The Apinautica - The Bundaberg Archipelago
Okay it's been a spot of a moment since an installment of my ongoing memoir the Apinautica. Where we left off I'd just arrived in Australia in October 2012 and was working for an asshole, but then I left that job. Let us continue with where I end up next:
Week 4 - November
The sun, quite impertinently, refuses to set over the ocean. This is contrary to what I had grown up accepting as the only proper solar behavior. In California it’s taken for granted the sun retires for the night beyond the briny deeps - but not here, here it hides its colorful daily finale behind the tangled branches of mangroves and eucalypts.
Not one to be out-witted by a giant ball of gas, I swim out beyond the waves, and watch the sun set from there. As I slowly backstroke through the warm water, the sky fades through ever darker blues. The silhouettes of large fruit bats flit about, before it fades entirely to black and a stunning array of sparkling stars in unfamiliar constellations. Finally I reluctantly leave the balmy water and walk the hundred yards to my empty house.
I try to outwit the sun by getting up early enough for sunrise, darting out to the beach in the grey pre-dawn light, the sand soft and cool around my bare feet, but, one step ahead, the wily bastard actually rises, slow and yellow like an egg-yoke, over a headland which curves out into the Coral Sea. The sun always wins here.
By 6:30 every day I'm headed to work, sweating, with the windows down, already too hot for hot coffee. The first and often only human interaction of my day would be at the bakery, where I stop for a meat pie for breakfast. “How are you?” I ask the proprietress.
“Thanks,” she says.
“How was your weekend?” I ask,
“Thanks” she says.
“Hear about the storm they say is coming?” I ask.
“Thanks” she says.
During the rest of my day I likely won't talk to anyone. I don't know what my phone's ringtone sounds like, no one has ever called me.
The beehives are mostly among the cane fields. Twenty-one trailers, just the skeletal frames of trailers really, each with a row of beehives on each side. They're parked in twos and threes, surrounded by solid walls of sugarcane like a hedge maze. It's rather like giant grass, like perhaps you've been shrunk to the size of a bee. Every few weeks they harvest the cane and burn the debris, so the fields become walls of flame, and then you're surrounded by open space again, until the cycle repeats. In some places the fields are bordered by impassably thick forest, in which insects make a constant loud buzz like high tension wires. There's a bird that makes a sound so much like someone whistling for my attention that I turn around every time. There's nothing there but a four foot goanna lizard giving me a wry look from the scrub as if to say, “As if there's anyone else here, mate.”
Twenty-four beehives per trailer. Five hundred hives altogether. Approximately thirty million bees. Commercial beekeeping smells of diesel and is caked mud on your boots. It is hard work in the hot sun. It is working for crotchety salty bosses as you slowly become one yourself. It is getting stung until getting stung is the normal condition of life. My predecessor in this job had to leave after he lost his eye and half his sanity. I'm told he's still seen around town on occasion, randomly, like a restless ghost.
My boss, the farm owner, reminds me of Steve Irwin -- he has the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm is entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables. Everything he says is peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies, of a sort that will leave you pondering for the rest of the day if it's anatomically possible and the epistemological implications. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. He has this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything goes wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work truck? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Truck gets stuck in the mud, oh look Trevor is just coming along.
January 2013
The rain is pounding on the pub's roof and cascading down in waterfalls in front of the large windows.
“Last run of the courtesy shuttle!” a staffmember announces, even though it's only mid afternoon. I hurry outside and climb into the van waiting under the covered pick up area.
“They think the road out of town is about to flood so I have to get out before then if I want to get home to Bundaberg” explains the driver. The van plows through water like a motorboat, and in front of my house I slide open the door and jump out into about two feet of water before climbing up my driveway. I assess I have another foot or two before it reaches my house.
For three days I can do nothing but watch the rain coming down diagonally in front of the windows, mop up the water coming under the door, and nervously check the water level in the street. Debris and branches flow down the street like a river.
I'm alone with only the radio news reports to connect me to society.
“Water is over the roof of the Bundaberg grocery store”
“17 helicopters working overnight evacuated 7000 from rooftops in Bundaberg”
And then the power goes out. Now I'm alone with the pounding rain and the rising water, no news.
I'm jarred awake in the night by an ear piercing alarm, I tumble out of my bedroom in the dark fearing the worst, only to find the smoke alarm has chosen this moment to run out of batteries.
I wake in the morning to sun streaming in the windows. Some neighbor kids are swimming in the street. Power is still out. I go walking around “town” to survey the damage. Moorepark was never much of a town at the best of times, two blocks of suburban houses wedged between the beach and a lagoon. Many residents are out walking because there's nothing else to do. Helicopters land and take off on the grassy central square. We're still completely surrounded by water. I grab the last three cans of stew amid the bare shelves of our small grocery store, and then collect coconuts on the beach.
