Lifestyle Blockages II

Another season was upon us. It was going to be our second season, but our first as experienced pickers. And in contract apple-picking, experience counts for a lot. So we were looking forward to a profitable few months.
The apple-picking basics are simple - any moron can do it ... and they frequently do. The general idea is, of course, to move apples from the trees into wooden bins as quickly as you can. Simple enough. It’s the quickly bit that causes all the problems. Basically there’s a distinct conflict of interest between the apple’s handling requirements (apples aren’t made of wood, but the bins are), and the pickers’ requirement to make money, exacerbated by the orchardists’ selective harvesting requirements. In the end, it’s not so much technique which matters, as knowing where the line of acceptable bruising (that is, tolerated bruising, because in orchardspeak no bruise is good bruise) lies.
And the season did start well. Our improved abilities and improved fitness meant we were literally twice as fast as the year previously. We steamed through the first week, gained further momentum in the second, picked up the pace another notch in the third. We were rolling confidently towards a record-breaking season ... and then the emotional wheels began falling off.
We’d found our dream section. We were planning our dream house. But Marion started to wonder if it all wasn’t really the beginning of some eternal nightmare. What had once seemed so straightforward, so uncomplicated, so perfect, began to darken with sinister undertones. We weren’t building a home, but a prison! And it wasn’t freedom we were weaving, but a heavy chain of commitment shackling us to a miserable piece of dirt. Only now, now that it was serious, did she begin to honestly consider the ramifications of our decision. Only now did it all become real. She began seriously questioning our plans, our future, herself ... and us.
What were we going to do here?
What were we doing here?
They were familiar questions. The exact same questions, in fact, that I had asked less than a year before. So I repeated the answers she had once given me.
We were going to build a home. A base. A place for our accumulated stuff. We were going to develop the land, to slowly progress towards basic self-sufficiency. We were going to create a life of simple pleasures. We were going to eat and sleep and swim and read and study and grow. We were going to pursue our interests. We were going to travel, to live in other towns, to discover new places, but always coming home. We were going to live together, enjoy each other’s company, start a family. We were going to live.
We were here, because land was cheap. Because there was always work (not work we wanted, but work when we needed it). Because it was only 150 kilometres to the city. Because it was quiet and peaceful and clean and simple and beautiful. Because we could do anything here. Because we could be ourselves here.
I was committed, but Marion was suddenly allergic to commitment.
I wanted to stay, but she wanted not so much to leave, as to flee. It didn’t matter where, as long as it was away. It didn’t matter who, as long as it wasn’t me.
Life suddenly seemed to lose its point. It was pointless picking apples. Pointless thinking about building a home. Pointless to think about anything except sorting our life out, rediscovering each other, redefining our dreams. So we headed to Germany. A few months staying with Marion’s family, travelling again, seeing new things, forgetting about the past or the future ... that’s what we needed.
But staying with Marion’s family proved quickly untenable, mainly due to the insidious effects of locked-in syndrome (commonly called the Wendy complex, or reverse Peter Pan psychosis). Defined as “a chronic psychological state in which offspring are eternally perceived as children”, this insidious affliction affects up to 90% of all parents with post-pubescent children, and yet remains virtually ignored by the medical establishment.
First symptoms usually appear as the patient’s offspring reach adolescence. These may include irrational behaviour (hiding car-keys, counting the change in pockets, marking whisky bottles), emotional delusions/misconceptions (offspring’s behaviour - growing long hair, mis-kicking penalties, failing maths - is designed purely to embarrass/annoy them), and increasingly illogical thought processes (disagreement is falsely labelled being disagreeable, development of personal taste is interpreted as rejection of parental taste, disliking pumpkin equals disliking provider of pumpkin).
Nobody quite knows how or why (some researchers have suggested a kind of empathic puberty may be responsible), but at some point during this normal, healthy (though often tumultuous) emotional sparring, a mental trigger is activated, thus setting in motion an unstoppable chain of mental ‘gate closures’. Our memories are very much like sheep, and LIS the deranged shepherd in charge of the pure parental flock, ensuring all diseased, disagreeable or simply wrong memories are shunted safely away. There is no known cure.
It seems there’s an unwritten international human law that the more interesting children become, the less interested the parents. Surely the primary role of parents should be to raise complex individuals capable of independent thought - children better than themselves? But better has become a word laden with mistrust. We may no longer be better, only different. But surely better is preferable to bland lies? Shouldn’t we hope our children are better than ourselves? Not more, not less, not bigger, faster or cleverer - just better. Rather than being proud of their children’s independence, proud of their evolution, most parents seem to rue the loss of dependence, begrudge their children’s hard-won talents ... or worse, ignore them totally.
Marion was a 28-year-old married woman who had gathered a wealth of experience travelling and working in numerous jobs in numerous countries under vastly differing conditions and cultures before ‘settling’ on the other end of the world, but by the time we’d risen three floors to her mother’s apartment in a concrete termite mound in the middle of a concrete termite village, she had been miraculously transformed into an innocent (read ‘stupid’) 14-year-old girl ... at least in her mother’s eyes. All her experiences, her thoughts, opinions, ideals and knowledge, meant nothing. We tried to fit in. We tried not to cause undue difficulties. We tried to be reasonable. We tried to be ready for lunch at precisely 12 o’clock. But nothing worked. So we decided to go travelling.
