A Desert Oasis

    The most beautiful lightening storm I have ever seen jolted through the sky on my last night in Mildura.  I was mesmerized.  Electric bolts flashing through the sky over endless acres of vines.  I was staying on the outskirts of Mildura, where we were the only people for miles.  A lone house on the horizon surrounded by Cabernet and Shiraz neighbors.  I was living with my bosses, the keepers of the grounds.  It did not matter to me that these grapes would not yield award winning wine, what mattered to me was the silence.  There was hardly ever even a breeze.  It was January, and forty degree Celsius was the average temperature.  On most days out in the paddocks, we could not go more than a few meters without needing a break, a rest in the deceiving shade of the older, overgrown vines.  

     My first day of work in Mildura had been on these same paddocks.  Rows upon rows of barely sprouted vines.  There were six of us backpackers, the same bosses, Jeff and Kerri, and the same grapes.  I was living in a hostel then, a dormitory away from any college.  I was the only American.  Although the political tension present at home often aroused debate, it was more often Bacchanal revelry that ensued.  Age and status did not matter.  We were travelers, seekers, surviving the hot, Southeastern Australian summer. 

     I stayed for two and a half months, having found a home, a place, among my singular travels.  Sunday through Friday of every week, my routine remained entirely the same, yet so different than any weeks I had ever known.  The alarm would ring at 4:15; I would lather myself in SPF 45 sun-block underneath the light cotton, long sleeved garb I picked up at Paddy's Market in Sydney.  I assembled my peculiar lunch of peanut butter and jelly, and gathered my four liters of frozen water, that would melt within an hour of being in the vineyard.  I would smoke a cigarette in the darkness of the Mildura dawn, while I waited to pile into the van with my co-workers, my co-travelers, for our forty minute commute down dirt roads along fields of dead trees and a prehistoric landscape.  I was in a place that it seemed time had never touched.  The Southeastern desert of Australia, the Outback, that man had forgotten to industrialize.  The novelty of kangaroos hopping alongside the van wore off within the first week, and soon I simply thought of them as I did New England deer. 

     The work itself was simple.  With shears in one hand and a fly net draping my head and tied tightly tied around my neck, I was ready every morning to enter the paddocks.  The silence in the vineyard mimicked the flatness of the horizon.  For the first time in my life, I could actually tell time by the sun's placement in the sky.   Our goal was singular: Make the infant grafts grow by trimming back the natural growth of Cabernet, which was considered by our employers to be a weed.  An entirely new perspective was placed on the delicacy of wine.  As I walked up and down those rows of vines, I could picture a day back home when I would return from my menial office job to uncork a 2005 vintage of Yellow Tail Chardonnay and know that my sweat and toiling helped create my beverage.

    Fridays were the only day that strayed from routine.  Our ride home was happier, even playful.  It was payday and party time.  Some weeks our bosses would treat us to Dove ice cream bars, some weeks it was lager.  A cold beer has never tasted as good as it did in the back of a beaten up Aussie van, covered in desert dirt and dried sweat.  I can still hear the childish laughter that roared from the open windows of that van on Friday afternoons, echoing in my mind as a reminder of a life I once knew.

   Despite our physical laboring, it was somehow fun to be out slaving in the paddocks.  We would sing songs, or play tricks on each other about the deadly Red-Back spiders that one might have disturbed after snipping a lone branch.  We would tease one another about our accents, our newly acquired Aussie words like "smoke-o" and "ta," which seemed even more foreign than being a migrant worker.  We talked of our lives back home, me as a student and waitress, Lola, a Dutch nurse, Maria, a Swedish journalist, Craig, a Scottish model, Min Gyn, a South Korean chef, Hilda, a Norwegian gymnast.  All of us from different paths, different worlds, converged upon that vineyard.  It seemed we had all come on a search for what might make us better humans, for what might make us understand the human spirit just a little bit more.  Mostly though, we had all come to Mildura in need of some fast cash at a trade we would never undertake anywhere else. 

