Visiting Cities, a tale of metrophobia

On Wednesday of this week I had occasion to visit a city. Yes I know, I swore off cities for life - I remember. But just sometimes, loyalty to your own blood and important conferences with high-ranking people directly relevant to your own blood override your better judgement, and it was in that spirit, with my better judgement railroaded in favour of my family, that I packed my bags and headed down to Sydney, NSW, for the aforementioned important conference. Before I left, I organised to meet someone for coffee beforehand, and to sleep over afterwards at a friend's place, as the event was scheduled to end fairly late for those of us in even nearby regional centres.

It was with a heavy heart that I packed my eccentric-but-toothless Luggage, the one that doesn't have "hundreds of dear little legs", with my favourite pyjamas, my laptop, my toothbrush, and a change of clothes for the following day, dressed respectably, and wrapped myself up in a warm winter shawl in conservatively dark colours.

The weather was a howler of a day, with high velocity winds and near-freezing rain, so a kind-hearted friend of mine agreed to drive me to the train station which would take me into the big smoke, so that I could avoid the whole bus-train-transfer debacle. In return, I was to buy this friend the lunch-of-their-choice (the conference was an evening thing).

We arrived in the vicinity of the appropriate train station, and said friend pulled their car into a side-street well-known to contain a couple of different fast-food franchises. And immediately hit the anchors. I say that advisedly as more than a metaphor for stomping hard on the brakes: the road was under a significant amount of water, and sundry cars were either choosing to pick their way carefully through it, or doing U-turns to get away from it. Boats have anchors, and a boat would have been more appropriate transport at that time.

So, no lunch. My driver chose the U-turn option, and dropped me at the station. I thanked them, unloaded my bags, waved goodbye, and hastened up the ramps towards the ticket office. My transport organised and paid-for, I had some time to wait for the train, and in that time a young guy of seventeen asked me about the colourful, eccentric braids on each of the zips on my luggage. I explained how to get that particular visual effect that had engaged his interest, and we fell into a conversation.

Seems he worked at the franchise where we had intended to eat, but as their carpark was completely awash with a living tide that was exploring the kitchen door and as there was low-altitude electrical equipment in the kitchen, his manager had wisely decided to err on the side of OH&S staff safety policies, and had powered everything down and sent the staff home. His bus came, my train came, and we parted company.

Trains are an interesting phenomenon, especially when they are almost empty. They provide a gentle rocking motion that is almost nurturing and is certainly conducive to meditation, but as the ground keeps getting whisked away from under your feet it is very hard to connect with it if you would like to use the time to do anything earth-based. Tunnels are also interesting - you are plunged into the earth but into a completely unnatural environment - and tunnels that lead immediately onto bridges high above salty esturine water are even more interesting with the sudden changes of energies. I spent the trip enjoying the flickering of passing sensations.

Just over half-way there, the air conditioning no longer could hide the fact that it was feeding us processed city air instead of processed heavily-populated regional air, and I gradually became aware of the increasing amount of spent fossil fuels and rancid chip-fat in the air behind the air conditioner's choice of low-grade chemical-based "air fresheners", an unwholesome combination of smells that once had me throw up on the pavement a few months after I took the plunge and moved out of the city two decades ago, and visited for one day less than three months later.

I disembarked at a major rail interchange, looking for food. I know my stomach, and it settles when it is lined with something familiar, so I went looking for something familiar. I was served by a woman whose personal and psychic shields were so strong that I looked at her with a combination of awe, revulsion and envy. Her aura was almost as solid as her body, and far more prickly. She smiled thinly with her public smile, and served me professionally and politely. One thing was for certain: at work, nobody ever saw the real her. And I was probably one of a minority who immediately knew that, and could see why.

As I ate, I started to relax, and became even more aware of all the psychic noise in the place. Hundreds of people, all in a hurry, all stressed about one thing or another (or several things), hundreds of people in a controlled panic over bosses and deadlines, bills and families, shopping and transport, and all of them - all of us - additionally stressed because the weather was unusually violent, even though rain is not necessarily a bad thing. All that angst filled me with existential dread and nausea, so I ate slightly faster.

