Seeing the Mountain

Once there were 13,000 inhabitants on the island of Montserrat.  Once there was a small capital called Plymouth, with 4,000 residents…

Wake up.  The alarm clock is ringing.  The Earth is calling.  The sun has risen over the waves of the sea to say that the time of unconsciousness is ended.  It is morning.  Dreams are to take rest and memory processing to cease, even on the idyllic shores of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, a British territory smaller than Bhola. 

People are opening their stores in the main street of Plymouth.  Mothers are walking their children to the school gate and a fisherman by the seaside has already cast his line.  At the dock a yacht is pulling in; at the meagre airport a plane is anticipated; and someone is writing a letter in ink, with a pen.  All the usual things must’ve been, in the days before they looked up to see their mountain again.

 

Imagine.  The circle of the sun, the gravity to hold them, the energy of food and the physics of human movement: the many life-defining forces that bring predictability and comfort.  The routines of sea breeze and season; the ebb and flow in the tides; the phases of the moon; and the greeting of friend and neighbour: all the natural systems to promote a laid back sense of continuum.  There must’ve been that usual perception of lives languidly evolving, in small steps barely discernable, like the leeward waves spreading out on the sand. 

It’s an easy matter that the Montserratians didn’t see their mountain, because a mountain that sits nearby all the time will with certainty fade into invisibility.

All the years of growth and change, from childhood to old age, the whole of a human lifetime: for the ocean and the land it’s just the blink of an eye.  The Earth has its own cycles and ambitions that last ages and eons rather than months and years.  On 18 July 1995 it was time for the mountain they call Soufrière Hills to wake up. 

There were signs.  For three years there had been stirring, seismic yawning to indicate the final stages of a slumber that had endured since prehistory.  But you know how minor tremors are: they reverberate through the ground and on into human gossip, what one was doing at the time and a whole series of ‘what ifs’, only to disperse from consciousness once more as the forces, the going to work, the fishing and the writing of a letter with a pen reclaim their centrality. 

They knew it was a volcano.  But with the thick of the forest covering the slopes it must’ve seemed a rather friendly one.  Yet when a mountain chooses to move, finally, there are none that can deny it. So it was when Soufrière Hills erupted.

Plymouth wasn’t directly affected at first, but a month later, on 15 August 1995, their mountain brought fifteen minutes of darkness to the day, as a large ash cloud descended on the town.  Plymouth had to be abandoned in the following year.

Wake up.  The volcano is waiting.  It’s 2006, the day we’re going to Montserrat.  The little plane with propellers will take us, there and back across the short stretch of Caribbean from Antigua to the new airport in Montserrat.  We’ll see what they call the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean: the forested north, the planned but soulless settlements where one-third of the evacuees from the island’s south now live.  We’ll drive to vantage points to collect our thoughts in view of the exclusion zone, the half of the island given in to rubble and mud.  We’ll see their Soufrière Hills spewing forth boulders that tumble down the hillside leaving tails of dust.  From the distance those rocks look as pebbles, so easily are they tossed.  We’ll see the great brew of their cloud and smoke that as far as Antigua changes the colour of sunsets.  It’s the ash and cinders the vulcanologists call tephra, the airborne fragments called pyroclasms.  We’ll hear their mountain: a continuous, distant rumbling is the voice of the Earth. 

The old airport, it’s down there, only a minor patch of tarmac left.  That’s the end of the runway with white lines still painted on it.  See it!  The control tower looks as an archaeological relic protruding from the mud. 

On the leeward side we’ll go as far as we can towards abandoned Plymouth, where pyroclastic flows reached the town and the port in 1997.  We’ll see the tree trunks, bare and lifeless as sculptures to destruction, upon the lower hillside; and we’ll see homes snapped like twigs with the force of the volcanic earthflows.  There!  To the distance is Plymouth, like a long forgotten shelf in an attic, covered in dust and memories.  It’s as they left it, so the locals say.  There are family photos hanging on walls; there’s a pen on a desk with a half written letter covered in dust.  Their mountain made a museum of exhibits but no visitors.

