The girl has dark hair that curls into her face and eyes. She wears a heavy layer of makeup that will make her cringe later in life when she looks back at photos of this time. She is about 15-years-old and wears tight black jeans. She comes to the counter and plops herself limply on the stool behind, gravity threatening to claim an arm or leg and drag her to the floor. She has been crying and looks at me expectantly but does not say a word.
I tell her I’m there to drop off unaddressed mail to go to every private residence in this tiny town way out in an area you’d never stop unless you needed to pee. But she doesn’t know how to do unaddressed mail. I ask if anyone else does. She tells me no. I ask if she knows when someone might return that does. She then talks to me like I’m a local – like I haven’t just driven for 2.5 hours to get here and like I know all the background to a story that goes like this: Mum is in hospital again. We don’t know when she’ll get out.
Okay. So I withdraw the box from the counter, not really sure of a Plan B to post flyers to households notifying them of our upcoming workshops. This is my first stop. I’ve got seven more post office stops today and will end up with 27 in total by the beginning of May. This doesn’t bode well.
I rack up 1810 kilometres over 3 days travelling throughout my work region to drop off flyers advertising our first 12 workshops in February. My region, the Riverina Murray, has about 153,000 people scattered about 80,000 square kms (about the size of Indiana or Maine). And our office is based on the very edge – so it can be a 3.5 to 4 hour drive to get to some of the towns way out west and northwest. It is one of Australia’s food bowls developed through irrigation schemes begun in the 1950s. But really, there is not much else out there. It’s flat, flat, flat. And hot. And boring. And riddled with flies.
At another post office, which I duck into amongst a storm with impressive lightning and sideways rain, the young chick up the front doesn’t know how to help me. I explain to her that we are doing community workshops to help people create household emergency plans and will be doing a workshop in this teeny town –that is set off a big, main highway. I tell her I want to send flyers to each address via unaddressed mail. She is still unsure about what to do and says the owner is out the back but not feeling well.
This woman, whom we shall just call the Wicked Witch of the West, eventually comes out to see what the fuss is about. She has long dark witch-like hair, a long nose to match, and is outright rude. We go through my needs, costs, what I’m expecting, etc, but it’s done in an extremely harsh tone and in a way to make me feel like I’ve imposed on them rather than me paying for a public service. She doesn’t weigh the items, or ask how many, she just says, “it’ll be $10”. (That’s actually a bargain).
Finally, she says, “so is it for something worthwhile anyway?” It is cruelly ironic that when she unfolds one to see what it is that she realises it is actually something very beneficial to the community. I’m not out there hawking carpet cleaning or something. It is even more ironic because the reason she is feeling unwell can be a major medical emergency – thunderstorm asthma attack.
The next post office 45 minutes away has no lights on, but the doors are open. The storm has knocked out the power. I’m a long way from home and it would be costly in travel and time to return here to try again. The woman shines a torch in my face and is friendly. I ask if I can leave the flyers as unaddressed mail and ring later with credit card details to pay once the power has returned.
But the woman is nonchalant about it all – explaining to me in the pitch black that this happens all the time. She hands me her business card – it has their bank details on it. She says, “no worries to take care of these for you. The total is $53.55, just transfer the money and it’s fine.” So I go outside and use the bank app on my phone to transfer money to pay. The power is out, but the mobile phone service is not. If any town has households that could do with a plan and an emergency kit for unplanned power outages, add this one to the list.
So every post office I’ve visited has a story. And every workshop has a thousand details to set up – venue hire, catering, invite lists, social media posts, flyers, media releases, liaison with all the emergency services, the local council, our workshop facilitator etc. And some of those details have funny stories of their own, too. I’m a Project Manager, not an Event Planner, so it is not enjoyable, but it’s what the project needs done. So I’m doing it.
There is no personal adventure at the moment, and I’m putting in way more hours than I’m paid for, but I figure I’m just volunteering through my job instead of separately in the community. It’s for a good cause, and I do get paid well for 35 full-time hours each week. And at least I do get to be on the road for a bit, even if it’s not the bike. I am getting to see a lot of places I never have any desire to tour on two wheels!
