On the Road

Venturing out on the highways and byways can be shear delight

 

Dear Virginia

 

It’s time to put the vegetable garden to bed for the winter. It needs a rest, and so do I. A few weeks ago I hung tomato plants over the trellis gate so all the green tomatoes could ripen while the leaves shrivelled in the late sun.

 

I picked the tomatoes and decided to take them over the motorway gulch and offer them to office-bound friends who bend over their computers like ripe bananas all day – five days a week, regardless of the weather or the song of the cicadas. I added some apples, the last feijoas and a couple of small pumpkins that have been sitting on the back step for a while. They made a nice hollow sound when tapped.

 

On my way across the motorway bridge I met Robin, a musician friend. He told me his brother – “an ordinary Jewish white boy from Pakuranga” was how he described him – is now in London teaching tabla drums to Indians.

 

I don’t imagine you have that sort of conversation on your country roads, but maybe you do.

 

I delivered the food and listened to the “oh, how amazings” from pale office workers who peered suspiciously into the bags to examine the alien growths from another world. Someone suggested we go for a coffee and a moment later we were in a car, being spat out onto the highway to our favourite French cafe, La Cloche. We ate large buttery spirals of flaky pastry with lots of raisins.

 

Later that day I had my own version of a country experience. Seven minutes up the motorway, I turned into a winding country road with horses, barns, gravel edges and no pavements, no white lines. I was visiting a recording studio up in the hills to discuss music styles for a story-reading project. A massive pet sheep was asleep on the deck. Phil told me, as we manhandled it out of the way to open the studio door, that they shear it with scissors.

 

Then I returned to my secret garden, where I spent an hour spreading new compost on the now-empty tomato bed.

 

Dear Janice

 

One seldom meets pedestrians on a gravel road. If I’m driving stock, the neighbours in their farm trucks sometimes stop and we have a bloke’s conversation with country pauses that goes something like this:

 

“A bit dry this autumn.”

 

“Yep. Could do with a rain.”

 

“Your ewes are looking good.”

 

“Yep, bit of fat on their backs.”

 

And then we look at the sky and at the roadside and one of us says, “Better get on then”. That’s how it is on a gravel road. We’re frugal with words. If I want extravagant conversation, I visit the city. Whether cappuccino conversation is any more relevant to the advancement of humankind I’m not sure – it just sounds as though it is.

 

I never make rushed trips to town. Every trip is planned days in advance. I make lists – lists of groceries, hardware, fruit, plants, library books. I make appointments, arrange to meet friends for lunch and then I ask Harry if there is anything he needs for the farm. Harry seldom visits the city so he hands me a long list; he needs horseshoes in Hornby and pump parts in Bromley. They’re on opposite sides of town. And he requires new socks, his horsewhip needs repairing and could I please drop off a starter motor in Amberley.

 

I plan my town day with military precision and then, on the eve of departure, John the shearing contractor rings and says, “We can shear if the hoggets are dry by lunchtime.”

 

Shearing is a spoiler. Shearing deals to a day in town like a magnet to a tin full of pins. Once I would have succumbed to martyrdom and, full of resentment, dutifully stayed at home. Now, older and wiser, I get up while the owls are still hooting in the pine trees and I bake a cake and make sandwiches and pack them all into the shearers’ tea box with mugs and tea and milk and sugar. As the sun rises, the bellbirds sing, the magpies quardle oodle ardle and I hum to myself because I’m escaping to town on a shearing day.