Brackish tongue – by Roanna McClelland
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
I write the first line of a poem: ‘I thought the river might heal me, but she is brackish on my tongue’.
And I wonder what story I am trying to tell when I use rivers in my work. A wonderful academic tells me water is my ‘medium’ and even as I am flattered, part of me squirms. To what end? What am I trying to express when I speak with and through rivers and nature? Do I really think I can bend and shape something as slippery as water to tell my stories?
But for the purpose of this story, water is a process of remembering and forgetting. It is a story about water, but it is also about fire and snow and ice and drought. It is about nurturing and taking. It is not about water, not really. It is about a human, my human, and many other humans besides who float in and out of my story but travel on their own currents. It is about how the smell of summer rain as it patters on parched earth can bring back a flood of memory; of droplets running down a tent tarp, of a human stopping my seven-year-old hand from reaching out to touch the side. The gentle explanation that touching the tarp will let the water into the warm cave we have made for ourselves – so instead, I watch the droplets turn to tiny rivers that traverse the canvas from the outside.
Thirty years later, I sit in a kayak on an unseasonably swollen river in what is essentially desert in California and feel the lively force of the water tug unnervingly beneath me. Two drunk men wrestle fishing rods on a dinghy nearby and yell about gun control and Trump and I am nervous for them – the current runs invisible and strong, and many people die in this river. At one point it whips and spins my kayak toward the river’s edge and I have to grasp at stinging nettles on the weed-heavy bank to stop myself being torn from my guide, and I wonder why on earth I decided to research rivers when I am so scared of them. Scared of the power of them, scared of their indifference to my human existence. Through my panic, a sharp memory of the canoeing trip Ruth took us on as kids: the ease with which my paddle slices the calm brown water, collecting slimy brown and green tendrils of loose algae on the way, and how the rhythm of our journey lulls my little brother to sleep at the back of the second canoe. Of putting up a tent in the rain and laughing as we slide through sticky mud and sling raspy wet ropes across tree branches, because the tent pegs are useless and slide straight out of the moist earth. Ruth gives us a nip of port and three pieces of dark chocolate each to warm our bellies, and we tell everyone at school the next week we have been down a river bigger and wilder than the Amazon. We believe it, because we live in the driest state in the driest inhabited continent in the world, and we time our showers with an egg-timer filled with snow-white sand, and we only know rivers as gasping trails of dust and cracked mosaics of brown and red hexagons.
Where I grasp the stinging nettles my nerves fire off a scattergun of messages to my already sore body. Red welts erupt on my hands and crackle in the harsh light, so similar to the sun back home. It all feels like home, this dusty town in a different hemisphere of the globe. The rankling hot air greets me like a warm hug and the rolling hills as I drive in, cleared long ago of a single tree or bush, are almost indistinguishable from the hills that roll up from winding roads during summer holidays in South Australia. The wine tastes the same too, and lonely strums of country guitars echo through streets with buildings so low you can always see the cloudless blue sky.
*
Growing up, my dad takes us to festivals where people from all over the world play guitar until late and we fall asleep under his jacket and under the stars, listening to flamenco in the Australian bush. He lies about constellations and we laugh and think he is a dag as we snuggle deeper.
*
My Californian guide and I take respite under a lace of canopies, knee-deep in stagnant brown water, and I think about Ruth teaching me to put on layers of sunscreen, to put methylated spirits on burning heels after another day of hiking. Of trailing behind her along ochre-clay tracks that look like dry riverbeds themselves, except for the occasional mounded bull-ant nests. I video-call my kids that night and deliberately don’t tell them about the watery danger in my day. They are getting ready for school and I tell them someone said they met a mountain lion on the winding river trail just behind my hotel. I promise to bring them back a plush mountain lion if I can find one in the shops. I think about Pinga, Ruth’s tiny plush penguin, who traveled with us as children and accompanied her as an adult. I remember Pinga sitting snug and safe in my jacket pocket as we walk along the beach, head down against wild winds, tears streaming down my face in the sharp air. Ruth stops – she always pauses in these places – and looks out at the ocean. I can feel Pinga against my chest and I look out at the churning mass of grey and I am afraid of its intensity, but Ruth pulls me close to her warm body in silence and smiles. That moment – me and her, silence, a view – is repeated hundreds of times in different parts of Australia across three decades.
*
My son insists on cutting through an alley on the way to school in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Slick garbage sticks to the automatic garage doors that back onto the lane. As we walk one day I notice water trickling across mossy stones into a filthy drainpipe. I wonder, if I spoke directly into the drain, would my message to her be carried down by the stormwater and be thrown between networks of glowing lichen and slime and slinky slugs and shiny black slaters? Would it travel through subterranean layers, circle an underground ocean heaving in darkness, then appear again on the other side of the world? Maybe my message could climb up trees like the spiky-clawed goanna, then glide from canopy to canopy before diving into a raging ocean, emerging to labor up an icy mountain range in the Himalayas. And I wonder why I think I need to speak to her there. I wonder if it is arrogant to infuse these places with my memories.
