When I was a baby, my parents planted a garden that became a forest. All through my childhood they toiled in this endeavour. Watering, mulching – tending plants like they tended us.
My father was a man of action. My mother had to be careful what dreams she spoke aloud, as by afternoon he would have brought them into actuality; before she shared an idea, she learned to be sure. Living in close proximity to this kind of impetus made the world seem governable. My father – the creator – shaping our habitat. You would like a pond? Dig here!
We lost him, in my late teens, and there began our surrender to the trees. Thirty years on, the garden – the forest – is self-sustaining. If we interfere at all, it is only to cut things back – to protect the house, to ward off complete engulfment. This involves ongoing labour, and my mother and I work hard, but without my father’s input, sections of our homeplace have become impossible to manage.
In amongst the trees are several different stands of clumping bamboo. One of these, planted on a low plateau on the furthest reaches of our property, is “giant”.
Even giant bamboo starts out small, and when my parents planted it, it was impossible to tell just how mammoth it would become. For years after my father’s death, we were warned by passing menfolk that this bamboo was likely to get out of hand, but in its prime it was majestic – at least twenty metres tall and almost twenty metres wide. Rich dark-green stalks, bursting with vitality, reaching for the sky.
We were protective of its beauty, and could not envisage the chaotic mess it would become.
Fast forward through multiple catastrophic floods, a drought, and – last year – a cyclone, and that corner of our land was in ruins. Most of the towering stalks had snapped, dead and bent double but still suspended in the air. The ground around the clump was littered with fallen bamboo, too heavy for us to lift. In among this chaos were other capsized trees, taken out by the cyclone, inaccessible through all the criss-crossing collapsed stalks.
The whole area had become, like a hoarder’s house, impenetrable terrain.
During those crisis-heavy years, we’d asked several different tree-loppers and machinery operators to give us a quote to remove the disastrous clump, but no-one wanted the job. How long would it take? Who could say. How much would it cost? Impossible to tell. What could we even do with the voluminous debris?
Last winter, we heard tell of a local man with a big machine, and he came to have a look. When he arrived, we realised he’d come years before and declined the job because his machine wasn’t big enough, but now he had a bigger one. He took in the wild disarray, our insurmountable problem, and said: “Yeah, I can do that.”
This man was quiet, borderline shy. I sensed he was not a shit-talker. He believed the job could be done. He was willing to do it. This was an unexpected turn. I tried to contain my jubilance.
I’d thought it would be messy work, but he arrived with his excavator and began to pluck each stalk from the ground, roots and all. It was delicate, like unpicking a hem. I was mesmerised by the precision. The giant stalks began to pile up – the plan was to burn them. This man was in the RFS, and knew about fires. It was a rainy midwinter; there could be no safer season.
It took days, but finally the man tugged out the last stalks, the root ball completely gone. The shock of the sky above – so vast – made me strangely ecstatic. Our bamboo had been twenty metres across at its base, but its canopy had ballooned to double or triple that size. For years now, it had taken up the whole sky.
A week later, the man came back and lit the fire. He started small, and – with the excavator – fed the giant stacks of bamboo to the flames in lots, the arm of the machine now a fire-stoker. In a few days, what had been a paddock of plucked bamboo mountains was ash.
It was an insurmountable problem, until suddenly it was not. How could something so big be reduced to something so small? I thought of my father – how much he would have enjoyed the transformation. How much he would have enjoyed the fire and the sky.
Sometimes things get away from us. We completely lose control. Paralysis sets in, no solution in sight. The problem gets so big, there’s no possibility of light. But the sky is always there, even if we can’t see it. All that is needed is the right kind of helper with the right kind of tools. Even our most impassible mountains can become tiny specks of ash.
Jessie Cole is the author of four books, most recently the memoirs Staying and Desire, A Reckoning. More about her here
