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These are my stories. Something inside of me just needed to tell them to you before I forget them. There was a little boy a long time ago whose father told him stories every night until his mother would shout up the stairs, “No more stories, he has to go to sleep now.” I'm going to tell you some of my stories now. Before I have to go to sleep. They are tales from my quest to find my true self. Perhaps they will help you in your quest. I hope you enjoy them. I didn’t make them up.

CHAPTER 1 JUDY

“Hey there, little bitch. Hey there, little three-legged, chicken-killing bitch. How can you wag your tail and look up at me when I gotta do to you what I gotta do?”

I loved being a jackaroo. The three thousand acre station (ranch) was way the hell and gone in the outback, twenty miles west of the tiny town of Trangie, far, far west of the Blue Mountains.

I’d never milked a cow or ridden a horse or driven a tractor or cut the balls off of baby cattle. I loved all of it. Well, maybe not the nut cutting part, but I did that, too. I’d found this job advertised in the Blue Mountain Gazette after being in Australia less than a week. The owner of the station, Allen Kinsey, arranged to meet me in a pub in Sydney and explained over a couple of ice-cold schooners of Toohey’s Lager that I would take my meals with the family, get Sundays off, and be paid the going jackaroo’s wage of two bob an hour, or about twenty-five cents U.S. I felt there must be some power looking out for me.

It was late afternoon and the sun was already sinking into the horizon. My back was covered with flies, and sweat poured out of me all over. A mob of 'roos a hundred yards off zigzagged across the range, sending up a cloud of bull dust that fed into a late day willy-willy, one of those Australian dust devils that often walk across the parched land.

Judy stayed close on my heels, hobbling along on her three legs. She yelped excitedly at a five-foot goana sitting upside down on the trunk of a big gum tree. The huge lizard didn’t bat an eye. I kept stumbling because it was hard to see the ground through tears. I held the rifle awkwardly and tried to keep it from her line of sight.

Kangaroos can breed up to such numbers that they seriously compete for the range on sheep and cattle ranches in Australia. When the 'roo population starts to get out of control, ranchers organize 'roo drives. As many as a hundred shooters will line up and blast away at a mob of kangaroos as they stampede by, being chased by shouting mounted riders and barking 'roo dogs. Judy was a 'roo dog, trained to muster kangaroos and drive them towards the shooters. But she hadn’t chased any 'roos for a long time, not since her left rear leg got crushed by a horse when she cut in too close.

I’d gotten up real early that day to milk the cows, and as usual Judy and the Joey were waiting for me. The baby kangaroo had been thrown out of its mother’s pouch during a 'roo drive, and my boss, Allen, had brought it home for his kids. The Joey and Judy had become good pals. Not great training for a 'roo dog, but since Judy only had three legs and couldn’t chase 'roos anymore, nobody cared. As I milked the cows, I gave each of them squirts in the face. They lapped it up and licked each other’s faces, too. After the milking, I put the milk in the centrifugal cream separator and turned the handle so fast that a spoon would stand up in the cream after it had been in the fridge overnight.

Judy and the Joey were always there at milking time. Judy and I were friends, and I think we loved each other. But she liked to kill chickens. Dianne, Allen’s wife, kept threatening to have Allen shoot her the next time, each time Judy killed another one.

Dianne and Allen were both in their early thirties. Allen’s face, weathered by the harsh sun and blowing dust of the outback, made him look much harder and older than his diminutive wife. Dianne, with her wavy brown hair and little-girl smile, looked almost childlike, but one took Dianne’s angelic visage as indicative of her underlying temperament at one’s peril.

It was lamb-marking season, and Allen and I had been out all day mustering sheep. With our two sheepdogs, Bing and Bong, we were driving a mob of over a thousand animals, and for the next few days we would be very busy cutting off lambs’ balls and slicing coded notches in their ears so other ranchers would know who they belonged to if they strayed into neighboring paddocks.

The sun was already sinking into the horizon as we approached the house. Dianne had been shopping in Trangie and had gotten back a minute or so before we did. Judy always stayed home when we went to the back paddocks. She couldn’t keep up.

We could hear Dianne screaming when we were still a paddock from the last gate. We ran the last quarter mile to the house. There were feathers and dead chickens everywhere. I could just see Judy cowering under the steps, pawing off feathers stuck to the blood on her muzzle and trying to be invisible.

“That’s it, Allen, either you do it or I will.”

This time, Allen knew he couldn’t get away with not doing it. He got the gun and he was crying. He loved Judy and he was really crying hard. He was a pretty tough guy, and I never thought I’d see him cry over anything. He didn’t take shit from anybody except Dianne when she was really, really pissed. She was really, really pissed.

Allen looked up at me and pleaded, “I can’t do it, Yank. I just can’t do it. Will you?"

I felt a stabbing pain in a place I didn’t know I had. I sensed the impossibility of his love. I took the gun from his hands and called Judy out from under the steps. She came out immediately and ran after me as fast as she could on three legs, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and her shame. We walked silently to the back of the second paddock and sat down together in the red dust. Just for a few minutes.

Judy put her head in my lap and looked up at me with those soft, loving, eyes, but her tail wasn’t wagging anymore.

“Hey, little girl, don’t you know I love you? Don’t you know I’ll always love and you will always be my little girl? You are such a good dog, and it doesn’t matter a shit if you only have three legs.”

