Gunshot Wounds to the Memory

This week Superhusband and I are dealing with two separate losses.  The first, and most painful, is the fact that it is now late April and even if we got news today that our immigration application was approved, we still would not have time to have an interview in Sydney before my visa runs out.  We must leave and come back.  We are really excited about the leaving part: seeing my family and Stateside friends for the first time in six months, living in a house (whether or not we're the owners of said house is now just a technicality to us), going to my mother's extended-family reunion...(I know this is another parenthetical reference early in the piece, but let me brag on this family again.  My mom is one of ten children born to a church of Christ preacher and his school-marm wife. Each of their children were also believing child-producers, and their children's children equally.  I am one of 34 grandchildren. The number of great-grandchildren is now approaching the 50 mark, and the great-greats started up in 2007. The sheer mass of us is amazing.  But what's astounding is that of all 130+ people that are invited to the gathering, there are maybe two individuals who I wouldn't choose to have coffee and/or a close friendship with. Families are messy no matter which one you're in; but to have this many people who like each other in one place is truly a blessing.  If you're reading this and you're single and of marriagable age, just let me know and I'll provide you with a list of cousins in the appropriate age range and gender categories for your perusal. You should jump on this train.)

Okay--so we're excited about going back, but what we really wanted was to go home. We wanted to come in with the trophy, the greencard, the cutting from which to grow roots.  Instead we return again as "temporary," as visitors, as rootless. It's as if we're returning from the State fair to the eager faces of our rural town, only to report that "Well, we could be the winner, but no one ever came to judge our entry. No one knew we were there." That's the painful part--feeling so insignificant in the face of the mighty international immigration machine.  And so we'll fly in to Memphis in another month, not knowing when we'll fly out again.  We will be excited to be back here in Australia later with the new side of my family, and the beauty and the adventure, of course, but a different kind of excited. The uncertainty, the back-and-forth, the money-hemorrhage continues. The houses, the jobs, the hometowns, the prospective children wait anxiously in the wings.

So what did we do in the face of this let-down?  We are on holiday!  We decided, rather ingeniously I think, to make the best of being here in the world's favorite vacation spot and see some of the Western Australian coastline north of Perth. Not quite making lemonade, but maybe lemon disinfectant. And it is WILD.  We set off on Tuesday and made it from Safety Bay to Dongara pulling our house and our hopes along the dry, red dust of the outback. We made it in about 6 hours, 2 of which were driven by me! Pulling the caravan!  If you know me in real life, you know that I've driven some pretty wacky and very lumbering vehicles, but until this week I had never attempted pulling a 14ft house trailer around a roundabout. Everyone should try it.  It's exhilarating.

Our first port of call was the beautiful, sleepy town of Dongara and its twin, Port Denison. We slept in, we sauntered around two main streets lined with Morton Bay Fig trees and ate whatever we wanted at whatever little cafe would have us. There were gangs of maurading children celebrating the last day of school holidays by careening their scooters in front of on-coming traffic, but since we were walking, we didn't pay them much mind.  Our first and last stops in the town were at the Priory Inn and the 1881 restaurant where were part of a free sausage sizzle in the morning (a weenie roast for my Alabamians), met the local watchdog named Lolly, and ended our evening in style dining on canneloni and steak/roasted pumpkin/chickpea salad amidst exposed limestone walls and wraught iron candlesticks.  It was glorious.  And we thought we were winning.

Then we headed to Kalbarri, a place of myth in Superhusband's imagination.  His family camped here when he was a child, and it's one of the last places he had good, strong memories of his father.  There are gorges and canoes, estuaries and lookouts, pelicans and promise.  But that was in the 1980s.  What he had no way of knowing was that the caravan park is now like a dirty parking lot with power hook-ups, every shop and eatery closes by 6pm and is enveloped into the vast darkness of the terrain, and the highly publicized "Daily Pelican Feedings" have never been the same since the flood of Christmas 2010.

Finally, after wearily driving up and down the one, dark, coastal street in this Superhusband-proclaimed-"Half-horse town," (and after literally being told at a closed gas station that "There would be three choices to buy petrol in the morning, but nothing is open after dark." as if they'd never heard of such a thing) we found the Kalbarri hotel open for service.  We were ecstatic. We walked resolutely up to the counter and ordered a "Gourmet meat-lover's pizza on a thick crust." Then we ordered our drinks and sat in expectation.  (By the way, Adam, I had a VB. It was nice, and indeed refreshingly B.) Unfortunately, our pizza was a homophobic; it seemed to fear the meats of its own kind like Italian sausage, pepperoni, bacon....it preferred instead meats that couldn't find Italy on a map: diced ham (like for salads), polish kebalsa, chunks of leftover steak, and some tiny ringlets of something that tasted like bologna, all nestled underneath cheddar cheese on a cardboard circle masquerading as crust. While eating it (because we were hungry and angry) I kind of enjoyed the bologna flavor--it reminded me of the fried bologna-and-cheese sandwiches we had as kids.  But we knew, Superhusband and I, that Superhusband could make better pizza with one arm and six ingredients tied behind his back. Blindfolded.  With a head cold. Our evening came to an abrupt end when, upon finishing as much of the "pizza" as we could stomach, the karaoke started and some guy named Gary began to savagely murder parts of "Rolling on a River." We skulked out, and got in our near-empty sedan to drive the 50 yards back to our dirty little campsite. We were awash in disappointment. I dare say, ennui.

So here we are.  Sitting a bit stunned in our caravan on a Friday morning, wondering if anything else is worth exploring.  I wonder if Lewis and Clarke ever thought "Another mountain?  Let's just map it from here. Once you've seen one loin-clothed native, you've seen 'em all. I want tea." Of course, we'll go to the world-renowned gorges in a while, and hopefully get some spark back, but for now it's a drudge.

It just goes to show, when travelling to even the most famed of locales, lower your expectations.  I think if we had EXPECTED to be robbed at gunpoint while being force-fed hot garbage while squirming on a slimy concrete slab, then Kalbarri would seem amazing. AND if you are reading this, and are one of the lucky few to have one of those famed boring lives of home, and children, and legal migration status, cherish it.  Live it up in your rut for those of us who take turns conquering and being conquered by our adventures. May your present live up to your past.