And a Moth Flew Out – by Helena Kadmos
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITINGWhat showering outdoors is teaching me about my place in the pandemic
At the bottom of my garden steps is a tap. I check that the valve to the sprinkler hose is closed, and that the one to the other hose is open. I turn on the tap and follow that hose to a hidey-hole behind a green plastic water tank that’s taller than I am. This is the shadiest spot in the garden. There are numerous fruit trees and small natives in my back yard, but these are staggered down a sloping suburban block. So I overlook canopy, but rarely stand under it. Here, in a one-metre strip between the tank and the grey, corrugated fence, a mature feijoa and a tall cottonwood stand just two metres apart, their wrestling branches forming a dome of alternating leaves. An old polyester shower curtain is threaded onto a blue rope stretching from one of the cottonwood branches to the section of pipe that empties into the tank. It was discarded from the bathroom years ago and has since served as a drop-cloth; dollops of paint blend with the original pattern. I pull the curtain along the rope, creating a room that’s open at either end. I undress and drape my shorts and T-shirt over the water pipe. There is a concrete slab under my feet, and all around it is a layer of blue metal that stretches to the fence and the base of the trunks. I reach toward a long-handled sprinkler wired to the cottonwood. I press its trigger and a cold jet of water hits me in the face. I have to stay my position to flick the trigger’s lock; only then can I turn my back to the water. I take deep, slow breaths to stop myself from shuddering in the cold, and within seconds my body settles. I pull my shoulders down and draw the blades together; my physio has instructed me to do this at every opportunity. I tilt my head backwards to receive the force of the jet and gaze into the lattice of the interlocking branches above – a ceiling of black and blue mosaic. I breathe. My feet connect with the slab, my toes feel around for grains of dirt and reach out to embrace a fallen blossom.
“My feet connect with the slab, my toes feel around for grains of dirt and reach out to embrace a fallen blossom.”
*
The shower was a present for my husband. He’d adopted the practice of starting each day in cold water, which he felt improved his energy, mood and attention. But as the weather warmed through the seasons, the bathroom shower had less impact, and he’d been dissatisfied with it for some time. He seemed grumpier. Still, I didn’t make the shower because I felt responsible for his mood. I made it because it struck me as a gift he might like.
I found a spare hose in the shed, ran it to the tree, attached it to a sprinkler head. When we wanted to use it, we had to detach the regular garden hose from the back tap. We’d turn on the hose and the sprinkler would burst immediately – the water running while we undressed, and continuing while we dried and ran back to the tap.
Those first few goes were fun, and reminded me of dancing under the sprinkler with my brothers and sisters. Friends came for dinner and I dragged them away from conversations about the pandemic, borders and vaccines, to lead them down behind the tank. I don’t think the sight of a sprinkler in a tree impressed as much as I thought it would. They didn’t see what I saw.
The shade, the spray, the slab called to me at every moment. I was as excited about the possibilities for me as for my husband. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
*
I was finally on holiday, pottering around the house in that gentle week between Christmas and New Year. The air seemed thick with fear of the pandemic, the border, the heat. I tried to keep that behind me by focusing on minutiae in the garden. Plants struggled in the impenetrable clay of the Perth hills in what was to become the state’s hottest summer. I moved pots from sunnier to shadier spots. I weeded. I gathered grass clippings to spread as mulch. I trimmed dying branches. When it was too hot, I went inside and sat at my computer under the fan. My eyes skimmed news headlines. I googled outdoor showers and scrolled hundreds of pictures. There was no normal. One shower curtain threaded around a hula-hoop that hung from a tree, with a hose pointing into the centre of the hoop. At the other extreme was a magnificent bathroom built against a rock face. A shower rose protruded from the rock, spraying water onto a stone floor surrounded by ferns and flowers. There were retro tap fittings; showers in watering cans and pouring from flowerpots. I’m not an artist or a handy person, and I had no faith in my ability to plumb anything permanent. And I was impatient. But I saw enough in those images to know that I needed three improvements to my first arrangement, and that these additions would make a big difference.
