The Turtle House

'John, why is it that you can attract so many hundreds of 'hits' from so many countries every second now? USA, Nigeria, Russia, China?'

'Well I guess it's just that it's the only World Bloke Blog Site that includes good quotes, for example, from Rex Mossop, Thomas Aquinas, and WH Auden, whilst giving minute by minute football update scores, and tips for the World Cup, and insights into Human Mindfulness.
It's something that Australian and, indeed, World Men, have needed in their lives for so damn long, that's all.
I remember, at 19, playing as the Sweeper for Manly Warringah soccer team, standing there just before kick-off, in a Zen meditational study, musing over the ramifications of the paradigm shift in Modern Australian Poetry caused by the movement of the Australia Council funding base from Balmain to Canberra...and, I guess, it's that kind of remarkable and unique capacity that makes the blog site so interesting, as a phenomenon, world wide now...
I'm not the only person who has ever had 'a moment of great philosophical clarity' whilst watching Rugby League...but I'm the only one who talks about it, as a way into Mindfulness, and the higher metaphysical planes on which we all play the game...some as Front Row Forwards, some of us as Hookers...It's all God, really...that's the thing...I mean, how long does Enlightenment last? Well, three and a half minutes. Everyone , I guess, knows that now, but no one is actually saying it in a Blog...I guess that's why the Turtle House blog is so important now. Twelve hundred dollars a second I guess means something...but it's basically about love."

Chapter Four

The Birdman

There was an old man who lived in a caravan. The owners of the large cattle property had allowed him to live out his retirement there by the creek.

Those owners sold-up and the new owners weren’t so keen on having the old man stay on. He was somewhat ill and emaciated but the main reason the new owners didn’t want him there was because he was, at times, to them, a highly chaotic character.

His caravan by the creek, quite remote from the homestead and the visual splendour of the greater property, was stuck away in a narrow gully. This old man, who I choose to call the Birdman, lived there with two dogs, one rooster named Sam, and a dozen or so wild, free range and free thinking chickens. The potential over-populating nature of the lusty rooster was kept in check by the two dogs. We think that our human lives are uncertain… well, that’s peanuts compared to the uncertainty faced by the young chickens or chickerlings as the Birdman called them.

His most frequent visitors there in his gully-nirvana were wombats. He was also occasionally visited by small lost wallabies. The wallabies were usually transformed through a particular form of mysticism, after one clean rifle-shot, into stew.

The new owners were concerned with the Birdman’s general appearance. It was pretty shocking… a gaunt, aesthenic, weathered man who was usually bent over, spitting. I’ve never met a man who could spit so much. He was a river to his people.

They were also taken aback by his vocabulary, which was quite profound when it came to swearing.

He had the capacity, when sorely-tested, to use the most creative and unpleasant words far more often, and far more frequently than he used any other words at all…even ‘the’ and ‘a’… and life itself sorely-tested the Birdman every minute, as it had always done.

He had always risen to deal with this test and lived his life as he chose it. His verbal skills were magnificent and incendiary. He could offend anyone. He could offend deaf people from hundreds of yards away.

He had a good double-barrel pump-action 12 gauge shotgun and a very nice Argentinean single-barrel 410 gauge shotgun. He had a very impressive extra-long barrelled stock 22 single shot rifle with very good telescopic sights. He used the rifle just for rabbits. He liked rabbits. The rabbit kittens were particularly sweet for dinner.

He would haul himself downwind of them, out of sight, and would wait. He would load his polished gun with the one single sub-sonic bullet. There was nothing, not one thing, in the life of the Birdman that was polished apart from his guns… except maybe his vocal chords when he really cut loose with swearing.

The extra long barrel on his rifle kept the underpowered bullet well-guided to its soft destination. The real joy for him, of course, was in the fact that the subsonic nature of the bullet meant that the rabbits didn’t hear the shot.

He would just pick them off, one at a time, as they happily relaxed outside of their little underground ‘condominiums’, totally unawares, dropping one at a time, as if it was just natural. He had perfect eye-sight.

When he had culled enough there, he would scarper down to the warren, pick them up by the fluffy ears, and take them home to cook.