Every evening I walk to the edge of town and watch the sun set in an orangish-red fireball into the vast inland sea where the surrounding cane fields and road to Bundaberg had been. For three days, under blue skies the waters around me continue to rise, as water continues to flow down from a vast inland catchment area. When the waters finally fall, it's all at once overnight like a plug being pulled. One morning at 6am to my utter surprise someone is pounding on my door. I jump out of bed to answer it, and there is Trevor, shoe-less as always, grinning at me.
“Mate, the water's receded, time to get back to work! I checked on some of the hives already and they seem alri--” and then his eye fixes on the smoke alarm hanging open “--mate, mate! Your smoke alarm ain't got no bloody battery in it! You can't have it hanging open like that! You know what's going to happen?” he pauses for just a moment as I stare at him blearily trying to catch up with what he is on about, “you know what? Your house is gonna catch fire and you're not going to realize because your alarm ain't working, and then the fire brigade is going to come, and you know what, they won't care a fig about you because you didn't have a working smoke alarm, and neither will I! You're going to die and they're just gonna go out and bury your body out back like a dead wallaby and that'll be that.”
I had been awake for thirty seconds. Last I knew I was on an island, and now it’s 6am and here is Trevor with some fascinating extemporaneous speculative fiction I am totally not prepared for yet.
A surreal scene awaits me in the formerly flooded lands. I drive past tin skiffs tied to telephone polls. An entire house sitting in an intersection. Dead fish laying around my beehives. By a miracle all the beehives survived.
Soon life is back to normal. Sixty hour weeks in the bee mines. In the evenings the sun slants sideways through the forests, bathing everything in a warm golden light. Sometimes the summer sun is already setting by the time I head home. When I'm running the honey extracting machinery in the corrugated metal extracting shed, it's an eighteen hour day -because it takes the machinery over an hour to heat up it's inefficient to do less-- so I emerge long after dark, into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, it might have looked the same a hundred years earlier.
At night the narrow muddy tracks amid the cane truly feel like a labyrinth. When I get home to my empty house, I make myself something quick to eat and walk out to the beach, where I sit in the sand under the stars, watching the lightning on the horizon as I eat. Sometimes I think I have it pretty good. Sometimes I feel I am serving a sentence of exile.
February 2013
I’ve been working hard, getting paid well, and being responsible for an entire 500 hive operation is fairly accomplished for a beekeeper, but I can’t help but wonder, is this what I want to be doing with my life? I had once dreamed of a career in the public sector benefitting society in a greater manner than simply producing honey for profit. Now I worked 72 hours a week the same thing day in and out stretching to eternity.
A job posting came to my attention, someone sent it to me. A “crop protection agent” ‘working for a national organization in the United States, attached to a university, inspecting beehives, liaising between commercial beekeepers and university labs to help improve bee health. Must be an experienced beekeeper, willing to travel. It sounds like my dream job. I apply.
The next morning I have a response, they think I sound very qualified. They’ll call next month to interview me. I spend the next month daydreaming about this upcoming job. I must get it, it would be too heartbreaking not to get.
March 2013
They’ll interview me by skype at 12 Eastern Standard Time, which I triple check to be sure it’s 4am my time. A panel of literally the half dozen biggest names in beekeeping in the United States!
I test my internet connection 12 hours earlier and it for some reason isn’t working at all. Finally it begins working with no particular reason why it didn’t. I hope it will be working at the time of the interview! I get up at 3am and make coffee and breakfast, put on a dress shirt and tie but retain the pajama bottoms. I didn’t know if it was going to be a video call or not, as it turns out it wasn’t.
It seems to go very well:
"normally we ask how people are with lots of travel but...",
"normally we ask if people think they can handle working in inclement conditions but...",
"normally we ask if people are sure they'll be able to handle the hard work involved in lifting beehives and working in an apiary but..."
And its over. I think it went well. They’ll interview the finalists in Chico California in May. No problem I’ve got a project in Nigeria (I am told the king of Sakiland is eager to meet me) and in Egypt in April; instead of returning to Australia I’ll just travel from there to California if invited. I thoughtfully sip my coffee as outside the darkness slowly lifts towards morning.
April 2013
I leave my keys and the remaining rent money on the kitchen table and head out barefoot down the beach on a journey to circumnavigate the world, from which I may or may not return. Not without boots of course but carrying them so I could feel the sand here for potentially the last time. Some coworkers from the farm who give me a ride to Bundaberg town joke “if I were you I wouldn’t return!” and I just smile, I’ve left everything in order in case I don’t but as far as my boss knows I plan to return.
###
Having now about 46,000 words written, which I think will be about a third of the total, I sent a link to what I have so far (in one consolidated google doc) to a publisher of beekeeping related books yesterday. This morning he had written me back asking for an outline, which I'm sending him so we'll see how it goes. I'm not sure what I might hope to get back from him at this point other than possibly encouragement.
