Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I smile. “I suppose it was kind of the main thing to say about us.”
“What was in it?” Orly asks. “In the nature corridor?”
I don’t know where to start, so I begin with the trees that were already there, the snow gums of course, but also the mighty ashes, some of the tallest in the world, and the old-growth alpine ashes, the manna gums, the eucalypts. I talk about the long silvery grasses and heathlands that cover one hill, and I tell him about the wildflowers Hank and I planted from seed to cover the entire stretch of meadow. Yellow billy buttons and white or lilac snow daisies, purple native violets and alpine
Podolepis with their yellow petals and blood-red centers. Vibrant bottlebrush for the bees and the birds. The alpine mint bush we planted has the most incredible hairy flowers, with geometric designs of yellow and purple on their white petals. I tell Orly about the mosses and the tree ferns that bordered one side of the house, making a kind of rainforest that led down to the stream, where the platypus lived. A delicate silver-dollar eucalypt, my favorite of all, right outside my window where the rainbow lorikeets came in pairs to feast. And on and on. So many plants over the years. So many experiments. “The climate there’s a challenge,” I say. “Not as bad as here but still tricky when you’re thinking about what to plant.”
“Did things die?”
“Of course.”
“Wasn’t that upsetting?”
I think about it. “I mean, yeah, a bit. You get disappointed, for sure. But that’s the life of a gardener. And it’s the life of all plants, right? Of living things? Nothing lives forever.”
He frowns and walks on, contemplating that.
I stand beside my husband’s handwriting for a little longer.
Rhododendron campanulatum, he has scrawled on one of the boxes,
Himalayan region of Nepal. Nearby is
Calluna vulgaris (heather), from Scotland, and I wonder at how they are organized, as it doesn’t seem to be by region. I then wonder at the fate of these two plants. Have they been chosen for life or for death?
It comes over me like the mountain we stand beneath. Now that I am here among them, contemplating the scale of these seeds-there are
so many of them-I can feel the weight Hank must have been under, I can feel the burden Dom spoke of. How to let go of plants and trees and flowers and shrubs, how to let go of the most exquisite, the most unusual, how to let biodiversity die in favor of what humans can eat. Not only do I feel this weight, I see the future laid out before me. A vast stretch of crops and nothing else, nothing wild or natural, and even these neatly planted rows threatened on all sides by flame and flood. All of earth, a wasteland.
I turn and follow Orly because I don’t want that image in my mind any longer.
Father and son explain to me what we are doing with the seeds, how we are referring to the list Hank has left us (so long it is collated in a thick binder), collecting the species on this list and moving them into a new area, then packing them carefully into travel cases. They explain how to find my way around, that the seeds are categorized by taxonomic classification-by their scientific family rather than their location. The aisles have letters and the rows within the aisles have numbers, like in a library. As I understand it, the seeds are cleaned, dried, and frozen before being transported, and nobody here can open the sealed containers once deposited. They also explain that we need to work quickly, because the cold is not cooperative; we have a limited amount of time down here before we have to get ourselves somewhere warm.
We work in silence. A malaise has come over all three of us. At one point, feeling exhausted by the scale of this task, I ask Orly through chattering teeth, “How many seeds are in this vault?”
“Oh, I’m not sure how many
seeds there are, but there’s at least three million varieties.”
I feel sorry that they have to live in darkness, in this place of death, instead of bursting to life up above as they were meant to. I feel sorry for all the boxes we are leaving on the shelves.
Our time runs out and we head for the exit. On our way my eyes go to the nearest wall. There is a large patch where the ice has melted away, leaving the concrete exposed. That alone is cause for concern, but I can also see that the concrete is flaky. “You’re getting concrete cancer,” I tell Dom.
He follows my gaze. “Meaning?”
“Meaning moisture. Sooner or later that wall will come down.”
“We only have to worry about the next five weeks,” he says, dismissing it, but I don’t know if that wall’s got a month left in it.
There is wet snow falling when we emerge from the tunnel. We lift our hoods against the freezing needlepoints but even this weather is a relief from the cold of the vault.
“You said you’re not in construction anymore?” Dom asks me as we walk. Orly is at the waterline with a huddle of king penguins-he is crouched among them, almost the same height as they are-so for the moment we are alone. “What do you do now?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrug. “I took jobs here and there, but mostly I just?… worked on my house.”
“The house that burned down.”
I swallow and look at him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, and I am surprised to hear betrayal in his voice.
My immediate reaction is to reply that I don’t have to tell him anything, but I know how much genuine pleasure he took from hearing about my house, and to be honest I took a lot from describing it to him.
So I try to find better words. “I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. For an afternoon.”
He scratches his stubbly beard. There is a long silence as he thinks about that. “So now what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Build another house?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point?”
Dom frowns. “So you have somewhere to live?”
I don’t reply. He hasn’t understood.
But then he says, “Look, you just have to keep going. That’s all. There’s nothing else.”
“I spent decades working for that house,” I say. “Now I just want to rest.”