She rolled onto her back for me to rub her belly. I stroked her softly and she peed herself a bit, like she always did when she was really happy.

I stood up. I could hardly see through my tears as I put the gun to her forehead. She put her head down between her paws. I pulled the trigger. The sound of the rifle blast went into my heart like being stabbed. For a second that lasted an eternity, I couldn’t tell if it was her body or mine that lay twitching in the dust.

“Hey there, little bitch. Hey there, little chicken-killin’ bitch. What are you trying to tell me with that small tear of blood between your eyes?”

I didn’t go home that night. I slept on the ground in the paddock, next to Judy. The sky was so clear that the stars overwhelmed me and sent me spinning into my depths and obliterated me with their immensity until I disappeared.

CHAPTER 2 THE DREAM

I came into this world by Caesarian section. When her time came, Mom was living in Salisbury, Maryland, where my father was stationed during World War II. I don’t know what went wrong, but I wouldn’t come out. Maybe I didn’t want to. Dad was in the Navy, assigned to a small carrier, The Card, which sank more U-boats than any other U.S. warship. The world was in turmoil, millions of people were dying. Maybe it was the cries of all those killed sailors caught somewhere with me in the Aether, their souls in the nether world the Tibetans call the Bardo, and my as yet unborn soul swirling together, afraid to be dead and afraid to be born. Anyway, I wouldn’t come out, so they had to cut Mom open and take me out.

During most of my childhood, my father was a cancer research scientist at the National Institutes of Health. Dad worked very long hours in the lab at NIH and would come home, eat dinner, and go into his den for hours more to hand calculate the data from his experiments onto handwritten spreadsheets. It was the late 1940’s, and computers for home use hadn’t been invented yet. Dad was working on testing the efficacy of several potentially chemotherapeutic drugs that later became main lines of defense against a variety of cancers. He would test the drugs in vitro (in test tubes in a special apparatus called a Warburg bath) at the lab and then tabulate the results at home. But he would always interrupt his work when it was time for me to go to bed.

My bedroom walls were covered with fold-outs from Life magazine. There were wonderful scenes of jungles with impossible numbers of wild animals all crowded together. I had shelves filled with cigar boxes full of shells, rocks and minerals, coins from foreign lands, and mounted bugs and butterflies. I had so many collections, and Dad helped me gather, identify, and sort each one of them.

On one wall was a big, almost three-dimensional red and blue circus wagon with bars on it. Dad had painted lions and tigers on the back wall of the wagon, and they seemed to be looking out expectantly, perhaps waiting for the nightly storytelling. Dad made his stories up on the spot as he went along. They were stories of Tarbaby, our black cat, and his buddy the robot, Mr. Methuselah. They traveled to the ends of the earth in the omlatrene, a magical vehicle that could go anywhere you could dream. It could travel to other planets or to the depths of the sea or the frozen lands of the poles or into the most remote and wondrous jungles. Tarbaby and Mr. Methuselah had incredible adventures together.

Mom made me go to bed at seven whether it was dark outside or not. In the summer, I could smell the honeysuckle blooming outside my window. The lightning bugs were just beginning their nightly show, and I could hear the beckoning sound of metal lids being slapped shut on empty glass peanut butter jars as kids chased the luminaries down and captured them for later use as pretend lanterns. The only saving grace for having to go to bed before all of my friends was Dad’s stories.

At seven thirty, Mom would inevitably start shouting upstairs, “That’s enough, he has to go to sleep. Wrap it up or he’ll never get enough rest.”

I’d beg Dad to tell me just a little more. I could usually wheedle an extra fifteen minutes of story before Mom eventually had her way.

I had a wondrous childhood and explored my imagination and my environment endlessly. But at night, sometimes I had this strange, recurrent dream. Maybe it was because I had been “untimely ripped from my mother’s womb.” I never made the transition that most people make when they pass from wherever we are when we are in the womb, down the birth canal with all of the associated trauma, and into the world of symbols and reality grids. Oh, I came into the same world as we all do, of course, but maybe not being “born” in the usual way left something attached to some Other-Where without symbols or grids. I don’t know.

From the age of three or four, this strange, recurrent dream would visit me, and it wasn’t pleasant. It started with a vibration and a deep tone that was not really sound. The vibration became more and more intense, the soundless tone louder and louder, but steady and unchanging in frequency. Then the vibration slowly changed and became increasingly uneven, the tone more and more discordant, building to an arrhythmic crescendo that filled me with a sense of -- I don’t know how to describe it other than chaos. It terrified me.

I would get out of bed filled with dread and not know where I was or who I was, or even what I was. I would run around and whimper and cry and try to hide in the closet at the top of the stairs that led to the ground floor, where my parents slept. When I think of the dream even now, I can smell the mothballs in that closet put there to protect Dad’s old Navy uniforms.

My mother would come to me, but I wouldn’t know her. She frightened me and Dad frightened me and the vibration and the sound that wasn’t a sound would continue in my head sometimes for half an hour or more. I was somewhere that wasn’t asleep and wasn’t awake, somewhere that felt like being lost in infinity with nothing to grab onto or fit into any perspective. I always came out of it eventually, and my mother would hold me and tell me everything was all right now. Then I’d go back to bed and be okay for the rest of the night.

