The past two weeks have not been kind to Delmore. The
generator has broken, the homestead bore has broken, one girls foot was broken
by a charging bull and another is lucky to be alive at all after flipping a
ute, Don nearly sliced his thumb in half, two more utes are out of commission
due to clogged engines, another person smashed a rental car on the corner of
another rental car and a whole host of other small mess ups and accidents have
plagued us in the past few weeks. All of that is on top of having tons of
cattle work to do. I haven’t been able to write much let alone think I’ve been
so busy. But the end is in sight. I am leaving on Friday. It was one of those
chance decisions that pop up and you just go with. Tom and Meri the gardeners
from utopia . . . did I mention
them before? They were the people that randomly showed up one night and dropped
off Celine. Tom and Meri turned out to be two cool guys that are doing
perma-culture gardening in the aboriginal communities up in Utopia. They showed
up to pay Celine a visit and Meri mentioned that they were heading up Darwin
way on Friday. I figure that I would be spending the time and money just trying
to find friends and rent a car anyway so I might as well skip the expense and
go with two guys I know.
Also I helped Matthew (Kathleen’s son) skin a cow today.
There is a big cattle show coming up soon and Don was mustering in the Delmore
West Paddock , but he accidentally hit one of them with his ute, breaking its
leg. He can sell damaged cattle so he shot it and gave it to Kathleen and her
family. But Matthew was the only guy in the group at the moment so Ji and I
drove out with Matthew, Kathleen, Elizabeth and Denisa to clean the killa. I
did the knife while Ji and Matthew pulled back the skin. It was quite an
interesting experience. I think we would have stayed to finish and to eat part
of it with Matthew and them but Ji wanted to go when the cattle truck passed
by. I imagine we would have actually been warmer staying by the fire with the
aboriginals, than in the big truck with windows that don’t roll up.
So remember a few weeks back when I almost crashed a ute?
One of the girls just rolled it. And not just rolled it but flipped it front over
back, that’s hard to do. Even more amazing than that is that she escaped with
only some big cuts and what was either a concussion or minor shock. Those are
pretty big injuries, but considering what the car looked like after all was
said and done she will never have any idea how luck she is to be alive. It was
thoroughly trashed. We think she may have been following to close behind
another ute in the big dust trail that is kicked up and swerved off to the side
into the gutter but we might never know. She had some pretty weird memory loss
right when it first happened and she still can’t remember the crash at all.
When I first showed up at Dneiper homestead and saw Chloe surgically removing
glass shards from Bridgett’s (crashed the car) foot, she commented on the fact
that the huge gash went right through her favorite tattoo. 45 seconds later she
made the same comment as if it were part of normal conversation. It was like
this for the rest of the day. She would be flipping through pictures on the
digital camera and commenting on them, get to the beginning and flip through
again making the same comments. Short term memory loss is a very spooky thing
to deal with. Of course Don had sliced his hand open whilst castrating a bull
so he drove her halfway to town where they met an ambulance. She is ok now, she
is in more pain but we’ve all been telling her that’s good because it means the
shock has worn off.
I think this may be my last post from Delmore Downs now that
it is Wednesday night and I started writing this on Saturday….. hahaha. But my
adventure is not over I still close to two months left in Australia before
going back to the states…and then….
No comments:
Post a Comment