Chapter 2 Digging In

Chapter 2

Digging In.

Having completed a smooth path from our place to the nearest ‘hamlet’, Helen and I made it our personal project to blaze a new trail all the way down to the road. The one being used below ‘the kitchen’ was steep and slippery in places so we hacked away at the lantana, moved a few rocks, and forged a really easy path going gradually downhill across the contour and then planted native trees at intervals beside the path where we’d chopped away a decent amount of space back into the wall of lantana. The main restriction on planting trees was the cost of buying seedlings large enough to plant out so it was important to keep the weeds cut back around them until they ‘took off’.

The new ‘contour track’ made a big difference when coming home carrying supplies or children.

We’d officially joined the group by making the new path.

There was a lot of carrying materials up from the road so working together made a lot of sense and it was pleasant to sit around the fire at night eating together. The group consisted of five men and four women in their twenties with a variety of other people staying or involved in projects because by then we’d built an oval-shaped pole structure fifteen metres in length with a beaten earth floor for cooking, socialising, and for visitors to sleep. The timber frame supported a roof made by stretching chicken wire and hessian over timber battens and then saturated with cement; it dried hard and was then waterproofed. The low walls were basalt field stone and in the centre of the floor was a circle of stones with a brightly burning hardwood fire. The smoke exited via the open roof gables.

Other than the fire the only other light was a kerosene pressure lamp hanging from a high hook on the main beam, or candles. A couple of guitars and drums leant against a wall lined with books and some gardening tools were bunched up in one corner behind hessian sacks full of freshly harvested onions and garlic. The sounds of night-time insects were loud but unnoticed.

We worked well together as a group because we were all committed to the same crazy dream and every task we completed made living more comfortable. It’d started from nothing more than a tent and a few tools but gradually we’d set ourselves up quite comfortably.

Not only had we built the impressive communal kitchen but each of us had our own small house to sleep in.

Quite often there were visiting musicians who were usually enthusiastic about showing off their talents by playing every song they knew; at least once. In response, while very stoned one night, each member of our group elected to chip-in to buy a bunch of instruments and practice on them for a year. We ended up with a couple of guitars, some bongos, a violin, a penny whistle and a mandolin. At the end of the year we got together and spontaneously began playing the song. It was great fun and sounded better than I’m sure any of us expected but it was just too much like a fluke so it didn’t ever happen again.

I’ll provide a solid example of how committed we all were to the ‘alternative lifestyle’. As one of the ladies, named Jenny, became ever more pregnant there was no doubt that she would be giving birth right there in the kitchen without electricity or telephone or any outside assistance, which she did, successfully. Afterwards the gang cooked up the placenta and ate it with spaghetti. That registers as commitment to me. Both the birth and the eating. Fortunately I’d gone to get firewood so I wasn’t there for the‘ritual meal’.

By the time we had ourselves basically established we decided to take some time off to travel down to an Earth First festival on the banks of the Cotter river near Canberra.

As Helen and I were hurrying down to the communal kitchen, preparing to leave, I accidentally cut myself with my sharp new axe and had to delay our departure fifteen minutes while I prepared a poultice of comfrey and rosemary for the wound.

I‘d been carrying the axe on my shoulder but it was flipped off by a heavy bag of hand-tools when I lifted the axe handle to open the gate. The axe had flown out of my hand and caught me on the back as it fell, weighed down by a claw hammer, a plane, and some chisels. The cut was about five centimetres long close to the base of my spine and bled quite a bit but in real 'alternative' style I just washed it with cold water and applied the poultice of mashed up herbs wrapped in comfrey leaves stuffed into the waistband of my pants. 

Five of us squeezed into a well maintained Nissan Cedric owned and driven by our friend Harry. It was close company in the old car but being uncomfortable was part of the trip. He drove the inland route south so I advised them to take a road that went past an excellent place to camp. It was a winding dirt road with a reasonably good surface but it was a hot day and we’d all been squashed into the car together since the previous evening so everyone was getting a bit impatient by the time we finally arrived at the very pretty white-painted old bridge across the river where we stopped for a refreshing swim.

It was a great place to relax and 'picnic' so we ended up staying the night. I have very fond memories of us sitting around a bright fire beside the peaceful river with Rick playing guitar as we passed around joints of home-grown pot.

I was so much in love with Helen, we enjoyed being in love with each other, and we were on a real adventure as bone-fide hippies I slightly sarcastically recall. We were dressed like hippies and I had the beard and longish hair, so we were in uniform.

Next day we arrived at the festival where everyone was having a fabulous time but it was at that festival that I had my first ever disagreement with feminists, and the encounter was destined to haunt me for a long time.

Walking past one of several large domes I heard a woman making an impassioned speech about sexism but when I looked through a head-size hole in the fabric I saw a dome full of women, and only women.

I listened for a few minutes to the complaints of discrimination but couldn't help thinking that they were the only example of sexism existent in the entire festival so I went to the door of the dome to ask if I may make a comment but I was told to go away, "Women only!"

It was a segregated meeting in an otherwise completely non-sexist environment so I accused them of being a bunch of female chauvinists and for that I was literally thrown out of that dome and received a few scratches on my face. The violent reaction gave me quite a surprise.

A young filmmaker caught the action and I found out years later he’d shown it all over the place so I’d been widely identified as an anti-feminist pig. The festival was a lot of fun but Helen and I left after four days of camping in a large cardboard box I’d taped some plastic over. We hitch-hiked up to Sydney in record time but as we got further north we were having trouble getting a lift after dark so about ten we’d slid into the sleeping bag together in a little roadside park beside the river and quickly went to sleep, only waking when we were almost run over by a garbage truck in the early morning so it was great to finally be safely back to our little house in the hills to continue working on our oasis, clearing ever more lantana, planting fruit trees as we could afford to buy them, and cultivating delicious vegetables.

I had been given some special pigeons but they were eaten by a carpet snake the first night. It had managed to get in through the chicken wire but then couldn’t get back out, so, despite being pissed off, I let the snake go free, with six pigeons inside it.

After a couple of months we needed to make some more money so we went to Mildura to pick grapes. We didn't know it then but quite a few people were making loads of money growing marihuana although I hardly saw any during the first year. Most people were growing their own smoko and most people were very proud of their plants but others were getting sneaky, greedy, and very jealous of their cash crops.

Quite a few were involved in the community for no other reason than to grow lots of marihuana in the forest and turn it into money or property. I guess they were the smart ones, although a few of them came to sticky ends. As soon as the connection was made with drug-dealers in the cities the potential was there for home invasions. How easy it was to steal a hippy’s stash compared with robbing a store!  But it still came as a big surprise when I heard about the first one.