The dream continued sporadically until I was into my middle teens, although as I got older I was less and less afraid of it and could watch it with a hidden part of my mind and listen to the tone and try to figure it all out. But I never did figure it out. Maybe I was just a nutcase. My parents never took me to a doctor to try to determine what was wrong with me. Maybe they were embarrassed or afraid I would be locked up. I don’t know, but the dream finally just went away and didn’t come back.

Sometimes I wish I could have the dream again, just to see if I would relate to it any differently now. Maybe I am still a nutcase. Maybe I need to be born all over again the right way, though I’m not really a born-again type. But who am I really? Jad-bal-ja’s Tales are some of the stories about how I tried to find out.

CHAPTER 3 SCIENCE STORIES

My father used to take me camping on weekends when he could spare time from his research work. We would set up a little two-man pup tent in the big field beside Paint Branch Creek in Berwyn, Maryland, near to the big old house Dad had grown up in. As a child, he had run naked in the woods along this same creek with his little brother, playing Tarzan and Indian Scout. The little creek was named after the soft, colorful stones that were plentiful in its bed. If you rubbed yourself with the wet stones, the color would transfer to your skin. My father told me that the Indians who lived in the area hundreds of years ago used the stones to create colorful designs on their faces and bodies. I did this, too, and it worked really well.

We collected edible mushrooms we found growing within earshot of the creek, and for dinner Dad would cook up a big cast-iron skillet of bacon, hash brown potatoes, onions, and fresh Agaricus campestris, or meadow mushrooms. Dad always taught me their Latin names. Mom never came camping with us, so there was no one to make me go to bed when the sun went down.

There was no air pollution in the area back then, and when the stars came out, the sky blazed with the full glory of creation. Instead of the usual Tarbaby and Mr. Methuselah stories, Dad would point out the constellations and tell me about our galaxy, the Milky Way. And he explained to me the various contending theories of how the universe came to be.

Back then, two of the world’s leading astrophysicists, Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, were still battling it out over whether the universe was born in a big explosion or had always been and would always be continually created in the vastness of space. Fred Hoyle sarcastically referred to George Gamow’s theory of an explosive beginning from a tiny point, which also was the beginning of space and time, as “the Big Bang. ” The phrase stuck, and it also turned out to be the accepted paradigm for the birth of the universe -- at least, of our universe.

To Dad, it mattered little which route God took to bring us into being. What mattered, he explained to me, was that we were here as a result of God’s act of creation, and we could know Him by opening ourselves to experience and appreciate those works.

Not every boy or girl had a scientist father who told them stories every night about Tarbaby and Mr. Methuselah and their adventures together in the Omlatrene or took them camping under the stars and told them all he knew about what they were seeing together in the glorious night sky. So throughout my tales I have included some of my favorite science stories that offer essential clues to the possible answers to the question, “Who are we, really?”

I’ll tell you my science stories as I might have told them to Piece of Pork and Beers and Captain Jimbo (whom you will meet soon), over a good bottle of Jack Iron, in Stressman’s bar back on the Lance. I hope you enjoy the discoveries they brought me as much as I did.

CHAPTER 4 THE JOURNEY BEGINS

I had no great love for high school. I graduated with an intense distrust of “The Establishment,” which included politicians, theologians, historians, and most “adults.” I was far more impressed by Holden Caulfield (of The Catcher in the Rye) than I was by the TV series “Father Knows Best.” I could empathize much more with the self-fulfilling characters of Henderson The Rain King or Atlas Shrugged than I could with the pontifications of Billy Graham or Barry Goldwater.

It was the beginning of the 1960’s. The libertine, swinging, counter-culture, social revolution decade. Bob Dylan was blowin’ in the wind, Joan Baez was singing “Danger Waters,” and Mick Jagger had just joined The Rolling Stones. JFK was president, our involvement in Viet Nam was just getting off the ground, and Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space. Khrushchev was banging his shoe in the UN General Assembly, the Cuban missile crisis had brought us to the brink of Armageddon, and primary school kids were still made to practice crawling under their desks so that they wouldn’t see the fireball that fried them. I was damned if I was going to join that Establishment.

I informed my parents that I would not be attending college and that the world at large would be my university. I would travel. I would live and experience other cultures and ways of seeing the world. I chose Australia as my starting point because they spoke English, there were plenty of jobs available to anyone with a high school education, and Australia had really cool animals.

My father, in his usual tolerant and understanding way, offered me a compromise I could hardly refuse. I had always had a keen interest in biology, and if I ever went to college, that would be my major. So Dad somehow managed to find me two volunteer jobs with scientists at the world-renowned Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, with the caveat that if at the end of the summer I still wanted to go to Australia, he would pay me what I would have made at my usual summer job as a junior chainman on a surveying crew.

I had to agree to apply for acceptance to three universities of my choice so I would have several options if I decided to rush off to academia after my inspirational summer with world-class marine biologists. This definitely was a better option than cutting paths through poison ivy and blackberry bushes in order for the senior members of the survey crew to pass unscathed through the woods we were surveying for the development of a new subdivision.

I had a glorious New England summer in that tiny harbor town of fewer than a thousand people. I ate tons of seafood, went sailing, and drank lots of beer, which I bought by presenting a phony ID my sister had made for me. At the Oceanographic Institute, I recorded the responses of snails crawling in magnetic fields, and at the Marine Biological Laboratory, I goosed giant torpedo fish, a kind of electric ray, with wires attached to a volt meter to determine how much juice they could put out.

