A Rhinestone Cowboy

I've met a lot of smart people in my life - people with brains billowing out both sides of their heads, facts and figures memorized, seeing the academic picture is second nature.  They can read a textbook cover to cover and instantly recognize what all the footnotes mean before they have even read them. 

I don't come across wise people as often - not that knowledge and wisdom are necessarily mutually exclusive, it's just that wise people tend not to speak as much.   Listening is their addiction.  From a human perspective, the best formula for wisdom that I have can think of is this:

[(Knowledge + Experience) - boastfulness] X passion = Wisdom

Those who have the intelligence to move forward in life, in spite of fears, to engage in all that life has to offer, subtract from that our society's incessant need to be noticed, multiply it by a conscious joy of what you really like to do and that's wisdom.

Trader is wise.  I've met him multiple times - he is married to Juliet, one of Christine's best friends.  In the United States he would be known as a rancher, in Australia, I guess a cattleman, or propertyman, but the best way, and probably easiest way to describe him is:

Trader owns land that has cattle on it and he makes sure they stay alive.

There, I've brushed my hands of trying to tell you what his job description is which is like trying to count the facets on a diamond, and now I can tell you what he is like.

When we pulled up our purple station wagon in front of their house, the kids greeted us with joyful hellos and screams of approval.  Trader and Juliet have three sons and I have three daughters - kind of like a weird Brady Bunch reunion.  Their sons, Hugo, Flynn and Ned, are high energy/incredibly respectful young boys who enjoy being outdoors.  Juliet is a police officer who works with Sarah on the W.A.S.T.I.D. program.  They live in a house near the 'downtown' district of Charleville which includes various pubs, two schools, an RSL and a few shopping stores. 

Like most of the houses in town, the house they live in is built on stilts and underneath almost all of these houses is storage space and miscellaneous play areas for kids.  The general idea for stilt houses is not only to avoid the damage of flash floods which can occur, but during the summer, the wind can cool off the house even just a little bit.  As we climbed the steps to enter the house, it became apparent that my emotions felt as if we were stepping back in time - and that's not speaking pejoratively, only a sense that this place where they lived had escaped the erosion of the late 1900's.  In fact, the décor spoke to a time from the 1950's; pistachio colored walls, vinyl and chrome chairs, wooden furniture that seemed handmade and created to last.  Even as Juliet greeted us, she was wearing a floral print apron the bespoke of a time when boys had crewcuts and girls spent much of their upbringing learning to sew, clean and cook. 

Juliet never really stops moving; she's like a hummingbird flitting between projects, checking on the kids, making sure the dinner is cooking asking the ubiquitous Australian question, "Would anyone like some tea?"  Behind her eyes, in the crevices where hard life accumulates, it presses on me why movement is essential - because if one pauses to stop and think, even for a little bit, how desperate times are when rain doesn't come, tears will flow instead.  She is strong enough to hold back the tide; a vibrant wife and mother who does whatever it takes for the family to make it.

Trader sits at the round kitchen table a smirking smile on his face.  His greeting to me, "Howya goin'?" is administered with a vise-like handshake.  I want to be tough and grip harder, but his hand is like a brick.  His eyes are much different than Juliet's, although they are both blue ( if I remember correctly.)  Steeled against the difficulties of what life brings, Trader radiates not only Australian male machismo, but also a good-natured wit.  His face is a perpetual two tone color: (kind of like the Danish flag, if you ask me - I can write that because he is six hundred kilometers west now) red and white.  The bottom half of his face, nose, cheeks and chin are kind of burnt color.  If you could mix rust and blood, that's what you'd get.  The northern half, bridge to scalp, is...  well, the best color I can describe it, and this sounds incredibly weird, is like the color of a plucked turkey, kind of a pale pink/white.  To state the obvious, I can tell that he wears sunglasses and a hat every day. 

I suppose he is kind of the romanticized version of what American's encountered with Crocodile Dundee.  You can imagine Trader, out on the range, working the cattle, being chased by brown snakes (which he said has happened to him), flying his plane finding the cattle trying not to crash, avoiding kangaroos by the thousands driving back and forth between property and home.  He's one of those guys that seem so manly, that when you look at him the first time, he looks like he's got a five o'clock shadow, you take a sip of your drink, and all of the sudden he's sprouting a ten o'clock shadow.  His bushy chest hair sticks out the top of his shirt like an extra wool blanket. 

I wonder if he grew that in a day.

As he invites me to sit with him over an ice cold beer, I ask questions about his daily life and he regales me with stories from the bush.  He looks into the distance as if somehow part of him is still out there - out on the land - and it is then that it hits me...

Here is a very wise man.  He can read the land like a textbook.  Trader has memorized the currents of the wind, the direction of the dust, the bends of the brush and uses that knowledge to engage in his passion which is free range cattle.  Most people don't recognize the intelligence of farmers or the wisdom that is invariably in the job description.  They don't recognize the passion which burns in them not just to overcome the elements and put food on the table, but the farmer/rancher/cowboy desires to satisfy the consumer in a way that only agriculturalists can. 