On a red tile at a safe distance we will leave our handprints in the dust that covers everything, there too, as we hear how the Montserratians occasionally need face masks when the wind blows northward, when the volcanic storms that fertilise the surrounding islands of the West Indies and far across the Caribbean, keep busy their brooms.

We will stop in the green north again to drink from a small spring on the hillside.  There’s a sign that reads: ‘If you drink from this burn, you will surely return.’  But for the two-thirds of Montserratians who left for surrounding islands and Britain, it’s a promise that’s unfulfilled.  Perhaps the return at the burn follows a longer cycle.

In the evening from Antigua, as we eat dinner, we will see the stripes of fire on their Soufrière Hills horizon, bringing light to the night as sure as their mountain once endowed darkness upon the day.

Wake up. It’s 2013.  It’s the other side of the world, in Dhaka, in Bangladesh.  The time for unconsciousness and memory processing are done.  There’s to be action, a stirring of a different sort.  Perhaps it will leave things altered, but not like in Montserrat; rather in a positive, healing way.  Maybe it was always there, you know, the mountain we didn’t see.

The alarm clock is ringing.  The Earth is calling.

From Montserrat. South lies Trinidad where the birds mimic the sun.  Southeast lies sweet, sweet Barbados where the waves speak of liberty.  Southwest, a little far, the Earth offers a blessing.  While on a distant continent, south, very south, extinct volcanoes spell adventure.

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Seeing the Mountain

A Beginning and An End

It’s too easy to conclude that lifelines are of concrete: fluid and flexible to begin but at a later time hardened.  People get set in their ways as they age, it is said, and opinions, it follows, eventually date rather than develop.  It’s not so straightforward.  It can as easily be that a beginning comes within a nonagenarian end.

Azaleas were for the springtime, the air sweet with the pungency of gardenias.  Impatiens kept the colour through the year.  In Grandma’s garden, phlox and hollyhocks, snapdragons and dracaena coaxed from cuttings kept the days filled.  It was annual and perennial.  It was growth.

The side gate was wooden and immaculately grey, and upon stepping into the garden she’d greet me with a ‘G’day mate.’ The greeting stood out as an older Australian tradition, historical at the least in Sydney’s suburbia. 

She’d likely spent hours in sun-hatted toil, trowel turning, digging, weed removing and thinking; for her efforts there was talk, not only of the plants but of the blue wrens for which the bird bath had been bought.  It was the result of hours on a mat on her knees. 

We’d wander inside and the reddish linoleum-topped table was set with deliberation, the tablecloth positioned diagonally and the homemade biscuits and sour tasting sandwiches of pickled onions, mustard or relish at home on the particular decorative dish she’d chosen. There’d be a plump, patterned glass on its coaster for soft drink.  Tables aren’t set so precisely anymore, not for morning tea.

Always neatly dressed, Grandma kept her hair short, curled into a perm with hot rollers; and after the food she’d bring in the teapot to rest upon the wooden teapot board.  The pot would be dressed in a hand knitted cosy to keep the tea warm.  Such detail! Perhaps I only wish to show that there was much about her to seem old-fashioned.

And there was contrast, for hers were not the only morning teas in those busy years that bookmarked the millennium.  In the government department where I worked there was, scheduled once a week, a morning tea for team-building.  There was a cake roster but we’d each arrange our own cup of coffee.  Naturally, those morning teas were hastier and marked by slightly forced chat that overshadowed the stress of deadlines.  The bosses rarely attended.  They were busy. 

Meanwhile, Grandma used to have a doctor, a hairdresser, several others visiting her home.  She’d mark up their scheduled comings in her diary.  That’s how many westerners like to imagine their old age, staying independently.  I know she enjoyed those visits because they brought company in the daytime hours.  But on the day I arrived while the doctor was visiting, I was surprised to see Grandma embarrassed. 

Once the doctor left she said, ‘she’s a good doctor but she always talks badly about the Greeks and Italians.  But they do alright here, don’t they?’  The doctor thought they used too much concrete and tiling in their Mediterranean gardens, Grandma explained, but she didn’t mind their style.