At the end of the summer, I had a choice of Miami University, Hawaii University, Earlham College (a small Quaker college with excellent philosophy and biology departments), or Australia. I chose Australia.

Always good to his word, Dad wrote me a check for what I would have earned in surveyor’s wages, and Mom bought me a terrific travel guide to Australia. Typically, she figured if she couldn’t talk me out of my folly, I might as well be sure to see all of the significant sights. Mom loved to travel.

With my own savings and the check from Dad, I had enough money to purchase one-way airfare to Australia. When I hit the tarmac in Sydney, I had just turned nineteen. I had a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, and I was ready for whatever this new world had to offer me. I got off the plane with a lump in my throat, the adrenaline of all things possible surging in my veins, and an erection.

I knew a former American Field Service exchange student in Sydney whose family put me up. By the end of the first week, I found a job as an apprentice ranch hand (the Australians call them jackaroos) way the hell and gone in the outback, west of the Blue Mountains.

I traveled across Australia for nearly two years, experiencing whatever came my way as intensely as I could, always open to new adventures that helped me in my quest to discover “Who am I, really?” I worked when I needed money. When I was on the road, I slept under bridges, in forests, or in jail cells if the local cops would put me up for the night. I became a sheep herder, a cowboy, a migrant worker, a railroad man, and a tin miner. I learned how to live off the land in the uninhabited southwest of Tasmania, I almost lost my virginity in a whorehouse in the outback of Queensland, I… Well. Why don’t I just tell you some of my stories?

CHAPTER 5 THE ‘ROO

I’d been working on the station about three months. Allen put in a small field of wheat each year just in case the rains came in time. The crop was good that year, and we had just finished combining the whole fifty acres. I didn't want to back the wheat combine into the big shed. The huge machine was attached to the tractor by a complicated assembly of hitches and ran off the power take-off. I didn’t have a clue how to back up an articulated vehicle. I'd only just learned to drive the damn tractor the day before, and I was really tired.

“Just do it, Yank!” Allen screamed at me.

He was tired, too. So I did it. Right through the rear wall of the shed. Allen screamed some more and told me what a dumb, fucking, wet behind the ears jackaroo I was. He started to laugh then, so I figured I'd still be allowed to take my meals in the Big House with the rest of the family and Veronica, their English girl-traveler housekeeper who came to the station just after I did, for many of the same reasons.

It had rained in the outback, rained a lot, and a miracle had happened almost overnight. The dusty red paddocks had turned a deep vermilion green, and Allen and I had to go out each day and see if any of the cattle had gotten the bloat, a kind of fatal indigestion cattle sometimes get from eating too much fresh green grass. When we found one lying in the deep grass, moaning and puffed up like a big cow balloon, Allen would pull out a long, thin, rapier-like instrument and stab them in the rumen, that kind of ante-stomach cows have where grass goes before it’s sent on to their second stomach for proper digestion. There would be a loud whoosh, and half-digested grass and goo would come gushing out of their sides. Then they would stop moaning and get up and start eating grass again.

Allen had promised to take me hunting ’roos some Sunday. I was never really a hunter. I’d shot plenty of rabbits since I’d been in Australia. When I was a kid I shot sparrows and starlings and, once, a robin. I was ashamed about the robin, but no one ever knew. I don’t know exactly why I wanted to shoot a kangaroo, but I did. So that Sunday, after checking the cows for bloat again, Allen took me out in his bakkie, an old Land Rover, to shoot one.

We drove several miles through the lush green grass. The acacias were in bloom, all covered with zillions of tiny yellow flower balls that scented the air with a fragrance something like old ladies’ powder. We startled an emu hen with a batch of chicks in tow. We drove by trees with big goannas, a kind of monitor lizard, sunning upside down on their trunks. A seven-foot black snake crossed our path, and we saw several browns as well. Both were deadly poisonous and we left them alone. I don’t know why most snakes in Australia are poisonous, but they are.

Finally we spied a mob of 'roos resting in the shade of a big gum tree about a hundred yards off. Allen stopped the bakkie and told me to get in the back. He handed me a French-made, rapid fire twenty-two with a tubular magazine that held lots of bullets.

“I’ll cut out a big buck and I’ll chase him. You shoot him. Try to hit a vital spot, because a ’roo can take a lot of hits and keep going if you don’t hit a vital spot.”

He didn’t tell me where the vital spots were.

Allen got back in the bakkie and started towards the ’roos. They all looked up at the same time and started off at a fast gallop, hip hop, whatever. They were really fast, but Allen had done this before and knew how to cut out the biggest buck. Allen kept right on his hopping ass for several miles.

No one ever accused me of being a marksman, but that French gun could shoot as fast as you could pull the trigger. The bakkie was madly bouncing up and down across the paddock. There was no road. The bakkie bounced and the ’roo hopped and I kept pulling the trigger. I managed to hit him several times by luck, I think, but not once in that vital spot. I could see him bleeding from several gut shots, and he slowed a bit but kept on hopping. We came to a five-strand, barbed wire fence about four and a half feet tall. He cleared it like it wasn’t there and kept on going.