Week 4 - November
The sun, quite impertinently, refuses to set over the ocean. This is contrary to what I had grown up accepting as the only proper solar behavior. In California it’s taken for granted the sun retires for the night beyond the briny deeps - but not here, here it hides its colorful daily finale behind the tangled branches of mangroves and eucalypts.
Not one to be out-witted by a giant ball of gas, I swim out beyond the waves, and watch the sun set from there. As I slowly backstroke through the warm water, the sky fades through ever darker blues. The silhouettes of large fruit bats flit about, before it fades entirely to black and a stunning array of sparkling stars in unfamiliar constellations. Finally I reluctantly leave the balmy water and walk the hundred yards to my empty house.
I try to outwit the sun by getting up early enough for sunrise, darting out to the beach in the grey pre-dawn light, the sand soft and cool around my bare feet, but, one step ahead, the wily bastard actually rises, slow and yellow like an egg-yoke, over a headland which curves out into the Coral Sea. The sun always wins here.
By 6:30 every day I'm headed to work, sweating, with the windows down, already too hot for hot coffee. The first and often only human interaction of my day would be at the bakery, where I stop for a meat pie for breakfast. “How are you?” I ask the proprietress.
“Thanks,” she says.
“How was your weekend?” I ask,
“Thanks” she says.
“Hear about the storm they say is coming?” I ask.
“Thanks” she says.
During the rest of my day I likely won't talk to anyone. I don't know what my phone's ringtone sounds like, no one has ever called me.
The beehives are mostly among the cane fields. Twenty-one trailers, just the skeletal frames of trailers really, each with a row of beehives on each side. They're parked in twos and threes, surrounded by solid walls of sugarcane like a hedge maze. It's rather like giant grass, like perhaps you've been shrunk to the size of a bee. Every few weeks they harvest the cane and burn the debris, so the fields become walls of flame, and then you're surrounded by open space again, until the cycle repeats. In some places the fields are bordered by impassably thick forest, in which insects make a constant loud buzz like high tension wires. There's a bird that makes a sound so much like someone whistling for my attention that I turn around every time. There's nothing there but a four foot goanna lizard giving me a wry look from the scrub as if to say, “As if there's anyone else here, mate.”
Twenty-four beehives per trailer. Five hundred hives altogether. Approximately thirty million bees. Commercial beekeeping smells of diesel and is caked mud on your boots. It is hard work in the hot sun. It is working for crotchety salty bosses as you slowly become one yourself. It is getting stung until getting stung is the normal condition of life. My predecessor in this job had to leave after he lost his eye and half his sanity. I'm told he's still seen around town on occasion, randomly, like a restless ghost.
My boss, the farm owner, reminds me of Steve Irwin -- he has the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm is entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables. Everything he says is peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies, of a sort that will leave you pondering for the rest of the day if it's anatomically possible and the epistemological implications. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. He has this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything goes wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work truck? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Truck gets stuck in the mud, oh look Trevor is just coming along.
January 2013
The rain is pounding on the pub's roof and cascading down in waterfalls in front of the large windows.
“Last run of the courtesy shuttle!” a staffmember announces, even though it's only mid afternoon. I hurry outside and climb into the van waiting under the covered pick up area.
“They think the road out of town is about to flood so I have to get out before then if I want to get home to Bundaberg” explains the driver. The van plows through water like a motorboat, and in front of my house I slide open the door and jump out into about two feet of water before climbing up my driveway. I assess I have another foot or two before it reaches my house.
For three days I can do nothing but watch the rain coming down diagonally in front of the windows, mop up the water coming under the door, and nervously check the water level in the street. Debris and branches flow down the street like a river.
I'm alone with only the radio news reports to connect me to society.
“Water is over the roof of the Bundaberg grocery store”
“17 helicopters working overnight evacuated 7000 from rooftops in Bundaberg”
And then the power goes out. Now I'm alone with the pounding rain and the rising water, no news.
I'm jarred awake in the night by an ear piercing alarm, I tumble out of my bedroom in the dark fearing the worst, only to find the smoke alarm has chosen this moment to run out of batteries.
I wake in the morning to sun streaming in the windows. Some neighbor kids are swimming in the street. Power is still out. I go walking around “town” to survey the damage. Moorepark was never much of a town at the best of times, two blocks of suburban houses wedged between the beach and a lagoon. Many residents are out walking because there's nothing else to do. Helicopters land and take off on the grassy central square. We're still completely surrounded by water. I grab the last three cans of stew amid the bare shelves of our small grocery store, and then collect coconuts on the beach.
