A Series of Unfortunate Events

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  Wallaby Creek, Australia
Thursday, September 27, 2007

Day 22  (15 at Wallaby Creek)                                                     September 27, 2007
 
             The sun rose three hours late today.  Despite the urge crying out from every scrap of my being to follow suit and sleep in, I instead roused myself out of my tent into a light rain in the early dawn.  The weather would gradually clear up, the clouds blowing off before noon, the sun suddenly emanating a portentous heat signifying the imminent departure of these unloved wintry mornings.  My inept attempt at packing has left me far better equipped for heat, so despite my natural preference of colder climes, the onset of spring, if not summer, is seen as reason for some celebrating.
             As with the weather, things are finally improving for me after a week of what some might consider karmic reprisals

the blind

.  I'll admit to a now-and-again nod to coincidence, a cautionary respect for superstition.  However, I believe my case warrants a more profound and disturbingly cosmic realization.  After a massive accumulation of evidence one must finally and reluctantly accept that he has in some way offended one of the lesser gods - be it Loki, Hephaestus, Mel Gibson, or Beelzebub himself - and that because, say your discarded gum has soiled the bottom of his new vintage hightops or something, he is now going to extraordinary lengths to make you pay for your impetuous act with bodily suffering.  And I know what you're thinking, Hephaestus in Converse sneakers - preposterous!  Well listen to this.
             Over the last seven days I have injured a finger, contracted pinkeye, had an allergic reaction to a tick bite, and finally, and in an admittedly comic fashion, smashed headlong into a tree trunk.  But I get ahead of myself.  It all started a week ago today, the day after the arrival of Kate and Jenn.  (Both maintain a compelling story of innocence regarding any voodoo or black magic.)  We were only a few minutes into our inaugural hike with all eight of us present when a typical machete swing at a not-outstandingly sized thorn bush left me reeling in a sudden pain emanating from my right index finger.  As I watched, a tiny spot of blood the only sign of outward damage to the appendage, it began to swell and became too painful to move.  Improvising, I splinted the finger with a relatively straight stick and continued the hike, chopping with somewhat dampened enthusiasm using my left hand.
             The next morning I awoke to discover that one of my worst visions (pun intended) of possible maladies that could befall me out here in the bush had come to pass.  With somewhat blurred sight, and crackling-riddled eyes, I scrambled up to the cabin.  A glance in the mirror showed a thick-stubbled, sleep-creased face with short, untidy hair and bloodshot eyes such as I had never seen outside a zombie flick

pikachu's nest

.  After another few days without using my contacts, but instead stumbling around in the myopic version of the world afforded by my out-of-date glasses, and with no sign of improvement, it was decided I had pinkeye.
             Somehow making it through the week with marginal visual acuity, attempting to perform bird trapping, bower spotting, and other tasks requiring eagle-eyed perceptiveness, it was finally Sunday: the day of our 100th Bowerbird Caught Celebration!  With the solace of the week behind me and the promise of medical attention the following day, during our weekly trip into town, I prepared a wholesome supper.  Fire-baked barbecue chicken wings, tin foil wrapped packets of various oil and rosemary-seasoned vegetables, washed down with Australia's finest XXXX gas-powered fridge-chilled gold lager made a sumptuous departure from our usual beans and rice concoctions.  And as an added treat we were allowed to sleep in until 8am.  Imagine the privilege!
             Next day, I looked in the mirror to have a look at my inflamed eyeballs and happened to notice that yes, they were inflamed, but also noted the appearance of a nasty rash spreading along my neck from a point above my collar bone where I had been bitten by a tick on one of our hikes.  Great, I thought.  Well, at least I'm already headed to the doctor.  I'll just add it to my list of things for him to check out...
 
*  *  *  *

             I was actually surprised to find that the tiny town of Urbenville (pop. ~150) has a hospital.  In fact, it has one GP, a kindly Asian fellow called Dr. Lee, who has a daughter that now lives near our project's headquarters at the University of Maryland, of all places

Eureka! a bower!

.  In minutes he had prescribed me some cream for the tick bite, some drops for the pinkeye and provided some cryptic scribbled directions to a hospital in Lismore, where my finger could be X-rayed.  He confided in me that they in fact had radiological facilities, though he preferred to send people to Lismore, where higher resolution equipment was available.
             And so, after a quick stopover in Woodenbong for phone calls, a much needed shower, and to drop off the rest of the crew, Linda and I headed off on a half hour trip to Kyogle to hit up the pharmacy and forty minutes farther to Lismore for a picture of the bones in my pointer finger.  In Kyogle, as we waited on the pharmacist to ready my sundry medications (even Kyogle Discount Pharmacy uses the jargon "It'll be 15 minutes" to refer to an hour's time) we went up a block to a little espresso shop for a shot of caffeine and a sit under the Euro-style outdoor awning.  We went in and Linda ordered a caramel macchiato.  I ordered a latte, and as I was attempting to reattach the lid after adding some sugar, I encountered some difficulty.  The plastic top simply did not seem to fit over the Styrofoam lip of the cup anymore.  I can picture Linda patiently watching my Cro-Magnon struggle with this modern-day disposable Rubix Cube, wearing an expression befitting someone witnessing a small dog with one of those gramophone-like preventative collars running in quick circles in attempts to lick himself