Allen stopped the truck and said, “That’s it, Yank, there’s no gate for a mile.”

“But the ’roo is wounded,” I said. “We can’t just let him hop off and die.”

“If you want that fucking ’roo, you climb the bloody fence and go after him. I’ll wait here in the shade of that gum tree over there.”

I jumped down, reloaded, and squeezed my way through the strands of barbed wire. The ’roo had stopped a hundred yards off and was standing there, his head down, panting and bleeding and, well, just standing there. It was hotter than fuck and I was soaked with sweat. The flies, thousands of flies, were covering my back and getting into my eyes and my mouth when I opened it.

I started after the ’roo and got to within maybe a hundred feet of him. He just stood there, panting and bleeding and looking at me. I knelt down and steadied the rifle on the stump of an old acacia tree and aimed very carefully. I got off about three or four shots and he leaped straight up and did a kind of flip, landing on his side. Then he got up and started running again. We repeated this procedure two more times, and each time he managed to get up and take off again, each time a bit more slowly, but I still couldn’t outrun him.

I lost sight of him, but there was plenty of blood to show which way he’d gone. I wondered how a kangaroo could have so much blood in him. After a few minutes, I found him standing beside a dam. A dam in Australia is a pond dug right out of the flat terrain, with a bore hole and windmill beside it that runs whenever the wind blows and provides precious water to the rancher’s sheep and cattle. When the ’roo saw me, he stepped into the dam and swam out to the middle. I could tell from the way he’d push off from the bottom and bob up and push off again that he was in nearly six feet of water.

Allen had made clear to me on previous trips to the back paddocks that you don’t fuck up a rancher’s dam. You don’t piss in them, and I knew I couldn’t shoot a ’roo in one and let him sink and rot and ruin the water. I put the gun down, took off my boots, and waded into the water. No one had told me that ’roos go into water when they are being chased by dogs. They grab the dog -- or man -- with their hands and rip his belly open with the huge claws on their hind feet.

I dog-paddled to within a couple feet of the ’roo. We both had to keep pushing off the bottom and popping up to keep our heads above water. We popped and bobbed several times, and then I made my move. I got behind and on top of him, dug my heels into his hips, and got my hands around his throat. He reached up and grabbed my wrists with his hands, which were as big as mine. He grabbed me so tightly that I got bruises where his hands had been. I pushed him under, but he kept pushing off the bottom and coming up again.

I was looking down, straight into his eyes. They were filled with terror, and I was filled with things I’d never felt before. Things primeval seemed to well up from unconscious racial archetypes buried deep in my psyche. Bloodlust, triumph, alpha maleness. His eyes bulged out as I tightened my grip on his throat, and his tongue protruded from his mouth and turned blue and swelled up. He never took his eyes off mine until he finally stopping pushing off of the bottom.

I dragged him to the shore and stood over him. His body was full of holes, his belly half ripped open, his form crumpled and limp. His eyes were still open, bulging out and staring up at me. For a moment, I couldn’t break my eyes away from his dead stare. My mind started spinning like a whirlpool, and I felt like I was being carried down into its vortex. I threw up. Then I started crying. I couldn’t stop myself.

In a kind of fireman’s carry, I lugged him all the way back to the bakkie. Kangaroos are very bottom heavy, and trying to carry one on your shoulders through nearly a mile of scrubby bush was a major enterprise. He kept slipping down my back, and my feet got tangled in his entrails which had started to spew out of his belly wounds. I arrived at the bakkie an hour later, covered in kangaroo shit and blood and the dried slime of fetid mud from the bottom of the dam. I must have smelled and looked like the Creature From The Black Lagoon.

When I told Allen what I had done, he screamed at me, “You crazy, stupid motherfucker! No one gets in the water with a wounded ’roo. Yanks must be dumber than Abos. You are my fucking responsibility, and I don’t want your fucking guts hanging out of your belly on account of I took you hunting ’roos. Stupid fucking Yank!”

My throat filled with lumps and all I could manage to shout back was, “Shut up!”

We drove back to the house in silence. To this day, I have never hunted again except when I needed meat. I didn’t even skin the ’roo. I buried him out next to Judy.

CHAPTER 6 FOSTER CLARK’S CUSTARD POWDER AND THE WOMBAT

Everywhere I went in Australia in the early sixties, I met other young people like myself from all over the world. We were adrift, unformed, tasting, roaming the planet in search of answers to the Big Questions, in search of ourselves.

After six months of jackarooing, I worked on a Black Angus cattle station north of Canberra for a few months, then moved on to Victoria, where I joined up with migrant workers from all over Australia and picked grapes for a month. When the grapes were all harvested, I took the big ferry, The Princess Of Tasmania, to Australia’s island state, where the apples were just coming into season. I found a job on a big orchard on the Tasman Peninsula at the southeast corner of the island.

It was there that I met Dahl Darling, an African-American boy about my age. Dahl had a white mom and a black dad. He had a wonderful, light honey brown complexion and a full, resilient afro Jimmy Hendrix would have been proud of. He had an uncertain, hesitant manner, both shy and precocious at the same time, and he spoke with a soft, slow, mildly southern-accented drawl.

“The heaviest thing I ever picked up before I set out on mah journey was a paint brush,” he told me.

