The five second time machine
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I was walking along the Warburton Trail the other day and I passed through a grove of pine trees. There was a breeze and the pine needles soughed in the wind.
For an instant, I was ten years old again at my grandparent's house and I could glance around in 1967.
I tried to grab at the memory...
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It's a blustery, overcast day. My brother and I are in the top paddock and there's a windbreak of pine trees rustling in the wind.
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... and then it was gone.
It triggered a cascade of memories from the old farmhouse in Glen Waverley that my grandparents rented.
It was in the middle of ten acres of paddocks surrounded by orchards and their long driveway came off Crow's Lane. The lane is still there according to Google Maps, but it's now just a name on a suburban street. In 1967 it was paved with bricks and lined with blackberries. It also led to the residence of "Mr Crow The Farmer" who ran, and probably owned, the orchards. My grandmother had a forelock-tugging respect for him. She told us he was not to be crossed, but we roamed the orchards anyway.
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The top paddock ends in a large pit that's been used for random trash for decades; rusting corrugated iron, rusted bed springs, random building materials and other junk. A gold mine for kids.
But that's nothing compared to the awe inspiring sight when we crawl through the barbed wire fence. Peering over the peak of the hill we look down into a vast pit that is, surely, a mile deep. The steep, vertical sides disappear into green water and we stare into the silent vastness with a faint sense of vertigo.
Our parents told us there is "a giant held down by an enormous stone who will jump out if you get near".
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We actually took that story seriously, despite its obvious contradictions. I guess that's how legends start.
Eventually the quarry was turned into a landfill tip...
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I'm with my dad and my grandfather. We're scrounging the tip to find wondrous things. We turn up dozens of boxes of pale blue childrens sippy cups. Completely useless, but we grab a box to take home anyway.
There's half a room from a weather-board house eerily tipped at an angle. The picture hooks on the walls, the wallpaper, and the scraps of carpet on the floor are a melancholy echo of someone's daily life.
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The driveway ended in a garage with a lean-to shed on each side. The garage had two enormous timber doors which we could prise open a bit to see my grandfather's dusty Standard Vanguard sitting in the gloom.
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We assumed the car didn't work – we'd never seen him drive it. It turned out there was more to the story. Apparently my grandmother, who was a notoriously anxious passenger, freaked out so much when he was driving that one day he parked in the garage and never drove again. Problem solved.
I always found him to be a gentle soul, but I rarely heard him say much.
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I'm sitting with my grandfather while he has a smoko, He smokes godawful Craven A cigarettes. I try to avoid the acrid exhalations, at the same time fascinated by the white curls and swirls.
After a few quiet minutes he turns to me and says, softly and a little wistfully, "you know... I'm a bugger for looking at clouds...", and turned back to ponder them.
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One of the lean-tos had a bench and scattered tools which we assumed were there for the taking.
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We find a hatchet in the tool-shed and wander the paddocks looking for something to use it on. We spot a hapless sapling, the sole remnant of the bush that's been cleared, and proceed to hack a V-shaped notch at shoulder height.
The axe is blunt and the tree is tough so it's taking a while. The drama mounts as the tree teeters and then... crashes magnificently to the ground as we shout "TIM-BER....!!!".
The shout brings my parents to the door and we're perplexed as to why they're upset. Isn't it self-evident why this was satisfying?
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It's hard to know how much of this is accurate or even real. Some of it will be actual memories, but they're molded by time and bit-rot as they overlap with family stories and other memories and recede further into the past.
Anyway, time to teleport back to sixty years in that kid's future and keep walking.