One thing, if you have been to the western plains of this great land, you will encounter is a magnificent sunset and tonight Mother Nature is turning on quite a show. Even from our fishing spot on the river with the bank and the trees filtering the view, the orange ochres build and crescendo across the landscape.
My restless night has me thinking, In the search for whatever it is I am actually seeking, my mind drifts back to that old parable about the man stranded on his roof during a flood, praying fervently for divine intervention. A neighbour rows past in a small boat and offers rescue, only to be turned away because the stranded man is certain God has greater plans and a more suitably dramatic miracle in mind. Later, a larger rescue vessel appears, the offer is again politely refused because salvation, apparently, is still pending in a form more aligned with expectation. Eventually a helicopter hovers overhead, the final opportunity extended, and still the man waves it away, steadfast in his faith that the miracle will arrive in the version he has imagined. When he finally reaches the Pearly Gates and indignantly demands to know why his prayers were ignored, he is met with the rather awkward explanation that three perfectly serviceable miracles had already been dispatched, all of which he had declined because they failed to match the packaging he thought divine intervention should wear.
Stories like that are wonderfully comforting when they belong to other people, less so when they begin to feel uncomfortably familiar.
As I sat with Aunty Kerre, trying to explain something that increasingly feels difficult to properly articulate, I found myself wondering whether I have become some emotional variation of that man on the roof. Not in the grand theological sense, but in the far more human way we sometimes become so attached to what an answer should look like that we entirely miss the ones quietly presenting themselves. I have come on this walkabout with some vague but insistent sense that I am searching for something. Freshness perhaps. Relief. Clarity. A recharge of batteries that seem to have been operating on emergency reserve for longer than I care to admit. Some interruption to the emotional sameness that retirement, despite its supposed freedoms, has quietly cultivated around me. Yet perhaps I have also arrived carrying an unspoken expectation that the answer will be dramatic, transformative, or at the very least unmistakable.
Life, of course, rarely bothers itself with such theatrical courtesy.
Yesterday’s encounter with Ann keeps circling in my thoughts for exactly that reason. Not because she arrived dispensing wisdom from some mountaintop, nor because our conversation resolved anything with neat emotional efficiency, but because perhaps what happened was far subtler than that. Perhaps what I encountered was not an answer, but a reflection. A kindred spirit. A glimpse of someone wired in ways uncomfortably similar to my own, and sometimes recognition is far more unsettling than revelation because it forces you to examine truths you have previously managed to keep just slightly out of focus.
I had tried explaining to Aunty Kerre what the sensation has felt like, reaching for imagery because plain language never quite captures these things properly. I described being locked inside a house with four walls, each one devoid of doors, each one slowly inching inward, not with violent menace but with quiet persistence, reducing the available emotional oxygen without ever quite becoming dramatic enough to justify panic. It is a difficult sensation to explain because from the outside, nothing appears catastrophically wrong. Life continues. Responsibilities are met. Meals are eaten. Conversations happen. Problems are solved. Appropriate laughter is produced at socially acceptable moments. Yet internally, something feels increasingly compressed, as though the available room to simply breathe has become steadily smaller.
That, I suspect, is one of depression’s more insidious disguises, because people prefer simple narratives and depression rarely behaves with that degree of cooperation.
In the public imagination, depression tends to arrive wearing fairly recognisable costumes. Curtains drawn. Inability to rise from bed. Obvious despair. Emotional collapse visible enough for others to identify and respond to. But the Black Dog does not always announce itself so obligingly. Sometimes it walks beside you while you continue functioning perfectly well. Sometimes it accompanies competence. Sometimes it settles quietly into the passenger seat while you keep attending meetings, solving problems, helping others, offering advice, laughing at jokes, and participating so effectively in ordinary life that even you begin questioning whether what you are experiencing really qualifies as anything worth naming.
That may be precisely what makes it dangerous.
Because when life continues looking normal from the outside, it becomes extraordinarily easy to dismiss what is happening internally as ingratitude, weakness, exhaustion, or some passing emotional weather front that ought to be quietly managed without fuss. Yet the walls continue inching inward regardless of appearances. The emotional room gets smaller even while the practical performance continues uninterrupted, and perhaps nowhere is that more dangerous than in the lives of people whose sense of worth has long been tied to usefulness.