But we quickly realised we didn’t feel like travelling either. Wandering around gawping at strange buildings and strangers’ lives had somehow lost its allure in the intervening years. Tourist attractions no longer held any attraction. Poverty was simply depressing. Cultural difference was simply a hassle.
We had to go somewhere, so we headed eastward into the new German states. There was nothing new. It was all the same, except greyer, dirtier, less friendly. Campground attendants weren’t yet accustomed to strangers wanting to camp. Restaurant prices hadn’t yet been inflated to pay for a waiter’s smile. It was cheap - train prices even reduced hitching to a quirky extravagance - and once cheap had been reason enough. Now cheap was simply depressing, so we headed back to Offenbach to consider our options.
The grey city and greyer skies soon had us casting our eyes southwards. We needed sun. Turkey beckoned. Years before, my sister Raene and I had started our travels together in Greece. After a ruinous (ie full of ruins) few days in sleet-stained Athens, we’d spent an idyllic week on Rhodos (and another week in Rhodos harbour waiting for the ferry to finally leave). Apart from being a beautiful island, it was also a major entryway between Greece and Turkey, so we met lots of travellers returning from Ataturk’s (attaboy’s uncle?) republic, and everyone, without exception, had simply raved about Turkey. But our plans lay elsewhere, and although Raene later joined the ranks of ravers, I somehow never got around to it.
Now was my chance. Friendly people, wonderful beaches, clean seas and cheap living - it all sounded too good to be true. And it was.
The people were friendly - we were all friends, invited for chai, invited to stay - as long as they wanted to sell you something or simply to boost their egos. Both of us quickly tired of the grinning lies and the hypocrisy (laughing with German customers one moment, spitting their hatred as soon as they were alone with us ‘Australians’), the leering, arrogant men and everything dirtied by the same dark greed.
The cigarette-butted beaches were no longer wonderful, the suntanned seas no longer clean, and it was no longer even cheap.
Of course there were exacerbating factors. An uncertain morning spent jostling with surly crowds (and even surlier officials) outside the Bulgarian embassy for the dubious ‘honour’ of securing an expensive transit visa had already pricked our sense of outrage.
Two days in a crowded bus had done little to boost our already-flagging morale, especially when rest-room attendants in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria demanded payment in foreign currency... but not coins! Neither of us were going to pay 10 Deutschmark to use a bathroom. The constant delays at random checkpoints manned by heavily-armed guards whose sole enjoyment in life seemed to be to ensure everybody was fully awake, certainly didn’t improve our reserves of goodwill.
(The Yugoslavian war had reached a temporary, and shaky, impasse, opening the borders between the newly-formed independent states for the first time in months. Our bus was one of the first to pass through, and the borders closed soon afterwards, providentially opening for a few days to allow our return trip before closing again, this time permanently.)
Being the rope in a desperate tug-of-war between rival restaurant owners certainly didn’t help relieve our stress. Neither did it help relieve the restaurants’ financial crises, because we’d rather eat nowhere than allow ourselves to be hijacked. It wasn’t our fault the Yugoslavian war had strangled the flow of tourists.
The bus conductors who constantly allowed three half-empty buses or more to depart to our destination before allowing us on board, didn’t enhance our opinion of the local people. And it didn’t matter that the brand new Turkish-built car (less than 30 kilometres on the clock) we finally rented to overcome the heat, the unreliable public transport service, and the 30 kilograms of carpets we’d already bought (we had a house - we needed carpets!) was constantly breaking down (despite the fact it had been outrageously expensive) or that it required regular servicing (and we had to drive vast distances out of our way in order to find an approved repairer).
What really annoyed us was the dealer who later tried to charge us double because we were bringing the car back two weeks early! According to his ‘logic’, we swapped the car halfway through the trip - after the first car broke down - so we had in fact had two cars. Our original deal was a special - one full month for x lire - but because we hadn’t rented the car for the entire month, we now had to be charged standard rates - the first car for six days at the daily rate, and the second car at the slightly discounted weekly rate. Altogether it meant we owed them for the days we didn’t use. So we asked for the keys back and said we would, under the circumstances, prefer to continue our rental for the duration. We’d park the car outside and send the keys back at the end of our rental period... from Germany! He realised we were serious, and with a final, muttered insult, turned away.
We hadn’t even started full of joy in the first place!
It was proving impossible to escape the past or the future. So our minds turned again to our house. Our home.
We visited a friend in Frankfurt. She took us to the Chinese gardens, and there, among the concrete lions and crooked bridges, we discovered our home’s ideal size. Eleven metres by five metres.
We wandered through the Offenbach Rathaus, and there, among the display boards of the alternative insulation expo, we discovered our home’s ideal roof. A living, growing, grass roof.
Together with the ideas we’d collected over the past six months, over an entire lifetime, the whole concept began to take shape.
I drew diagrams and began working through the details.
Marion built a cardboard model (and a little cardboard couple).
We would have a single, open-plan living/kitchen area downstairs with two mezzanine bedrooms, reached by ladder and connected by a narrow walkway (quickly widened once cardboard me had banged his head twenty times while trying to walk between bedrooms). Low ceilings, no interior walls, an open fireplace, lots of rafters, semi-circle stained-glass windows in the peak of each end. A toilet/bathroom out the back. A front verandah running the length of the house. And a grass roof.
For the first time we saw our home. It was wonderful ...