*
There’s an island in the river near my home where the trees weep under the weight of hundreds of ibises and their snowy white faeces. It’s known locally as ‘bin chicken island’ but my daughter thinks the term is derogatory. ‘It’s Ibis Island’, she says defiantly. The council tries to move the long-beaked birds on, plant more saplings, revegetate, but the birds come back and the trees choke and wither under their stench. My daughter grins quietly to herself when we pass and I think how much she has in common with Ruth.
*
On a vast expanse of water that cuts through an ancient gorge at the top of Australia, a leering crocodile stretches across a rock, statue-still while around her the water chops and bounces shards of light. So different from my urban creek, where litter is strung across scraggly branches like festive crepe paper. When I return to my motel every night, I shed red dust onto cool floors before typing notes about a river whose presence my words will never fully capture.
*
My great-grandfather slept outside all year round on a wrought-iron bed and filthy mattress under an almond tree. I imagine shriveled brown leaves fell on him as he slept in autumn, that his hair was dusted with yellow pollen when he woke in spring, that wizened taupe almond shells plonked him on the head in summer. I don’t know if he came inside when it rained or if he gazed up through the canopy at the silvery arrows of water flying through the moonlight. This house with its outdoor bed is a luxury. My grandmother remembers the house before the almond tree: a one-room tin shed in a cow paddock that will later be cleared for hundreds of white houses with red roofs built in sterile rows. The planners will forget to plant trees and when the rare rain comes, it will slide across dirty concrete and hunt for an escape before pooling and flooding these houses again and again. Grandma remembers the heavy sigh of the cows leaning on the corrugated iron walls when they sought warmth at night, how the walls curved and groaned as though with their breath. On a camping trip up north when we are kids, my mum picks up broken pieces of pottery in the dirt at the ruins of an old station, wonders if the pieces might once have been touched by her relatives’ hands when they lived there. Mum brings the shards home to Adelaide to fix together, but never manages to brush off the red dirt. It becomes cemented in the cracks of her mosaic and makes a congealed red border, looks like the hexagons of the dried rivers of my childhood. I wonder about the childhood of the women before her. About her great-grandmother, all but locked behind bricks in Adelaide’s Destitute Asylum to give birth to her bastard baby alone. I wonder whether she missed the sky or the water or the scorched earth the most.
*
When I am six, I perch on my little rock and trace brown swirls that circle deeper cracks. The rock somehow remains cool in the furnace-heat. My dad and his long-haired friends are encouraging me to join them as they scale the burnt cliff-face in fluorescent lycra, purple ropes swinging down the length of the rock like garish pythons, but I love to sit on my rock and watch them. I watch the haze as the heat rises, sit still and silent enough that the fairy wrens with their cocky flash of blue land on the saltbush nearest me for just a second. She’s climbing the cliff-face too, this new superhero friend of my dad’s with the long brown plait and plaited arm muscles to match. Many months later, I’ll try to do my hair to look like hers, but it’s fine and curly where hers is dark and thick. When we go to the pub after they tire of climbing, I sit by myself on the porch overlooking a sun-drenched valley and Ruth brings me a lemonade and doesn’t try to speak to me while I read my book. In a different part of the country in a different decade, we will peer under bushes on our many hikes and laugh at the fairy wrens as they bounce out from beneath low-flung shrubs.
*
I know spring has arrived in my suburb in Melbourne when I smell the sweet jasmine, identical to the wandering bush my mother plants outside my childhood bedroom so that when I look out of yet another rental window, I see pink and white and green and smell honeyed nectar instead of corrugated iron. She tells me I was born in an unseasonably warm winter and people brought sprigs of jasmine to her hospital room. She’s patient with this new woman in our lives, grateful we are being cared for. Mum tells me about her childhood creek, about the roaming gang of children who were allowed to free-range on its banks. About the lurking man with the jacket he would open to send them running screaming back home.
*
Ruth teaches us how to traverse a treacherous mountain path. She is so careful, demonstrates how to place our feet, how to move across shale and loose gravel without skidding down the surface of the earth. She still watches my brother and me like a hawk though, as we follow the trail she makes. By then she loves us like her own, and I can tell she fears for us in these wild places as all mothers do. I am obsessed with brumbies and when she travels to the high country, I ask her to take a photo of one: she can’t find those elusive wild horses so she comes back with a blurry photo of a cow in the rain, and laughs and laughs at my disgruntled little face.