He was slightly built, just a hair over five feet tall, and noticeably not used to manual labor. Dahl and a young Italian fellow world-traveler lived in the hut next door to mine in the migrants’ camp of the orchard.

The wife of the owner of the orchard called her husband Pip, but no one else dared call him that. He always wore this floppy old slouch hat that made his round, cherubic face with his crooked grin peeking out from under its pinned-up brim look like a comic rendition of an outback stockman. His baggy, Salvation Army thrift-store pants were held up by suspenders that were too short and made his pants legs end five inches above his ankles. The crotch was hiked up so high that he walked with a kind of springy gait that made him look like he was perpetually stepping over something.

Pip had an inferiority complex that jumped out at you and made him need to dominate and bully his employees. He had a high, squeaky voice which was not at all lacking in volume. You could hear him squeaking ten trees away when he caught someone eating one of his precious apples or when an apple with a bruise escaped the scrutiny of one of the graders in the packing shed and made its way down the conveyor and into a shipping carton. Pip inspected every carton.

Picking apples is not glamorous or exciting, although picking apples with people from seven different countries in the verdant, green countryside of Tasmania did have its compensations, not least of which was providing a temporary income. But after six weeks of apple picking, I started to get bored and was tired of hearing Pip squeak and squawk at his workers. So, one day when it was my turn in the packing shed, I selected an immaculate, large, juicy, red Macintosh and inscribed it with the punch of my Swiss Army knife, in large bold letters: PIP. I hid the apple under a box by the conveyor for an hour, so that the letters would turn nicely brown and really stand out. Then I set it free down the conveyor, making sure that it made its way to the top layer of a shipping carton.

I have heard of people turning purple with rage, but I never thought it was really possible. It is. Even Pip’s wife heard him squeaking and came all the way from the house to see what was wrong. I resigned the next day, not ‘fessing up, of course, though Pip suspected it was me. There had been a previous incident involving one of Pip’s ducks that went missing one night in which I was suspect.

Dahl decided to leave with me, so we hitched together to Hobart that very day. Dahl had never been camping before, and we thought it would be really cool to “go bush” for a while and check out Tasmania’s uninhabited, virgin wilderness.

We contacted the wife of Dennis King, a locally famous naturalist and woodsman who had a one-man alluvial tin mine in Port Davey at the southwest corner of the island. Dennis’s camp was at the end of a tidal river that flowed in from the Southern Ocean and ended in a beautiful valley named after a fragrant shrub that grew there, Melaleuca. The river was the only way in unless you wanted to hike for eight days across three mountain ranges, or charter a plane. Dennis had scraped off a short landing strip with his bulldozer.

Mrs. King proved to be a gracious lady in her mid-fifties with a warm and welcoming manner. I think she was both amused and charmed to meet two young Yanks who wanted to spend the winter in Tasmania’s uninhabited southwest. She radioed Dennis and asked if he minded two Yanks coming for a visit. She didn’t specify the duration. Dennis didn’t particularly like modern young people, she explained. But he agreed to let us come. There was an abandoned mining and surveying shack a few miles upriver to which Dennis had the key. It was far enough away that we probably wouldn’t bother him too much.

The next morning, we chartered a small plane with the last of our money and were at Melaleuca before lunchtime. We spent that first night at Dennis’s. We talked with him half the night and hit it off pretty well. The following morning, we loaded our gear into the dory of the larger boat that he used to bring out his tin every few months, and he rowed us upriver to what became my home for four months.

The hut was made of corrugated tin and had three rooms, a wood stove, two bunks, a table and two chairs, and a roof that didn’t leak. Best of all, in one of the bedrooms, left there by the geological survey team which had abandoned the shack two years previously, there were cases and cases of Foster Clark’s Custard Powder and powdered milk. Powdered whole milk! There were also cases of oatmeal that was full of mealy worms. These treasures became important to us later on.

During our first month, Dennis came to check on us from time to time. He told us stories of how he had grown up in this unspoiled, uninhabited wilderness with his father, mining tin and catching Tasmanian tigers (large, marsupial carnivores now extinct, as big as a wolf) in leg snares he had set for wallabies, small versions of a kangaroo. He also taught us how to make the leg snares and neck snares with which we were able, very occasionally, to catch Bennett’s wallabies, wombats, and native “cats,” a marsupial variant of the non-marsupial kind. They did not taste very good -- the cats -- but they went well with Foster Clark’s Custard if you were really hungry. Wombat and wallaby are delicious.

Our tin hut sat high up on the bank of a tidal river, overlooking a wide valley of button grass which lay between mountains covered with virgin temperate rainforest. The air was crisp and clear, and many nights it frosted. But we had a wood stove, and there were plenty of dead trees standing in a nearby burned-over patch of forest.

We ran out of food after the first month. Dennis was back in Hobart and unable to return because the seas at the southern tip of Tasmania were too rough for his small boat to navigate. But we had our custard powder and our snares, so we weren’t really in danger of starvation. It was amazing, though, how possessive you could become of your one-half bowl of Foster Clark’s custard. Dahl and I went to great lengths to be sure the day’s batch of custard was divided exactly in half.

After about two months, Dahl went bonkers. He set out on his own to an old mining camp on the coast across about fifteen miles of button grass. Dahl had so much gear in his backpack that I had to help him to stand up from a sitting position. In addition, he had filled one of Dennis’s wheelbarrows with more gear.