I went to Bunnings in forty degrees, buying a sprinkler head with an extendable arm and a lock on the trigger. I taped this to the cottonwood. I had to adjust the angle a few times to get the spray hitting the centre of the slab. When I found the sweet spot, I secured the sprinkler with a hook and wire. The second investment was a dual-outlet tap fitting that allowed me to permanently attach two hoses. This meant I could turn on the shower without detaching the garden hose, and no water would run until I was under the shower and had pressed and locked the trigger. When finished, I could unlock the trigger to shut the water off, then dry myself and take my time getting back to the tap. The third purchase was the blue metal, which ensured better drainage, stopping a muddy pool forming at my feet.
I also addressed a problem with the shower curtain. The easterly breeze can blow wild in the mornings, battering branches and billowing the curtain inwards. To reduce this, I slashed the curtain in a few places like I’ve seen on banners outside Hungry Jacks. I wanted to keep new materials to a minimum, so I rummaged in the shed and found a rusty bicycle basket that I hung off the fence for storing shampoo bottles and soap. Next to it, I placed a hook for my towel. Suddenly the shower had substance; it seemed worthy, and so did my actions to tend to it.
“Suddenly the shower had substance; it seemed worthy, and so did my actions to tend to it.”
At this time I was reading Rachel Carson for a course I would teach the following semester. As I worked on the shower, I listened to an audiobook of Silent Spring, and in that clear and urgent prose, I heard her approval; that there was sense in narrowing my attention to the small confines of two trees and some soil: Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. Was I bewitched? My teenage niece visited and when she saw the shower, she couldn’t wait to get under it. As her thick, brown hair became a dark waterfall down her back, she told me the shower was enchanting. It occurred to me that she was right. Had the feijoa, the cottonwood, the gravel, the water, cast a spell?
On Perth summer mornings, the light and temperature are softly balanced before the harshness of the day sets in. That gentler light filtered through the curtain when I showered, casting a warm tone on my skin. Unlike the glassed-in cubicle indoors, there was more room under the trees to move out of the way of the spray, so, outside, I showered with open eyes. I could see my body, its curves and bulges, the roll at the knee, the chipped toenail polish, and I did not recoil.
After ten days of showering behind the tank, I reluctantly returned to my bathroom where I kept my razor and the face mask I applied once a week. I closed myself behind the screen door and lifted the mixer lever. I didn’t let it get too warm but a chlorine smell hit me quickly. My nose crinkled. The shower rose is higher in the wall and the spray is harder to dodge. I shut my eyes and almost immediately noticed a rapid drumming. Was someone mowing, or using a power tool nearby? Surely it was too late in the day for that. I called out to my husband – what’s running? He didn’t answer, so I moved my head out of the spray and found the noise. It was the water pattering the plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles at my feet. It astonished me that in such a short space of time, I’d grown used to the way noise dissipates in the open air. Inside, the shower wouldn’t let sound or scent escape, and I felt assaulted by those everyday sensory inputs. It seemed strange to feel less comfortable inside the known bricks and mortar of my home than when exposed to nature in the vulnerable act of showering. I suspected it had something to do with being still, in silence.
“It seemed strange to feel less comfortable inside the known bricks and mortar of my home than when exposed to nature in the vulnerable act of showering. I suspected it had something to do with being still, in silence.”
It had been a noisy summer. At its height, it seemed as though my news feeds were constantly shouting at me, and I wanted to run from them. By late January, social media contacts were incensed about one thing or another. There was a long post from a friend who was furious about the Premier’s back-flip on the first border opening. He’d posted a mini essay on what the Premier was not, he believed, taking into consideration about the state’s economy. A few weeks earlier, a different group of friends had shared their alarm that the forthcoming border opening was raving mad. Tones had switched. With the closure extended, those happy about it were posting pictures of sunrises and baby animals, and those against shared their analyses. In addition to the border, there was concern about the human rights of tennis player Novak Djokovic who was trying to stay in Australia to compete in the Australian Open, though the government was intent on sending him home. Some of my contacts vented in support of Djokovic; others did not. I felt outside of the debate, beyond it, underwater. In the end, he was deported on the grounds of health and good order, and that particular noise quickly subsided. Dragged down with it were valiant attempts to shine a spotlight on refugees and asylum seekers kept in the same hotel. The posturing from all sides felt like a weight I longed to shed. There was no fire in my belly for any of it, and while I felt no shame for finding some of it trivial, I did wonder at my deafness to any call to action. In the outdoor shower, I turned face-on to the spray and surrendered my eyelids to pin-pricks.