As I sat there trying to explain the sensation, I found myself thinking less about what I am trapped inside and more about whether I have helped construct some of the walls myself.
I have spent much of my adult life operating under a fairly straightforward philosophy, one borrowed years ago from Bigweld in Robots (2005 – Twentieth Century Fox): See a need, fill a need. It sounds noble enough because, in many ways, it genuinely is. Someone needs help. You help. A problem presents itself. You solve it. A gap appears. You step into it. Businesses are built that way. Communities survive that way. Families function because someone quietly shoulders burdens others either cannot or choose not to carry. There is dignity in that sort of contribution, and I have built a considerable portion of my life around exactly that operating system.
But noble operating systems can conceal dangerous design flaws.
Because when usefulness becomes your native language, achievement can become strangely invisible, not because achievement is absent, but because participation becomes the baseline expectation. You solve the problem because that is what you do. You help because standing idle feels unnatural. You contribute because contribution has become identity rather than conscious choice. No applause is sought. In truth, public recognition often feels vaguely embarrassing. Yet somewhere deeper, some quieter emotional accounting system may still exist, not seeking applause, but seeking nourishment.
And perhaps that is where the erosion begins.
If every act of contribution becomes merely expected behaviour, then nothing emotionally registers as achievement. If solving problems is simply normal, then completion offers little replenishment. If helping others is just standard operating procedure, then the very activities that once generated purpose begin consuming energy without restoring it. That creates dangerous territory for someone vulnerable to depression, because human beings require more than movement. We require meaning. We require some private acknowledgement that effort mattered, not because others applauded, but because we ourselves are capable of recognising that something worthwhile occurred.
Without that, something peculiar and rather cruel begins to happen. You become highly functional and quietly hollow.
Others see competence, reliability, generosity, and the familiar figure who always seems to make things happen. Internally, however, the emotional reserves continue depleting because nothing ever feels like enough to refill them. Participation continues, achievement becomes emotionally invisible, and the walls keep inching inward while the outside world remains blissfully reassured by appearances.
That may be why Ann unsettled me more than I first realised.
Not because she somehow solved anything, but because she may have shown me a version of myself reflected back in ordinary conversation. Another person who sees a need and instinctively moves to fill it. Another person who contributes not because recognition is sought, but because helping has become reflexive. Another person who may understand the quiet exhaustion that comes when usefulness becomes habit but fulfilment quietly fails to keep pace.
And that leaves me asking a rather uncomfortable question about this walkabout.
What if I am not searching for some grand answer at all?
What if this trip is not about escape, reinvention, or rediscovering some mythical younger version of myself waiting patiently beneath the dust of routine? What if what I am actually seeking is permission to recalibrate the internal mathematics entirely? Permission to acknowledge achievement without feeling vain. Permission to accept that participation alone is not the same thing as fulfilment. Permission to understand that usefulness, while admirable, is not the sole measure of personal worth.
Perhaps that is the real miracle the man on the roof never understood. Answers do not always arrive looking the way we imagined.
Sometimes they arrive disguised as ordinary conversations, chance encounters, or uncomfortable reflections that fail to solve anything immediately, yet quietly shift the angle from which the problem is viewed. If that is what happened yesterday, then perhaps the walkabout has not delivered the answer I thought I was seeking, but it may have done something more valuable. It may have persuaded me to finally begin asking a better question.
Trevor would like to fish today but I think we may struggle to get to the river for a suitable attack. Mitch is keen to slab the logs we have set up in the wood pile area. He is not the earliest of risers, and has appointed 9.00am as the appropriate time from commencement. If we were serious about a fishing adventure we would have been on the river for two hours by then.
The winding up to speed gets its impetus when Mitch arrives half an hour before the “appointed time”. Casey has gone to work already and he sees that as motivation to seem to strike a blow. In all fairness that simply means wandering to his parents home, plonking himself in his fathers favourite arm chair and chewing the fat for a while.