It was a guy called Flea. So many people had nick-names. Sometimes to disguise their real identities I realised later. He’d accidently grown a good patch, sold a few pounds at a thousand dollars a pound and then spent the winter bragging about it in the pub while downing countless JD and cokes he normally couldn’t afford so when the guys with the shotgun turned up at his place in the middle of the night during the following growing season he had a difficult job trying to convince them that they were wasting their time. He didn’t have a patch and he didn’t have a stash! They cut both of his nostrils with a knife before giving up and dumping his naked body in the lantana, all taped up, in the middle of winter. Freezing and frightened but still alive.

I’d bought a newish Honda Endure so we rode down to Mildura for the grape harvest. Picking grapes was hot and dusty work but making money that way meant we weren’t going to get bailed up in the night by desperate criminals.

We were able to pick more grapes than anyone else because of the method we’d developed. Helen and I utilised our particular strengths but even so, the farmers had been in the business for generations so they knew how to pay the minimum. The paddock we really looked forward to harvesting was suddenly worked through by a bunch of Italian relatives on a Saturday. No wonder they can’t get people to pick their fruit these days. While we were there a popular song was “I heard it through the grape vine” and we were so insecure it caused us anxiety hearing it.

Helen didn’t talk much about her childhood or memories but she did tell me about her favorite movie, Vanishing Point. I hadn’t seen it but giving long detailed descriptions of movies was one of Helen’s endearing traits. People would sometimes giggle when she’d begin.

One night Helen complained of stomach pains. We went to a doctor but he ‘treated’ her on the verandah of his house and seemed to have no idea it was the first indication of endometriosis. The next day she felt much better so it was more or less forgotten.

After a month it rained and the grapes were finished, but we’d made some money, so I rode the motorcycle back while Helen caught the bus.

Back at ‘the commune’ we put our energy into clearing even more of the all-enveloping lantana. The property had been a dairy farm for eighty years but it had gradually become overgrown by the lantana that climbed up into the trees and totally dominated the ground level in a vegetative orgasm fifteen feet thick. The perfect home for ticks in the summer and leeches in the wet season.

The kitchen garden was steadily growing larger as we each contributed energy to move rocks and dig the fertile earth.

I began to do yoga every morning from four until six before cooking some oats for breakfast and getting stuck into removing more lantana from the orchard area. We worked together chopping our way into the sprawling bush and tearing out the roots so we could drag the entire plants out and roll them onto a raging fire.

The best times were winter nights when we’d keep chopping into the night by the light of the blazing lantana fire. Even when it is green there is sufficient oil in the plant to make it flare up brightly when added to an established fire and even when the fire seemed to be almost smothered by a huge pile of green lantana having been dragged onto it the flames would soon roar up illuminating sweaty bare chests and flashing blades.

Jumping ants were often a problem. Their sting was nasty, especially when bitten by a few at once, so it was a desirable developed skill to be able to feel the ants on your skin before one of them stung, because, by then, so many nest defenders would be on your boots already it would be time to start hopping and jumping and slapping. There was also a much larger variety of bull ants but we didn’t so often see them.

We weren't the only ones attacking the weeds. Big clouds of blue/white smoke could be seen rising from one place or another somewhere in the valley most days.

Beneath the lantana the soil was rich and deep so the fruit trees we bought and planted grew fast and strong. We planted litchis, avocados, custard apples, mangoes, citrus, and all kinds of other things to eat in the future and thereby become independent from the industrial warmongers and oppressors of the masses. We were committed to a long-term lifestyle as an unquestioning couple.

I was so in love with that girl. She was everything to me. I was infatuated. We were hardly ever apart. Constant companions. We didn’t teach each other about sex but we learnt together. We were a hot young couple in peak physical condition and obviously designed for each other. She had a cheeky grin and kindness in her eyes. Kids loved her instantly. And with that lithe, sexy body we were continually trying to make a baby.

One day we were going to town with a couple of kids in tow. I’d been told by a horse-lover friend about a pair of full-blood Clydesdales that had been purchased by people closer to town so I kept my eyes open and sure enough in a large paddock on the bank of the river were the two beautiful big horses. We were excited. The kids were excited. So we all piled out of the car for a better look.

Unexpectedly both horses came over to the fence. The magnificent mare first. Right on her tail came the stallion who within what seemed like seconds cracked the biggest hard-on penis you could ever imagine. With much snorting and a bit of whinnying the big guy was ready to mount the mare just as a generous squirt of juice streamed out of the her vagina. Her tail was lifted, the stallion was up, and like a genius of nature in slid that huge cock.

It didn’t take long, but long enough, as I shepherded the children away from the earthquake of horse flesh.

And then the stallion was down on four hooves again and making all the appropriate victorious noises so we were all better off for having witnessed such an unforgettable display of raw sexual power.

It left me wondering if the sexual pheromones being emitted by Helen had turned on the horse but later when a stallion ripped the warning sign down with his teeth when we were about to walk across his paddock I felt pretty sure that they had. I know I was under some sort of erotic spell. I just wanted to make love to my sweet girl any time I could, whenever there weren’t more pressing tasks at hand.

So many guys swooned at the sight of her, “Where do you come from?” they’d ask, like they were ready to buy a ticket to that destination right away; often on bended knee.

At the time there were a couple of songs I remember. “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman” more or less described my constant state of mind. And Black Magic Woman” was something else again.

Although the new feminist/ women’s rights political jargon had become a bit familiar during the previous months the first actual feminist I recognised as such came riding into town on a blue BMW 650 one hot and dusty afternoon, just before sundown. I just happened to be making a rare visit to town at the time.

The woman pasted up some posters for a play called Failing in Love Again, and others saying Take the Toys from the Boys, referring I supposed to nuclear weapons. I supported all forms of theatre, and it had been spruiked as a ‘must see’, but after seeing the play, which had a basically anti-family, anti-normal theme I tried to talk to ‘the commissar’ about the play but she just brushed me off. Without roads or raisons. She’d done her job of using theatre to stir up trouble.

I hadn’t yet realized I was witnessing the end of honour. The dignity culture was being replaced by a victim culture. The women doing the play were there to sow discord between the men and women of the community and most of us fell for it because we were all so receptive to anything deemed ‘artistic’. Much later I began calling the simpering attitude “gratuitous niceness”.

“You sure? That I’m not paying you enough attention? Sorry Darling, I’ll do better.”The entire male population seemed to be saying. Without any real need for strength and courage, due to tractors and low level of crime, no matter how much a need was manufactured by going primitive, the role of the men had been subsumed by the service economy and government handouts were the new big daddy.

Since I’d been a monk I’d always been eager to help and be generous. Yoga and ‘right living’ isn’t something you do for an hour or so in the morning, it’s a continual attitude, will, and intention. I’d taken the precepts seriously and still did my best to stay in the ‘now’ while always being helpful, without bad behaviour; until The Women’s Camp.

It was the first ever gender-divided action that had occurred during the entire alternative community, hippy thing, so I didn’t help load the truck with their gear because I just didn’t like the idea of segregation, and that play had left me with an uneasy feeling. Let them load it themselves, I decided, if they are so determined to be ‘independent’.
The feminist thing was half way between serious and a joke; but it wasn’t just a joke when Annie, a young woman who’d been living with us for a few months started criticising what she viewed as different ‘gender’ roles. It turned out to be basically a veto on her, or any other female, making cups of tea for the ‘workers’.

Jenny had a young baby to look after and the men were generally involved in the heavy work; clearing, building, carrying materials and fertilizer up from the road; which made a lot of sense, but, anyone was welcome to help outside, to do anything they pleased. There was no formal organisation. Everyone made their own decisions, and there was plenty of work to do.

All that the outdoor workers wanted was a cup of lemongrass tea offered occasionally because Annie or one of the other women usually hanging around the kitchen weren’t doing anything else anyway, except talking and eating.

When we got into a building or clearing team we pushed on until the goal was achieved, or darkness fell, whether putting on a roof or laying a pipe. Subconsciously the tea-break was a ‘reward’ thing as well; recognition of the hard work we were putting in for the good of the group and from a purely cost/benefit breakdown it didn’t make sense for an active team member to stop working for the time it took to boil water for a cup of tea. In summer it was damned hot so a tea-break in the shade was always appreciated.

Of course it turned into a big deal and the tea breaks ceased so when the main two inch water pipe which connected us to the stream four hundred metres away came apart late one night I suggested it was a good time for the females to exercise their equality by going out in the cold and dark to fix it. As I’d done several times.

After three stubborn days without water Annie finally took up the challenge but she couldn’t find the break because the lantana had grown over the pipe too much for her but she did manage to chop a new hole in the pipe with the double-sided brush hook we kept razor sharp. She’d made twice the work for the guys who did end up fixing it but we had a laugh nonetheless.

Besides that kind of nonsense Helen and I had escaped the outside world. We were totally in love and together twenty four hours a day, gardening, cooking, reading, laughing, smooching and making love in our funky little house and that is all we wanted, but behind my back the feminists were at work for a multitude of their own bent reasons. Ugly women have their own twisted way of seeing things and nothing unites them like a common enemy.

Working on a friend’s roof was not the best place to be when Helen appeared with her lovely long dark hair completely shaved off. Tracey-the-bitch, a blow-in from Melbourne, was standing there with a big smirk on her face but Helen was so naturally attractive that the crew-cut that quickly grew back simply emphasised the symmetry of her facial features.

Reading was the thing to do on the days the rain fell continuously so I often read far into the night using only a candle. The library thirty kilometres away had a broad selection and friends swapped books around. I was reading all sorts of non-fiction and a few classics. I was delving, searching, expanding, making up for being uneducated. What the world needed, I gradually decided, was a practical, universal new culture based on sound economic and environmental principles, and that was what we were kind-off doing in our own clumsy, naïve way.

Ellen sent her eight year old son to school in a dress. Predictably, the kids made fun of him and he came home crying. There were new ideas, both good ideas, and bad ideas.

While we were working in our personal garden a woman walked by on the pathway toward our little house. It was a small surprise because we didn’t have many visitors and I’d never seen that woman before. Helen seemed to know her and went to the house with her. For tea.

After a short time I felt uneasy and though I was completely naked, because often in the warm weather we chose to work in the garden naked, I also went to the house and grabbed a sarong. When I arrived there was a strange atmosphere, and then straight away the mysterious woman left. I didn’t know who she was or what they’d been talking about but I knew she was trouble. It was so unsettling I didn’t even ask Helen about it. I tried to let it pass, as though it hadn’t even happened. I didn’t know it then but I was beginning to get seriously targeted by the feministas.

‘Live simply so others may simply live’ must be the most concise way to describe our ongoing motivation for struggling to set-up from scratch. The camaraderie was great. We were united in our efforts to change the direction of the world; however foolish that was, or sounds now, but it certainly wasn’t easy and couldn’t have worked without a particular mindset. In the early stages while still living in the small dome on a rocky outcrop a tiger snake with a big cattle tick on it had come into the dome so I left it where it was for several days to ‘heal’. I was sleeping within a metre of a deadly snake.

There were many fantastic times on that ship of fools’ paradise, but unfortunately, all of the usual problems of the outside world, and some new ones, came with the people into our new-age utopia.

Helen and I were still just as keen on having a baby, and we had sex at least three times a day, every day, with that intention. Helen was always ready to have sex, or make love depending, on the time of day. We had fun, easy, satisfying fun, indoors or outdoors, but she just didn't ever get pregnant.

It was very confusing and disappointing for both of us. Every period was like a funeral, while life went on around us and lots of our friends were having babies.

When the local council amalgamated with the nearby city council our ‘commune was threatened with demolitions because the new zoning for the land we owned, about a thousand acres by then, only allowed for one house per ninety acres and we were being threatened with having many of the houses bulldozed.

Some of the best legal minds in the country came to our assistance because they wanted to help the social experiment we were all involved in; to find a less consumptive style of living. Of course now that I look back on it I realize that a certain percentage of people were just there making a fortune from growing dope to spend on beach houses and others were there to bludge off everyone else's hard work. But many were committed, like us. Idealistic fools.

We carried on building and planting and playing music and getting stoned. We all worked harmoniously together in what had by then become a very beautiful place to be. The fruit trees were beginning to bear, the vegetable beds were overflowing with organic goodies, and it was all irrigated by the poly pipe from the stream that never stopped flowing

Being set up and secure we decided it was time for a trip to Nuigini to visit Helen’s mother for Christmas so we hitch-hiked to Brisbane, went to the embassy to apply for my visa, and as night fell we tried sleeping sitting up on a park bench until a couple of cops took us to a ‘flophouse’ to pass the rest of the night. The train didn’t leave until the afternoon so we had to amuse ourselves. As well as finding a mediocre museum we also found the lift up to the clock tower in the town hall and hung-out on the little verandah overlooking the city centre plaza. It was fun and no harm was done to any animals.

The train north to Cairns took about two days back then. It was a long way, and the train was slow, and not very comfortable.

My first passport had been stolen from me a few years before while eating chapattis in a small Nepalese border town named Raxaul. It had been difficult to get back into India without a passport and the embassy in Delhi only supplied me with a temporary passport that displayed a very amateurish photo of a skinny guy with a shaved head and a few weeks growth on his face that had been taken in the street so it must have caused some problems in the immigration office when the photo for my new passport had me wearing longish hair and a full beard.

We waited for my new passport in a small house in Kuranda, with another couple of people. One of the guys owned a customised Kawasaki 900 which he let us borrow any time. It was a powerful machine which required some careful control going down the mountain range through corners where the sun hadn’t managed to reach into the shade from the forest. Being candy-apple red, and bearing a loud megaphone exhaust made it difficult for us to be inconspicuous while riding on it, and ‘the beast’ was painfully hard to restart if it stalled. They had kick-starters in those days.

There was a horse in the yard that was just there to eat the grass but I made the mistake of tying it up to a tree on a slope where the grass was green. It was a very bad thing to do I discovered when the horse tripped over the rope and broke its leg. I had plenty of time to feel sad and guilty while I dug a very deep hole to bury its corpse.

The passport finally arrived so we flew to Port Moresby where we stayed with someone we vaguely knew. Back in those days all the hippies were like one big tribe so there were connections everywhere and anyone and everyone was welcome to ‘crash’. The situation was more sophisticated there in Moresby. Our ‘friend’ was a school-teacher ‘making a difference’ in PNG and she mainly related to Helen because the ‘women-thing’ was already gaining momentum. Her husband worked at the university.

We tried to get on a plane to New Britain but there just weren’t any seats available, at all. We hadn’t even thought about making a reservation. I suggested to Helen that she wait-list herself on a flight to Popondetta and I’d use the walking trails that criss-cross the mountains and meet her on the other side of the island, from where we could get a coastal trader to take us further north.

But Helen insisted on coming with me, so that was that.

Not many people who venture into tropical rainforest, more appropriately referred to as jungle, seem to understand the degree of difficulty involved in negotiating the often steep and slippery paths. And it was much more so back in the seventies before the track across the central mountain range became a popular challenge.

As it turned out the best thing about setting forth on our hiking adventure was getting to the other end. The relief of it all being over was something to savor. A bit like banging your head against a wall for five days and then stopping. At last!

But that was what Helen and I were about to find out. All we had to go by was a simple cross-sectional diagram of the main mountain range that divided the country into north and south. It was marked with the names of some villages and showed elevations of up to two and a half thousand meters.

Ahead of us from where the road ended were one hundred kilometers of dense forest covered razor-backed ridges with roaring torrents between each one. It was the beginning of the wet season but we didn’t really appreciate the significance of that so the following six days were more than we’d bargained for.

Fortunately our friends lent us a small tent but we took no food or water because there was nothing but canned food in the trade stores, and villages were marked all along the track on our rudimentary map so we expected to be able to buy fresh fruit and vegetables from the local people as we went. There’d be plenty of fresh mountain water in the numerous streams. How could anyone be thirsty in a rainforest? Helen and I were vegetarians then and only ate fresh food.

We hitch-hiked up to the end of the road so by mid-morning we were already on the red-earth foot path that wound sharply down for several hundred meters to a pure  river of cool, clear water churning constantly between huge boulders.

We felt fabulously free and wild so we stretched out in the sun on a huge hot boulder after wading across the river naked. A derelict flying fox hung rusted against a backdrop of luxuriant rainforest while bright dragonflies, butterflies, and birds adorned the pulsing sound radiating from the thick forest.

It was heavenly but misgivings began when we arrived at the first village marked on our map but it was no longer there. Just the remnants of some broken down buildings in an overgrown clearing without people or tropical fruits dripping with sweet juice.

It was still early though so we wandered along the narrow track between large rocks and trees, across streams and up and down hills looking for the next village as the sky clouded over and long, faint rumblings of thunder began.

The forest canopy allowed almost no sunlight to penetrate but we could see that the sky was one large swirling cloud as lightning flashed continuously. The rumble of thunder made me bow my head but we kept on moving fast hoping to find food and shelter before the rain fell.

At the bottom of a very steep descent we came to a small stream where the path appeared to follow the stream-bed. On the banks were some very dilapidated bush shelters but no sign of life so we waded through the shallow water until the track emerged onto the other bank to cut off a sharp bend; and then the sky was simply torn apart.

Helen was not a woman of faint heart but the air changed to a thundering ceiling of water so suddenly that she was confused and almost frightened. I’d prepared for the inevitable downpour so as soon as the first drops hit we stripped off our clothes into a plastic bag and as quickly as a formula one pit stop erected the tent in the middle of the path. Before its poles were in place Helen had dived inside, secured everything and dried the floor with my underpants. The rest of our clothes were still dry.

It poured and poured like I have never experienced before or since. Helen was very worried. We hadn’t eaten anything that day and she feared that we’d be stuck there because the creek that blocked our way in both directions was already too deep to cross. I reassured her but later when I went out in the dark to take a look I could hear the water moving rocks as big as medicine balls.

The rain gave no indication of ever stopping and we were about to sleep in a tent pitched astride a main highway for wild pigs and other animals that moved about in that primeval forest at night. Tree roots poked at the nylon floor. We didn’t have a light.

For fifteen hours we cuddled and dozed and talked as the rain gradually eased and finally stopped late in the night. Neither of us had a watch but at first light we packed the tent and got moving because the water level had dropped enough to make the creek crossable.

We struggled through the fast-flowing water to where the track began a very steep climb that went up the far bank and kept going up for several hours. Thick forest blotted out the sky and primitive banana trees poked their fire-red stamens directly upward into the woody air.

Naturally enough it was very muddy so we soon took off our shoes and carried them in a traditional string bag called bilum. We should have thrown them away.

The ‘map’ indicated another village a couple of kilometers ahead on the spur but when we finally got to the place there was no sign of habitation. Hardly evidence that a village had ever been there, until I noticed a tree with edible-looking nuts scattered around it. We pounded some with the soft rocks we could find but finally gave up. Later I discovered they were okari nuts, which are edible, but the shells take a lot of breaking between very hard stones which we didn’t have.

After what seemed like hours the top of the ridge was reached and we headed towards Ofi Creek. A long easy winding downhill walk to a well-deserved drink of clear, cold, mountain water.

As we began the climb on the far side of the stream we saw a little warning sign tacked onto a tree telling us of twelve false crests and no water for five hours! Discarded beside the crossing was an empty jar with a trace of Staminaid in the corners so once we’d drunk our fill from the creek we set off up the mountain with the tiny jar of water to be consumed between us on the way. Five hours without water! In a rainforest.

The grade was so steep and never-ending we were often climbing hand over hand on all fours, step by step, hour after hour up the slippery slope with tiny vinegar flies zapping into our eyes and mosquitoes congregating in swarms whenever we tried to catch our breath.

By midday we were finally at the highest point but found to our dismay that in our drained condition the climb down the other side was just as difficult because all of the strain on our leg muscles had been one way for hours and suddenly the opposite function was expected from them as we spilled over each ledge on rubbery legs grabbing trees to slow ourselves down.

By early afternoon we arrived at Nauro village. From the spur above we could see houses and gardens and it looked peaceful and prosperous. The people made a fuss of us when they first saw us, probably because we were barefoot, without backpacks. Helen let them know that we were very hungry and thirsty, “Bel belong mepela e cry lik lik!” she told them.

We were given water then shown to a sleeping hut after buying fruit and vegetables brought to us by the young people crowded outside, ready to bargain shyly. Very quickly a fire was burning and yams and sweet potato and pumpkin cooking in a big old pot. After a few hours of deep sleep we ate a second time.

Next morning the sky was clear after constant rain that had begun about three-thirty in the afternoon and finished sometime in the early hours.

The village was situated on the edge of a big drainage basin so there was plenty of water lying about in the morning. At first light we set off along a low bank which ran parallel to the side of the grass airstrip until we entered into a swampy forest with many small water-courses traversing the path. It was wet and slippery but we saw some very long thin whip snakes, a paradise kingfisher, scrub hens, and lorikeets collecting nectar from a flowering flame-of-the-forest. Butterflies and giant wasps buzzed us and the occasional wallaby crossed our path. At higher altitudes the lack of wild-life was surprising.

Within the hour we came to a narrow but fast-flowing stream that we followed for a couple of hundred meters before it was necessary to get across it.

I looked around for material to make a raft to enable us to keep our gear dry while we crossed. The current was strong but with a few logs tied together with cane we managed to get across safely and grabbed some roots sticking out of the far bank to enable us to scramble up.

We walked on through the dense lowland rainforest crossing a few lovely clear streams overhung with palms and vines before the path began climbing uphill for a long way until we came into a sharp saddle with a huge tree overhanging it and some outcroppings of chert. One of the few places with a view.

Below could be seen the village of Menari, bathed in bright sunlight with thatched houses on an expansive central area of red clay that was always swept clean. It was a very welcome sight.

Forty-five minutes later we were comfortably accommodated in a newly built hut. We bought vegetables and cooked them on a fire that burnt atop a forty-four gallon drum lid sitting on a bed of insulating sand with three fist-sized stones placed equilaterally upon a floor of split palm trunk.

We sat eating while the village life went on in the square outside. There were plenty of small children playing a variety of games. Women were cooking corn and bananas on hot coals. A father and son team were building a house nearby, busily splitting bamboo for the walls by smashing the nodes with the back of an axe. They rolled out the fractured stems ready to be woven into two by one meter panels.

The sky was already overcast and huge clouds were rolling over the mountain range from the south but it was still stiflingly hot and sunny.

The young adults playing basketball on two courts marked only by goal rings on an almost flat area of hard clay attracted our attention so soon Helen and I were invited to join the game.

It was extremely vigorous and at times hard to avoid contact with some of the other players. A collision with one of the shy girls would bring the game to a temporary standstill while everybody went mad with laughter; until the rain came down in full force and everyone was scattered either into or under their houses.

The rain was constant so we smoked some ‘bush’ tobacco and went to sleep early knowing that it was likely to rain every day at about two o’clock, and the next day we had a long way to go. The path crossed some awesomely mountainous country that was very slippery and steep with many creek crossings.

During the night the rain stopped and it was extremely peaceful and beautiful with a big moon hanging in the newly washed sky. A tawny frogmouth sat silhouetted on a branch of the tree outside our hut waiting for mice.

When it became obvious that the night was almost over we arose and began rolling up our blanket with our spare clothes tucked inside. We carried our tent in the bilum and the rest in a large homemade shoulder bag. We shared our small load.

As soon as we could see enough we moved off down a slope through cut grass past the airstrip and into the forest. A long continuous spur carried us upward again for a couple of hours before following a contour around the side of a substantial mountain and then we wound our way down to a stream. The water was cool and sweet. Just what we needed before the uphill climb resumed and within the hour we arrived in a pleasant village where we felt like stopping but because it was still only midday there seemed to be an urgency. The idea of getting caught by the afternoon storms and being trapped in wet clothing without time to ever dry them properly kept us moving fast along a descending spur as storm clouds continued to build and the sky rolled solid thunder.

After crossing a magic little stream with plenty of smooth rocks we headed straight uphill again until we came to a tired-looking village that to my surprise had lots of mangy, growling dogs and seemed to be populated exclusively by old people.

A few of the houses were falling apart but overall it was very picturesque because of several large and shady fig trees, and its location high up on a spur overlooking a huge valley of unbroken jungle.

We bought some of the mandarins that hung from the boughs of the many citrus trees. They were very refreshing and we ate them all as we continued on through the village dropping peel and spitting out pips as we walked.

The track soon dropped away dramatically to yet another stream with a steep path down through a clay bank. After that there was another climb, another stream and then the steepest climb we had yet encountered. The rushing water could still be seen below us after ten minutes of climbing hand over hand up the side of a saturated gorge covered by luxuriant foliage. Veins of micaceous schist were visible where the soil had fallen away.

We hadn’t stopped walking for about eight hours, so we were more than glad to see a large village with about fifty houses surrounding a three-tiered rectangular area ahead of us further up the spur. Beyond the village rose the massive main-mountain with dense clouds hiding its jagged peak.

We were very glad to be welcomed and shown to a hut where we put down our bags and rested for a few minutes but food was at the forefront of our minds. Unfortunately it was Saturday, the Seventh Day Adventist’s Sabbath, so we weren’t allowed to make a fire, or anything else until the sun set.

No-one was allowed to work or play on Saturday, in public at least, just because a particular brand of missionary organization had established itself there some time in the past so we sat patiently, tired and hungry, waiting for the sun to set beyond a huge green mountain with garden patches scattered across its lower flanks. Small sleep-outs could be seen amongst those widespread gardens, some with smoke beginning to rise lazily into the cooling air.