I’ve been socially and politically active before – a planner, a campaigner, an organiser, a networker. And there is no shortage of causes I care deeply about. But that summer, I felt paralysed by the particular confluence of crises. I don’t mean overwhelmed; not hopeless. I felt instructed to be still – that there was something I needed to see, hear and learn in the ritual I’d established in the shower. Carson expressed it decades before me: There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. By taking myself outside, stealing into this secret place, undressing, and standing steady in cold water, I reassured myself each day. Nothing terrible happened to me, and another day dawned. Through such unremarkable actions I understood, a little better, my relationship to creation.
I sensed too, the wisdom of my spiritual traditions, and my daily observances felt holy. Thomas Merton, an American monk and mystic, once said, there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. It was not my time to act, but to listen to my garden and what I found there.
One day, I was behind the tank checking the hose fitting, when I saw what I thought was a folded leaf on the slab near my feet. But when I bent to flick it away, I saw it was a tiny baby mouse, lying on its side with its paws together, as though asleep. It was clearly not long dead. I felt a rush of regret that I had not heeded calls to leave containers of water in the garden; for this, a burial, I found some energy to act. I did not want to bruise its body, so I found two pieces of bark to scoop it up. I dropped it the first time and almost cried out. I lifted it again and stilled my breathing so that I couldn’t blow it away. I carried it to the upper garden. It was so delicate. I lay it under the branches of a correa bush and settled fallen leaves over it. When I let out my breath, it felt like a prayer.
“When I let out my breath, it felt like a prayer.”
The state border remained shut a little longer and, from conversations around me, I sensed I was supposed to feel trapped. But I didn’t. I couldn't muster the conviction common among my contemporaries about our right to travel; to complete autonomy over the physical locations of our bodies. When Russia invaded Ukraine and the images started coming – bodies showered in ash, labouring mothers in blood, lines of refugees in the freezing cold, old women and children huddled in bunkers – the sense of having been allocated a space grew stronger. It didn’t feel oppressive. It felt humble. In the chaos, I was just one. It was this place, and this time, that I was to inhabit. I was not stuck. I was awake.
*
For many weeks now, I have walked down the stairs and showered behind a ripped polyester curtain. On very warm evenings, when my skin feels clammy, I shower then, too. I feel no fear about where my feet tread in the dark. I made the shower for my husband, but I don’t think of anyone else when I’m in there. I wonder instead about lacing fairy lights in the tree, and perhaps building a more permanent screen. I sense that as the weather cools, I might lose my nerve to go and stand in the cold. That saddens me a bit, so I push the thought away. We have weeks of warm weather yet.
It really does feel precious, to be naked under the trees, behind the water tank and curtain, with my feet standing on a solid slab. I do not think about when I will travel again; where else my body might go, or has a right to be. It’s here now. A fallen feijoa blossom squishes underfoot, but I don’t tense. Life doesn’t frighten me as it once did. I feel fleshly connected to all of it − dirt, leaves, twigs, other beings. I embrace Carson’s reminder that in nature nothing exists alone. I shampoo my hair, soap my body, wash my ears, rinse. I flick the lock back in the other direction and the trigger pops out and the water shuts off. I dry myself, then reach for my shorts. As they slide off the water pipe, a moth flies out of one leg. It flutters downwards to my toes, before rising and fluttering out behind the curtain. For a second it is a shadow puppet on the sun-drenched screen. ▼
Photo by Ann-Christin T on Unsplash
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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