Guess what. Familiar food doesn't help if it is accompanied with boiled beverages made with water heavily polluted with a cocktail of chemicals only beginning with chlorine, and lungsful of air heavily polluted with many kinds of burnt fossil-fuels and other chemical residues. Twenty minutes later, I was upside-down in a none-too-clean public toilet, emptying myself spasmodically.

And my mother has spent decades saying I fake my metrophobia to cover the fact that I hate her. Two things: I don't fake metrophobia, and I don't ever cover my emotions. At least I have emotions, unlike some.

After I washed out my mouth - with polluted water - and waited for the taste of pollutants to lessen in my mouth, I foolishly went to the same venue, but this time only purchased a bottle of apple-and-guave juice. I love guavas, and have a young sapling in my garden that gave me its first crop last season - around a dozen exquisite, juicy fruits. After drinking the juice slowly and playing with one of the Tarot decks in my bag as I did so I started to feel less contaminated, almost clean.

I did say "almost". You can't ever really feel clean in any part of a city.

It was an hour before the appointed time of the conference, and time to wend my merry way there. I pulled out the documentation and double-checked. Then I went looking for someone in uniform, to ask what was the best form of public transport to get there. I followed their advice. Having taken "the dry option", one of a number of routes that allowed me to be inside vehicles or under cover for most of the trip, I arrived at my destination-building with all my clothes sticking to my skin, and so chilled-down that I could no longer feel how cold I was. My waterproofed Luggage was also satched, in the parlance of my daughter, and I was slightly anxious that it and the waterproof laptop bag within it might not have been waterproof enough to protect my computer. There and then I wasn't going to check, though.

Along with a few other people, I lined up at the door, and waited to have my name marked off on a list of people who had RSVPed that they were coming to the event. I had emailed my RSVP to the correct email address a day before the deadline, so I was obviously on the list, right?

Wrong. I and half a dozen other people, about four of whom had travelled great distances and arranged accommodation and swore blind they had RSVPed in time, were not on the list. We were going to be turned away after all the effort of getting there until we started making a fuss, then seeing another potential public relations disaster looming they decided to let us in as long as we stood quietly in the back of the room, didn't disturb the people who were legitimately there, and didn't voice an opinion about the matter-at-hand. We were told we wouldn't get coffee in the break, either.

Guess who voiced an opinion about the matter-at-hand. I got growled at. I gathered my somewhat damp shawl around me with as much dignity as I could muster, grabbed my sodden Luggage, and stalked off in high dudgeon. All that time and effort for a non-event. And a non-event in a *city*! I was seething - cities are places to avoid right up until you are frogmarched there by circumstances you can't change or ignore.

Cold again, I made contact with the friend I was to stay with, met them, and got whisked away. We were to sleep on a superannuated ferry now moored in a quiet part of the harbour. Option one for getting on the ferry was a boat, but there was no boat available to us. I briefly considered swimming - I could hardly get more wet than I already was. Option three, which we took, was a pretty little bush-walk, past boulders and trees and ferns, with the occasional flight of stars cut into the very bedrock. I would love to do it again by daylight to really appreciate how pretty it was, and preferably when I wasn't so cold that my joints were all locked up (don't worry, my two companions were the same!)

Option two was a walkway prepared by the local authority, through a tunnel. There had been three original tunnels, two of which were blocked off. The third, which was open, channelled massive amounts of water from the hill over it through a couple of broad openings, and was flooded out. I am told the other two had perfect ceilings, and had they been open, no rainwater or runoff would have found its way in.

Lessons of the day:

* Town planners are not the smartest people in the known universe.
* Bad weather is not fantastic for travelling in.
* Executive bodies of major organisations with annual budgets in the billions, don't know how to manage events, or even maintain a list of RSVPs.
* City air is toxic.
* City water is toxic.
* City energy is toxic.
* People who live in cities are panicky, angry, and/or ill all the time, to some degree. This is because they are being constantly systemically poisoned. They then generate huge amounts of negativity as a result of being poisoned without even realising they are doing it - thinking they are only receiving it from others - and this only makes the environment less human-friendly, not more.
* Cities are great places to get out of, as quickly as possible. Even if they contain friends that you've known for decades and now see only rarely.
* Metrophobia is the only sane response to a city - any greater degree of acceptance than that is symptomatic of a break with reality and a crumbling of awareness of the real world.

