Twin Storms Eriko Kennedy   © Copyright 2024 by Eriko Kennedy

Photo courtesy of Greg Holland, Bureau of Meteorology Darwin, Australia.

I already knew. It was after dusk when I was called from homework hall to go to my dormitory mistress, a vague spinster in charge of our schedules and bedtimes. In her dark sitting room, her profile backlit by yellow lamplight, she told me stiffly that my father had died. I burst into tears. I cried all night for him, and for me.

At dawn, I was tucked into a taxi with a suitcase for the long ride to Brisbane Airport and the flight back to Darwin. My friends waved their goodbyes from unlit dorm windows. In puffy– eyed silence, I leaned my head against the car window and watched the world outside speed by in the morning glow. Shadowy gum trees and houses gradually shifted into dark greens, ochres, browns, and red brick as the sun rose. My internal world had riven but outwardly everything appeared unscathed, untouched.

On the flight home, the scenery below changed from the greens and scattered houses of the coast and Great Dividing Range to a vast plain of unrelenting sunburned outback.

Occasionally, a kangaroo bounded below.

My father and I loved this country. In the Dry season, he and I would go down “the Track” - the sole long highway connecting Darwin to central Australia - to his property out by Daly River. Only once or twice, a car or a semi-trailer filled with cattle whizzed by us on the bitumen. Our truck heading the opposite direction, down South, would set hundreds of rosebreasted galahs to flight, screeching as their grey wings beat and clouded the sky.

Long hours into the drive, dad would take a right turn, off the Track, onto a rocky dirt road. Dust plumed behind us. There were no street signs from here on in. We followed old rutted trails and memorized the way–make a left at the old gum tree, take the left fork at the triple termite mounds. The broken barbed wire fencing delineated some old timer’s acreage. Maybe it was ours? Out here, it could be dangerous making the wrong turn, or having engine trouble. Days or weeks could pass before anyone came this way. Water, petrol, and spare tires were life necessities.

By late afternoon, we would finally reach Daly River. Our modest “homestead” was set quite a distance from the riverside, likely to keep away from rising floodwaters during the Wet, or the plentiful fresh water crocodiles. We set up our hammocks and hung mosquito nets in the corrugated tin shelter. Our nets were also good at keeping the incessant flies and occasional snake away. The old wood and tin outhouse was claustrophobic and disconcerting as it was home for the inevitable common poisonous redback spider. So I peed by parched shrubs, returning water back to the dry earth. Our Bush tucker was basic and often canned baked beans cooked over the campfire. I mixed flour, salt, and water and nestled it in the coals to bake. We picked and flicked off the damper’s blackened crust to eat the bread’s steaming insides.

At dusk, nocturnal and diurnal moved into their proper places. In the waning firelight, my father and I watched and listened. Mobs of kangaroos heading toward shelter bounded by, silhouetted black against the sinking sun and a deep yellow and crimson sky. The chatter of birds died down as they nested; flying fox bats swarmed in flight in search of fruit. The moon hung big and close in the sky.

The Southern Cross in the great hazy Milky Way glittered with diamonds, twinkling down upon us. We sat in this limitless expanse, specks in the creator serpent spirit’s eye. Our existence was just one short thread woven into this ancient rhythm of life–staying but for a moment, and passing through. I was at peace and at home, in Country, safe with my father.

My tears had dried long before the plane door opened and muggy heat enveloped me. Clammy with dread and flattened emotion, I walked down the portable steps to the tarmac. I rallied myself and created a protective shell before greeting my prickly, young, and beautiful mother. Mother had left behind everything in Japan when she married my British father and moved to his adopted country. She tried to adapt to the rugged land, life, and food. White townspeople disliked her race and there were few other Japanese women around. Mother had my father and me, and she made it clear she was unhappy with her life choices.

Dad’s early death left our finances in a mess; he was generous to a fault and loaned people money or tools which were occasionally returned. At the funeral, mother sat crying and hid her tears behind a black veil. I stood beside her as she clung to me, whispering about the people who had hurt her and of dad’s supposed friends, those who were indebted to him and had walked away. In the weeks following, she needed help and little came.

My optimistic father often came up with schemes on how to make a living off the land. The pineapple, mango, and crocodile farming ventures failed. The one business endeavor that stuck was house construction. He became a small-time developer and built our three homes. On our last home, I came after school and sat in 100 F degree shade watching him, hand sawing beams and girding in the unrelenting heat–his back dripped with sweat. The industrious repetitive hammering of nails was hopeful, anticipatory. Over months, he patiently taught me how to frame and set concrete floors, lay our brick walls, prime and paint my bedroom walls. He never snapped “go away and stop asking questions,” as did mother. My father filled this house with his calm gentleness.

Now, when I came home, I could not find him. Dad was not sitting in his favorite leather chair listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sherazade blasting from the stereo; he was not lying down resting in his bedroom; he was not in the kitchen making Sunday roast or the dog’s buffalo stew. He wasn’t coming inside to put the kettle on for his morning “smoko” break of hot tea with two heaped scoops of Sunshine powdered milk. My father’s tools and truck were downstairs, but he was no longer here.