“You have to ease into these things,” he says, and in so many ways he is right, although the phrase carries far more weight than perhaps even he realises in the moment. On the surface he is speaking about the practical realities of work, timing, pressure, and not forcing outcomes before circumstances are ready to support them. Yet beneath that sits something much broader about life itself, particularly once entrepreneurialism, family obligation, ageing, and the differing rhythms of country versus city living begin colliding with one another.
Because from the outside, country life and city life are often painted as complete opposites, almost as though they belong to entirely separate emotional universes. The city is portrayed as frantic, pressured, noisy, ambitious, permanently exhausted. Time-poor people hurtling between meetings, trapped in traffic, staring at glowing screens while eating expensive lunches they barely taste. Country life, by contrast, is sold as slower, simpler, calmer, more grounded. Open skies. Space to breathe. Time to think. The mythology suggests one environment crushes the soul while the other restores it, as though geography alone somehow determines emotional wellbeing.
The truth, however, is rather less tidy than the postcards suggest, because pressure does not magically disappear simply because paddocks replace office towers. Stress is remarkably adaptable. It changes clothing, shifts scenery, and adopts different language, but emotionally it often behaves in exactly the same way. The city business owner worries about rent, wages, deadlines, market share, overheads, staffing, and relentless competition. The country entrepreneur worries about weather, seasons, machinery breakdowns, staff utilisation, transport costs, delayed payments, fuel prices, and whether one bad season might wipe out six months of careful planning in a fortnight. The stressors differ in appearance, but the underlying mathematics remain stubbornly familiar because income still needs generating, bills still arrive with depressing regularity, and responsibility still possesses the unpleasant habit of waking people at three in the morning.
That, perhaps, is one of the great misconceptions romanticised by those observing from a distance, because people often mistake environmental pace for emotional pace. Country life may physically move slower, but the mind carrying responsibility rarely does. If anything, the slower external environment can sometimes make internal pressures feel even louder because there are fewer distractions competing for attention. In cities, stress becomes almost communal. Everyone appears busy, rushed, mildly overwhelmed, and there is strange comfort in collective exhaustion because nobody feels uniquely burdened. In the country, however, pressure can feel quieter and therefore more isolated, because the surroundings falsely suggest calm while the internal calculations continue relentlessly beneath the surface.
That paradox sits heavily in someone like him, because there is an outward-looking laziness to country life that visitors often completely misinterpret. The slower speech. The pauses in conversation. The willingness to sit, observe, and think rather than constantly perform movement for its own sake. City people often equate visible busyness with productivity, as though rushing itself has become evidence of value. If someone is not moving quickly, surely they are not under pressure. Yet beneath that slower rhythm sits a body and mind entirely familiar with entrepreneurial stress, uncertainty, and the relentless need to keep things functioning regardless of what the outside world imagines.
The seasons dictate cashflow. Weather dictates opportunity. Staff cannot simply be discarded because work temporarily softens, particularly in smaller communities where employment carries personal as well as financial consequence. Keeping people occupied matters because idle staff quickly become financial burden, but equally because these are not anonymous payroll entries sitting on a distant corporate spreadsheet. These are people you know. Sons of old mates. Daughters of neighbours. Families connected to other families through decades of overlapping community ties. In country business, economic decisions rarely remain purely economic because human relationships are woven through every practical calculation.
That changes the emotional equation rather dramatically, because in cities pressure often feels transactional while in the country it becomes relational. The numbers still matter, perhaps even more so when margins are thin and seasons unpredictable, but the numbers are attached to people whose lives intersect with yours at the pub, the local shop, sporting clubs, community fundraisers, and family gatherings. Success and failure become harder to compartmentalise because distance barely exists. Responsibility follows your home not merely financially, but socially and emotionally as well.
And then there is family, which may be the greatest dividing line of all between the mythology of city life and the reality of country living. In the city, the dominant pressure often becomes time itself. Time poor. Schedule poor. Attention poor. Everyone sprinting between obligations with barely enough emotional fuel left to remain polite. Conversations become compressed. Meals become functional. Parents, children, and partners can occupy the same physical spaces while emotionally existing in entirely separate calendars. In the country, however, there can still exist something city life increasingly struggles to accommodate: contemplative space. Not leisure exactly. Not idleness. Simply the existence of moments where conversation is not immediately consumed by urgency.