where the kangaroo hit me with a stick

.  Such was my infernal plight.
             And then I had it!  In order to secure the lid properly, I had only to push it down over the cup with greater force.  I did this, and as I did it, the cup wall buckled inward, causing a displacement of fluid, which then found its way out through the tiny hole in the (now firmly attached) lid and spouted neatly in a perfectly formed arc of hot foam and concentrated essence of coffee bean.  The arc seemed to hang in the air next to me like a tiny monocolor rainbow of destruction, and then sped on to Linda, whose face was transforming suddenly into a grimace of alarm and shock as the frothy liquid splattered all over her fleece, hair, and neck.  I stared in horror at this unexpected event, but then she squinted up at me and cracked a wide, disbelieving.  Taking this cue, I erupted with laughter.  Linda joined in as napkins were handed to her matter-of-factly by the barista.  The cook, working over a stove behind the counter merely commented dryly, "Haven't seen that in a while," as she shook her head, unamused.  I wasted no time in laying on a surfeit of apologetic phrases, albeit whilst continuing to guffaw mightily.  I was therefore thankful Linda was a sport and joined me in my enjoyment of the incident long after we had retrieved my liniments from the pharmacy and were on or way to Lismore.
             After some driving around and a few turnabouts in residential driveways, we finally located the rough rectangle that Dr

a male satin bowerbird

. Lee had scribbled onto a piece of paper, and which indicated the Lismore Base Hospital.  (As a matter of interest, the "base" has nothing to do with the military, but refers to the extent of the hospital's services.  These apparently fall just below "general" in the overall gamut of possible curative offerings.)  Inside I said hello to a receptionist who miraculously intuited that I was American, even before I told her so and handed her my passport.  This meant, of course, that like all Americans I would have to pay for my doctor's visit.  (Both of them, actually.)
             So I was handed the usual forms to fill out and told to wait in the lobby.  Here, no jargon was necessary; we both new my stay would be a considerable one.  But after a full three hours I had my answer: my finger was not broken, but very swollen, and possibly infected.  The doctor kindly gave me some antibiotics and told me to start exercising the finger.
             And so we drove back to Woodenbong along a nearly deserted stretch of newly paved road, gracefully undulating across a sea of pastureland, suddenly very vibrant and idyllic, every pool of water or querulous, munching cow now saturated with the intensity of the sun's setting rays.  Everything seemed so much more picturesque and inviting now, with the knowledge of my various maladies and the promise of a speedy convalescence.  And so I was in high spirits when we finally reached Woodenbong at sundown just in time to catch the last Aussie burger coming off the grill.  A beef patty, lettuce, tomato, onions, and beets, smashed enticingly between sesame seed buns: panacea for the weary road warrior.
             Things seemed to be improving.  But it must have been a sizable piece of gum I carelessly discarded on the ground, for the very next day another hilarious injury would befall me

grazing roos

.  Early the next morning after my doctors' visits, Kate and I were charged with discovering the new locations of Bowers 4 and 8.  We had just been to the Bower 4 area on Sunday, so it should have been no problem.  My brain wasn't up as quickly as my feet, however, and we spent an extra hour traipsing up and down the grassy slopes looking for the trailhead.  We spent some time covering a lot of the ground from our previous search, and waited for half hour intervals, listening for a call, to no avail.
             So we transferred over to the western section of Northern Trail to look for Bower 8.  This is where I would suddenly find myself, after much near-sighted squinting into thickets and bumbling raucously through gnarly vines and snaring lantana, utterly lost - beyond the range of our call-response hooting system - and without a clue which way to make a heading.  I occasionally stumbled upon a few disconnected trees which had marked paths to bower sites in previous years, but which trailed off rapidly, leading once again to the infuriating sameness of the dense forest.  More than once I found myself literally spinning in a circle, trying to spot a glimpse of orange, a snippet of neon plastic tied to a tree trunk, or else attempting to glean some useful remembrance of the earlier position of the sun, now well on its confoundingly parabolic path across the sky.
             Only after a great deal of hooting and steadily more frantic pursuits of what were most likely owlish bird cries, did I finally decide that I should head directly SE, which would eventually take me back to the trail

the green catbird

.  How I came to this conclusion is another thing entirely; what is important here is that once I took this bearing and headed for a few hundred yards, I heard a response to my hoot.   It was Kate, who, smart girl that she is, hadn't gotten herself lost, and had stayed relatively close to the trail.  In my excitement at finding Kate and the way back, I surged through the impossibly dense vegetation.  Kate's own crunching steps were within my hearing range when a looped root caught my boot perfectly in mid-lunge.  Propelled inexorably forward by the force of my own effort to barge through a daunting bouquet of winding tendrils, I was powerless to slow my sudden descent.  At just inside 5ft. 8in. distance from my quagmired foot stood a not large, but respectable eucalypt trunk, completely oblivious to goings on.  A millisecond later my glasses and forehead met the tree's shin, and I stared hard into bark, my glasses sent flying by the impact.  I saw stars for a moment, but then got up, collected my bent glasses, apologized to the still silent tree, and calmly walked over to greet Kate.  She would be the first of many people to ask, "What happened to you?!"  "Kangaroo hit me with a stick!" I replied, with a look of incredulous indignation.
             So, to whichever entity it is I offended by discarding a mass of bubble gum on the street, messing up an otherwise pristine sneaker sole, I sincerely apologize and hope that I have finally and satisfactorily paid for my momentary lack of consideration.  I assure you with an almost supernatural certainty, and with every microliter of my being, every Australian dollar in my possession, every bowerbird I capture as collateral - I promise you that as long as I reside on this often savage, fantastic, always surprising, gloriously unruly, mixed-up planet, never again will I be so crass as to spit my long-bland wad of Big League Chew onto the sidewalk.

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