Stilwater: Finding Wild Mercy in the Outback - Softcover

De Grenade, Rafael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571313141 ISBN 13: 9781571313140

Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The spellbinding true story of a young woman's adventure in the Australian outback as she joins a small crew on an abandoned cattle station and drags feral cattle in from the wild.

One thousand square miles of coastal scrub—inundated by monsoon floods in summer, baked dry in winter, and filled with the most deadly animals in the world—Stilwater seems an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But in the countless miles beyond the station compound roam tens of thousands of cows, many entirely feral from a long period of neglect. Rafael has been hired, along with a ragged crew of ringers and stockmen, to bring them in for drafting. Over a season they use helicopters, motorcycles, bullcatcher jeeps, horses, ropes, and knives to win Stilwater Station back from the wild.

A deeply poetic inquiry into our desire to make order where we find wildness, Stilwater: Finding Mercy in the Outback suffuses us with salt and scrub and blood, blurring the line between domestic and feral in wondrous, unsettling ways. This is a whirlwind of men, women, cattle, horses, machines and landscape in collaborative evolution, all becoming different manifestations of the same entity—the Australian Wild.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rafael de Grenade grew up on a rural farm in the foothills of the Santa Maria Mountains outside of Prescott, AZ. She began working for the rugged Cross U Ranch in north central Arizona at age 13 — riding, branding, shoeing horses, and gathering cows. Her diverse and place-based education helped her to develop a deep understanding of the farm and the Southwest and her place as a land steward, artist, scientist, and writer. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in environmental studies from Prescott College, plus a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Arizona. She has traveled in many countries, seeking to understand the complexities of the people-place relationship in the context of a globalizing world. Rafael divides her time with her husband, Jaime, and daughter, Soraya, between the Southwest of the United States and Chile.

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[From the first section]:

Gulf Country

I landed on Stilwater in the dry season. I arrived by air, sweeping across white savannah mottled with sand ridges and the speckled green of vegetation. From above the upper reach of gulf country was a painting--tracings and patterns with vivid colors and no distinct shapes, the future and past laid out below all at once, temporal paths cut by countless spirits on walkabout, here and gone.

Trees took shape as the plane descended, tall, with blue-green willowy canopies, and then a small station rose up, a compound with its few rectangular scattered buildings, a few corrals at the end of a long white line of road leading in from the east. The pilot veered, dipping one wing, and the long dirt strip appeared and there was no avoiding the ground. The small wheels jolted against hard-packed earth and yellow grass blurred past the windows. It is never possible to turn back--the past disappears as quickly as the next moment arrives; any direction is movement forward.

When the pilot opened the curved door, I climbed down over the wing. I had arrived alone, the sole passenger. The searing white earth rose to meet me.

[SB]

Australia is an island between two oceans, a landmass isolated for some fifty-five million years. Most of the twenty million people there today choose the tranquilizing lip of deep blue water at the eastern rim. But farther inland, farther north, red earth and black earth, hot savannahs of eucalyptus trees and bronze desert reveal the continent’s heart. This subtle expanse reaches for days of flat nothingness, the creases of thin drainages like wrinkles of skin--parched, leathered, endless.

Hours from the cities on the coast, across the barren sweep, a horn juts upward on the northeastern corner: the spiked protrusion of the Cape York Peninsula, which reaches almost to Papua New Guinea. Here the earth begins to green again, just the palest tinge of tropics clawing into the flattest land on earth. In its farthest reign, the horn cuts between the Arafura Sea in the Indian Ocean and the Coral Sea of the Pacific Ocean. Retreat a little to the south and west and the Arafura Sea bleeds into the Gulf of Carpentaria. Stilwater was a rectangle that bordered the sea and covered a swath of the coastal plains.

The gulf country is alternately, and sometimes all at once, a rippling savannah, a salt flat, a scrub whose edges endlessly change and play at the wide silk of the sea. Rivers snake across it in broadening oscillations, resisting the moment they become one with the wide, glittering ocean, trying to slow down time. Shallow channels cut between the major conduits, where, depending on rain and the direction of storms, water can flow in either direction. Salt arms reach inward like the limbs of an octopus, their tentacles fringed in mangroves.

