Grass, willow, skin – by Ben Walter
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The wind is blowing off the dead of the river and every gust is hollowing out my body. Even though it's summer and the evenings are spending all the light they've been saving up through the year, it's freezing cold – I am eleven years old and there is nothing to me, my arms and legs are an arrangement of twigs, and the creeping ice is threatening to snap my body into pieces. The sense of arctic nakedness, of shivering in the outfield of a skewed oval, is all pervasive, and the moment of finally being overcome by the great fast bowling wind that is swinging through the air and seaming off the deck, that moment of deserting my deep, lonely outpost in the field, racing for the bank where our bored bags are slumped against the soil and grabbing at a light jumper, that moment – along with my limited repertoire of cross bat shots that worked fairly well or not at all, and that time in the nets when the savage, hard-nosed ball leapt up and bruised my elbow so that I couldn't move it for days and was unmoored in my nerves from the game – that moment is my most vivid memory of cricket.
Outside: a venue attended by the weather, by the sun, the wind, the rain and the sky, home of a game that is open to the opinions of any stray cloud, that accepts the sound of seagulls flying for the cover of the air and the earthy smell of mown grass; so much grass, for the game is founded on simple, natural elements. Tough, muscular leather with its proud and glowing face presented to the players at the start of each day, showered and shaved; scrubbed-up skin that has hardened and aged but is ready to run as fast as it can. Willow, the trees that are shaped and carved, sawn and sanded to form the bat's strong arm, and ash: such ironic timber for the stumps.
And above all: grass, an ocean of grass holding up the game's stage like a wide, flat earth existing only for itself.
But you who are reading this: we might be standing in the uncommitted slips in a crowded backyard. There is a wooden fence behind us catching most of the loose shots and a range of garden beds, fruit trees and play equipment fielding in the covers, and over on the leg side our families are sitting around tables picking at soft cheeses and chips; it is Christmas, perhaps, or a summer birthday, and they are not at all responsibly keeping their eyes on the tennis ball that is slogged at times through the mid-wicket region, scattering sparrows and paper plates. The five-year-old has just gotten out for the fourth and final time in five balls, and you sip your beer and the brown stubbie glints in the sun like it has just been mined from the ground. Then you point out that all of our pursuits, even the most claustrophobic and walled indoors of them, all of them steal and adapt the resources that have accumulated in the natural world for their own purposes; what's more, these, in particular, are weedy, foreign resources that have been dragged in to form a thick and almost impenetrable patch over the real island, with its peat soils and rainforests crammed with sassafras and myrtles, its wombat bones and thick possum fur.
There are the lumbering, persistent cows that stomp down and compact the paddocks, thirsty willows that choke up our rivulets, and so many invading grasses that outcompete our natives, marching over the top of them like mould on bread. Those in cricket are no different to the raw animal-vegetable-mineral substances that are built into our computer games and crocheted scarfs and stamp collections: all of these elements slashed to the horizon of our purposes.
And even if, you suggest (as the ball flies between us off an edge and thumps into the reliable fence), even if the game were played with pademelon leather and king billy pine bats on a wide stretch of native, ochre-tinged kangaroo grasses, would this be any different? Wouldn’t it still be an utterly human activity, with so little regard for nature that it might as well be played in a conference centre, where the real world can't be contemplated or make its presence felt?
I bend down slowly. A feathery dandelion brushes against my fingers, and I consider picking that dandelion and sniffing at its seeds before blowing them into the whims of the breeze; but I leave it growing where it is and grab instead at the patient ball, straightening my back and underarming it against the wind to the lone offside fielder, taking a moment to breathe the garden's air and sip the beer that I am holding. And I'm compelled to nod, for you have a strong case, and an afternoon ache is beginning to swell in my head (I should have fetched my straw hat from the car to keep all that sun out of my hair) and the beer is tasting a little metallic, as though valuable ores could be panned from its sediment, and just as I did so many years ago – this time from the power of overwhelming heat – I abdicate my position in the field and sit in the limp shade that is offered by the deck; there is a hammock that has been briefly abandoned by its inhabitant and I settle in and quickly go to sleep.
And then perhaps it is later in the afternoon, or the following day, or perhaps a week or even a year has passed, but I wake up: and now we are sitting in the carefully ordered scree that forms the concrete stand at the southern end of Bellerive Oval. The lights are shining with the power of a million trangias flickering outside a small tent in the central highlands, and there are fifteen or sixteen thousand people around me – this oval is now the fifth biggest town in the state – and the speakers are pounding with the same tiresome rhythms and music, there is beer in our hands but also hot chips and many messy newspapers. And there in the stands it is as though we are watching television; and though there is a great expanse of grass with every blade named and individually catered for with its own personal rider and requirements (or perhaps it is an army of homogenous grass with its hair crew cut that is standing below us in crisp green uniforms) and even though the clouds may be a spectacular work of art in the sky, a burlesque of orange and black that shows its face and then hides it and then projects a new face, and even though these clouds may soon let forth their loud voices in a choir of rain (there will be many exposed figures on the hill who must run for the cover of the stands, what with all those barrels of water ferried up the Derwent River and unloaded), the crowds will still have to put up with the sun's acidic stare, a long white shard that stabs across the stands as the evening wears out and lies down; even with all of this magnificent clutter of the real world swelling and imposing its essence all around us, aren't we closer to the inside than the outside? More so, certainly, in a sealed mainland stadium that blocks out the true contours of the land and perhaps the sky; but even here, in a regional arena by the side of a river with the rows of dark, eucalyptus hills spectating all around us?
Have you been talking, or have I? It's easy to lose track, and the game before us has been meandering; together we have been floating down a lazy stream, lost in our thoughts. There is a cold, burnt chip in my hand. As I lift it very slowly towards my mouth it is as though I am dipping a limp paddle in the water, and as the batsman eases into a forward defensive shot, we all move forward just a little in the late evening.
And then I turn to you and say: And yet. And I spread my theories wide like a defensive field. While at certain extremes of rain and darkness, this game retreats indoors, there is never an escape from the heat and the wind and the simple cold; and in any case, aren't these abdications true of those who play in wilder parks? I know many who shy from bushwalking in the dark, many who would never consider spending dismal hours watching lapwings drink and dip in the hurtling rain. This is a garden, I continue, beckoning and making a rising sign with my hand, and (as we pick our way through the stumps of many legs, leaving our bags, jackets and piles of rubbish behind us at our camp) I suggest that even if this game remains a part of the human world, where many natural elements have been adjusted and heightened (and we are walking down the steps, one or two at a time, and our shoes slap at the heavy stone like leather on flesh) still, the real world can burst through. We may be watching the game, playing the game, and a small native bee will swerve buzzing beside us; that bee who has been banned from our living rooms and kitchens, from our bedrooms and our brains. Or a forest raven will get trapped in the caved roof of the stands and caw its miserable objections to the seating.
There are the clouds and the sun and the sky.
There is grass, willow, skin.
The oval frames a wholly different arena beside the game, and we have a choice as to which we view; although perhaps we are watching and engaging with them simultaneously. This is not a calm, pure contemplation of nature, but neither is it sitting inside staring at the walls. It is walking to work in the suburban morning through a mixed environment of rose gardens and eucalypts and bitumen streets; it is the snowflake shocking the pink of a cheek as we sit there waiting for the bus. It is reading a book in a basking park on a clear and sunny day; all of its tetchy words calmed and settled down. It is standing on a beach, and it is fishing.
We hoist our legs over the boundary fence, one after the other, rough jeans rubbing on steel, and as we plonk down on the soft grass and begin to unbutton our shirts, I remind you of the time we played with a broken branch of horizontal scrub and a tennis ball that you stowed in the top pocket of your pack, there on the dried out mud beside the buttongrass plain that hadn't been fire-mowed in years, and the ball spun and danced and splattered in the jumbled surface and it glanced off the lean meat of the bat and was caught by a sure tussock; and even there, as the silence beat down and was pricked by the barracking of honeyeaters, there, surrounded by thousands of ovals of undisturbed wilderness – even there we were utterly absorbed in the movements and comforting rituals of the game. Embedded in nature; cricket as a means of moving through it, of choosing which tack to take in a breeze that blows all day. Just another way to beat our hearts; the natural world shaping our hours and days, even as we form smaller squares and circles in its minutes.
And perhaps all of that isn't such a far cry from here, I suggest, as we streak completely naked into the deserted field and feel the grass below our feet and the sun on our backs; you reach down and pick up the willow bat and I take the leather ball in my right hand, and I walk away towards the stands to the very end of my run-up, feeling the fresh day filling up my lungs, before I turn and run towards you through the masses of brilliant, bustling wind, as quickly as I possibly can. ▼
Image: Matthew McLennan - Unsplash
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