“Which is essential for mah survival,” he drawled in angry reply to my objections.

He got as far as the first of many deep little creeks that dissected the button grass plains, at which point he had to abandon the wheelbarrow.

The southwest tip of Tasmania is incredibly beautiful and incredibly isolated. High cliffs overlook the Antarctic Ocean, and there are verdant, rainforest-covered mountains a few miles to the north. There was nothing but a lighthouse on a rock to the south, and Antarctica a few thousand miles after that. The relentless surf pounding against the cliffs, frequently accompanied by mournfully howling winds, produced a never-ending, booming bass note cacophony that Dahl told me reminded him of a symphony of death.

After he had been gone for a week, I was getting really worried about him, so I hiked the fifteen miles to check on him. I found Dahl in his long underwear, covered in baked beans. His can opener had been in the wheelbarrow, and he had to beat the cans open with a rock. His hair, quite a substantial afro by now, stood out from his head like a clump of fine, tangled vines, stuffed with twigs and leaves and laced with baked beans.

His eyes were huge and wild. His pupils were like big, black holes surrounded by large, white circles. He had been hearing (imaginary) children screaming on the beach and was having almost continuous hallucinations of fantastic paintings and geometric designs. His speech was half English, half like something from a long time ago when language was a new thing.

Since I’d hiked fifteen miles and you don’t get to the southwest tip of Tasmania too often, I decided to stay a few days. I didn’t think it mattered much whether Dahl was crazy here or crazy back at our shack overlooking the tidal river. Crazy is crazy, and I couldn’t do much about it either way.

The sea is never calm there. The Antarctic Ocean booms against the high cliffs and over the eons has carved out little bights with gravelly beaches, and deep, rocky holes that are exposed at low tide. Sometimes for weeks at a stretch only the biggest and bravest boats can round the tip. But on some days, the surf takes a break, and at low tide you can lie on your belly and see down into the holes.

There are crayfish in those holes, lots of crayfish, and no one has ever fished them there at the southern tip of Tasmania. These saltwater crayfish are really spiny lobsters, and can run to fifteen pounds each if no one has ever fished them. They sit in crevasses and on little shelves of rock, waving their long antennae back and forth, kind of meditating. You can lie on your belly and plunge your arm into the icy water really fast and grab them between their eyes, by their antennae, and pull them out before your arm turns as blue as the balls of a blue-balled monkey. You have to be very fast and precise.

Dahl had held onto my feet while I grabbed the first five crayfish, but now he was off doing his own thing. I reached way down to grab crayfish number six, lost my balance, and almost fell in. My fucking glasses did fall in.

They went about six feet down and landed on a little shelf of rock. I called to Dahl. He was frolicking up and down the beach, playing with his imaginary little children. He’d been seeing the children for several days now and had become very friendly with them. They didn’t scare him like the paintings he saw in the sky. I won’t go into that.

Dahl left the children and ran over to me. I explained my predicament and showed him where my glasses were.

“No problem, mate.” We’d both started talking like Australians, and called each other ‘mate.’ “You jump in head first, and I’ll stand on your arse and push you down, and you grab your glasses.”

I could never have kept myself in that ice hole long enough to find my glasses without someone pushing me down. I was encouraged by this moment of lucidity from Dahl. It sounded like a good idea to me. So I crossed myself (doesn’t hurt to hedge your bets) and plunged in. Dahl stood on my ass and kept me down while I screamed and screamed in my mind and got my glasses. But he kept standing on my ass. It was time to come up, but I think he must have gotten distracted by a painting or something.

Somehow, after an infinity but before my brain completely froze, I managed to turn my body in the tight hole and shot up like a cork when you open a cheap bottle of wine. When I got out, I realized I wasn’t really mad at him. He was crazy, after all. So we went back together to the little one-room shack some prospector from another era had built about a hundred feet back from the cliff top. We made a fire and thawed me out. Like I said, I’d snatched five or six crayfish before I lost my glasses. We didn’t leave them on the beach.

I don’t know who built that tiny tin shack or what they were mining. It must have been a long time ago because it was half rusted away in places, but we were grateful to have a roof over our heads. Even more grateful when we found a tin of canned Danish Butter under an old chamber pot in a corner of the shack. I don’t know how old that butter was, probably really old, but the tin didn’t have any holes in it. There was also an old, five-gallon kerosene tin that hadn’t rusted through. We had been eating only vanilla custard and oatmeal with mealy worms (an acquired taste) for several weeks. Dahl, of course, had had baked beans, but they were gone now, so we were really ready for some manna from the crayfish hole.

We boiled those suckers until they turned a glorious orange. Some of the tails must have weighed five pounds at least. We punched a hole in the top of the butter tin and set the butter to melt beside the fire. The Danish butter didn’t really taste like butter anymore. It was more like a vaguely rancid, oily fluid with a somewhat butter-like aftertaste. We didn’t care; it was butter. We tore off huge, sweet hunks of tender flesh, dipped them into the gift from the Danes, and stuffed them into our mouths until our cheeks bulged like carnivorous chipmunks. It is hard to smile with crayfish juice and butter running out the corners of your mouth, but we sat there grinning at each other and making continuous mewling noises as we stuffed in more and more crayfish. If you don’t think it’s possible to eat ten pounds of crayfish in one sitting, you’ve never eaten nothing but oatmeal with mealy worms in it for a week.