A son can still sit with parents for hours without the interaction feeling inefficient or stolen from some competing obligation. A discussion can unfold slowly across an afternoon rather than being squeezed between calendar reminders and traffic delays. Silence itself is not automatically treated as wasted time requiring correction. And perhaps that matters far more than outsiders realise, because entrepreneurial stress has a cumulative effect regardless of postcode. The body learns it. The nervous system absorbs it. Over decades it settles into the bloodstream like permanent background static. Even when the external environment appears calmer, the internal machinery often remains permanently half-revved, conditioned by responsibility, uncertainty, and the awareness that other people’s livelihoods may rest partly upon your decisions.
That is why his comment carries such quiet wisdom, because “you have to ease into these things” is not merely a statement about work. It is a philosophy about survival. Not rushing. Not forcing. Not attacking every problem with the frantic urgency modern culture increasingly mistakes for competence. Easing into things means allowing context to emerge. Allowing thought to catch up with reaction. Allowing understanding to develop before momentum bulldozes over nuance. There is a patience in that approach which city life often mistakes for laziness when in reality it may be closer to emotional intelligence.
Perhaps that slower rhythm, the ability to sit with parents, to think rather than constantly react, to allow meaning to unfold gradually rather than be extracted under pressure, is one of the few remaining luxuries country life genuinely offers. Not freedom from stress. Not absence of responsibility. But moments where life briefly permits contemplation rather than relentless acceleration. And maybe that is what so many exhausted people, regardless of geography, are actually starving for, because beneath all the noise, ambition, deadlines, and pressure, there remains a very human need simply to have enough breathing room left to hear oneself think before the next demand inevitably arrives.
It also doesn’t help that Mitch is not well. Rumours of a hernia are presently being investigated and the consequences of such a diagnosis in the general scheme of a labour intensive business, rattle around the house conversation.
Soon enough he trundles into Condobolin and fetches his staff member, brings him back to the Little Prairie and sets him to work splitting firewood we assisted in accumulating a few days ago.
Once he is in place he sets us in motion, ensuring the chainsaw we are to use for slabbing the timber we have amassed is fit for purpose. It is a relatively new piece of equipment and far more powerful than any similar tool either Trevor or I have previously had the privilege, or perhaps danger, of handling. The thing looks less like a chainsaw and more like something designed to negotiate directly with hardwood forests on behalf of small nations. It possesses that unmistakable mechanical aura suggesting it should probably come with both operating instructions and a signed liability waiver.
Like all motorised equipment, however, it has its own peculiar nuances, because machinery, particularly machinery involving petrol, compression, vibration, and rotating death, always seems to develop personality traits over time. In this case, “holding your mouth right” while starting it appears to be an essential component of the engineering process, one that Trevor simply cannot quite master. The saw will start for me with almost embarrassing obedience, yet somehow steadfastly refuses to cooperate for him, which creates a wonderfully absurd role reversal given Trevor is infinitely more mechanically gifted than I could ever hope to be.
That is where situations like this become unexpectedly entertaining, because logic suggests the outcome should be entirely different. Trevor is the bloke who actually understands machinery. He can dismantle engines, diagnose faults by sound, wire electrical systems, and explain mechanical processes using language suggesting he genuinely comprehends what all the moving parts are attempting to achieve. I, by comparison, often operate equipment through a combination of optimism, luck, and the faint hope that confidence might somehow compensate for technical deficiency. My long-established approach to mechanical failure has generally involved ringing Trevor and standing nearby offering highly questionable observations while he quietly repairs whatever catastrophe I have managed to manufacture.
Yet somehow this monstrous saw decides I am its chosen whisperer, which does nothing for Trevor’s emotional wellbeing whatsoever. He pulls the cord. Nothing. He adjusts settings. Nothing. He checks choke positions, fuel flow, and all the other sensible things competent men are apparently supposed to inspect while muttering mechanically intelligent commentary beneath his breath. Still nothing. Then I step forward possessing absolutely no additional expertise whatsoever, give the thing a pull, and the saw erupts into life as though delighted I have finally arrived to release it from captivity.
