Dear Friends,
Here I sit in my tiny mezzanine studio in Tantawangalo, nearly one month into 2020 - a year that’s already been record-breaking, though not in the usual positive sense in which those words are used. For as most of the world knows, my adopted country, Australia, has been burning for weeks now with unparalleled intensity.
It’s only halfway through the summer bushfire season, but already major blazes originating in the south and northwest have swept through farmland and communities in the region of the far southeast coast of New South Wales where I live, reducing homes and sections of townships to ash and rubble and fields and forests to blackened wastelands.
(Candelo NSW, enroute to Tantawangalo, 3rd January 2020)
To date my local neighbourhood, Tantawangalo, has escaped the onslaught. Yet there is no guarantee that huge, still-uncontrolled blazes won’t turn our way again, or that localised flareups won’t threaten us at close range. As a result, my neighbours and I find ourselves confronting that most basic of human instincts: survival. Our homes and the properties they are built on are at the mercy of shifting winds, fluctuating temperatures, lightening strikes and happenstance. And as the courageous men and women of our Rural Fire Service have attested to, there’s no facing these fires once they’re truly on the move - in some instances forming walls of flame 30 metres or more in height, with inner temperatures of 1000 degrees Celsius - steel-melting infernos.
(Rural Fire Service Shed, Candelo, 10th January 2020)
But before relating my personal side of this story, I want to backtrack briefly to my return to Australia in early October from extended travels in Europe, the United Kingdom and the USA. At my time of re-entry, the long, severe drought that we’re now experiencing was first showing its face, with temperatures of up to 36 degrees Celsius (approximately 102 degrees Fahrenheit) in a month roughly equivalent to April in the Northern Hemisphere. And signs of stress were already manifesting in my home environment - in the plants, trees and animals and on the very ground I was walking on, slowly turning into brown dust:
My trajectory through Scotland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Romania is well documented on my Facebook Band/Musician page, https://www.facebook.com/Michael-Menager-1416532291922347/?eid=ARBHi9xzjfoRJCDN02A3ykbXLdSXVUgmTpVM__4kpgo5tA9Td2gEDVcMRt6USmqdsncQnZsaDLXPWtb6
It’s an experience that’s still alive within me, a rich time of exchange with a range of audiences and of collaboration with talented fellow musicians:
Pictured here is Swiss clarinettist Toni Lauper, who accompanied me one evening around midnight in the big festival tent at Hard Am Bodensee, Austria. Toni's good company, good humour and fine musicianship helped lift the string of shows we played together in Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria into a higher octave of synergy and fun.
My subsequent run through the USA - Southern California, Arizona, Northern California and Northern Washington State - had more to do with connecting with friends and family than with performing. Although I couldn’t go through San Francisco without visiting Stella’s Salon, a very affable little pop-up venue in the inner city that I’d performed at the previous year:
Knowing that I was on my way to the Bay Area, my old college pal Bob Gardner reserved my usual berth for me on the Plumb Crazy, one of two vintage sailboats he owns and berths just off Jack London Square in Oakland: always a welcome interlude for me in travels back to my home country.
Bob and I go back a long way, yet we still haven't run out of things to talk about - including his work teaching English to immigrants in a city that continues to stand up for its own, in defiance of the odds. May it forever be so!
My final stop in the USA brought me close to the land and hence to thoughts of turning homeward. My friends Rafa and Shukyo Mithuna own and manage a farm called Three Rivers near Deming, Washington, at the foot of the great Northern Cascade Mountains, and for the third year running I stopped in to give them a hand.
Due to the fact that I arrived in autumn, the work priority was gathering, sawing, splitting and stacking the winter’s supply of firewood - something I’m quite familiar with from my own yearly preparations for winter heating. However quantities multiply in a place that gets heavy snows rather the occasional heavy frosts that happen at home - so it was handy to have a nifty little machine capable of moving equipment, fuel and wood around.
And quickly enough, I was landing back in New South Wales and awakening to the reality of the “big dry” that was already well under way, and to the degree of risk that this situation presented.
Soon after my return I started applying myself to every form of prevention that was practical. In consultation with my partners here on the farm, I assessed a “stay and defend” strategy versus a “leave early” one, and and in view of the magnitude of the risk and my degree of preparedness for it, I decided upon the latter. Yet still, I went hard at things that I felt could increase the odds of of my house surviving a bushfire. Cleaning out gutters clogged with bush debris, cutting away close-lying growth, collecting and raking bark, leaves and branches in the large clearing around my house and burning off when it was safe to do so.
Yes, and amidst it all taking care of my apple, pear and citrus trees, tending to my chickens, and planting a garden to sustain me (and potentially others) in the weeks to come.
In the middle of this tense scenario, with major fires already burning out of control to the east of Sydney, I decided that I would honour a commitment I had made to attend a friend’s very significant, extended birthday party, set to take place south of Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsula. Accordingly, I left home on December 24th, travelling by bus and train down the coast and then across the flatlands of northern Victoria. It was a smooth run all the way, through country that seemed somewhat less drought-stricken than where I’d come from. But by my scheduled day of return from Victoria, December 30th, much of what I’d seen on the way down was burning. All of the roads home were blocked by major bushfires, and swathes of country to the north, south and east of Tantawangalo, the rural district I live in, were on fire as well.