We ate crayfish for two days, and then we hiked together back to the shack on the tidal river that was our real home. Dahl left all but a few of his children on the beach. A week later, a crayfishing boat put in at our cabin. The fishermen had heard about the crazy Yanks living in Melaleuca and wanted to see if we were real. I gave them Dahl, so they had a real crazy to take back to civilization. I was alone after that for another month before Dennis finally could make it around the tip of the island.

I had had a brief exposure to the practice of Zen meditation when I spent two days in the Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto while I lived with a Japanese family for a summer after my junior year in high school. I had read a few books on Zen and continued to meditate in my own fashion when the spirit moved me. After they took Dahl away, the spirit moved me a lot. I was starting to hear things myself and thought it might be the music of the spheres calling to me. So I took frequent advantage of the setting and meditated every day with increasing results.

There was a spot in a small patch of rainforest high on the banks of the river where there was a level sward of soft, green moss and ferns all around. The mountains across the valley were sharp and clear, far away and yet very close. There was a huge wombat burrow right beside my spot. The entrance was so big that I could stick my head and shoulders into it. It seemed a good place to try again to transcend the veil.

It was a sunny day, not cold at all, so I took off all of my clothes and assumed the full lotus position. I could do that then. I sensed that this time there was going to be something different, something new. I settled down and let my breath become a mantra. I became totally still. After a while, time and thought went away. There was awareness and hearing, but there wasn’t me. The cries of the gulls passing over the river, the thump thump of a wallaby in the forest nearby, the scent of the moss and the ferns and the trees -- they were me. I was That, and I wasn’t there at all. I wasn’t I anymore; It was everywhere and everywhen, Every Thing and No Thing.

Maybe it was the effect of eating oatmeal with mealy worms or of almost dying a few days before when I got food poisoning from eating spoiled, moldy jam that Dennis had given us a month before he’d gone up north. I don’t know where I went or if I went anywhere.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but at some point my whole body shuddered and I opened my eyes. The sun was setting and it was getting cold. I looked down at my pecker. It had shriveled to an insignificant nub. I sensed a presence, an entity nearby.

I turned my head slowly and there, to my right and close enough to pet, sat the wombat. He was the biggest wombat in Tasmania, weighing maybe a hundred pounds. His grizzled brown coat of coarse fur was lightly jeweled with dew and stood out from his stumpy, groundhog-like body as though it was slightly electrified. He was sitting beside me, staring out across the river, his eyes focused on something only he could see. I closed my eyes and went back into the place of Every Thing and No Thing. After a while, I no longer felt the cold. We meditated together for at least another hour.

I had a much smaller wombat in a cage back at the hut. I had caught her in a neck snare a couple days ago and was saving her for a special occasion, like dinner. I let her go when I got back. I threw all my snares away and just ate vanilla custard until Dennis finally returned a week later.

CHAPTER 7 GLASSES IN THE FIREGRASS

I’m not a mountain climber. I’m clumsy, I’m lazy, and I’m afraid of heights. Take me to the top of Everest in a helicopter, thank you. I’ll be totally fulfilled and awed. Because It’s There.

My tin shack on the banks of the tidal river at the southwest corner of Tasmania was surrounded by mountains. Not Everests, but a few thousand feet in height and covered with rainforest full of tree ferns and secret places with little waterfalls whose rocks were clothed in soft and wonderful moss gardens of ten different shades of green. Dahl had been gone for three weeks, and I was feeling pretty lonely and maybe a little bored. You can’t really stay bored for very long in the uninhabited southwest of Tasmania, it’s so beautiful, but I just had the urge one day to climb a mountain.

So I picked one that was not too high and not too far away, and I set out early one frosty morning to climb The Mountain. I’m sure it has a name, but I never knew what it was. Mountains don’t really need names. People just need to give mountains names so they don’t feel so alone. The people, I mean.

I just called it The Mountain. It was only a couple thousand feet tall, maybe a lot less. Dennis King, our absent benefactor and host who was off in Hobart selling the tin he had sluiced from his mine a few miles downriver from my hut, had told me I could easily get up it and down it and be back in my hut by nightfall. Sounded like my kind of mountain.

It only took me an hour of hiking across the button grass to get to its feet. Button grass grows in big tussocks, and you can either walk around or jump from tussock to tussock. The narrow, button grass valleys are crisscrossed by lots of little icy-cold streams that you don’t see until you almost fall into them. They are about two feet wide and two feet deep, and most times you can jump across them.

The streams are full of tiddler trout, which are only about six inches long and are every color of the rainbow. I used to catch them in a minnow trap I made out of old wire wastepaper baskets that had been left in my hut. I joined them together at their tops, baited them with oatmeal with mealy worms in it, and laid them sideways in the streams. Tiddler trout taste really good steamed with Melaleuca herb and served with oatmeal with mealy worms in it.

I started up the mountain straight away so I could get down and home before dark and get a fire going in my cast-iron stove. During the winter in Tasmania, it can dip into the low twenties at night and leave a good frost on the ground by morning. I huffed and puffed and fell on my ass many times, looking like the clumsy fool that I am, but there was no one to see me so it didn’t matter. I made it to the top.

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