It was good food. Especially the kittens… and, you didn’t have to dig out the bits of lead that you’d have to do if you did this kind of hunting with a shotgun. They were killed fresh and without a fear, just going about the usual business of being young happy fornicating rabbits.

He had started swearing a year before he started smoking, at nine, when he went to work for his uncle on a bullock-train hauling cut logs through the mountains there. He had lived his whole life in the scrub and forests thereabouts. He was born with no ‘original sin’. He earned them all, himself, every one, every day, and he liked them.

In retirement sometime he would sit on the step of his caravan door with a long piece of wire and trip over a chicken before grabbing it quickly, snapping its neck, plucking it, and cooking it. He was a master at survival. He had excellent vision, he was very fast over short distances, and he also knew how to wait for hours until the moment was right and ripe.

When it came to his gully, he was the master of that universe… and he was the contentment of it. He was Alpha and Omega to all things there.

The new owners eventually told him he’d have to leave. This direct order came to him after a certain incident. He had sent his two gifted dogs, Mutt and Jeff, to chase up and chase down a wild pig… and they failed in their task to bail up the creature. So, he shot them.

To him it was a sensible decision based upon how many chickens they ate and how much quarry they brought home. It was mathematical and nothing personal. They weren’t bad dogs.

To the new owners, well, this was something unacceptable. They considered him to be a great danger to himself and to all other creatures. The paramedics grabbed him en route to the local dog-pound where he intended to pick out two new hunting dogs… as pups…and give them food and train them well in all the things he knew best about living in the world.

At least, I suppose in retrospect, it was good that the paramedics didn’t just shoot him. They brought him to our Hospice instead.

He didn’t really fit into the mould of a Palliative Care patient. Sure, he would eventually die, but probably through lack of good, well trained hunting dogs rather than through any human illness. He was very tough. He had some organ failure but, knowing him, he’d find his way around all that… and he’d find his way around all of us as well, as it best suited him.

He was the most alive person I’ve met on Earth. His awareness of the natural world and of weather, of the way in which each breeze bent down each blade of grass, of the way each animal must behave, because it loved its own nature, was phenomenal.

It was not phenomenal to him. It was natural enough for him for he had only ever lived in that realm. Being in the Hospice, well, it was the only building he had been in for thirty years apart from his small caravan there by the small clear stream.

His eyes were very bright. There were galaxies of clarity in them. We didn’t have to do much for the Birdman, no one ever did, or could, or had to. He was right enough as he was. He was ‘right as rain’. He didn’t mind being at the Hospice, the bed was comfortable enough, just as long as he could be outside most of the time.

He would just sit there in the garden atrium of the ward with a bit of string and a small loop and he would snare the occasional pigeon… but only the slow, fat, dopey ones.

He snapped their necks as soon as he caught them and presented them to one of the nurses or the kitchen staff. Good eating.

“Well, thanks, Mr… um, that’s unusually considerate of you… um, look, maybe we should talk about this…um, no, not now. Just… um… thanks… and… take it easy, eh. Oh, and can you just spit outside?”

He didn’t die during the time I was there although a good number of dopey pigeons did. We sought out more suitable places for him to live but the most suitable place, his golden gully, was lost to him. All treasure is lost. We all know this. It is why we cling to it.

The medieval meaning of a Hospice… a place on the way for pilgrims… suited what the place meant to the Birdman. It wasn’t bad. It was comfortable enough and people didn’t bother him. It was something along the way.

I learned quite a bit about pain control and symptom management during my time at the country Hospice. I learned a fair bit about drug half-life ratios and known, believable, disease trajectory.

I learned about counselling and the basic function of grief. I learned that each death involves the re-ordering of life and reality. I learned how reality is not constant, but is flux itself, and I learned that meaning cannot be prescribed from the outside.

I also learned how to catch a nice, slow fat pigeon with a bit of string. It’s always a potentially useful skill to have up one’s sleeve. I have yet to use it in hospital ward staff-meetings, especially those to do with issues related to nursing theory, seamless integration and holistic corporate practice, having well resisted any such temptation.

As times pass and things change then we will all see what part of learning is most useful at each juncture.

I don’t think the Birdman was ever a fringe dweller. He never lived on any edge. I think we do. I expect the Birdman outlived, and still outlives, us all by leaps and bounds of wonder in the mystery and natural meaning of all of this.