This land is a body without boundaries, filled with veins that transgress and regress, feeding and starving its different organs with impunity. In some places rivers are dependable, land is dependable. This is a landscape where anything can happen. A place that defies human nature, and even seems to defy nature itself.

Few places on earth have a single tide each day, but in the gulf, in what feels like a conscious rebellion against physics and gravity, two oceans collide, and the combined forces cancel a tide. Rivers flow out to the gulf for half of the day and the gulf flows into them for the other half. The tide pushes upstream, kilometers inland, blending salty and sweet.

The gulf is not inviting. More like luring--full of sharks and jellyfish and silver barramundi. Crocodile eyes follow any creature that ventures to the shore, but not many do. Most know to give the coastline its wide berth, and the waters ripple alone. Low tide exposes white beaches and sand bars with shallow water spreading in translucent, jade-green fins between them. The crocodiles sleep on the warm sand just above the surf, deadly and serene.

Inland, forested bands of sand ridges dissect the grasses and flats. Low ridges appear and disappear across the plain, sections of old waterways left a few feet higher than surrounding country after millennia of erosion. Tall, waving grasses sweep a meter high in faded gold between open forests, brackish lagoons, and murky bogs. Saltwater mangroves line the coast and saline rivers; freshwater mangroves grow on stick legs along the swamps. Water lilies raise white and purple palms in the lagoons in rare, delicate gestures. Sea wind blows in from the coast, cool on the winter mornings. Sea eagles haunt the line between sand and sea while wallabies fidget and nibble and bounce, a foot tall and easily frightened. Huge lizards--goannas--prowl the scrub and snakes trace wandering lines into the sand.

Deeper still, the forest country begins, a savannah of tall bloodwood trees, weeping coolibah, broad-leafed cabbage gums, white-trunked ghost gums, and shorter tea trees. A year turns the grass between them from a lush green to a dead, bleached brown.

There are only two seasons here, and there is no mistaking which is which.

The wet thickens the air with heat and moisture until it bleeds into drops, the pounding monsoon storms turning the country into a hammered sheet of water--half flood, half ocean. Thundering herds of clouds give the sky more topography than the land has known for eons. As the water falls, the sea invades, as far as it can reach, and the crocodiles follow. Animals crowd onto the jungled sand ridges, which only afford them a few inches of protection above water. Violent cyclones crack the trees, and animals huddle against the rain. Many don’t escape. Roads become impassable, and the mail plane can hardly ever land. Mangoes ripen and fall in rotting layers on the lawns. Heat turns viscous and the shallow sea of rain and gulf rises under the metal stilts of the houses, isolating the inhabitants for months at a time.

Eventually the rains stop, and not a drop falls for nine months. Water recedes and mud hardens slowly along with its remnants of dead vegetation or animals. For a shuddering moment, the country blazes in neon green. Small flowers bloom. Then, the green follows the water, receding, bleaching the savannah. Grasses dry into a dead sea. Dust releases from the clayhold, ready to scatter with any hint of wind. The sky reaches an unobstructed, piercing blue and haze rings the edges. The sun shifts imperceptibly, warmth and light losing their tone. A subtle chill invades the night. Few clouds tear against the thorny crown of stars or temper the incessant sky. Months in the dry, like those of the wet, stretch on and on, demanding either patience or surrender. All weather intercepts, and seems to pass right through the skin.

[SB]

When I was twelve I quit school and began working as a ranch hand on a neighboring, rough-country mountain ranch in Arizona. When I eventually learned of north Australian cattlemen and their strange lives on the edge of an edge, I thought that my years horseback might prepare me for the extremes of wilderness they called home. At the least, they sparked a dream in me that was wilder and more remote than what I had known. And because I was more at home in a sleeping bag under the stars than among people and had a driving motivation to be away, beyond borders clear to me then, I decided to travel to their country.

I wrote to my great uncle’s wife's stepmother’s cousin who lived in central Queensland. She responded, eventually, with enthusiasm. The distant relative, Tara, was pregnant with her first child, and her husband needed help in the "muster" or roundup. I could ride her horses and stay as long as I wanted.

I flew to Central Queensland and landed in the land of kangaroos and bilabongs and coollibahs. I worked there for a month, and in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Milkweed Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1571313141
• ISBN 13: 9781571313140
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar