My island, your island

I have asked my American friend Kristin from Wanderlust, to write a guest post for me. I have had the pleasure of reading Kristin’s wonderful writing for a while now and it is time that I began to share. So without further ado I have great pleasure in introducing Kristin Brumm.

I admire Kim for many things, but chief among them is her unabating love for our environment. I will say upfront that I do not consider myself someone who steps all that lightly upon the earth. I recycle more than I throw away, I compost, I often eat organic, I campaign like hell against Republicans. But I also drive a minivan, because I have children and it’s practical. I don’t take public transportation or carpool. I rarely buy used. I am the face of the concerned, yet mildly apathetic citizen. Middle consumer. I also sometimes, under duress, pull into the McDonald’s drive-thru and order Happy Meals for my kids, even though I know they are devoid of any nutritional value. This doesn’t mean I love my children any less than other parents who have the fortitude to avoid such lazy temptations.

And so it is with our planet. I love our earth with such intensity that it sometimes hurts, and I especially love the Australian land – recklessly, passionately, inexplicably – which is why when Kim invited me to write a post for her, my mind tracked back 22 years and landed on this story.

When I first came to Australia I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the land. I’ve written about that on my blog, but that’s not what this post is about. I was young, traveling alone and on the cheap, and as happens in those situations I didn’t follow a set itinerary, but rather allowed fate and whimsy to chart my path. Which is how I found myself headed to the tropical coast after four weeks in the Northern Territory. At this point in my travels I had already been in the country several months, met a couple of traveling companions (an Aussie and another American, both men) and covered some 7,600 km, from Sydney to Brisbane to the Red Centre to Darwin and points east, all by car. Someone knew someone in Cairns and thus my traveling companions and I ended up at the home of a man and his 2 sons, crashed out in the spare room.

The man was a divorcee, probably in his 40’s, and his sons were maybe 8 and 10. They were a motley bunch, the father clearly out of his league trying to raise two kids on his own. The house was littered with fast food wrappers and had all the touches of a make-shift bachelor pad. Sparse, mismatched furniture, barren walls in the kids’ rooms, empty beer cans piled in the trash.

And the kids. Wild, unruly, angry as a bed of scorpions. Violent. And simply starved for feminine affection.

As the lone woman in the group, the kids were fascinated with me. I was there for perhaps three days and they never left me alone. They followed me everywhere, hung on my arms, showed me their toys, hit me when they got angry, often hit me hard. One of my companions would have to pull them off me and physically restrain them until they settled.

I had met their mother in Sydney. She had left their dad a couple years back and in doing so had left the boys too. I don’t know the reasons for any of it, it wasn’t my place to ask. She was an attractive woman and seemed much more cultured and sophisticated than the father, and I just couldn’t see the two of them together. I think I remember hearing that the boys were just too unruly for her, or that was a reason given anyway.

One day we took a boat out to Green Island. I went off for a walk and the boys followed and I was annoyed by this. After being harassed and shadowed and pummeled for three days running I simply wanted some space. It was a secluded path and I was taking in the beauty of the trees and the shrubs and the silence, what I could get of it anyway with the boys yammering loudly behind me.

And I remember this, so clearly. One of the boys, the older one, reached up and grabbed the branch of a small tree and snapped it off violently. Snapped it right off this beautiful tree like it was nothing. I was shocked. I remember feeling actual pain in that moment, as if he had ripped an arm off my body.

I wheeled around angrily, started to explain to him that this was wrong, that you didn’t just go destroying wild things willy nilly, but even as the words were escaping my mouth, I realized their futility. How they were like fragile seeds falling on the cracked and barren desert.

We stood there, facing off. Me, defender of trees, foreigner passing through his life, stirring up unwelcome emotions. Him, defiantly holding his stick, his nine-year-old heart shattered in a hundred places because he had already suffered the deepest blow imaginable. No, unimaginable. A mother’s love is a given, the one constant we should all be able to count on.

As I looked at him I felt an odd emotion which I’ve since come to know well, something that sits at the border of aversion and love. Perhaps it is merely compassion. I stood there, feeling utterly inadequate.

“Come on then,” I said, “Let’s get back to the beach.”

The next day we left Cairns and headed down the coast. On the way out the kids showered me with brief hugs and fisticuffs. I have no idea what became of them. I never saw them again. They would be around thirty now, perhaps with children of their own, perhaps with divorces of their own. Though in my mind they will be forever frozen in time, two children throwing themselves against the world, asking it to bleed for them, angry, bewildered, raw, bereft.

When I think about that branch being ripped from the tree I cringe a bit even now, so many years later. I still love the Australian land as much as ever and I still lack the words to explain, though as I’ve gotten older I’m less interested in explanations in general and more interested simply in rich experience.

It still makes me immensely sad that so often we can see but not mute the pain inside another person. That seems a flaw of the human condition.

Kristin writes at Wanderlust
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