Other adventures over the past few months included the hunt for a new used car after I nailed a kangaroo on my way to work. It doesn’t look so bad, but the insurance company wrote it off and I got back such a piddly amount of what I’d insured it for that it makes you wonder why you insured it at all. It doesn’t seem right that they take the value of the registration out of the pay-out. I think of that as a separate payment to the car value!
I also moved back into Albury so that I could be active again. I had been housesitting for a friend and doing lots of yard work for a place with many linear metres of hedges and a gazillion ornamental roses among a million potted plants that needed watering way more than I wanted to commit to. I hated using a full day of my weekend every weekend to keep everything looking nice and tidy. I never ever want to weed a gravel driveway again! I am so very much not cut out for domesticity.
The worst part of it all, however, was that I had a 35 minute drive to work each way each day. I was always driving at dusk and dawn. After the kangaroo I struck, I had to take evasive action to avoid other ones more than eight times over the next two months. Plus, I was driving into sun glare each way. Add in a 10-hour work day (I worked full time hours over four days until December), another couple hours doing coursework using the work computer (I just completed that Accounting course – it was free and I figured it was something useful to know), and that 1 hour and 10 minute time in the car… and those were very long, very sedentary, crappy days.
So now that I’m in town, I use the time I used to be driving to work to go to the gym or go for a walk or go for a ride before work. I walk to work everyday. I ride my bike the 18 km return trip to get fruit and veg at the market. I easily get in 8 kays of walking each day, even on days when it’s not my focus. Much, much better.
I’ve also started ride planning. The next ride picks up the stuff we didn’t get to in the VIC high country on the last ride. And I’m also going to hit up Tassie. I’m getting pretty excited about somewhere I’ve not yet really explored. I first got a bunch of books from the library, then ordered a bunch of high level planning maps and the digital 1:25,000 topos. I also ordered a book on the Tarkine.
My high level plan is to do bits of the Tassie Trail, the Tassie Gift and Tassie Giro routes, plus add in stuff I route out myself that I’m interested in visiting. I plan to totally skip the east coast. Where possible this ride will be a continuation of the steep 4WD tracks like I did in VIC last year. This is the type of riding I love most, and I’ve got to do it now before I get old and boring and have to convince myself that riding down in the valleys around the mountains is just as satisfying and fun as riding up and over them.
I’m also trying to talk myself out of rafting the Franklin River – something that’s been on my to-do list for a long time, not just for the remote and pristine beauty but also the environmental and historical significance. It would be a bit of a pilgrimage, but it also costs $4000 for 8 days!!!
I don’t know when I get to take off on this tour. It depends on whether we secure funding for another year of work. We got past the first round of applications, but there are two more rounds, and for various reasons, I do not think we have much of a chance. The good thing is that I don’t care either way. I’ve already surpassed my savings and investments threshold I had said I must meet before I took off on the bike again, so I’m ready to head out again. However, if the funding did come through in September, the salary is too good to pass up. So either way… I’m happy.
I’ve also booked my flights to America. After not seeing a fare below $2500 for the past nine months, SkyScanner dropped a gift in my lap last week. If I flew on very specific days, I could fly for $1250 return. I snapped that up and will have about 4 weeks in America from late July.
I hope to spend seven days of that doing a solo backpacking trip in the La Garita Wilderness. I also am hoping to do an overnight backpacking trip with my uni friend and her daughter. It’s 30 years this August that my friend and I met as first-year roommates at CSU. Then there’s plenty of family time. The guys are ready for Arkansas River floatie sessions and skate park sessions with my dad in race skates he’s building for them.
Now if you don’t hear from me again for awhile, you’ll know it is because I am neck deep in a flood of project components:
27 community workshops,
transport vulnerability mapping with natural hazard layers on GIS,
Needs Analyses,
Heatwave Action Plans,
Trigger Documents (detailing triggers and actions to take at local government level for fire, flood and storm for each emergency management phase)
and local government workshops that help them embed all of the aforementioned information into their strategic planning and reporting documents!
It’s a lot to do before 30 June, but man oh man, it will be so sweet to wake up on 1 July and the contract has finished!