(My place, 8:30 AM 4th January 2020)
There wasn’t much that I could do for the next couple of days, apart from watching the news unfold and trying to figure out a way back. Land travel to New South Wales was out of the question and all of the flights on Regional Express, the one airline that makes the run between Melbourne and my region, were fully booked - along with a warning to customers that fire conditions had already caused flight cancellations and might well do so again.
Meanwhile Kathleen (the birthday friend I mentioned earlier) had some connections around town and was quickly able to organise some accommodation for us in Yarraville, a quietly cosmopolitan inner suburb of Melbourne. The place definitely had the air of being secure and well-guarded:
A couple of times during this period of waiting, when I could manage to lift my spirits far enough out of their worried state to focus on something else, I enjoyed several excellent Margaritas and some authentic, tasty Mexican food at a a certain Yarraville bistro located just where the city rail intersects Anderson Street. Also for a native Californian like myself to find himself in a Spanish-speaking environment once again. Recommended!
Sometime on January 31st, opening my laptop to the Regional Express site “just in case” for the hundredth time or more, to my amazement a seat from Melbourne to Merimbula - the nearest airport to home - suddenly popped up on the screen. Departure date January 1st, 2020, on the very first morning of the new year. Not the sort of morning that any part of me really wanted to be waking up to - but I pressed the “Book Your Flight” button anyway, and that was that.
At the airport ticket counter, the Regional Express agent instantly asked me, “Do you live up there? Because if you don’t, we can’t let you get on the plane.” But when I showed her a driver’s license that read Tantawangalo she let me right through. Only a select group of passengers were being allowed to travel back toward Armageddon, so it seemed. On Saturday January 4th, just two days away, temperatures of 45 degrees were predicted in my part of the world, along with fierce southerly winds strong enough to push the huge uncontrolled blazes in Northeastern Victoria up towards the New South Wales border and possibly beyond.
And as it was prophesised, so it did happen. The terrible days of January 3rd and 4th, in the year 2020. Fires moving in seemingly every direction, threatening us here in Tantawangalo particularly from the south and the west, hammering forested areas, towns, farms, outbuildings and open fields up and down the coast and inland as well. The blazes travelled swiftly, mercilessly, relentlessly. At one point in the middle of the day on the 4th, with windstorms in the forests making it too dangerous for fire crews to remain in place, everyone in the region was encouraged to evacuate to one of three local townships that would be ringed and defended by the crews that had fallen back. No absolute guarantees given, of course, but at the time any other options I could think of seemed far more risky.
Besides, I had someone other than myself to think of. A couple who are longtime, close friends of mine - she a community health nurse and he a drug and alcohol counsellor - had been working virtually non-stop at our regional hospital, to the extent that they’d been eating and sleeping there as well. And during this time they’d entrusted their dog to my care - Olive, a lively and intelligent Australian Kelpie:
I knew that my friends wouldn’t want Olive or me to be taking any unnecessary chances, so I decided that she and I should move on to Bega, 50 kilometres or so to the northeast. Shelter had been offered there by a friend and his wife who lived with their two young kids in a quiet suburban street, and who were already hosting a small assortment of other fire refugees.
I’m sure that lots of similar stories could be told about January 4th 2020 in Bega. It was a time when many doors were opened to friends and strangers alike, and when all of us, no matter who we were or where we’d come from, suddenly had darkness and uncertainty in common.
Yet the fact is that over the critical days I’ve been writing about, principally through the mercy of changing winds, my home and the property I live on were spared from the flames. But since then, with weather conditions ramping up existing fires and creating conditions for new ones to flare up, I’ve had to evacuate yet another time. And as I write today, early in the week of 27th January, the predictions are for hellish temperatures and high winds to manifest again by Friday or Saturday. I’ve shifted hard-to-replace gear such as my instruments and amplifiers to safer ground, my car remains packed and fueled up and my travel bag is close at hand. If I need to, I can move quickly.
And in the meantime, as you might know from my posts on social media, I’ve been entertaining a number of native guests who usually don’t come around so close, but who’ve tuned into the minimal “green zone" I maintain around my house and the bit of sustenance it offers them. Depending (as far as I can tell) on personality, some of them are a bit jumpy when I come around and other seen not to take much notice of me at all.
Here's my most newly arrived guest, a usually shy monotreme (egg-laying mammal) known as an echidna. Every one of these I’ve met in the past has curled up into a spiky ball at the very sound and scent of my approach, but this fellow (or lady) has been shuffling around the place at will for the past few days, digging up ants with its elongated snout that serves as both its mouth and its nose, and not seeming to mind too much at all about being photographed.
One of my daily activities in this time of uncertainty is to consult the emergency fire warnings that are updated at regular intervals on the New South Wales Rural Fire Service website. It’s an easy thing to remember, especially on days when the smell of smoke is is in the air and the sun is showing dull red behind a grey haze.
When a local fire is still uncontrolled but temporarily quiescent - ready to jump its constraints at any moment with a change in the wind - the Fire Service posts this advice: Watch and Act. And I’d say that this short phrase pretty well encapsulates my life at the moment. Watch and act. I must be alert, and make an effort not to miss anything - anything at all. And I need to be ready to “turn on a dime”, as they used to say in America: to move into action, in any direction, with very little advance notice.
Watch and act. There’s a edge to this phrase, something a bit uncomfortable, a feeling that complacency would be too dangerous to consider. At least for now, at this point in history. Or could it be that becoming complacent is no longer even an option?
It’s a consideration for both you and me to make, each in our own way, in the midst of these very unusual times.
With all my best wishes to you & yours,
Michael