No more cities. I've done my dash. Never again, even if it means turning my back on those I love. The only thing that saved the day was friendship, and the fact that in retrospect I can see how funny it all was.

"Of Droughts and Flooding Rains"

Twenty-four hours ago, I was making immediate preparations to head north, drive as far as I could, then simply stop, find the nearest place where it made sense to pitch in and help out in any way possible. I was prepared to do whatever I could do that would be helpful to someone for about a week, then come back and do some necessary things that will be happening here, then later, when I will be absolved of some local responsibilities, head straight back north.

Circumstances got in the way, and it wasn't to be. Instead of heading north and doing whatever I can for strangers trusting that other people will be helping in the communities where I have people I love, I'm sitting here in my community, worrying-the-hell out of myself whenever I don't hear from one or another northerly friend for a few hours. I've already sent away money that I would normally squander in the course of the fortnight (my "me money"), plus money that others have offered me, divided between the official flood appeal and a direct bank transfer to a friend whose husband and children were away on school holidays when it all got out of control, and who is trying desperately to leave town to join them, one of the people I haven't heard from for a while. 

They have a horse stud and a few acres under crops: the water has already destroyed this next year's income for them. If I can find the money she needs for the vehicle to move a few of her more valuable animals before she leaves, then that is at least something saved for them to use when the clean-up is over and they have to start all over again, but the bulk of it is going to the relief fund where it will be distributed between total strangers on the basis of need: I may be aware of the suffering of some people, but by no means all, and I trust humans to display basic humanity in times of crisis and be evenhanded and fair with aid.

Earlier this afternoon I was talking to an elderly Jewish Romanian woman who fled the pogroms of forties and fifties. Even her children are old now, one of them in a local aged-care facility. I think she is fairly lonely now, and while she has never done anything so formal as to visit me, she certainly makes it her business to pop out of doors at about the time of morning I'm likely to be out the front watering my raised vegetable patch (or recycled box-trailer), and have a chat to me. This morning it was pretty difficult to avoid talking about the floods. She is a good Jewish woman, and I know a friend picks her up on the Sabbath and takes her to the prayer meeting of her choice - the nearest synagogue apparently is too far away.

This morning she was shaking her head from side to side. I had just told her that I had been trying to go north to help out, but hadn't succeeded, and was reduced to doing whatever I could do from a distance. I had not mentioned religion at all - hers or mine - when she turned to me, looked me hard in the eye and said something like: "You talk about God. God? Hah! How can you expect me to believe in God after this? When I was just a girl I had to leave my country because God would not stop the brutes, and I thought God was testing my faith. But now God does this? After taking my husband? I have always been careful. I have always prayed. I have always followed the Laws. And God does this? It is all too much. God is not testing our faith. No, this is proof that God doesn't exist at all! How can I believe, hmm? If there was a God, He would stop  all this."

This struck me as being terribly, terribly sad. Her love of the Torah and her faith in God had nourished her through a lifetime, probably a longer lifetime than I'll ever have. It had sustained her through years of  unthinkable brutality, through having to start up in a new country where she knew no one and nothing, not a person, not the language, not even the food. It helped her raise children in exile, and sustained her when they grew up and left her, one by one. It helped her when her life-partner grew old, grew ill, and died. Her faith survived all of that, burning steadily like a well-stoked furnace, not flickering feebly like a candle near an open window.

But suddenly, with the floods, she crumbled. I asked, and no, she had no relatives or close friends involved. She herself was as bewildered as I was that after a lifetime of being strong, she suddenly crumbled. I suppose it was just one last tragedy in a long line of tragedies, one last straw on that overloaded camel of parable and cliche. She stood there near my vegetable patch, straight and proud, until I impulsively reached out a hand and touched her shoulder. That was just too much - she collapsed into tears on me. I held her until she got a hold of herself, walked her home, made sure she went inside, and extracted a promise that she would ring her daughter and ask her to come over. Then I walked away. I felt bad, but I had things to do, and her daughter would understand her better than I ever could.

