazy CAD design by some remote office boffin brainlessly dropping CAD blocks into model space, and a builder that didn't care enough to make it right.
            And once the Architect had done guffawing, we showed him the twelve inches of eave overhanging the north façade. All of the other stuff is small stuff.  Amusing sound bites to show off  to guests.   We laugh at it and it gives the house the personality that shiny new houses that are built right take years to earn.
            What is genuinely infuriating is the house's terrible environmental design.  In the middle of the desert, in a climate of climbing energy costs, rising energy pollution and massive private and public focus on sustainable building design, our roof is black, our north façade is pure window with no overhang and the windows and doors, far from being sealed and double-glazed, are quadruple-vented and drafted and gusted at every seam.            
            Our house is fairly representative of the contemporary mass-produced domestic design and building technology in this town.  It seems about as cynically inefficient as it is possible to contemplate.  Under that black roof, our cream-puff and vapor insulation is more or less useless.  One of our wedding presents was an indoor-outdoor weather station.  Careful observation has established that at 25 degrees centigrade, the internal and external temperatures equalize.  They rise steadily together until the outside temperature reaches 32 degrees C, at which point the inside temperature begins to rise faster than the outside temperature and the house turns into a Turkish bath.   In high summer, with the air conditioners going full-bore, we have struggle to keep the inside temperature under 30 degrees C.
            We spend most of the summer subsisting on popsicles and ice-cream sticks and cucumber salads.
            On the flip side, this house is a fantastic case study in the value of really good environmental design.  I am writing this in our study - the eave-less, window-lined ex-main bedroom on the North side of the house. We are having a cool week and the main part of the house is pleasantly chill.  But it is a lovely sunny morning and in the two hours since the sun came out the study has become so hot that I am sweating rivers in a tank top and boxer shorts, while the spins fast enough to raise whirlwinds.  I am about to move out and go set up my computer on the dining table, where bare arms raise goose bumps and I can shunt the bulk of my personal energy budget from gasping and sweating to thinking.


*Mr Tabubil won our private side bet. 
            I said Not even the Architect.  
            He said You wait and See.
            And Sure Enough, as the Architect entered the city limits, he made a phone call.
            "What is your address, by the way?  I've just realized it never occurred to me to actually ask you where you live.  Reckon I should have thought of that a few hundred kilometers ago, eh?"
            And two minutes after that, we received another call mentioning apologetically that he hadn't brought a street map, so could we possibly offer a few directions? 
            This was complicated.  Our town doesn't have street signs (there are a few, painted on the kerb in letters two inches high, but they're hard to see in daylight and completely invisible after dark) so they drove around town aimlessly until they found a hotel with a name visible on the front and we talked them in.
            I paid up.  

Along a Lonely Road

Spiders

When we first moved to Whyalla, our house was plagued by spiders.  Redback webs* covered the outside walls like tatty lace curtains, and mama redback spiders sat in the window tracks laying down egg-sacs like strings of sea grapes. Inside the house, there were Great Big Black Spiders with abdomens like ripe plums. When you entered the kitchen you'd see them scuttle across the floor and flatten out under the fridge like they'd been cross-bred with cockroaches. They were in the bathroom.  They were in the bedrooms. They were in the closets. They were, god help us, in the cracks between the cushions on the chairs.              
            More seasoned heads told us, in superior tones, that that these big black things are not, for a strictly limited definition of poisonous, actively lethal.  Unless you are pregnant, weigh less than sixty pounds, have a compromised immune system or are Canadian.
            If you are a Canadian, it's not the venom, it's the psychological shock.  Canadians do not do well with Bugs. When we lived in Toronto, we spent a fair bit of our free time in the comedy club scene. The city has some good clubs, and there's a huge range of comedians that pass through, and whoever the comic, or whatever his style, the biggest laugh that a Canadian comic will get all night is the one that happens right after he talks about the Great Outdoors.
The jokes go like this:
            "I was out camping last weekend, and I saw a bug!"
            Gales of laughter. 
            "No kidding, eh?  It was thiiiiis big."  He holds his hands about three inches apart and the Canadians in the audience will roar and slapped their thighs and roll their heads from side to side with hilarity.
            "It was sooo big, I saw a shadow!"
            And the Canadians fall out of their chairs sideways because they're laughing too hard to breathe.**

Back in Whyalla, our first real breaking point was when, less than a day after we'd set up the furniture, Mr Tabubil found a redback building a web among the television cables under the TV cabinet. The web was a solid and substantial piece of real-estate, indicating permanence and long-term planning- the sort of brick-and-mortar edifice for which you're prepared to stump up a 60 year mortgage, then move in to bring up all your children.
            Mr Tabubil hollered. "Where's the Raid?"
            "Why?"
            "There is a redback underneath the television and he's looking back at me and I don't like the way he looks at me and he's gonna die."
            Half a can of Raid later, even Mr Tabubil could safely admit it was definitely dead, but the living room was uninhabitable. He claimed that opening a window would dilute the potency of the gas.
            We began to spend our evenings with the can of poison gas underneath our elbows and things went from worse to worser. I'd lift a pile of laundry from the basket to dump into the washing machine and a big black eight-legged grape would scuttle shamefacedly out of the sleeve of a shirt.
            Mr Tabubil would pick up a pile of clean and folded laundry to put into the closet and he'd find another spider making a run for it from the bottom-most pair of underpants. 
            But the absolute, ultimate straw was when Mr Tabubil put on his trousers one morning and a juicy black thing the size of a 50 cent coin made a high-speed getaway down his right leg.
            We are city folks. We make no truck or peace or treaty with nature when it's got eight legs and a venomous overbite. We called the exterminators.

*For my North-American friends: imagine a black widow spider with a big red cross on its back and a bite that makes your North-American venom feel like the soft furry nuzzle of a newborn puppy.

**To be perfectly fair to Mr Tabubil, when my Australian Mum and Dad moved to Vancouver two years ago, Mum had to deal with a few small issues of her own.
            A week or two after they arrived, a friend of theirs came to town to care for his brother in law, who had been mauled by a bear while out in the woods doing a survey inspection along a power line.  Mum reacted sensibly. She took Dad out to buy a high-riding station wagon that could double as an armored personnel carrier. A few days later I had a phone call from Dad, sounding oddly diffident.
            "Hi Tabubilgirl."
            "How you doing?"
            "We're in a sports store."
            "Mmm?"
            "Your Mother wants to buy a bear kit."
            "A bear kit?"
            "It's for when we go hiking."
            "Mum hikes?"
            "You know what I mean" Dad said impatiently. "For emerging from the car, walking gently in the mountains, that sort of thing."
            "So what's in a bear kit?"  I asked.  "Pepper spray?"
            I heard a gusty sigh. "There's a bell that you tinkle all the time when you walk so the bear can hear you coming.  Not sure of the logic of that. He might think it's a delivery bell. There's pepper spray for when he decides you are the menu and wants to season the dish.  There's a water bottle. For you. Not for the bear. There's your basic hiking stick that can double as a club or a spear for when he decides the pepper spray is a seasoning. There's a flare gun to scare him off when he decides the hiking stick's a toothpick - "
            There was a clanking sound in the background.
            "What's that?"
            "I think that's the Howitzer…."