     I left Mildura for the first time in December.  I was headed south, to Adelaide, to celebrate my twenty-fourth birthday on the white sands of Kangaroo Island.  It felt as though I was leaving home once again, leaving the home I had found for myself on the other side of the globe.  I had taken a nineteen hour bus ride to get to Mildura and would take an eight hour ride to leave.  It felt like it was a much longer journey upon my departure, a journey that was even scarier than boarding that initial flight from Los Angeles.  My time in Adelaide was easy and relaxing though, filled with shopping and tours and drinking with new-found friends.  It was the complete opposite of what Mildura had been, with the fifty hour work weeks and waking before the sun.  Yet, I found myself longing to return. 

     After celebrating the New Year in Sydney, I stumbled onto a lone street in Bondi Beach.  I had made my way back to Sydney, back to the beginning, to find the same unappealing city that I had so desperately wanted to leave after four days of my arrival in Australia.  Sitting on the steps of a quasi-mansion, a few blocks from the bustling beachfront of Bondi, I found myself dialing my former employer's phone number.  Kerri's voice was aged and scratchy.  She habitually smoked more than thirty cigarettes a day.  This addiction, coupled with the fact that she had spent the last twenty years of her life tending to flora, be it grapes, oranges, or zucchini, under the harsh Aussie sun, had given her a leathery hardness inside and out.  She was glad to hear my voice; we exchanged pleasantries about the holiday season.  I begged for a job.  She granted me the opportunity to live with her and Jeff in their newly acquired home nestled quaintly among the vines.  Two days later I found myself aboard another nineteen hour bus ride destined for Mildura.

     My first arrival in Mildura had been greeted by Donna, the feisty, well-traveled, chain-smoking, owner of the Mildura International Backpackers hostel.  It was Donna who would become my landlord for those first ten weeks.  Donna was tall, slender, and gritty.  Her oil slick hair streaked with pink, a desperate attempt at her fading youth.  She ran the hostel with her life partner, Gil.  Donna believed marriage was "for suckers."  They shared a fourteen year old son, the hostel, and ten years of globe hopping.  They were both Kiwis, but reluctant to admit it.  Donna's best friend Kim helped out at times.  It was Kim who bought me my first and only meat pie.  She had a lazy eye so extreme that it was often difficult to watch her as she spoke.  Her hair was sandy blonde.  Her pale skin told nothing of her ten years in Mildura. 

     My second arrival in Mildura was much more foreboding.  I watched other backpackers pile into the vans sent by various local hostels, while I climbed into Kerri and Jeff's pick-up truck.  We drove through and past downtown Mildura.  We drove for miles down their road, the only neighbors being orange groves and vineyards.  I settled into their spare bedroom and quickly realized that my return to Mildura was to be nothing like the home I had left.  Our alarms rang at the same time and I made the same lunches, but our days among the vines were solemn and still.  It was real work this time, the adventure of being an American laboring in the Australian outback had faded.  The solitude of my days gave way to thoughts of the future, of where I would return to after Australia.  I had sold all of my furniture, finished college, and quit my job.  I was twenty four and felt the conflicting twinges of freedom and fear.  I wrote poetry in my mind on those days in Mildura, dragging my feet through the sandy, irrigated ground.  I sang what lyrics I could remember of the folk songs I had known so well as a teenager under my breath, as I wrestled with the now overgrown vines.  

     The nights at Jeff and Kerri's were even quieter than the days.  I sat in the humid darkness, focusing my mind on the occasional breeze as it stirred the grape leaves.  Mostly though, I sat with my memory.  I thought of my first love and leaving him behind in Vermont.  I remembered the cool freshness of my favorite swimming hole.  I remembered my regular Tuesday night patron at the bar, how his crooked smile was both welcoming and alarming.  I remembered my film professor's theories about Third Cinema.  I remembered that above all else this trip had been about rediscovering a part of me that had been lost in the awkward adolescence of high school and college.  I remembered the café where I drank my first flat white in Sydney with my first friend in Australia. 

     I left Mildura three weeks after returning.  I finally understood what my step-mother meant when she lectured "you can never go home again."  I sat remembering all of the subtleties of my parents' adages and lectures while I waited for my bus to Melbourne.  The adventure had begun to return as I loaded my fifty pound pack onto my narrow-shouldered, sweaty back.  I boarded the bus, and watched Mildura pass through the tinted window.  I smiled as we turned onto the highway, watched the murky, brown river as it flowed past, and began to remember Mildura.