When I am an adult and able to traverse gravel-strewn paths by myself, Ruth moves across the country. She falls in love with the blue film that emanates from the mountains where she spends many weekends, loves the warble of the magpie and the low silvery shrubs and the bursts of yellow winter wattle. She relishes the tang of the eucalyptus and the salty sting of our southern hemisphere oceans. But her heart also aches for the bluebells in the woods behind her family home, for thatched roofs and spring bulbs and deer and the wild places she grew up in, so different to mine. I get a large tattoo of a fairy wren wreathed by bluebells and winter wattle on my left shoulder. My kids trace the coloured outline etched into my skin when they sit warm on my lap, and they ask me about the friend who was a mother, who I loved, who died high in the mountains on the other side of the world.
I am glad Ruth doesn’t see the blue ranges she loves catch on fire, doesn’t see the whole country catch on fire: shrieking walls of orange and red and smoke and heat and gusts so powerful they flip trucks. White ash falls like the snow she died in and coats my porch, but this white smells of trees cracking in pain as flames lick up their silver trunks, of terrified animals with singed paw pads drinking water from plastic bottles – the same bottles littering my urban creek. I try to put on my windscreen wipers and they smear dirty soot. We wear masks so we can breathe, not knowing we will soon wear masks again when a living, writhing virus whips around the country faster than the fires.
Ruth’s friends, her widower, often message me still: they feel her presence in a winter ocean, see her in a double rainbow bursting through the rain, send me a message saying they saw something beautiful and it made them think of her. And I’m not religious, but I believe these signs with every fibre of my being. Imagine her as part of the elements and in the wildest places. For a long time, I picture her ducking and soaring between mountains, plunging into rivers, floating slowly through forests. My northern Australian guides don’t notice me crying as our boat lurches past the leering crocodile and it doesn’t matter anyway – my tears disappear into that other great body of water and I know she would be awed by the feeling of this place. Later that trip, I visit Mataranka Springs, the magical site my mother goes to when she first hears the news. We are separated by tens of thousands of miles and mum drives across red dirt to immerse herself in the turquoise waters that seep up from caverns far below. She allows the current to carry her downstream. When she flips onto her back and stares at the sky through palm tree fronds, she wonders how to comfort a daughter fearing for a stepmother who is missing. At almost the same moment, I run along a winter beach and wonder if anyone lost in icy mountains ever survives.
*
Once, Ruth makes me sit perfectly still as a snake with warning red on its long body slides past our campsite. Tears are welling in her eyes and I think she is mad, this British expat I love who cries at the sight of poisonous reptiles. ‘She’s just trying to find water,’ she says. She has a pet house spider that lives in the soft fronds of the maidenhair fern in our foggy bathroom. ‘They have as much right to be here as us,’ she says. Once, under a deluge of rain, we cut a hike short and hitch a ride in a trailer. When I notice the sinister black leeches strewn in the tray’s puddles, inches from my leg, she has to physically restrain me from jumping out of the vehicle. I now have a collection of whiskery Daddy Long-Leg spiders in my home. My children won’t let me remove them. They say good morning to them before school, observe their bent legs in different cornices. We walk alongside our urban river on weekends, a river winding through houses and factories, gathering pollution on the way, but still beautiful as it struggles and thrums. There is a climbing tree along its banks with boughs that reach out in an embrace and local kids sit along the branches in rows, legs swinging. They are taught about the people who lived on these banks for millennia before us, who still live here now, who understood the waters far more than us settlers ever could.
*
Water gives life. Our watery bodies know it. The drought-stricken plains of my childhood know it. The water slithering down the stormwater drain is teeming with organisms; it caresses those underground living things as it seeps past them into the earth. It caresses – or tosses – humans too. We are bound up in its flow, in the rise and fall of water from river to atmosphere and back again.
Water takes life too. Even the quietest body of water can lure a swimmer under forever. And a wave of frozen white water can make a human disappear.
*
I don’t need to imagine Ruth’s last moments. A body camera captures a winding walk through the thickest white snow I have ever seen: a trail of mountaineers on a precipice, literally and figuratively. The air looks as though it is thick as well, and my mind tricks me into thinking I can hear the wild wind screaming. The camera cuts to black.
Whirring drones will show me bent bodies partially obscured by a blanket – an avalanche – of snow. They are not images I seek out. They fill my feed, transmitted from high mountains on the other side of the world to my phone before I have a chance to look away. I receive messages asking me if I am ok before I know there is a reason not to be.
My remembering or forgetting is, perhaps, irrelevant to watery forces. Memories themselves – of people, of places, of nurture, of loss – flow, evaporate, and rain down in turn. But there is a compulsion, inexplicable, to create from or understand that which we are part of. And so I write, and I read what others write, and I use water to tell stories, and I wonder about using nature across my work.
Later that year, I will stand at the top of a mountain in Switzerland and watch tourists cut a winding trail through the white and my chest will constrict and my heart will race and a mad heat will rise even though it is below freezing. I will have to sit in silence, breathing in the sharp cold wind that smells of ice water, until the panic attack subsides.
When Ruth’s belongings are returned, Pinga is among them. ▼
Image: Matthias Herheim - Unsplash
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