Every evening I walk to the edge of town and watch the sun set in an orangish-red fireball into the vast inland sea where the surrounding cane fields and road to Bundaberg had been. For three days, under blue skies the waters around me continue to rise, as water continues to flow down from a vast inland catchment area. When the waters finally fall, it's all at once overnight like a plug being pulled. One morning at 6am to my utter surprise someone is pounding on my door. I jump out of bed to answer it, and there is Trevor, shoe-less as always, grinning at me.
“Mate, the water's receded, time to get back to work! I checked on some of the hives already and they seem alri--” and then his eye fixes on the smoke alarm hanging open “--mate, mate! Your smoke alarm ain't got no bloody battery in it! You can't have it hanging open like that! You know what's going to happen?” he pauses for just a moment as I stare at him blearily trying to catch up with what he is on about, “you know what? Your house is gonna catch fire and you're not going to realize because your alarm ain't working, and then the fire brigade is going to come, and you know what, they won't care a fig about you because you didn't have a working smoke alarm, and neither will I! You're going to die and they're just gonna go out and bury your body out back like a dead wallaby and that'll be that.”
I had been awake for thirty seconds. Last I knew I was on an island, and now it’s 6am and here is Trevor with some fascinating extemporaneous speculative fiction I am totally not prepared for yet.
A surreal scene awaits me in the formerly flooded lands. I drive past tin skiffs tied to telephone polls. An entire house sitting in an intersection. Dead fish laying around my beehives. By a miracle all the beehives survived.
Soon life is back to normal. Sixty hour weeks in the bee mines. In the evenings the sun slants sideways through the forests, bathing everything in a warm golden light. Sometimes the summer sun is already setting by the time I head home. When I'm running the honey extracting machinery in the corrugated metal extracting shed, it's an eighteen hour day -because it takes the machinery over an hour to heat up it's inefficient to do less-- so I emerge long after dark, into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, it might have looked the same a hundred years earlier.
At night the narrow muddy tracks amid the cane truly feel like a labyrinth. When I get home to my empty house, I make myself something quick to eat and walk out to the beach, where I sit in the sand under the stars, watching the lightning on the horizon as I eat. Sometimes I think I have it pretty good. Sometimes I feel I am serving a sentence of exile.
February 2013
I’ve been working hard, getting paid well, and being responsible for an entire 500 hive operation is fairly accomplished for a beekeeper, but I can’t help but wonder, is this what I want to be doing with my life? I had once dreamed of a career in the public sector benefitting society in a greater manner than simply producing honey for profit. Now I worked 72 hours a week the same thing day in and out stretching to eternity.
A job posting came to my attention, someone sent it to me. A “crop protection agent” ‘working for a national organization in the United States, attached to a university, inspecting beehives, liaising between commercial beekeepers and university labs to help improve bee health. Must be an experienced beekeeper, willing to travel. It sounds like my dream job. I apply.
The next morning I have a response, they think I sound very qualified. They’ll call next month to interview me. I spend the next month daydreaming about this upcoming job. I must get it, it would be too heartbreaking not to get.
March 2013
They’ll interview me by skype at 12 Eastern Standard Time, which I triple check to be sure it’s 4am my time. A panel of literally the half dozen biggest names in beekeeping in the United States!
I test my internet connection 12 hours earlier and it for some reason isn’t working at all. Finally it begins working with no particular reason why it didn’t. I hope it will be working at the time of the interview! I get up at 3am and make coffee and breakfast, put on a dress shirt and tie but retain the pajama bottoms. I didn’t know if it was going to be a video call or not, as it turns out it wasn’t.
It seems to go very well:
"normally we ask how people are with lots of travel but...",
"normally we ask if people think they can handle working in inclement conditions but...",
"normally we ask if people are sure they'll be able to handle the hard work involved in lifting beehives and working in an apiary but..."
And its over. I think it went well. They’ll interview the finalists in Chico California in May. No problem I’ve got a project in Nigeria (I am told the king of Sakiland is eager to meet me) and in Egypt in April; instead of returning to Australia I’ll just travel from there to California if invited. I thoughtfully sip my coffee as outside the darkness slowly lifts towards morning.
April 2013
I leave my keys and the remaining rent money on the kitchen table and head out barefoot down the beach on a journey to circumnavigate the world, from which I may or may not return. Not without boots of course but carrying them so I could feel the sand here for potentially the last time. Some coworkers from the farm who give me a ride to Bundaberg town joke “if I were you I wouldn’t return!” and I just smile, I’ve left everything in order in case I don’t but as far as my boss knows I plan to return.
###
Having now about 46,000 words written, which I think will be about a third of the total, I sent a link to what I have so far (in one consolidated google doc) to a publisher of beekeeping related books yesterday. This morning he had written me back asking for an outline, which I'm sending him so we'll see how it goes. I'm not sure what I might hope to get back from him at this point other than possibly encouragement.