At least we arranged to buy some vegetables from one of the ladies but she must have had to walk a long way to gather them so it was dark and the rain was falling heavily by the time we’d cooked the corn and yams she’d sold us. One of the peculiarities of slash and burn agriculture in practice is that as the soil is eroded and leached of its fertility the gardens must be moved further away into the hills until they’d regenerated for many years. Harvesting firewood also took a toll.

At first light we were once more on the track and diligently working our way up the long spur that lead to a prominence where a great view of the folded ridges was visible to the south. Slipping and unexpected jolts were the cause of much fatigue so we’d realized the importance of taking care placing our feet and locking our knees with each step on steep slopes to give our legs many momentary rests.

It was a long haul across the top of the highest point of the cordillera through dripping moss forest where the trees were covered in light grey-blue beards. There was a peak not far to the west but we traversed a high plateau carpeted in a deep soggy mulch which squelched beneath our feet and extruded between our toes. Many single-log bridges had to be carefully negotiated in that strange type of forest that held an eerie mist.

We stopped to eat some left-over sweet potato wrapped in banana leaf before descending through unusually rocky terrain to yet another creek-crossing. The usual bundles of thin tree trunks tied together with vines spanned from large rock to large rock across the furiously flowing white water pumped up by the previous night’s downpours.

It was difficult to find the continuation of the path on the far side but by spreading out, Helen looking upstream and me downstream, we were soon on our way again generally following the main flow of that growing river but gradually getting higher up the side of an expanding valley, crossing many small side streams flowing into the main torrent.

The ground was absolutely sodden underfoot but we kept up a pace where we were almost running in an effort to reach the next village or shelter before the sky again exploded with rain. We were cold, wet and increasingly tired. Physically and psychologically threatened by the sky.

The ‘map’ no longer made any sense because we were no longer crossing ridges at right angles but were now following a north-facing river valley. It didn’t really matter that much because we just had to keep moving along the only path, putting kilometers behind us.

There were foxholes still noticeable in several places as we changed direction and began shuffling our way down a long steep spur. The type of topography the Australian troops chose to fight from when they attempted to hold back the Japanese invasion in 1942. Despite their courageous efforts they were repeatedly uprooted from dug-in positions and driven back by being outflanked in a jungle without limits.

Rain began to fall as big single drops but I resisted the temptation to stop and erect the tent because I knew that we couldn’t keep going downhill forever and at the bottom, as we soon discovered, was a corrugated iron lean-to under which we set up our tent for another fifteen hour stretch.

We climbed inside and lay side-by-side feeling a great sense of relief as the full fury of the storm was unleashed. Raindrops pounded the corrugated iron shelter like fists on a drum. It was a mad time to be doing the walk but there we were.

We stripped our clothes and made love with the sky flashing like the climactic battle in a science fiction movie and then lay out exhausted, talking quietly with our faces close.

A bolt of lightning struck a tree somewhere on the side of the mountain causing a landslide that really frightened us. It may have been hundreds of meters away but we realized that if it had struck a tree above our position we would’ve been buried under tones of rock and soil.

The thunder was squeezed thick and tight as it came rolling up the deep gorge and continued to sound, to us, like massive boulders careering down slope directly toward our insignificant little tent. It was an intense couple of hours.

Just before dark the rain eased so I stuck my head out to see what kind of animal I could hear snuffling about in the undergrowth. It was a pair of wild looking dogs that had slinked off without seeing me so I followed them for a few hundred meters down to a stream that rushed madly between giant boulders and spilled over numerous small waterfalls.

Near the far bank was a man with a young girl on a large, flat rock washing out the intestines of a wallaby they’d recently killed with the shotgun that was leaning against the hump of stone behind them. The water roared and covered any sounds I made as I slowly edged my way across the ‘makeshift freshly cut trees tied together with lawyer cane’ bridge that stretched from boulder to boulder across three slippery sections.

The man and girl were concentrating on what they were doing so the hunting dogs where the first to see me and went into a fit of barking.

The pair were a bit surprised too but they soon relaxed and we had a chat in pseudo-pidgin about how far it was to the next village. He said it was an hour away and my first reaction was to pack the tent and aim for it but he insisted it was better to stay where we were and come along the next morning.

I took his advice, returned to the tent, and told Helen about it. She was glad to know that there was a village ahead because the cross-section ‘map’ had ceased to mean anything.

We made ourselves as comfortable as we could with only a lap-lap for a mattress but slept like the blessed dead because we were so thoroughly tired.

One more thirteen hour stretch in the tent left us keen to get walking so at first light we were already moving.

The path veered away from the course of the river but settled on a contour about four hundred meters above it. The ground was sodden and the path was covered with overhanging weeds that scratched our legs with sharp little dried flowers. At first they were annoying but soon there were so many thousands of the tiny scratches that spots of blood oozed from them.

We hadn’t looked around for any alternatives to the first path we saw when we crossed the stream in the early light but after two hours on the path I was beginning to think we’d taken the wrong one. It looked as though no-one had walked on the overgrown path for years and I was just about to suggest to Helen that we turn around when I saw the first sign of recent use; a thin branch cut off with a bush-knife!

This gave us encouragement so we continued walking persistently, Helen in the lead and me stepping in her footsteps to make sure there was nothing sharp to tread on. Our bare feet were holding up well and we wanted to keep it that way. We pulled off all the leeches that managed to get above our knees. There were so many on our red legs that if we stopped to pull them off one leg there’d be just as many hopping onto the other ankle.

Ahead was an enormous landslide that had wiped out the track for almost one hundred meters. A huge piece of saturated mountain had moved down slope with rocks and trees mostly split, fractured, cracked and poking out of the re-arranged soil at weird angles. In the tropics the main topographical change occurs through mass movements of water-logged soil such as that.

We clambered across the debris until finally the path re-appeared amongst the undisturbed forest before turning sharply uphill into an area of food gardens, and then an expansive village.

It was such a relief to see human habitation because we were very hungry and beginning to feel the effects of accumulated fatigue from another morning of forced marching and climbing.

As we entered the village the people appeared to be upset by the clusters of leeches on our ankles and calves. Thick trickles of blood showed where the fully bloated ones had dropped off.

It amazed me because I thought that anyone living in rainforest would be rather blasé about leeches but the villagers were really agitated and insistent; that we get rid of them first thing.

After a rest and a fruitless attempt to buy some food we resumed walking to the next village only a kilometer further along the mountain at the same altitude. The path wound down past a waterfall before emerging from the forest at an old village displaying obvious cultural decay. The young people had been drawn away by the growing towns on the coast so the village had become dilapidated because the gardens weren’t being planted or houses rebuilt.

We asked to buy some food but were told that there wasn’t any for sale. I offered to pay any price for any kind of food but went without, except for a cup of lemon tea with powdered milk that tasted really good.

We were ready to leave, without having eaten for twenty four hours, when I noticed a women about to feed a beautiful ripe, golden, paw-paw to a cassowary penned in under one of the houses.

Cassowary chicks are trapped in the forest, raised and fattened for special feasts. They are valued highly as both an edible asset and status symbol.

I offered the woman plenty of money for the piece of fruit but she was adamant that it was for the bird. The same quality of adamancy that makes it okay to sit under a tree for a week waiting for a truck also makes bargaining or negotiating with a similarly blank face quite frustrating.

Fortunately a third party joined in and we were eventually sold the paw-paw which we broke in half and ate immediately. So sweet and juicy. Wishing the seeds were edible. Walking mountains would make anyone hungry.

We felt no inclination to stay any longer than necessary in that unfriendly place so we were soon on the track again winding along the contour through coffee groves and patches of bananas. It was easy walking but still above the expansive white clouds.

By then we had only one thing on our minds and that was to get out of the bush and back into the luxuries of consumer society. It had been an amazing re-assessment when we couldn’t even buy food with the holy dollar. We hadn’t planned on walking barefoot for a week through some of the roughest terrain in the world so we were suffering for our lack of preparation.

Fortunately the track was mostly downhill from there-on and we made good time with Helen in front moving along as fast as possible. At one place there was a very large branch that had snapped off the main trunk about ten meters above the ground. Helen’s focus was on the next patch of track that she was about to step on so the chopped-off end of thick branch just above her eye level caught her straight in the top of her head and knocked her onto her back. I pulled her to her feet and set her walking again; tears or no tears. By that time our legs just kept rotating like wind-up dolls and there was no value in standing still.

Not long after that I kicked my foot into the end of a decaying log when I looked up to catch a glimpse of the shy green-winged pigeon. It was painful and resulted in several deep punctures on the top of my foot. After pulling out a couple of half-rotten splinters I limped along, glad to be within hours of the road because we’d both had enough.

On a steep section Helen carelessly stepped onto a slippery surface that caused her legs to cross and spun her rolling over and over to the bottom of the incline.

She sat up too tired to cry so I crouched down and we rested in each other’s arms for a few minutes to gather the energy for one final push to the end.

By early afternoon we were at the bottom of the spur so the last few kilometers through shady rubber plantations on soft level ground was an absolute breeze.

That night was spent in a government rest house at Kokoda. It was a dirty and uncomfortable fibro hut and nothing worked but we still had to pay for the privilege because we had been too late to catch a ride fifty kilometers to the coast.

We bought biscuits and tinned food from the trade store. Our determination to eat only fresh food had been temporarily laid aside for obvious reasons.

After a browse through the military museum housed in an old shed nearby we lay down to pass one more long night together. Sleep came easily but strangely about midnight I woke up feeling the need to walk around.

The moon was glowing full as I wandered across a playing field past some pieces of broken airplane to a stone monolith beneath a flame tree. It was a memorial to a particular soldier who’d won a posthumous medal for exceptionally heroic behavior during the war.

Suddenly the realization of just how horrible it must have been flooded through my consciousness and I felt a deep sadness for him and all of the other pawns of war who’d drowned in mud and blood to turn back the Japanese invaders.

Walking the track in peacetime had been enough of a struggle to make me sore and sorry for myself. It must have been hell on earth crouching in a hole, wet and hungry, feverish and afraid, trying to kill strangers whose only intention was to stay alive by killing you.

The next morning we bought a ride into town in the back of a ute and went to the wharves looking for a coastal trader steaming north, but ending up going to the west, which was almost the right direction.

My foot was already throbbing so I was glad to be able to lay back on the deck of the little cargo ship, read a book, and let the clean salt air and sunshine help us recover from the most exhausting six days we’d ever experienced.

The cruise along the coast was very relaxing and showed coastal shipping to be the best way to get around. It was cheap, comfortable and slow, with plenty of unexpected stop-over’s at remote coastal villages where people and cargo were loaded or unloaded with much yelling and arm waving.

From the next major port we bought tickets on a light plane north to the island where Helen’s Mum, Elsie, lived. At the airport Helen surprised me by producing a little joint of marihuana she’d carried all the way from Australia so we lit up in the car park before boarding and really enjoyed the flight. The pilot did a big banking turn around an active volcano on the southern extremity of the island so were able to look directly into its throat where the lava was bubbling and smoking.

At Elsie’s place we received the expected warm welcome and quickly blended in to the household routine.

We all ate breakfast together, usually white rice, a leafy vegetable called ibica, and bully-beef fried up in a pan with onion, garlic, pepper and soy sauce. Really delicious. When I asked whether they had any brown rice, which we’d been eating for the previous few years, Elsie looked at me and said, “The only people who eat brown rice are the prisoners in the calaboose.”

The two-storied house was one of three right on the beach. A yellow beach without any waves. From the verandah a smoking volcanic cone could be seen poking up over the horizon. Coconut palms and large flowering trees were all over the place. Most socializing was done downstairs where it was the coolest.

Elsie’s brother-in–law owned the house. He was a local businessman who had his fingers in every available pie I soon figured out. Although the standard of living for almost everyone was ‘subsistence affluence’ there was a lot of money being made and not just from his trade stores that sold everything the locals could need.

Despite the low level of consumerism, because almost everything was grown or caught, the locals were very brand conscious. When I noticed customers ripping the labels off the cans of fish they’d just bought I was told they didn’t want to reveal that they’d just bought the cheaper version.

Elsie had a big laugh and seemed to be often stirring people up. Her status in the house was kind of floating. Boss of everyone else but not quite on the same level as her sister and brother-in-law, Morris. In a more general sense she was halfway between the tribe and the more modern world. Her clothing and hairstyle was ‘modern’ but she had faded tattoos on her face.  Helen told me she’d worked in the post office for quite a few years but now she was retired.

In the marshy area not far from the back of the house was where the massali lived according to Elsie. A massali is a huge, hair-covered snake. There was no doubt about its existence, so we were always wary of that massali.

