The Valley of Vision

The drive home, once I’d nervously said goodbye and accepted Lee’s kind gift of a jar of blackberry jam, was like no other I’ve experienced. I’ve driven the tracks and roads out in those hills countless times but never in such a state of terror and bewilderment.

I drove flat out from Rennie’s gun-metal gates until I got off the Poorool saddles and back onto the Dray Road. What kind of cruel twist of destiny was it that had landed me in this situation? I had to wonder. If I said no to Rennie, there was no telling what he might do, but if I said yes then the whole concept of my hotel would be rendered a fraud. I’d be standing there poker-faced behind the bar while the rest of my friends were innocently drinking XXXX and thinking it was The Dancing Brolga Ale. And by the look of how many full pallets there were in Rennie’s storage shed, that situation would last for quite a while. What’s more, although Greg Beer was a prude and a terrible wowser, I had no interest in becoming the puppet-master at the crossroads of his life. Frankly I didn’t want that much influence over anyone’s life. Live and let live: that was my motto. All I really wanted was to sit on the old lichened ironstones out the back of the Bootleg Creek and paint some blue air, have a bit of ham and tabouli for lunch and see if I could get the atmos just right.

I really couldn’t see how any of it was any fault of my own, except that my seeing the play-acting brolga in the bush had made me susceptible. So, was it just my imagination that had got me into all this trouble? Was it pure sentiment? Well, hardly. I’d also been bloody stupid enough to take on a bloke who needed to live behind high security out at Poorool as my beer supplier. Sure he was local, no matter how recent, and so was the grog – or so we thought – but in the end it was just dumb. And the fact that his relationship with Lee had come to have anything to do with me was debilitating. I felt like a bream who’s just been swimming along minding his own business in the river until suddenly whack, he’s got a shiny steel hook in his mouth, and someone’s pulling him towards the surface of the water. If he tries to swim the other way, he’s gonna rip his own face apart, but if he just lets it all happen pretty soon he’s gonna be drowning in oxygen. Yeah, that’s how I felt as I bumped along in the Brumby on my way back to town.

I cursed Rennie, Greg Beer, even Lee. And in the end I cursed my own hopeful visions. I could’ve cried. Right there on the Dray Road, I could’ve cried a whole pondful of tears, but I didn’t. Instead I laughed. I laughed as hard as any kookaburra but maniacally, tearing along the tree-lined road in Kooka’s bespoke Brumby, with the windows down and the wind whistling wildly.

The animals hiding in the roadside trees must have watched stunned as I sped by. By the shallow dam at Termite Junction a man and his young son sitting with yabby-strings in the water nearly got cleaned up as I tore around the bend. They scattered like dotterels at a skiffle-board, only narrowly escaping disaster. By the time I passed the Birdsong Quarry and got up onto Mexico Bend, my laughter was finally stalling into a pathetic series of chuckles.

I came round the fox-coloured bend and saw my home valley laid out in front of me – the green flats, the ridges on either side, the golden headland, the dune hummock, the eel of a river winding seaward to the mouth. It looked so lovely in the gentle December sunshine that immediately I was touched and my laughter disappeared. For the umpteenth time I realised that the perfect scale and beauty of this little valley was my deepest luck, my brightest joy, my most profound inspiration. Its gentle figurative truth had always been the measure by which I compared myself and my actions.

And so it came to me, clean as a fish, what I should do. I pulled over to the side of the road and switched off the engine.

The madness was over. The day went still. I began to cry. I wept long and silent. My tears were the size of dewdrops and they tasted like the sea.