After that, I knew I had to renew my efforts: I made more phone calls, this time to friends and acquaintances who were two (or more) car families, seeking to borrow a larger vehicle. But no, I seemed destined to stay here. I did some banking, had an extreme luxury - an iced coffee - with my own daughter, and did other things I needed to do. 

On my way home, walking through the summer heat weighed down with some fruit, I passed the corner of her street, and started thinking of her loss of faith again. And again my heart went out to her, but I also started thinking that she wasn't giving Deity much credit. After all, imagine being a Supreme Being. There might be some non-physical beings who take a kindly interest in the fates of humans, but they are likely to be local energies. A Supreme Being, responsible for it all, is bigger than that. They set it all in motion by triggering a Big Bang, and allowing the Laws of Physics, the formation of galactic chains and within the chains individual galacxies, stars and planetrary systems. They made it possible through the laws of physics for evolution to happen and thus for us to develop; but with so many hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy which are potentially habitable, and so many hundreds of billions of galaxies around, why would they focus on us? We'd be like the individual atoms found in a single flake in a snow-dome on a window-sill.

Then again, consider Deity-as-Pet-Owner. Assume that Deity is conscious of us as a species, possibly even conscious of us as individuals. I used to have a very large tropical aquarium in my living-room in my old house. I had set up the environment, supplying stones, gravel and river-sand. Supplying plants of different species, filtration and on occasion when necessary, pH balancing. I stocked it with a known number of fish, of several different species. They showed every sign of being aware of my presence when I approached the tank, but continued on their ordinary business when I was in the room but didn't approach. May I not have appeared like a looming, unknowable God to any of them who might have thought?

I fed them regularly, providing flakes every day and supplementing them regularly with mosquito larvae - they loved hunting down living food. Every so often to keep the environment healthy, I'd drain off about two-thirds of the contents of the tank, and replace it. It was a large tank so I used a thick hose, and this created turbulence. At such times, I'd also move the stones around, checking the plants for damage and rot, and removing dead or unhealthy bits. This would create more turbulence. Would not any fish in the tank have regarded this as we might regard an earthquake, a storm or - yes, a flood, as an "act of god", causing panic and discomfort, and possibly even death if I wasn't very careful or the fish chose to swim in the wrong direction for my movements?

I created their whole world. I provided everything they needed in their environment for them to stay alive. Every so often, I'd create enormous and probably terrifying turbulence, in an effort to remove contaminants from their environment. And later, there would come a time when I gave the last of them away, and dismantled their environment for ever. That sounds pretty god-like to me - could it not be happening to us on a grander scale? Like me and my fishes, events that from a local eye seem devastating, might have a long-term effect of cleaning up the bigger-picture situation. We talk about annual seasonal cycles - why don't we think about longer seasonal cycles, calculated in decades of multiples of decades? They might also be about planetary cleansing, regarding us as either a species whose complaints should be ignored for the greater good, or worse, the actual contaminating organisms that are being cleaned away.

Perhaps, from a Gods Eye View, we are either the source of a lot of problems, or just an irrelevant species that is too numerous for the size of the "aquarium", anyway. God may have a greater responsibility, to look after the whole of the planet, the whole of the solar system, the whole of the galaxy. All of us agree that mankind has out-bred our resources: that's why the "average" Australian lifestyle would require seven Earth-sized planets to maintain if we managed to give everyone alive the same standard of living. Why would God have to be seen by religious people to nurture a species that is out of control? Why wouldn't God prune them slightly, tie them back as a tender gardener ties back pruned wines, keeping the garden more organised and more fruitful that way?

