Road

 

I can’t tell you how happy I am to share with driving companions views of morning light across miles of ocean below cliffs where the Road rounds new corners beyond inlets and indents; light that shines and flashes across water otherwise a wintry grey when a break in suspended raincloud lights up also towering inclines of towering eucalypts to something clearly green. It defies description, effortless or not, the workmen in thermals constructing the new bridge over Wye River at the Road, the birdlife through the trees, their clean distinctions of plumage, surprise showing of kangaroo or koala, a dog and his human doing two-step with the waves, despite all my (our) intensive and most imaginative efforts with English. Words cannot express the pleasure of seeing a fallen tree trunk long since cut into sections till only the base remains, resting after years at a Roadside creek crossing where moisture and rot cause grass and small flowers to sprout in abundance, reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Great Piece of Turf’, albeit near a sign warning that I am located at an Otways Weed Hotspot. Just as I cannot start to say how much of an effect there is when noticing the remains of the Christmas Day bushfire amidst regrowth nine years later, the whitened trunks and blackened stumps on hillsides deluged by so much green, the extensive earthworks on public land and private shoring up and stabilising the collateral erosion brought on by fire and exposure. Words cannot do justice, watercolour whatever, to the shy first buds of winter, new bends of fern like bass clefs at the base line, or even the casualties of blackberry spraying; and, given that, how can I possibly express (or anyone) in encyclopaedic, minute detail the character of birdsong, the Roadmap home without thinking “That’s one way”, and again, “Funny, that!” Countless efforts have been made to describe raindrops almost without notice beginning to land on decking, pathways, Road before increasing in force and suddenly landing in white torrential extremes, rising water streaming in floods wherever gravity sends the rushing downpours, but how many of the countless efforts are remembered hours or days later? I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am in the midst of creation finding the words, quickly or reflectively, plainly or reflexively, to key the Road into the window of light later, a page of language surfing in crests of cursives and dependings before gone again undertowed back into the mysterious depths of language; happy even at its hairiest, the hairpin changes of metaphor. The stories have never been told that are being enacted at windows of light on the riverside hills and above the ocean and Road now night silently falls, such dialogues as would captivate could they ever be turned into living fragments of theatre, as I lower the blinds on our windows of light to keep in the heat and keep out the cold and the solstice passes in reading and sleep.