Life was going to get worse.

Two months later, on Christmas Eve, the radio cyclone warning announcement alarmed. Secure everything outdoors. Fill the bathtub with water. If the cyclone hit, shelter in the bathroom or smallest room in the house. A cyclone recently passed by Darwin without damage so everyone ignored this one, grumbling that the warning was much ado about nothing. Anyway, there were many last minute things to do before Christmas.

Despite the bustling people and town around me, the land was strangely still. Wildlife disappeared. I became uneasy. At first, there was no breeze. Our Great Dane became unusually skittish - following me around, anxious and needing reassurance. As the day progressed, I too felt the change in air pressure and started packing my mother’s prized Venetian glassware. I tucked them securely in a mother of pearl inlaid camphor chest she had ordered from Hong Kong. Mother laughed at me for doing so.

Rain closed in and the wind picked up. Townsfolk were still running around doing last minute errands. That evening, our roast dinner was ready waiting on the dining room table, but mother stayed in her jewelry shop working the counters. Christmas was traditionally the busiest and best time of year for business, and we needed the money. Finally, around 9 p.m. when even the most intrepid customers would not venture out in the heavy winds and torrential rain, mother closed shop and came home.

We never got to eat. The power went out. The whirling mass barreling toward the city did not let in moon or star light. Mother and I huddled by candles hoping the worst of the cyclone would pass us by. Rain battered our windows. Tree limbs and garbage cans whipped through the air. My bedroom window cracked, then shattered. The wind picked up and peeled our tin roof off like a sardine can; rain belted down in sheets. With the ceiling falling around us and in pitch blackness, mother left me to run to her bedroom to find the shop money bag. We then started tracing our way downstairs and hunkered down cowering against a brick wall–one that I had helped build. It soon started to sway from the wind. It might fail too. Mother covered and protected me as best she could. Our dog whimpered and pressed against us, quivering. I started singing the Lord’s Prayer, having learned it at boarding school. Mother hissed, “Shut up. There is no God.”

Mother and I listened as our home and my parent’s dreams, past and future, were torn asunder. That night, metal roofing, wooden beams. furniture, cabinet fixtures, glass louvers and bricks sliced and smashed through the air. The wind, an angry daemon, splayed the bubble gum pink walls of my upstairs bedroom. It howled as it picked up and discarded daddy’s treasured classical LPs and record player. It dragged mom’s baby grand piano across the second floor then dropped it on dad’s parked truck. All these worldly toys were ephemeral.

At dawn, I woke up and walked outside alone. I stepped into an unfamiliar dystopian landscape of flattened houses and trees, house parts wrapped around broken telephone poles, detritus strewn across impassable roads. The eerie silence was deafening. I felt we were the only ones left alive in a war zone. But I was not afraid anymore, not of nature–I was safe with her. My external landscape now matched my internal world. Nature had shown her powers and clearly explained her rules. I had watched, listened, and understood. I knew now what was important.

That morning we moved into the back of mother’s jewelry shop, as it was surprisingly intact. Dad had made a strong metal awning that protected the windows from shattering and blowing in. I cleared the backyard and spent the day dragging barbed wire, roofing, and anything else I could find to make a formidable barrier to keep strangers out and our dog fenced in.

Without word from the outside world, and no power, water, or policing, the town became feral. Before midday, a crowd swarmed and smashed windows to loot the local grocery store. I went in afterwards to look and the shelves were emptied. I watched horrified as former customers broke into our neighborhood Italian deli and picked it bare. That afternoon, our shellshocked butcher opened his doors and gave away his inventory. Without refrigeration the meats were going bad. The dog ate well. Despite everything being waterlogged, somehow mother and I made a fire to cook the beef.

That afternoon, Mother carefully climbed over torn walls, glass, and bricks to get up to what was left of our house’s second floor to find dad’s rifle. The rifle barrel was bent and the bullets were scattered somewhere in the rubble. The thing was useless but she kept it in the shop by the back door, just in case. When dad and I had driven out to the Daly, the rifle had come with us. I had fired it often. Dad would leave me alone as he toured our property perimeter. As he would be gone for the day, I would eventually become bored and shoot tin cans and bottles on large earthen termite mounds for target practice.

By the third or fourth day after Cyclone Tracy, rumors started. There was a curfew at night and people were taking it upon themselves to roam in groups to self-police. Someone warned us that stray dogs were being shot. Mother and I stayed put and did not leave the store. However, we desperately needed drinking water, as we had used all the rain that we had funneled into salvaged buckets, pots, and pans. Mother took two buckets and went out searching for clean water. I stayed inside the shop and the dog was on a chain guarding the back.

After a while, a man came up to the barricade and started to clear a pathway to get inside. I yelled at him to stop. He did not pause and kept coming closer. My dog knew something was wrong and barked ferociously, pulling angrily on his restraint. I aimed the rifle through a window at the stranger so he could see the barrel and knew I meant business. But he kept coming. He was not going to turn back. “Stop, or I will shoot!” I pulled the trigger but of course, it clicked and did nothing. Suddenly, my mother came around the alley corner and started shrieking. She dropped the precious full water buckets and raced, arms flailing, toward the man. He quickly backed off and darted away. That was the moment I learned I could, and would, shoot someone to stay alive.

