For Bill Lober, Rosco and Martin
Bill’s front yard is a movie set for a great novel as yet unwritten. The middle aged forest borders the undulating paddock overlooked by Bill’s dogs who sleep on the veranda and watch the winding dirt road for visitors to bark at.
Hidden in the low rolling hills behind Port Macquarie, the floor of the trees, that circle the great shed, are populated with cars waiting to be restored and sold or wrecked, and while they wait the forest, in its own time, decorates their rusting bodies with lush creepers. One decaying bus is now a platform for a staghorn that offers its hands of leaves to the sun that the quiet trees are dappling.
Imagine foxes giving birth in the back seat of a corolla, or rats stealing the insulation from under the bonnets to make warm nest for their offspring that will grow among the engines; fading dreams that drivers once imbued them with. Even now, as I travel far away, I can see these cars in my mind’s eye and hear them yearning to be rescued by other drivers’ dreams.
Inside the cathedral of a shed, with its hoists and dirt bikes waiting to be repaired, all manner of tools and parts from forgotten vehicles, have found a place to call their own as high above you, fat spiders wait quietly in dusty webs for the never-ending supply of bugs drawn to the suspended LED lights.
Rosco
At night, while waiting for sleep in Florence, the music of these insects was so loud I could all but see their waves rolling above me. Each instrument calling for love, and so the question was are they all lonely, meaning this music was an endless ballad, or were they making love above and all around me, and praising their luck with this symphony just a brief piece from their joyous prayer?
Florence is up on stands, her front wheels removed and Martin and Rosco and Bill are around her bringing all their expertise to the many problems she has.
Martin has busied himself fixing her dents, and Bill started on the injectors. And since the parts for them wouldn’t be ready for days, this shed, this farm became my home, once again, and briefly.
I doubt if the New World Order will ever be made aware that these men and this shed exist, and yet if it wasn’t for Klaus, I would never have found this property. This haven of mechanical and spiritual solace.
The forest is deep and hungry to recreate your monsters from the crackling movement of kangaroos and bush turkeys, creatures who somehow missed our desire to farm birds like them for food.
Bill
Down at the fence line a deep creek ebbs towards the ocean, and the tributaries feeding the unspoken wisdom of its flow, include the soft deepening lines in Bill’s face, and if there are fish in there, no doubt their wet scales in the sunlight would gleam like the flashes of humour in Bill’s eyes.
We call them the resistance mechanics. I’m only one of a stream of travelling freedom fighters who come seeking shelter. To talk about life and the challenges of our unfolding world, while laughing to anything that tickles our funny bone. And so often we are laughing.
Bill is jabbed. He took two to travel to Vietnam where he goes motor bike riding with friends, crisscrossing the country. The first jab had no effect but the second saw him climbing off his trail bike, and them ripping of his bike gear to lay on the ground, as his heart raced at an unprecedented speed. Would these slow passing clouds be the last ones he would see. And he was here, near home, for despite taking the jabs he, like many, were not allowed to travel.
Watching Cafe Locked Out
Those pains have now passed, but he has told me he monitors himself like someone with a timebomb ticking in his veins, and the anger from this is discernible, but never used against us.
Rosco never took it, and as Florence is dented from my driving, Rosco’s heart and soul are dented from life, there are unrepaired cracks from his youth that I won’t share here, and his long time, on and off girlfriend was killed by the jab, after obediently listening to her doctor and not to Rosco.
But despite the damage, there is a vast kindness in his eyes and I could always feel his empathy with these new nerve endings I have come to trust as much as my critical thinking.
In the shed is an old cat. Rosco found it in a past backyard, it had been dumped and was starving and cold when he took it in and he has cared for it ever since. When he leaves it cries out for him as Martin and Bill with good humour and gentle tones try to sooth the cat’s concerns by informing him, repeatedly that Rosco will be back soon.
Rosco almost died recently. He began to feel ill but not wanting to go to hospital because he is unjabbed, he tried to tough it out. When Bill asked me to check on him it was clear he had had or was having a stroke. For a second opinion I called a Doctor, suspended for questioning the narrative, and over a video call, he agreed and Rosco went to hospital. And while he has made a remarkable recovery, he is slower now as he works as Bill’s assistant.
Both he and Martin live in buses that will never drive anymore.
Martin, also unjabbed, makes a living buying cars cheaply, fixing them up and selling them. His record is 42 cars in one year. Every car is a problem, and he fixes them with a bush mechanics ingenuity and patience.
I won’t share his back story but I will share his kindness and energy. He worked on Florence tirelessly and she now has a heater for the colder nights that runs off the diesel.
Each evening there I went live on Café Locked Out from the shed, and afterwards Bill and I shared some organic brussel sprouts, whilst he, I and Rosco talked about the maelstrom; the world that was racing around the calm eye of this shed.
When it comes to leaving, a part of me always wants to stay, to learn the tools and live at their pace, the pace of trees, the pace of eagles gliding over the land, the pace of men, when they find a kinship and a purpose.
But leave I must, bouncing over the long dirt road that winds to this shed, with Florence below and around me feeling and sounding like a refreshed warrior bear.
If our country was an aging bus, these three men, freedom fighters in the mechanical ranks, could not only have fixed her, but because of their skill and kindness and love for their country, we would be a different people as we drove into whatever future, people we will never meet, are attempting to build for us.
I can see some of the people I have met on my travels now, they have transitioned into cars. Their dents are rusting, and under the spreading creepers, animals are making love and creating families in their bowels as they wait on the men in the shed, those there souls hewn form the cloth once called, what it takes to be an Australian man, to come down and begin their repair.
Like they repaired me.
Michael Gray Griffith
Cafe Locked Out
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Good to think of these people tucked away 'out there', looking after people and cats. The more the better.
Wishing you bodacious travels