I also missed Yasi, the Category 5 Monster Super Ridiculous Continent-Sized cyclone which mowed down Innisfail again.
But I WAS there for an unnamed storm during which I entered into a notorious cluster fuck.
This storm didn’t even rate as a genuine cyclone by the numbers. It was within a few millibar or windspeed mph or whatever meteorological criteria you use to classify a cyclone, but it hadn’t quite crossed the threshold. That didn’t stop it from chucking a tree onto our shed and turning Barron Falls, which is normally this:
into this:
This same river cut off whole towns for days. Most of greater Cairns was flooded, albeit less seriously than the Great Queensland Underwater Event of 2010 (click here to donate). I’d seen some distant wisps of hurricanes and watched them go muscling around the Gulf of Mexico when I worked in Florida, but this was the first time I’d ever been in the middle of anything like this. However, I am from New England, so I took the attitude that as long as I wasn’t dying of hypothermia, everything would be A-okay. And how could you die of hypothermia in tropical Queensland? This was going to be a total walk in the park. Cyclone, schmyclone. Bring it.
Unless things get so serious that you actually need to run for your life, Queenslanders seem to react to natural disasters—or actually, any event, disastrous or otherwise—in one way: they lay in a stash of booze and barbecue materials.
 |
| How to arrange your emergency management kit |
Being vegetarian, I was mostly exempted from the latter, but on the day this storm was moving in I was told repeatedly and sternly not to come home from class without copious alcohol.
First I went for a drive to gawk at the overflowing rivers. If you’ve never seen a coastal area in monsoon rain, it’s amazing. The whole place goes underwater on either side of the elevated roads until you appear to be driving across an enormous lake with a wet highway in the middle. Periodically the asphalt in the road subsides under you as the ground becomes so soaked it just flows away. Streams turn chocolate brown and rush by the bridges at roughly a million miles an hour, then eventually overflow the bridge altogether. People crossing them in SUVs often run over fish.
If this is the biggest drama you see, monsoon storms are kind of pleasant—you get a good violent show of nature while everything manmade stops and waits peacefully for the waters to subside. It’s a nice reality check to be at the tender mercy of the environment, especially when you’ve been living in People World and your biggest concerns are powered by petrol or electricity and computers rule your life. I stood at a bridge, getting soaked by bucketing rain, contemplating this for awhile. Then, having had my blissy hippie the-earth-is-all-connected moment out staring at a bunch of water, I went to the liquor shop and picked up a bottle of wine and a couple of Archer’s Peach. (Naturally, when I went home I was told that this was woefully inadequate by Australian standards.)
I found my housemates Sam and Cathy sitting on the back porch smoking and drinking and laughing, where I joined them with my Archer’s. We had a good laugh comparing storm stories and watching the dogs run around and get soaked (at this point we still had two Jack Russells!) while I slowly drank my two Archer’s, congratulating myself on my restraint and feeling smug that my meager alcohol ration would TOTALLY last out this storm—up yours, Aussie lushes! Then Sam pulled out my wine and looked at me questioningly.
Okay, I thought, just one.
This was my downfall, as it has been for so many before me. Sam filled my glass just as the Corrs came on the stereo, complete with fiddle fills. Sam and Cathy got up to dance, and I, being happily tipsy and a total prick about the fiddle, yelled something like “I CAN PLAY THESE TUNES!”
Sam looked at me challengingly and said, “Well, why DON’T you then!” So I whipped out my violin and started playing along, at which point Sam refilled what I’d drunk out of my glass when I wasn’t looking. If her goal that night was to make me steaming drunk, this strategy succeeded excellently. I would take a few sips and put the glass down, then play another jig or reel while Cathy jumped around like a maniac. Meanwhile, Sam would sneakily put in what I’d just taken out. With my usual powers of genius and observation, I did not notice this.
 |
| Fiddling while Rome pours |
Then the boys next door came over. They were three single guys living there with us three single girls at our place, so this was clearly, in their minds, THE BIG NIGHT. At that point, Sam finished pouring my wine bottle and went to welcome the guys, and I put my fiddle down to chat, continuing to sip from my glass and congratulating myself on my slow pace of alcohol rationing. Then I looked over at the bottle.
Empty.
I have never been able to hold my liquor. Never ever. At that time, I was probably at my worst, since I was running and swimming twice a day, plus I was only 21 and extremely square. I looked in horror at the empty bottle, knowing that I wasn’t drunk yet but ALL OF THAT was inside me waiting to be metabolized into blood-alcohol ridiculousness—and yet there was nothing I could do about it.