The expression on Trevor’s face is magnificent because it combines confusion, irritation, disbelief, and wounded professional pride all at once. It is not genuine anger, nor even serious frustration. It is the deeply offended bewilderment of a mechanically superior man being betrayed by physics itself. Somewhere inside him there is undoubtedly a refusal to accept that the bloke whose boating maintenance strategy largely revolves around emergency phone calls has apparently developed mystical chainsaw powers.
And that is the funny thing about machinery, and perhaps life generally, because competence and outcome are not always close travelling companions. Every tradesman, farmer, mechanic, or handyman eventually encounters some piece of equipment possessing irrational loyalties and behaviour patterns completely disconnected from logic. One person can start it effortlessly every single time while another, infinitely more qualified operator, is reduced to sweating, swearing, and questioning the moral character of German engineering. Rational explanations are always attempted involving fuel mixtures, throttle positions, compression timing, pulling angles, or subtle operating differences, yet deep down everyone suspects there is also something faintly superstitious involved.
Country culture in particular seems wonderfully accepting of this contradiction, where logic and mythology comfortably coexist inside machinery sheds without either feeling especially threatened by the other’s presence. Nobody genuinely believes there is mystical science involved, yet everybody carries stories about tractors that only start for Grandpa, generators that refuse to cooperate with specific family members, or chainsaws apparently requiring emotional negotiation before agreeing to participate. Equipment develops reputations. Machines acquire personalities. And before long, entirely sensible adults begin speaking about mechanical objects as though they possess feelings, grudges, preferences, and selective loyalty.
Trevor eventually begins referring to my success as “having the touch,” which naturally becomes the only acceptable explanation once mechanical logic fails often enough. It is deeply satisfying in a childish sort of way because opportunities for technological superiority over Trevor are exceedingly rare and therefore deserve full emotional exploitation whenever they accidentally occur. For one brief shining moment the hierarchy reverses. The mechanical expert becomes the confused apprentice while the bloke usually incapable of programming a television remote suddenly appears gifted with supernatural petrol-powered instincts.
Of course, the truth is almost certainly far less glamorous than the mythology we immediately construct around it. I am probably pulling the cord differently, standing at a slightly altered angle, unknowingly applying exactly the correct throttle pressure, or accidentally following some obscure starting sequence without realising it. But reality is rarely as entertaining as mythology, particularly when mythology allows one to torment a mechanically gifted mate while standing beside a roaring chainsaw and a pile of timber.
So by the end of it the official explanation becomes wonderfully simple and entirely irrefutable in the way all good shed logic eventually does. Trevor understands machinery in the technical sense. I, apparently, understand this particular chainsaw’s feelings, which is clearly a completely different and far rarer skill set altogether.
The first cuts give hope that this operation is going to be relatively easy and once completed will allow for a fishing expedition before predicted rain intervenes. Oh the best laid plans of mice and men.
Mitch has returned to his staff member, filling the hopper of the splitter with large pieces of timber, the machine rhythmically chewing through hardwood with the sort of agricultural violence country machinery seems to specialise in. Then, in the way these things always seem to happen, one awkwardly shaped piece falls sideways toward the propulsion machinery and snaps the carburettor bowl on the mechanical splitter, clean off. The sound itself is almost unimpressive, a small metallic crack swallowed by the broader noise of the worksite, yet everyone immediately understands what it potentially means because even minor failures out here have a habit of growing teeth remarkably quickly.
In a city environment, the response to something like that is often relatively straightforward. You stop work, order the replacement part online, ring a supplier, or drive twenty minutes to some industrial estate where shelves are lined with spare components waiting patiently beneath fluorescent lights. At worst, there is inconvenience, delay, and mild frustration. Modern city life has increasingly been designed around immediate replacement, where if something breaks, another one can usually be sourced, delivered, installed, or substituted with enough speed that nobody is forced to truly confront dependence on the original item.
