"SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media" (silentbutnotreallydeadly)
08/17/2019 at 08:00 • Filed to: None
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"SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media" (silentbutnotreallydeadly)
08/17/2019 at 08:00 • Filed to: None | 6
| 9 |
...we found it. Eventually.
Only the best part of a hundred kilometres away. But that 100 kilometres? Brilliant.
We were hunting for a gilgai. It’s a term from one or more of this region’s indigenous languages. Essentially it means a depression in the landscape that collects water. In our experience, it is more common in a different soil type further west of here, so it may not be the right term for this language area... however, our English language tradition for adopting a pretty word means gilgai has stuck.
There’s not much to this story. We are both a bit crook and it was easier to go for a drive than to to work around the property and just make the rhinovirii worse. We’d been told that the gilgai in Pilliga National Park still had water in them from a particularly big rain event back in April or May. So we decided to go and check it out given it could be decades before they do it again...
Piled into our old SF Forester and blasted off through the Pilliga. Eric Rolls in his very nearly unreadable Australian classic work of non-fiction called the Pilliga....’A Million Wild Acres’... that was about as succinct as he got.
It’s a vast blot of trees and scrub and landscape that most people would think why does this exist if most people actually didn’t even wonder why it does exist because most people have better things to do.
The reason it does exist is simply because it is agriculturally useless. If you expose the soil for crops, it either blows away, sets like concrete or turns into this amazing substance called Pilliga Spew. Put simply, it has all the nutritional value of modern political discourse.
It does however grow a couple of very fine trees. One is a lovely old girl that we call White Cypress. It’s a kind of conifer (a pine tree if you are a heathen) but one that beats the usual northern hemisphere suspects like Monterey Pine and Douglas Fir into mere weeds in every respect...except one (it’s a bit slow growing). The other is Ironbark. There’s a couple of species but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that these things grow tall, straight and true. Slowly. But they put on the sort of mass and density that would make a sumo blush. And the timber is...amazing. A cubic metre of it, dried, would destroy the suspension of our ute....1,200 kilograms. Dense, strong and very saleable.
And that’s how the Pilliga has been used since European settlement.
We used the roads that are used to extract this resource (what’s left of it) to navigate our way from one end to the other...just to see a bit of water.
In the meantime, I had so much fun I forgot that the clutch in the Forester is 263,000 kilometres old AND that M’lady no longer appreciates drifting through sandy corners.
The smell of the clutch and the slightly dirty look when we stopped halfway at the Salt Caves Fire Tower was both alarming and life affirming.
The view from the fire tower is also life affirming. Especially if you don’t look down through the see-through mesh to the ground 30 odd metres below...
After many more sandy corners, busted creek crossings and fabulously lonely tracks...we found water. Deeply insignificant water to most people but they’d be the ones chock full of mindfulness.
This stuff just is. A tiny little spot in the middle of nowhere. Full of life that just couldn’t exist without a chance rain event. An event made even more unlikely given our current drought. It was a grand outcome on a lurgy filled adventure.
The best bit though was having a top day out over some entertaining dirt/sand roads driving a 19 year old one owner Subaru Forester on its original clutch with original head gaskets, having a whale of a time in some corners despite the owner of the car saying please don’t do that again...and that little old car never skipped a beat. Sometimes...Miata is not always the answer.
Just Jeepin'
> SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
08/17/2019 at 09:21 |
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That’s awesome, thanks for sharing.
This is one reason I love my Jeep: finding places to explore without worrying about whether I can get back (although as unreliable as it is, I should worry about that a bit more than I do). Much of the back-roading (soft-roading?) I do probably could be done in a Miata, but every now and then you find that corner of the world where clearance and traction matter.
DipodomysDeserti
> SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
08/17/2019 at 09:27 |
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I could use a gilgai right now. We’ve had a real shit monsoon season this year. No big storms to speak of with extreme temps for weeks at a time. I miss the smell of wet greasewood.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
08/17/2019 at 09:52 |
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Nice story! Needs more pictures!
It all comes down to water. Life has a hard time existing without it.
In the coastal Texas area, the land is so flat it has a hard time draining. There is a hard pan of clay near the surface that makes it difficult for many trees to grow, so the natural environment is a coastal prairie.
Within the prairie are shallow depressions which collect water and become ephemeral ponds. Lacking a rich local language to pull from, they just became prairie potholes. This causes some confusion because a prairie pothole up north is a very deep structure caused by a large chunk of glacier being left behind as the climate warmed and the glacier retreated.
As part of my graduate work, I identified potholes in a particular watershed from historic aerial photography. I looked at the same locations 50 years later and most of them were covered by residential development. I always wanted to go back and see what kinds of issues those houses suffered from. I’m guessing that flooding and foundation problems are common.
It’s unfortunate that I’ll never be able to take a wild ride to visit our version a gilgai. As far as I know, all of ours have been developed.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> Just Jeepin'
08/17/2019 at 10:55 |
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Just yesterday I came across the pictures of my buddy’s Jeep after we spent an hour rolling through the mud on his property. It reminded me how thankful I was that he has four sons who were tasked with cleaning up the dirty Jeep when we were done.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> DipodomysDeserti
08/17/2019 at 10:56 |
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Greasewood? I’ve never heard of that tree!
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DipodomysDeserti
> TheRealBicycleBuck
08/17/2019 at 11:12 |
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Greasewood is the common name for a variety of plants . It’s also called chaparral, creosote or in Spanish, la gobernadora de disierto. It fills the deserts of the Southwest. It secretes a very fragrant oil which you can smell when it gets wet. Even though I’m in a big city, it’s all you can smell when it rains. If you’re out in the desert during a rain storm is smells amazing. It’s a very sweet, clean smell.
I have some extract that I drop in baths. Very relaxing for someone who’s grown up in the desert. I’m thinking about making an aftershave with it, but it can fuck up your liver if you absorb too much of it.
The oil is an herbicide as well , and can also be used to kill weeds.
Really interesting variety plants that live a very long time. There’s an 11k year old ring of larrea tridentata in the Mojave Desert.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> DipodomysDeserti
08/17/2019 at 13:06 |
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Chaparral is something I know. Creosote is residue in a chimney or used to treat railroad ties. If you can’t tell, my desert experience is fairly limited. I did spend some time in the Sonoran desert, but we were there to look at potential environmental impacts of some proposed roads and my job was to manage the team, not be the environmental expert.
I’d lov e to spend a few weeks exploring out there.
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> DipodomysDeserti
08/17/2019 at 13:06 |
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Chaparral is something I know. Creosote is residue in a chimney or used to treat railroad ties. If you can’t tell, my desert experience is fairly limited. I did spend some time in the Sonoran desert, but we were there to look at potential environmental impacts of some proposed roads and my job was to manage the team, not be the environmental expert.
I’d lov e to spend a few weeks exploring out there.
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SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media
> TheRealBicycleBuck
08/17/2019 at 19:33 |
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I would love to have taken more pictures but I was having a little too much fun hooning about and the potato phone was all I had anyway!!
It’s nice to know that geography exists everywhere and that humans have created so many different evocative names to describe them. What's not so nice is that human disrespect or ambivalence towards them is sadly universal these days...