Queensland Floods

You know, I am outraged with myself for being as shallow, superficial and self-interested as everyone else. Two days ago I found out that the Queensland Floods were covering an area of the state as large as France and Germany combined, and the affected area has only grown since then. Today a few hours ago after coming home from doing whatever I was doing during the day, I received a call from friends of mine who moved to Nanango in Queensland back in 1982. We are good friends, and although I haven't been up there since 1999 (for a family wedding) and only saw them briefly then, I'm fond of them and stay in touch.

A day or two ago they were okay, and I was watching the whole Queensland thing, along with satellite pictures of cloud cover, with some concern. And honestly, if I hadn't been home for that phone call, that's all I would ever have done. Now things are very different, though. As we spoke on the phone a short while ago, though, I switched on the ABC to find unscheduled flood coverage had replaced "normal programming". Some parts of Nanango are lower than others. Jack and Michelle, both ex-military, retired up there when they moved, with some capital, and set up a hobby-farm on a smallish patch of land outside town. Last I heard, they had a house-cow supplying their milk and yoghurt needs, rather a lot of dogs, a veggie patch and an extensive orchard.

Seems they sent their teenage daughters to relatives for the holidays, so they really had to worry only about the animals. Jack was talking about evacuating, saying he didn't really know what he could do with his animals. He was saying that if the situation got much worse, even the final solution wouldn't be a solution - the fewer dead animal carcasses were around, the better.

They have two vans. Michelle has hers packed with an evacuation kit: clothes, valuables and heirlooms, HDDs for the computers (the rest of the systems can be replaced, it's really the data and software that is valuable), sleeping bags and thew like. Jack has already headed to Brisbane with his van full of blankets donated by his neighbours and food donated by neighbouring businesses, to help out at the evacuation centres.

If he can do this when his place is in danger, how can I sit around living life normally when my place is nice and dry?

Answer: I can't. Or, I can, but it would be wrong. My financial resources to be able to help - just to get myself there to help - are meagre, but what the hell, I haven't spent the last hour or two being idle. I've made a number of phone calls. A friend of mine works for a well-known car and truck hire place: first thing tomorrow morning I'll find out of she's managed to get her boss to donate a vehicle for a week to enable me to go up there and pitch in. Friends of a friend of mine, who operate a roadside fruit and veggie stall, have said that if I can organise transport, they'll donate some boxes of slow-to-spoil foods, like potatoes, pumpkins, citrus. Even my normally quite insular neighbours across the road have said they'll water my veggie patch and throw food at the cat once a day.

I barely have enough money for fuel right now (in a day or two that will ease up), and I'm certainly no Mrs Musclewoman who can repair damaged infrastructure at a single bound, but what I can do is this: I can bulk-cook. I can serve out food to people in evacuation centres. I can play with children whose parents are freaking out. I can provide a shoulder for the parents (or non-parents) who are freaking out. And because it's not my environment and not my community, I wouldn't have the temptation, that I would have if it was happening here, to keep checking on my place and my neighbours, so I'll be reasonably calm and unruffled, something that will be needed. And best of all, I can fall asleep at will and even sitting bolt-upright, allowing me to "stock up" on sleep in advance of needs, so I'll be able to work ludicrous hours, sleeping when its convenient rather than being kept awake because my body is not used to sleeping then (something that has always surprised me in other people).

So yes, tomorrow morning I find out if the idea - and I - have wheels. If it does and I do, I'll be out of here an hour or two after finding out. I'm going to put a Paypal donation button on the bottom of this post. Please, if you can spare something, do so. Donations received after I return will go straight to the Flood Relief fund that's been set up - I believe wireless internet has been set up in a couple of centres for relief workers, so I may well be able to access it fairly immediately. Any friends of mine or locals around here might want to get in touch with me tonight if they feel like contributing: Paypal chew significant percentages of received payments when you transfer it into "real" currency.

If I don't receive a van or a car to use, I won't be able to make the offers of vegetables or my own labour happen. But then again, I will be able to donate what I would have spent in fuel to the relief fund, plus anything I receive from Paypal donations, so please, anything you can, now or in the future. There are going to be plenty of people who will be needing help for at least two seasons after this.

Oh, and wish me luck. Even if everything goes exactly as planned, it's going to be a hell of a drive.