Salt Story (6 page)

‘Pick up any hitchhikers lately?' Salt asked me when I arrived at the inlet. It didn't help that Nick Cave's
Murder Ballads
had been on repeat for the long drive. I'd passed three police cars on the highway and that made the road unusual and slightly fraught. The Bad Seeds carrying on about general human nastiness only made me jumpier. Salt told me then that a fugitive was on the loose in these parts. Apparently, he'd escaped police custody in a town near the inlet and had taken to the bush. They'd put out the planes and dogs after him. ‘He's without his meds,' Salt said, looking at me meaningfully. ‘Better keep the cars locked.'

To make things more interesting, Mountain Man had moved back to his perch right next to the only toilet in the isolated fishing camp. His set-up of a ute and trailer would be sweet if he didn't swathe the whole circus in a shambolic mess of white canvas. At first I thought he was drying out his annexe but it was sunny for days. His camp shone white through the trees from every angle on the point. But my main beef was that he was a shouter and he completely freaked me out.

Last time he camped here, he shouted at me at five thirty in the morning when I was bumbling up to the loo. I got yelled at to ‘go and live in the Tanami if you want to wander about with your fucking dog'. I thought then that
he'd
be better off in the Tanami Desert, or as far away from me as possible, or least a bit further away from the only public toilet in a fifty-kilometre radius, if he really wanted to do a Greta Garbo.

So this time around after we set nets in the evening, I sat on the toilet and could not persuade any of my bodily functions to function. Why? Because it was getting dark and I cannot leisurely eliminate when someone is yelling next to the corrugated iron wall, ‘Told you not to put yer fuckin' nose in there you shit of a thing put yer nose in the fly net mosquito net if you put yer fuckin' nose in there again I'm gonna get fuckin' mosquitos biting me and I'm gonna fuckin' flog yer you hear that I'll fuckin' hit yer I'm sick of it.'

I rarely see Mountain Man. Even when he yells at me, he keeps out of sight. I may see his thin neck and his head crowned with a colourless beanie peering at me from the windows of his car, or I may see a wisp of smoke from his camp fire behind his car, or the pointed ears of his long-suffering, yellow-eyed cur dog.

I sat on the toilet with no door, completely unable to shit whilst Mountain Man continued his rant.

I studied the signs written in black Artline on the toilet wall.

PUT THE LID DOWN.

DID YOU SHUT THE LID? NO? OH NO NO!

(It's a complete failure of a compost dunny and is filling up at a rather alarming rate.) I gave up. He was still shouting. I watched for his shadow in the doorway, saw it was clear and walked out, avoiding looking towards his camp. Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact.

Then I realised I'd forgotten to shut the lid.

Back at our fire, I said to Unruly and Salt, ‘I think I'd prefer to die of faecal impaction before I use that dunny again.'

Salt snorted, ‘Yeah, it's fillin' up, girl.'

‘No, it's Mountain Man, he scares the crap out of me. Well, actually my crap's too scared to come out while he's yellin' at me.'

‘He's yellin' at his dog,' said Unruly.

‘Oh. Well. He's creepy.'

‘He's pretty harmless,' said Unruly kindly. ‘Just took too many trips when he was young. Lives around all these beaches, he does. He was at Bremer last week. Or maybe Normans. He won't hurt ya.'

Salt and I both locked our cars that night. When I unzipped my tent, I shone the torch around before I stepped inside. In the morning I was climbing into my wet-weather gear, struggling to fit the plastic pants over my boots, when a silvery four-wheel drive cruised past all kinda sharky, no lights in the gloom before the sun. They drove onto the beach, turned around and went past our camp again. Plain clothes, looking for an escapee, I thought. Maybe. No doubt. Cops.

An early nor'-westerly struck up a tune on the water while I picked undersized crabs from the net and shook out the coral. Salt backed along the net into the wind, keeping the propeller off the cork lines. He tried cracking a few jokes but they weren't really working on me.

I dug a bush toilet for myself in a nice quiet
non-shouting
space. Later, while I was packing the bream into boxes and icing them down, the radio announcer said that they still hadn't caught the fugitive. He repeated that the man didn't have his medication.

At the roadhouse, fifty kilometres away, I bought some fuel for the boat and the woman at the counter volunteered an A4 printout of the runaway prisoner. He didn't look like the fugitive from
Great Expectations.
He wasn't whiskered and gnarly with bad teeth and nasty eyes and a pocked nose. He was a nice-looking young man, slim, pleasant, even given the police ID board he held in front of his chest – from different police station to the one where cops had botched his latest arrest.

‘But apparently his hair is shorter now,' she said. ‘And he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt.'

We were both quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘Poor bugger. I hope he's okay. It was really cold last night.'

On examining the picture, he definitely wasn't Mountain Man but that wasn't much of a relief because it meant there were two freaked-out folk wandering around. The inlet is a good place to slide like a needle into the veins of country and never be seen again ... except by people like us living there.

Before dawn the next day, I lay in my tent listening to the swans and the ducks and the grebes awaking. Then there was a new sound...

A trumpeting, a
blow
like someone breathing through an amplified didgeridoo, then the slapping of huge wads of flesh and skin against the skin of the sea.

The whales.
The whales are back.

Salt put the kettle on and turned up the radio. The fugitive had handed himself into a farmer last night. He'd been taken to hospital with hypothermia. Mountain Man had finally quit his hollering too. He walked past the camp with his dog and threw out a tattered sleeve in what I realised later was a wave hello.

