The Tree In Changing Light (4 page)

Trees on farms grow from a word being spoken. I took that word from Wilf Crane: ‘Let's do it.' It was as though through friendship with Wilf a hand swept over the acreage and a developing treescape materialised.

I wish there had been longer. But there's never enough time in life or with trees, and letting go is part of what a tree planter does. Practicality was Wilf's motto. ‘You can do everything one hundred percent right with trees,' he would laugh, ‘and still go ninety percent wrong.' All trees were his poetry, but chestnuts in particular. Trees and flight. He died at Bungendore in 1992, when his Volksplane fell out of the sky.

We sold the farm to the Sydney Water Board at the end of the same year. It will form part of an environmental exclusion zone if a projected dam is built. Meanwhile the house is rented and the land is grazed by a neighbouring farmer. The chestnut plantation is there and I want to go back to it when I can, to look at its bareness in winter. I want to be witness to its fuller growth at some time in the future, if the trees haven't been mauled by agisted cattle and if they have survived the marauding of sheep. I want to be there when their leaf-heads burst with green, and form a canopy in the sheltered zone below Conversation Hill.

I am not so sure about the thousands of pines. They were to be my superannuation policy. I had no doubt I would move through the plantation in future years busy with thinning, pruning, and applying a few principles my grandfather might have applied. I was going to use a forester as my guide, but it won't happen that way either. It is not part of the concern of Sydney Water, the new owners, whose charge is to have land in their possession once the final decision is made to build the Welcome Reef Dam on the Shoalhaven River. They have most of the land they need, now, and the rest awaits a political decision. When that happens and the dam is built the high-water mark will creep up Durran Durra Creek and flood the lucerne paddock. The pump shed will go under. The house will be demolished, if any part of it still remains.

I wonder if anyone will tend my trees, or if they will just grow wild and tangled across the former paddocks. Or if, as in an ancient forest, a degree of self-regulation will prevail, and it will be as if the human hand played no part in the organisation of the place.

H
OW IT
happened this time was different from the ways it might have happened before, but when it came, we knew this: it was always coming. The way he grabbed a spade from my hand, and raced up the hillside knocking thistles from the ground and levering up phalaris tussocks, it was coming then; it was coming in the jumble of gear in the back of the station wagon; in the way he wouldn't stop planting trees, even in the dark, especially if it was raining; it was coming in the worn teeth of the pruning saw; in the rattle of the chain saw; in the dribbling herbicide spray; in the dynamite demonstrations from way back; in the not quite out of control paddock of burning tussocks (in the joy of the flames). It was coming in the next beer and the next red wine and the next beefsteak at the campfire; in the sixteen-room bunkhouse he tendered for, ludicrously low, and won, and the expense it was going to be to have it transported away (at least thirty thousand dollars); it was coming in the expandable ninety percent (or was it one hundred percent?) special mortgage he'd got onto, and the beauty of it was, apart from being able to draw on it at any
time, if you used up all your credit, you could go and have your land re-valued, and the mortgage limit would increase proportionately; it was coming in the way he always registered his vehicles in another state (if they were registered at all); it was coming in the accelerated growth of the Super Tree, that promised to blow itself out of the ground, a tribute to con-trolled nutrition; it was coming at the end of phase one of the effluent irrigation project, in the moment of self-sustaining growth when the canopy closed over, meaning that nutrients would have to be pumped somewhere else, because the plantation would have a life of its own then, and there would be no way out of the cycle except to move on to other trees.

It was coming in the closure of every circle and the completion of every meaning in life; it was coming in the slogan he coined for Greening Australia,
Think trees, Grow trees
, it was implicit there—because the tree was the symbol he chose early for himself, and made into a life for himself.

And it was coming in the two aeroplanes he owned, one touchy to fly, the other underpowered for what he wanted it to do; and in the fact that he loved both of them. It was coming in the flight across Bass Strait when I asked him if he wore his life jacket, and he said that Colleen had had hers on, but he didn't wear his, but kept it handy. It was coming on the day he took off at Sassafras and hit the fence at the end of the strip, ruining the propeller and wrecking the wings, and shaking him to the heart, as if, he said, he'd been betrayed by someone he loved. It was coming when the air traffic controller walked into the aero club and saw him sitting in an easy chair, and said, ‘So you're the guy who's been flying the new regulations for the past year before they came in.'

It was coming in the idea of flight as spiritual leap; in the idea of tree as spiritual growth; it was coming in the image of flight and tree combined—in the image of the stumpy red Grumman Lynx taking off from Moorabbin and seeking a way over the Great Dividing Range back to Canberra, its pilot peering over the edge of sleep—over the lip of twenty-four hours in each day, never enough of them—but always getting through, tracking the cliffs of cloud, diverting to Mangalore, flying up over the Murray, following roads at times under low scud, and eventually coming gently down, safely down and certainly down as a settling leaf.

 

It was coming that night when Reg Ffrench watched the TV news, and saw what looked like the plane on the ground, the one that had circled The Elms at eleven-thirty that morning, the pilot hanging from the straps, waving happily. It was him. Accident. One person killed. It had come to him.