Sam, Cathy, and the boys, meanwhile, had decided it would be a good idea to take a taxi into town before the bridges washed out. Based on my wine backlog, I was hesitant—which led to Sam marching me into the bathroom and telling me to shower and get the hell ready.
By the time I got out of the shower I was deteriorating fast. I’m pretty sure Cathy dressed me, but I have very little memory of clothing that night other than that I wound up wearing her trousers, which had no pockets--somehow making me think that not carrying a wallet or phone would be a better idea than changing. Outside, everyone else was waiting for the taxi. I was laughing my head off and falling over just as much as you expect a 21-year-old completely pissed girl to do. Eventually it entered the ever-darkening fog of my brain that—shit—no phone? no money? no ID? not even house keys? I told this to Sam with a plaintive little look, which led to her walking me back to the house and putting me inside. Sadly, she did not collar and chain me in the yard, which may have been a better approach.
As their taxi pulled away, I realized it was nearly 9 p.m. and I was absolutely rat-arsed and hadn’t had anything to eat yet—maybe food would save me from the roaring hangover I knew would arrive along with the cyclone. Sam had made an enormous pot of stew earlier in the afternoon. God knows why, since it was about a million degrees outside, but she must have had an urge. So I scooped it into a bowl and stuck the bowl in the microwave. When I took it out, the bowl had reached roughly the temperature of molten iron, which my drunk hands did not register until I was halfway across the room.
What do you do in this situation? You drop the bowl. And the bowl shatters into ceramic shards, and the stew goes everywhere.
Now, any normal person in this scenario would have cursed, mopped up the stew, and swept up the broken pieces. Not me. At this point my inner thrifty Yankee came bursting out in all her drunken glory.
Obviously a bowlful of homemade stew is irreplaceable, especially when you have a whole cauldron of it to hand. Inner Yankee enthusiastically began gathering up the ceramic shards to throw in the trash, leaving the stew in its piles on the floor. Then, being ever so careful to conserve as much stew as possible, I scooped it into a mug to eat it.
(Do bear in mind that this was the same floor I had repeatedly cleaned of dog shit. My only defense is the alcohol.)
I flopped down happily onto the sofa, congratulating myself on my food conservation strategy, when I realized my hands were wet.
Why? Because I’d slashed them to shreds picking up ceramic shards. I’d managed to clean up the floor and then thoroughly mess it up again by bleeding all over the place. So I went through the motions again of finding a sponge and the disinfectant, and cleaned up the floor, and then realized that in doing so, I’d just bled more. At this point, in the absence of smarter ideas like band-aids, I took a roll of toilet paper and wrapped it around my hands.
But this still didn't deter me from eating the damn stew. This also went badly. I didn’t understand for a long time why there were hard crunchy bits throughout the stew. Isn’t stew supposed to be sort of gooey? Like squishy comfort food? I was a little bit concerned, but not enough to stop eating. As I neared the bottom of the mug, I discovered the cause.
There were dozens of little ceramic shards in my stew. And I had happily eaten bite upon bite of them.
I remember thinking to myself, that’s hilarious! I ate a bowl! Not a bowl of stew—THE ACTUAL BOWL! And then I passed out facedown on my bed.
Around 1 a.m. I woke up, feeling far less drunk but still fairly confused and tipsy. I could hear someone outside the door. Normally, when I hear strange noises at night, I get freaked out. I don’t recall being frightened this time. I remember being kind of excited, like oh yay, someone’s going to come play with me! (I wonder if I were channeling those damn Jack Russells.) So I frisked over to the front door, knocking over someone’s glass of red wine onto my (fortunately purple) shirt, threw open the door and yelled, “CATHY! IS THAT YOU?” In reply, I heard a “Shhhh!” So I stopped yelling and instead turned on all the lights, opened the door, and stuck my head out, and said, “Hi!” as Cathy and one of the boys next door nuzzled each other against the wall. Classy.
Fortunately, the next day most of this was forgiven. The storm had passed, Cathy still got to have her good times with the guy, despite my enthusiastic interjection, and except for having to clear up myriad fallen trees in the yard, all was well.. Cathy found humour in the mess of broken bowls and wine glasses and strewn toilet paper and specks of stew I’d left in my wake, which by that time looked like we'd had our own private cyclone indoors. I suppose I’m lucky we didn't have any fine art to ruin. Sam missed most of the saga, having picked up a guy in town and spent the night there. So of the three of us, my night was by far the most useless.
It was the next day that when I explained this to my friend Vanessa that I received the best summation possible: “You mean you could have gotten laid but instead you got drunk and ate ceramics?”