Elsie had spent her childhood in the village being imbued with the traditional animistic worldview and then been subjected to the preaching of Lutheran missionaries, until the Catholics had taken over. When the missionaries had first arrived in the village they’d press-ganged the locals into cutting timber for them but the trees the village men were being forced to cut were the same trees traditionally used for building the canoes which were the key to their trading system with the offshoreislands. Their entire culture was being destroyed.

Later I read some oral history about those events, how the Lutherans had hung the "ringleaders" when they’d decided they didn’t any longer want to work for free for the missionaries. What the missionaries called, "Wok belong god!”

The villagers were exiled from their own tribal lands to live like beggars for many years on the land of other tribes until the Catholic missionaries had taken over. Determined to return to their own lands, the people had gathered all of their ritually significant artefacts outside the ‘father’s’ house and burnt them to show they were going to be good little soul-slaves. A form of cultural vandalism that occurred in many places.

The local villagers were still very primitive in many ways despite the patchy intrusion of modern trappings. There were quite a few books around the house so I had time to read up on the history and cultural practices of the region while Helen hung-out with her Mum. Except for swimming and going for rides to wherever anybody was going I didn’t really do much except try to learn some pidgin words from the staff. It was such a fun language.

After a few days I noticed the guys who worked around the house seemed to be hiding out the back. They told me a man from their tribe had killed a man from another tribe so now they had to lay low until a guy from the other tribe killed one of their guys to even things up. It’s called payback. Standard practice in many human societies. There were plenty of things to be scared of and it wasn’t just crocodiles and massali.

Over-all the trip was a success. I’d even earned some money by constructing a store-room full of stock shelves for a Chinese guy who needed to tidy up his trade store. I was told that he’d gone on holiday to Manila with some of the boys and then given his wife a virulent form of syphilis when he came home. She was getting out of there, divorced, but she needed to know just how much the crazy, mixed-up jumble of stock in the back-room was worth so she could get her share.

Helen’s Mum was superficially easy going. Especially after a few beers. But I felt sure there were a few things about me she disapproved of. Most people found something to dislike about me.

Nearby was a heavy equipment workshop for the machinery used by logging companies. They had some huge old Rottweiler’s for guard dogs. The type that chew off your rear-view mirrors, easily.

Before we left on a normal flight home Elsie gave us a mortar and pestle that had been dug up by a local. It was probably worth a lot of money to a collector but I dropped it off at the national museum on the way through the capital because I was against the idea of plundering cultures. When I went to look at it in the museum ten years later there was no record of it ever existing so maybe she’d been right.

Unfortunately Helen was still not conceiving after three years but on the way back home from Brisbane in the rental car she began having severe abdominal pains which finally revealed she had some internal problem. I drove her straight to a hospital where she was diagnosed as having endometriosis and immediately admitted.

The doctors performed abdominal surgery and prescribed the contraceptive pill for six months to balance up her hormones. Helen recovered quickly and seemed brighter and more carefree. She’d been hard to get along with sometimes during the previous year because her body was getting the signals that it was continually pregnant even though it wasn’t, but wanted to be. “When are you two going to have a baby?” I heard a thousand times.

During that period we quite often took a few days off from the everyday clearing lantana and building to ‘do the coast’. Our favorite ‘holiday’ place was the beach we called ‘black stump’; three beaches south of the nearest town and hard to get to.

All we took with us was a large ‘bilum’ full of tropical fruit, oats, nuts and a couple of sarongs, some books, and towels. Once at the beach we set up a little camp in the shade of the pandanus palms on the bank beyond the sand and simply enjoyed being in such a magnificent place where the air was pure, the ocean so energetic, and the beach like a freshly washed bar of gold covered in sand. But most of all we simply enjoyed being together. Alone together.

The lifestyle we followed in those days was very healthy, except for smoking pot, but our attitudes, diet and endless physical exercise had developed in us an extremely positive view of the world, and senses that were much alive and responsive to the natural world. There was no sign of human industry there except for the occasional ship which would slowly move across the horizon. Just the band of native forest, the rocky headlands with the fresh waves breaking onto them sending spray to the breeze, the sunshine glinting off wet sand, and prehistoric palms holding onto the sand banks and steep slopes.

Being so quiet it was the perfect place to read and relax.

First thing after waking each morning was to run into the sea and wash away what remained of sleep then maybe lay on the sand with the waves sneaking up to wet our legs, but after a breakfast of muesli and fresh fruit when the sun had already risen high enough to create much appreciated patches of shade we’d do what we were there to do; relax together and recharge ourselves for a return to living in the hills. Occasionally we had to do it. We worked so hard.

The place we’d chosen to spread our sarongs had excellent exposure to the cool breeze and a great view of the beach, the headlands and the sky. Helen’s beautiful brown body lay motionless with her head resting on my lap and I was slowly stroking her hair as we both read in the warm shade. Holding the book with her slender fingers. I loved her very much; we loved each other very much, and looking back I can see how close to paradise we were. We believed in something, we were totally engrossed in each other, and we were open to the joys and wonders of the world.

The coastal strip is all national park so it wasn’t uncommon to see silver sea eagles cruising and hunting on the breeze along the beaches so when I saw one out of the corner of my eye I just noticed it and kept reading. A few minutes later I noticed the eagle again. A large magnificent bird. But then I saw that it wasn’t alone. They were a pair flying together, and it turned out they weren’t hunting.

A brisk breeze was blowing from the south-east and the eagles headed into it side by side, continually gaining altitude until midway along the beach. The bird I assumed to be the male suddenly dropped into a steep tucked-in dive before swinging steeply upward and as he reached the zenith of a smooth trajectory he rolled-upside down and joined belly to belly with his mate by clasping their talons.

Thus connected, the two large birds then went into a disastrous-looking out-of-control dive at a forty degree angle that sent them plunging toward the beach a few hundred meters below. I sat up in mild alarm which alerted Helen to the situation as well, but of course the eagles disconnected and regained their poise rather than hit the beach. Each of them gliding away in a different direction.

It was an amazing spectacle and the best of it was that the two eagles continued for a couple of hours cruising to the north and then returning at a high altitude to do their death defying dance of love again and again.

Those were beautiful carefree days, so sure of each other and what we were doing. Dedicated and determined to make a child between us. Such things as the sky dance of the eagles inspired us because we admired and respected the natural world where things were always what they seemed. We were fortunate to be audience to such a display in such a way on such a perfect day and it’s a memory that will all ways be with me, for many reasons, but most of all because I shared that day with Helen.

Soon enough life was back to normal, only better, because later that year we received the wonderful news that Helen was pregnant at last.