The whales. I could hear them from where I stood drinking my coffee, looking out to the sandbar. I couldn't see them but the chilled dawn air was so still that I heard them like they were right in front of me. They sang for hours that morning. Ten or fifteen whales, singing the story of their return from Antarctica.

An old lady told me once that her people used to take their teenage girls to Waychinicup for healing, to fix them up when they got sick or sad. This place has a kind of fey wildness that never fails to infect people with a creeping sense that strange, shy creatures are watching from the breathing scrub and waters. Waychinicup feels like it is making me better.

A river runs through the deep, moist valley, darkening with the tannins of tea-tree until it reaches the stone-bound inlet. The sea squeezes in through granite gatekeepers and the two surges of river and sea combine to make a gentle, breathing tide.

We returned to Waychinicup last night, swept down into the primal contours of her gully. I feel elation on return to this country – that, and a curious sense of unbelonging. That last drive down to sea level, the water laid out like silver paper between creased hills, makes me feel all of these things. I brought the girl Pearlie with me and set up the tent for her, watched her burrow into a swag and sleep. She slept for fourteen hours.

‘I want to live there,' I pointed out the granite elephant to Salt, the lithic, slumbering creature, one of the many strange rock formations that bind the inlet. Perfect hindquarters displayed her fanny to the world. Someone had lovingly constructed a dry stone wall around her hind legs, to keep out the wind. Inside was the carcass of a cooking fire.

‘I want to live in the belly of that elephant.'

‘Well, the rent would be cheap.'

We both said, ‘Till the ranger drops in.'

The mountain above is sprayed with rocks, streaked with rain. In a not so distant past, a pilot, legendary spotter of whale chasing days, along with some detectives on a search for floating drums of illegal drugs, obliterated themselves and their plane against this unforgiving mountain.

I could live here though, away from the complications of machinations of my current existence. I could fish for just enough to eat each day and garnish that with native spinach and celery. I could grow quiet and hermity, surprise myself with words occasionally. I could live in the belly of the elephant. And I would sing. I would watch and listen to the gentle meanderings of this isolated universe. I would stitch myself into the inlet. I could do that.

Till the ranger dropped in.

An old man wobbegong slides back into his stony grotto.

We wrestle a whole school of clumsy, striped ludericks out of the nets and slip them back into the water.

A Port Jackson shark, a dinosaur, the biggest I've ever seen, fins like Cessna wings, crusher teeth hooked into the mono. I untangle him, eyeing his dorsal spike. He folds back into the murk and just ... disappears.

Glossy skipjack the size of my forearm. Keepers.

Poisonous angelfish, their bristling spikes keep them entangled.

Cobbler. Waddy thump.

Black branches of long-sodden tea-trees, dreamcatchered with green ribbon grass.

Oily, soft yelloweye mullet

Good honest herring.

And a quickening pace to the buoy.

When the sun came up I filleted the skippy. The wobbegong had taken a bite from each one. I threw the frames back into his grotto, shooing away the Pacific gulls.

‘You feeding that bloody carpety again?' yelled Salt from the shore. ‘All the better, so I can catch him later and
eat
the fat bastard!'

Tonight the humpbacks visited. We were waiting for whiting to mesh, sitting out the sunset, twitchy with the need to pick up the nets and see what was there and not leave it too long before the dastardly squid ate the lot.

Sometimes the waiting becomes the event and the nets are a mere by-product. Tonight was like that. The sun set over the houses and dunes at Goode Beach and at an indefinable moment of half-light, the motorbike frogs began revving from their swamp behind the primary dune. A couple fishing on the beach turned on their gas lamp. Mares' tails and mackerel scales, a sure sign of storms to come, dotted and streaked the sky with crazy colour. Out to sea, Breaksea Island glowed magenta and white-water monsters crashed against her rocks.

Three humpback whales rounded Mistaken Island. Two of them cruised back out of the bay as I cut the motor. The third stayed nearby. I watched his footprints slowly dot across the surface as he moved towards us.

The footprints enchanted me: the closeness of this beast, his massive bulk beneath the surface, undetectable but for those circles of calm.

He rose to the surface about fifty metres from the boat, presented a mottled fin and rolled sideways to look at us. His head was all bumpy and alien, cowled with barnacles and glistening with brine. He breathed in the night and then arched straight into a dive.

‘That means he's diving deep,' Salt told me. ‘The way he arched sharp like that. He won't come up for a while.'

We began looking around for footprints. I was reminded of sitting in a paddock, giving up on catching an errant horse. Eventually the horse would eat its way in a spiral to my feet.

And there he was! About ten metres from the boat. We both stood in the
very little tinny.

‘Jeez,' said Salt. ‘I hope he doesn't have any barnacles he wants rubbing off.'

The whale dived again, then a footprint appeared right beside the boat. I spun around, trying to track the whale and turned the wrong way. Finally, turning clockwise instead of withershins, I saw it. A perfect clock face of whale tracks. Salt and I stood in the centre like the hour and minute hands.

When we saw the whale again, he was heading out into the open water, spouted and then arched into another deep, long dive.

‘Well,' said I.

The water lay completely still, glassed off, the sun nearly set and everything silent but for those frogs. We stood in the dinghy in a perfect circle of whale tracks.

‘This is really quite unpleasant,' said Salt. ‘I can think of better places to be, like sitting on my couch at home, watching TV or something.'