There was no way of putting off the news, asking it to go elsewhere. The word came like a known door slamming shut on a shadow. I saw his face. It turned dark in the expression of the word. I saw him leaning back against that door, on the other side of wherever he was. I saw his eyes ringed with tiredness, the shine of his brown eyes, the wild, wiry unsmoothed eyebrows, the kindly half-smile, the dropped shoulder, the voice about to speak, but not speaking, the voice about to say, but not saying. This was the moment when a man is revealed as a spiritual being, when the meaning shoots back through his life, and we know the insufficiencies and wasteful untruths of our own lives in the
waning light of another's, the moment of impossible transformation, of mighty surge as we try to become immortal. I saw the dirt under his fingernails from the planting of his last tree; I saw the blue, stained joggers he'd left by the cooking fire; the saggy trousers, the flannel shirt turning pale in the final obliteration of choice.

I heard him explaining why Norwegians survive in the cold better than other people, because of a trick they have with otherwise unburnable logs, of keeping a triangle of wood apart in proportion. (He knelt on the ground and described this with his hands. ‘A mate and I are patenting firedogs to do just this.') I saw him lift a carburettor from the floor of the old Holden, and tell me about getting a conversion to LPG for free, through an interest-free loan from Boral, conditional on using a minimum of three hundred litres a month (which, he laughingly swore, he would easily). I heard him suggest in a month when all the farmers were shooting their sheep because they couldn't be sold, that each sheep carcass should get its own post-hole, and a tree be planted alongside it, and so what was wasted would cause increase.

I heard his voice at one in the morning: ‘I've rolled the car. It's back about four k's from the end of the bitumen. I've walked a fair way trying every farmhouse along the way, and now I have these lovely people out of bed, they're making me toast and tea, could you come and give us a hand, Alec has a winch on his Toyota, and we'll have the car righted in no time.'

He came tapping on a window pane, in the pitch dark, out there among the spiky oleanders, frightening people as if they had seen a ghost, and making friends for life in the moment (though they would never see him again).

I remember that night—and the strange shower of rain at the road junction where I farewelled him in his righted Holden, asking him if the car (fully loaded), that had got such a jolt as it mounted a bank and came down thump on its side, was roadworthy for the home journey. Was he, who seemed dizzy-drunk from a blow, or shock, okay? He shook his head at the irrelevance of such a question; it had been fumes from a leaky jerry can that had made his attention wander, he said; he needed to be back in Canberra by dawn, there was a spit roast he was putting on for some people, a friend who had done him a kindness one time. The momentum of the man distorted the conventional run of hours, it twisted ways of seeing in the way of a work of art. He was the one who did things for others. He hurled himself at them being helpful. He charged himself up with caffeine and went on. When I got back to the last gate, returning after the car-winching, a vast silvery sphere materialised over the eastern ranges, like a magnesium flare, and I couldn't conceive what it was. It was morning.

Now he is on track from The Elms to Bungendore. Reg has farewelled him. The beautiful small plane with its pilot sitting happily above the wings recedes to a dot, shadowing over the shaley, wombat-riddled gullies of the Tallaganda forest. There is nothing untoward. It is a natural day. It is peaceful on the ground, with Christmas beetles helicoptering into the leaf masses of trees that are like planet spheres in themselves. Reg is back in his shed, pulling down his welding mask, joining metal to metal, fixing truck bodies, making gates, and mending the treads of the dozer that cleared the strip at Tagfor, enabling hair-raising take-offs.

In the sky something is wrong. What is happening in this flight? We need to get angry about this and ask what it is, raise our voices and shout until he hears us in the sky—because time has already begun altering for him up there, and for us down here, and he is parting like a splintering limb in a tree whose growth is not finished yet, and nobody has noticed anything yet. Not even, we have to guess, the doctor at his last flight medical—unless he scorned it, somehow, leaping that obstacle as he leapt so many others, by deciding it wasn't there. (Anything was possible now except the reeling in of time.) From here on in there could be no more connection between us, no more handshake, phone call, beer, mud map, field day, enthusiastic outing or celebration at Smiggins, Tallaganda, Sassafras, or Spring Farm, no more tree planting, gift of a sucker, bucket of fertiliser or two-litre jug of boron supplement left in a grass patch by the roadside for pickup later.

He flies under a bright sky into a darkening tunnel of pain. There is little time. He lands at Bungendore, in the paddock with a windsock and neat white ground markers. This unattended place (and places like it) are the paradises of wandering pilots, of which poetic company he is one. We cannot linger as he looks around, looking for what—a vehicle? A helping hand? There is a wonderful doctor in the town just minutes away by car, why can't someone do something about this? We can only accompany the darkening of his day brutally, with contempt for the images we create to hold him, now, the pictures of never wanting him to fall, of cycles, of inevitabilities and shared patterns and all the echoes of reverie that language breeds and nurses. This is no place for reverie. What we want is a mayday call from the paddock, an ear
splitting yell, where he swings the prop looking white as a ghost, and clambers in for take-off, and there's never a burp or interruption to the smooth rumble of the Volksplane as she climbs, levels off, and looks pretty well trimmed and on track for Canberra.

Where is the hand-held radio, is it out of order? Can we tap him on the shoulder, and say if he feels unwell to get this plane down, shoehorn it in to a side street in front of the doctor's there. Come on, you can do it, it's your style. There is no flight plan, things happen in wild order. Everything stumbles and stops in the narrative of his progress at this point. It is a massive heart attack. The flow of words I am creating around him like a swirl of leaves in a gust of wind is gone. He is gone.

There are things anyone would want him to see and smell. I hope there is a fire somewhere, and the smoke is in his nostrils at the last, making him feel happy; and looking down, I want him to see down through trees.