I never heard her speak badly of any nationality, but we never spoke of such things.  She seemed somehow distinct from society.  Nonetheless, on that day I thought perhaps she was at the start of something.

What was more surprising happened at the time she was admitted to hospital for a minor procedure, just for a few days.  She found herself in a ward in a suburb of Sydney that is predominantly Turkish.  The ward she shared with a talkative, middle aged Greek-Australian woman, and in the bed opposite, a woman of Somali origin. 

Grandma thought to make mention of how the Greek lady kept her company.  She’d sampled homemade Greek food and liked it.  And she lent towards me to whisper, ‘but that other lady, she is so dark that sometimes when I see her face after waking up I forget where I am and I get scared.  She tried to talk to me.  I don’t understand a word.’ She was being totally honest.

‘But I suppose she’s alright,’ Grandma said, ‘We are who we are, aren’t we?’

It’d never occurred to me how much Australian society had changed since she was born.  In the span of her ninety plus years, change wasn’t only a matter of electricity, cars, vacuum cleaners and microwaves.  There’d been the migration waves too: amongst them the Italians and Greeks from the 1950s and Africans since the 1990s.  When Grandma was born, assuming it was in a hospital, it’s probable that all of her baby-contemporaries shared her fair complexion.  It was a largely British-Australian society into which she was born.

As I said goodbye in the hospital, I leant in to kiss her and at the same time shook her hand; and after that, instinctively and accidentally, put my hand to my heart.  I was embarrassed by the small gesture she hadn’t noticed, because it’s not an Australian custom but a welcome habit from the Bangladeshi village. 

Meanwhile at the office there was contrast.  It was strange the day one of the bosses not only found time to attend morning tea but embarked upon a small speech about how it was that Muslims would never fit into Australian society.  ‘They think differently,’ she said to her team.  It was her main point.  As it was known I had friends in Bangladesh, the little speech may have been for my benefit.  Or it was simply a personal view that needed airing.  Either way, I think differently too.

I’d not bother to mention it but it wasn’t the only time I heard senior public sector managers talk like that.  Such displays in Australia are, in practice, in reality, accepted.  A bit of racism might even be considered a good way to get ahead.  It’s mistaken for national loyalty by some. 

In a broader sense there would appear to remain some confusion between racism and leadership in Australia.  Sadly, ironically, the department I write of has responsibility for anti-discrimination legislation.  It was disturbing that even there Muslims could be on the outer.

Grandma meanwhile had a spontaneous side.  The woman who would never forget a birthday, having presents wrapped and tied with ribbon sometimes months in advance, was also the one who thought to crawl under her dining table to hide from her great grandson.  He had to find her.  Her mind stayed sharp and her bone joints were not unwilling to bend.

The last year of my father’s mother was 2001.  Her grandchildren had grown and Sydney had become a post-modern, multicultural society.  It was the year of the terrorist attacks on New York’s twin towers, her last.

Some people adapt.  Others don’t.  And it’s interesting because just as Grandma’s tolerance of others seemed to be on its rise, so it quickly faded, as if there was no place left for it.  And there was loss.

But at a time when tolerance in Australian society was in steep and rapid decline maybe there really wasn’t any place for it.

At age 93.

One could say it’s still the nation’s foremost security risk, the type of ‘us and them’ exclusion that prevents any society from flourishing and creates all the other security consequences.  It remains well-protected, the ‘us and them,’ because down under the ‘us and them’ retains many important advocates.  Some degree of extremism is not a problem as long as it’s of the white kind.

Some people adapt.  Others don’t.  I wonder if Australian public processes will ever catch up to Grandma. 

It can be that she waited, several months later when she again went into hospital.  Her hair was long, straight and tumbled down over her shoulders when I saw her last.  I never knew she had hair like that.  If it had been of a colour other than white she might’ve looked as a teenager. 

Of course it's all about learning to think, appreciating different ways of thinking and, well, adding a little heart. 


This article also published in Star Magazine, here: A Beginning and An End