Country life, however, operates under entirely different mathematics because the tyranny of distance changes everything. A “quick trip” can consume half a day. Suppliers are not around the corner. Spare parts are not sitting conveniently behind a counter staffed by teenagers armed with barcode scanners and inventory systems. Delivery timelines are measured not in hours but often in days, sometimes longer depending on weather, freight schedules, and the unpredictable realities of regional logistics. A small mechanical failure in the city is an irritation. In the country it can become an operational crisis remarkably quickly because downtime does not politely pause all the surrounding obligations waiting patiently for repairs to occur.
That reality shapes people differently over time because necessity has always been one of the greatest educators ever invented. It creates a form of competence born not from hobbyist enthusiasm but from practical survival. As Mitch says, out here a simple accident like this can cost an entire day of production if you cannot solve the problem yourself, and in environments where weather, daylight, seasons, labour, and delivery schedules all intersect financially, losing a day is not merely inconvenient. It has genuine consequences. Timber not split today remains timber not delivered tomorrow. Staff still require paying. Jobs still need completing. Momentum matters because smaller operations survive largely through continuity rather than redundancy.
So country people learn things city people increasingly outsource, not because they romanticise hardship, but because practicality demands versatility. Skills are handed down not as quaint traditions or nostalgic relics of tougher times, but because survival, productivity, and continuity require them. Fathers teach sons how engines breathe, how fuel systems behave, how machinery sounds when healthy and when troubled. Welding, wiring, patching, rebuilding, adapting, and improvising become part of ordinary life because waiting helplessly for external rescue is often neither commercially nor practically viable. Competence broadens naturally out of necessity. A mechanic may also become a fabricator. A farmer learns plumbing, electrical work, hydraulics, carpentry, and small engine repair not because multiple qualifications were pursued, but because life repeatedly presented problems and nobody else was immediately available to solve them.
That, perhaps, is one of the profound differences between a throwaway culture and a repair culture, because modern urban life increasingly conditions people to replace rather than restore. Phones are upgraded rather than repaired. Appliances are discarded rather than dismantled. Entire systems are built around convenience, disposability, and the assumption that replacement is easier than understanding. There is efficiency in that model, certainly, but there is also a gradual erosion of practical resilience hidden beneath the convenience. The less people are required to understand how things function, the less capable they become when those things inevitably stop functioning.
Out here, that luxury barely exists because machinery represents investment and downtime represents lost income. Improvisation becomes valuable currency. And so Mitch does what generations before him would have instinctively done. He raids another broken machine, butchers a similar component from it with the calm practicality of someone who long ago accepted that perfection is often the enemy of productivity, and trusts it will work, or at least work well enough. In country problem-solving, functionality frequently matters more than elegance because standing still is rarely an affordable option.
Then comes the cleaning process, and what strikes me most is the complete absence of drama in the way it unfolds. There is no theatrical frustration. No exaggerated panic. No declaration that the day has been ruined. Mitch simply inspects the salvaged component, immediately sees that although potentially functional it requires proper cleaning, and quietly sets about restoring it to usefulness. His offsider extracts the broken piece while Mitch prepares the replacement, both men moving with the sort of unspoken coordination born from repetition rather than formal instruction. There is no committee meeting, no frantic search for authorised service providers, no paralysis while waiting for somebody else to arrive and solve the problem. There is simply the assumption that the problem exists and therefore the problem must now be dealt with.
Within half an hour the younger man is back at the original task as though the interruption barely occurred, and that efficiency says something rather important about the mindset operating here. Watching it unfold, it strikes me that this sort of knowledge is becoming increasingly undervalued in modern life precisely because so much of society now functions on replacement rather than repair. Yet there is something deeply grounding about people capable of dragging broken things back toward usefulness through understanding, patience, improvisation, and accumulated experience. It is not merely mechanical competence. It is a philosophy of resilience built around the belief that failure does not automatically justify disposal.
And perhaps that mentality extends far beyond machinery itself because the same mindset seems embedded within country people generally. They patch. Adapt. Salvage. Continue. They work with what is available rather than waiting endlessly for ideal conditions to arrive. Distance forces that mentality. Isolation cultivates it. Family reinforces it because children grow up not merely watching things repaired, but understanding why repair matters. Knowledge is not theoretical. It becomes woven into ordinary life because circumstances repeatedly demand practical capability rather than dependence.