There were other similar unpleasant incidents before, and after, we were evacuated out of Darwin. When women were allowed back into the city, mother worked hard to rebuild and patched-up the now one-story house. I stayed at my old boarding school, waited until schools were reconstructed, and returned when children were allowed back. I continued to pay attention to the land and listened to its rhythms. Another Dry and Wet season came and went. Mangroves grew back, tadpoles and green tree frogs returned, eucalyptus grew sage green again, parakeets renested. Neighborhoods were resurrected. But, my mother was too wounded to heal. After a year, we packed and moved to Hawaii to start anew in a kinder tropical paradise. I cried all the way to the airport. I wept once more at an airplane window, etching the myriad colors, mounds, trees, and tributaries below into my memory and heart.

In Honolulu, I made do and tried to re-ground. Mother’s bad luck and decisions continued. Eventually, she laser-focused her disappointments and aspirations on me. She tried molding me into her desired image, demanding and mapping out my life and ambitions. So I kept leaving her. My path tracked on the scratched out addresses on reused moving boxes: Sydney, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.. Each time I started settling into a place, I was pulled back to Honolulu to care for mother after some medical emergency. My roots were shallow.

Stability happened with marriage and two children. I worked to make home where my heart was, with the small family I created in Maryland. But I felt like an interloper in the city I lived in. Something was missing: dogs were leashed and their poop collected in plastic bags; suburbia was manicured lawns and sad sterile gardens. I was disconnected from this land and there was no one to guide me and my new family. My husband’s parents had died young and my mother remained unwell and distant. No elder came and sat down at Thanksgiving and chronicled how they lived and navigated through their world. So, just as Aborigines passed down their history and culture in Dreamtime stories retold and sung through the ages, I too wove my story and songlines to make my own Dreaming. I told the children stories of my youth to imbed in them my thread of memory and belonging to a land and place.

My daughter was also twelve when her father died. And, I unfortunately relived the same hurts and broken promises my mother had endured. But I survived. Years later, I took my daughter and her brother to visit Australia. On the first day in Darwin, we made a pilgrimage to my father’s grave and I introduced them. As the children wandered among tombstones, I sat on dusty red dirt and talked with my father and other ghosts. I apologized for not visiting and updated dad on my life since Cyclone Tracy - my accomplishments and sorrows. I said goodbye at the cemetery with my heart wistful, but at rest.

As we headed down the Track to camp out in the Bush my energy and joy were palpable. I belonged to this rust colored land. I felt grounded and at home. Half an hour out of Darwin, our jeep accidentally drove over a snake. Our guide stopped, jumped out, grabbed his shovel from the side of the jeep, and chopped off the snake’s head. The children gasped and looked at me, stunned. My Snake Dreaming stories were coming to life for them.

The time when I was a baby - I kept crying and my mother, not wanting to turn on the light to fully wake me, kept soothing me, and putting me back in the crib. She finally turned the light on when I would not stop crying and was horrified to see a snake slithering out of my crib.

The story about the lethal king brown that coiled and wrapped itself around my leg as I stood by Mrs. Bell’s chicken coop. I flung it off and one of the Bell boys rushed back over with a shovel to decapitate it. The cold nights when snakes lay warming on the roads and our car gently bumpity-bumped as we inadvertently drove over them. These were not fairy tales, they were real stories anchored to a place and time.

An hour or so later we stopped by a roadside restroom. A suburbanite rushed out of a stall, frightened, screaming, “There’s a huge spider in there!” I walked by her and looked inside. A three-inch grey-black fuzzy Huntsman spider scurried into the toilet paper roll dispenser. I checked behind the toilet and under the toilet seat, closed the door, then used the restroom - but didn’t use the toilet paper. My children stood in awe outside. They had long heard about venomous red-back spiders and knew to check for them under toilet seats.

This beautiful inhospitable land distilled to the essence everything important about life - how to survive, what and who to trust, how to live. Now here, my children could see, feel, and learn firsthand. They were beginning to appreciate all I had tried to carefully impart thousands of miles away. They now began to understand and love this part of Australia.

My children and I also found my father out in the Bush. His spirit had become part of the land. He was with us climbing up the ancient escarpments at Kadadu and by us as we absorbed the panoramic views. He watched his grandchildren jump into the Jim Jim Falls, where I once swam. He helped us when we set up camp on an old disused WWII airplane runway and cooked in the scrub. He was nearby scanning the undergrowth first to make sure there were no snakes before we peed. My father was present the morning the kids discovered wild dog or dingo tracks circling their tent. Together, we cooked by a crackling campfire, watched the sunset paint the sky yellow, crimson, and purple, and listened to fruit bats wing by. We gazed up at the moon, the Milky Way and the Southern Cross sparkling through the night and millennia. Later, dad sat behind us as we watched and listened to Aboriginal dances and songs. My heart sang and merged with the clapping sticks and didgeridoos, my earliest childhood lullabies and memory.