This is another double post. chronologically the last post comes before this one!
As it turns out I will be here at Delmore for one more week.
The guys that I thought I’d be getting a ride had to push their plans forward a
bit and it ended up not working out. Although, I will still be meeting them in
Darwin and Sydney later on in my journey. I thought I’d be leaving with them
this morning but I guess it didn’t work out. Oh well, I can do a lot with
another weeks pay anyway.
So instead of having my first day off in a month, I started
the day by trying to fix a bore that would only work for a minute before
shutting off. I spilled petrol on my clothes filling up the engine, I soaked my
arms in petrol while cleaning the air filter then worst of all I got a mouthful
of petrol trying to siphon the bad fuel out of the tank. That was an awful
experience that I will hopefully never have to repeat. I’m very lucky that I
didn’t swallow any. . . I think. . . .
Most of the guys went back to university last week so my
week has been spent teaching the new guy Craig where all the bores are and how
the intricate details of how to get them started. I’m sure that his skills will
come quite in handy what with Delmore being run by unskilled backpackers up
until now. A typical conversation may go . . .
Britt: “ This is Carmensita, the fuel line is too long and
is bent on this one, so you have to hold it up when you are bleeding it in
order to get all the air out.”
Craig: “Why don’t I just cut it shorter and reattach it the
next time the tank is empty?”
Britt: “Oh yeah, I guess no one ever had time to think about
that.”
He is a pretty cool guy and a plumber by trade, which when
you think about it, most of what raising cattle in the desert amounts to is a
giant plumbing job. Pumping water out of the ground then over thousands of
kilometers of pipeline and keeping all the tanks full is 90% of raising the
cattle. It’s only twice a year that you muster up the ones that are big enough
to sell.
But despite his plumbing prowess, we spent the better part
of two days zooming around Dnieper trying to figure out why water was not
pumping from the dam next to the Dnieper homestead, to the yards a K away. And
after driving, tap switching, on-foot-pipeline following, two burst pipes and a
half a day spent hauling a trailer over some of the worst roads in the property
we finally got it pumping. Of course then as soon as the water started flowing
into the yards the thirsty cattle rushed over and broke the floaters off of the
troughs and messed with some pipeline so we lost probably 20,000 liters of
water according to Don (so it was probably more like 5000 liters but still a
lot). So that’s a project for today.
I spent the rest of the day ear tagging cattle at the Old
Macdonald yards. Yes, there is an Old Macdonald farm here, the jokes have been
made. Actually the homestead there says Old Macdonald Downs right on the roof.
But while the yards there are set up so as to make moving the cattle around
very easy, the crush (the contraption at the end of the race that holds the
cattle down while you brand and tag them) is at such an angle to the fence,
that I while tagging I was in the perfect position to be slobbered on and
blood-gushed-on and just generally thrashed around by the poor
not-so-defenseless cow in the crush. But apart from my arm nearly being broken
every time, my arms got covered in cow slobber as they threw their head in
every other direction than the one I needed them to look. The slobber itself is
not so bad you can just wipe it off, and getting really dirty in the yards is
part of the fun of the whole adventure, but I found out something interesting
today. I am allergic to cow saliva. I hadn’t noticed before because I was
always wearing a long sleeve shirt when I tagged but yesterday, with a t-shirt
on my arms got really itchy only where the slobber touched me, then my eyes got
kind of itchy and I started sneezing a lot. The same order of events as when I
am around cats for too long. It wasn’t so bad and we got the job done but you
never think about animals you might be allergic to that you are never in
contact with. I might also be allergic to dolphins, lemurs and porcupines for
all I know. But actually, the cattle sneeze sometimes as well, maybe they are
allergic to humans.
Today a bunch of us are going into town for the big cattle
show. Unfortunately I am among that group but I am happy to at least have most
of the day off. There is a mixed group of nine cattle that need branding at the
Delmore yards, but that’s not a lot of work and it’s only like 3 K’s away so I
basically have the day off. Not to mention I will be in Alice for good in less
than a week’s time anyway. It doesn’t really seem like my time here at Delmore
will ever end, or that there ever was anything before this in my entire life.
But it has been a great experience to look out the window and see the box I was
living in shrinking in the distance. I have learned so much and experienced so
many things in my stay here that I will be forever changed. But most
importantly, I think I can safely say that I have accomplished what I set out
to do by coming here, namely to find the drive and inspiration that I felt I
had lost after college, and to free my self from the worries of a future that
was all to clearly laid out in front of me. I do have goals, but sometimes
being able to see the path to them too clearly, holds you back from molding
yourself a better route, and coming to a place where there really is only what
is right in front of you, has been enormously helpful in wiping my etch-a-sketch
clean. Now when I get back to the states I will be in a boat with paddles,
rather than a raft. Not to mention sitting in the back of a ute and going
ballistic chasing cattle across the open bush is really great time. And I have
met some great people and made friends in New Zealand, England, Morocco,
Germany, the Netherlands, Australia of course, and I can officially say that I
know 1/1,000,000th of the population of Denmark. But my journey and
my travels are not over by far, literally anything could happen in the next
five days or in the two months I have before going back home. It is a bit weird
to think that I am only 2/3rds done with my trip here, as I said earlier it
feels like I’ve been living here a lifetime.
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