Perhaps that is why city and country often misunderstand one another so completely, because the city sees slower pace and mistakes it for simplicity while the country sees dependence disguised as convenience. Yet standing there watching Mitch calmly resurrect a broken machine from spare parts scavenged off another dead one, it becomes difficult not to feel that somewhere along the line modern life may have confused disposability with progress, forgetting that resilience often begins with the simple refusal to discard something merely because it momentarily stopped working.
Our endeavours have hit a snag as well, but nothing as adverse as the splitter. We have simply run out of fuel, and with that a chain replacement is in order. The output to date sees several planks of a well grained yellow and deep brown timber planks ready for stacking in the trailer.
I am most happy with what we have done, and the seemingly short amount of time it has taken to do it.
Mitch changes the chain, fills the saw with fuel, and he and his staff member are off to mow lawns, leaving Trevor and I to our own devices. We complete the log we are working on, then rather than moving onto the next similar species one, I suggest we attack a piece of different timber.
It seems a fatal error as this timber is far harder than the initial logs, and within moments of the first cut, a squaring off of the log, the chain is blunted. Without Mitch around to provide assistance, we are at a loose end.
I text him, telling him of our predicament and he suggests he will be back once he gets Josh the apprentice underway. He eventually returns, replaces the chain and we return to the easier logs, until we eventually run out of fuel again.
We have done enough and annoyed Mitch too many times already, so we pack up, having created several planks for the Mens Shed cutting boards and decide, discretion being the better part of valour, we will hit the river for an afternoon fish.
It’s balmy, or at least it seems that way, as we have been working intensely operating the chainsaw and cradle, and once we don’t find the spot I am thinking of, the weir at the eastern end of Condobolin, we fall to a spot we can get to. What seems like a cleared swimming area with swing rope and all, at the end of Orange Street.
The sun is waning and according to the reports, the rain is coming, so there is no time to be lost. I park the Cruiser, walk to the edge of the river, bait the one rod I have ready to go and launch the hook and sinker into the flowing water. I return to the Cruiser to totally rerig the line I snagged on the last outing as Trevor peruses the area for where he might fish, a far different approach to my “get straight into it” one.
By the time I get back to the original set line, the rod is bending violently much to the chagrin of my fishing buddy, who disparagingly immediately calls “Carp”. Unfortunately he is right and I soon have the pest on the bank before dispatching it to the bank where it will not reproduce again.
The landing of a fish immediately continues the conversation as to the score, on which much debate has “raged” over the course of the week. To this point in time I have landed 2 carp and one legal sized cod, whereas my partner in crime has caught three cod, all of which had to be returned to the water being undersized. The conundrum is, are fish in the bag counted, certainly in the boat, they have to be in the box, or can in circumstances like this where they are few and far between, they all count, or in a this level of contention, do the pests, clearly landed and not returned actually counted.
Whatever the manner of counting, by the end of the session I had taken a significant lead. Trevor had only one, again undersized fish, to add to his total whereas I had the carp, three other undersized specimens and a cod big enough to take home.
On the “on the bank and legal”, I lead 2 to Nil, on the just cod count I lead, 5 to 4 and on the “boated fish” count I lead 4 to nil. Although all sorts of attempted mathematical outcomes are suggested including fines for the pests, for now he concedes I am in the lead.
One thing, if you have been to the western plains of this great land, you will encounter is a magnificent sunset and tonight Mother Nature is turning on quite a show. Even from our fishing spot on the river with the bank and the trees filtering the view, the orange ochres build and crescendo across the landscape.
The pest in me cannot help myself. I have a vista, I have a mate lagging in the fishing competition, how can I resist adding the two together and taking a picture for prosperity of him, snagged, but seemingly playing a large fish against the ochre creating lowering sun. The photograph is spectacular, if not brilliantly focussed and a prelude to pulling up stumps and heading home for a promised roast lamb dinner, before settling into a State of Origin evening, that I suspect I will be lucky to make half time, and sure enough with the Blues seemingly being out enthused by the Maroons I shower and hit the sack before the game ends its first period.
Author