The difficulty that both Juliet and Trader encounter living in Charleville is that they do not live on the property; they, like many ranchers and those who work in the mines must be separate from their families for large swaths of time.  In order to do the work at hand, on the dry dusty landscape, there are weeks when families do not get to see each other, and this is written especially large when the rain does not come.

We sat and ate with them, the rhinestone cowboy, his hat not sparkling with gemstones, but his heart reflecting the gems of his wife and family; and a town cop/mother of three laughing loudly to engage with the family from the east.  Their home, seemingly from Back to the Future, stilted and airy was a refuge for us, an oasis from the world closer to the city.

They are a beautiful family.  Wish they lived closer.

The Elixir of Life

I take for granted the times when I walk to the cupboard, take out a glass and lift the handle on the tap.  Lukewarm water flows freely into the cup and I drink deeply but rarely do I think about this miracle of modern plumbing or, more importantly, how important this easily accessible water is to most of Western culture.

As if by some miracle of nature, there seems to be an endless supply of life's elixir - water - and far too often we treat it as such.  We (speaking in general) leave the shower pouring over us when our skin and hair has been cleaned ten times over.  Our toilets rinse with a gallon of water per flush.  We spend inordinate amounts of time and energy hooking up sprinkler systems to water a lawn on which we rarely walk.

But water is life. 

Life is very hard for the people around Charleville, when water has ceased to fall from the sky.  Clouds are a rarity; the sun is a constant, beastly friend with a searing smile which creases the skin of the planet.

The statistics of water are hopefully well known to you.  Seventy percent of the surface of the earth is water although the vast majority is beyond consumption and use because of its salinity.  Of the 326 million trillion gallons (326 with eighteen zeroes behind it), only two percent is freshwater.  And of that two percent, most of it is locked away in the polar ice caps leaving us with three minute sources for humans to be able to live - freshwater lakes, streams and water vapor.

Tapping into these lakes and rivers (and underground reservoirs) is how humans can survive, but it is the fickle water vapor that replenishes through the water cycle - as most fifth graders could probably describe in great detail. (hopefully)

These are some of the statistics - but there is another one I want to start off with today, a hydrationary one that I wasn't aware of but it was brought to my attention by two of my sisters-in-law a few weeks ago:

Water tastes funny sometimes.

I did my best to argue with them, but in my eighteen years of experience, arguing with the in-laws is like trying to use the Force to turn off the light after you've gotten into bed: Futile.

We were vacationing at the Gold Coast and had journeyed to the apartment where Nicole and Amanda were staying with their two broods of children, when over the night meal, Nicole took a drink of water and scrunched up her face as if she had tried to ingest a lemon by biting through its skin.

"This water tastes horrible."

Theoretically speaking, water shouldn't have any taste at all; it should only have two sensory qualities - touch and temperature - but according to my Princess and the Pea sisters-in-law, water has taste also.  So, I attempted to disagree.  Attempted. Like any good scientist, I smelled the water and like a great wine connoisseur, I swirled it in my glass looking for any discolorations, or anything else that might give the water a taste.  I raised the glass to my lips sipping (mind you) so that I could engage my nose in the process, because, as we all know, taste is very much dependent on our ability to smell also.  And as I drank, I noticed, briefly, a faint feathery touch of chemicals in the water...

But I spoke it not for fear that would open the door for a sense of rightness from my banded sisters by marriage.

If I reflect on life, I know that water, from different areas, has a certain taste.  For instance, if one were to drink the water from the taps at my parents house, one would get the sense that one does not just drink the water, but one chews it.  There is so much rust that it tastes like you just swallowed your bicycle.

In some countries, the water tastes so bad that they either drink sparkling mineral water, which, in my unprofessional opinion is the worst of all possible hydrated worlds, akin to ingesting carbonated urine (pronounced u-rhine in Australia) which is another story that may be told some day - or they drink beer. 

So, I admit - I was wrong, and it grinds me to write it.  There is nothing more defeating than having your in-laws stand over you like Tolkein's Galadriel, superimposing their will of awesome power in rightness.  But I must go into the west...

It's a good thing I think my sisters-in-law are excellent, or I might have to use the ring of power. 

I encountered the truest definition of their rightness when we first arrived in Charleville.  After meeting the most pleasant park attendant, Rhonda, (Whom I will write about later, but when introduced to her I kept thinking to myself, Help me, Rhonda, help, help me, Rhonda), we settled into our cabin and I proceeded to take a two minute shower because of what I assumed to be drought restrictions in the area.  The moment the water jetted from the shower head, I was aware of the smell.  The sulfurous odor smelled as if Hades had indeed spewed forth and was filling the steaming air with the Hell's eau d' toilette.  Not only did it smell bad...

It, indeed, did not taste particularly good.  Now I'm not prone to drinking shower water, but sometimes it happens, and the water issuing forth made me call it Satan's Martini.

But Charleville hasn't had a good rain for years.  I mean that - it's been years.  As I perused the scenery on a morning run, the air seemed to fold in on itself because of the lack of humidity.  My mouth dried out after minutes and the flies... (we'll get to them later)

As I ran, though, something strange assailed my early morning exertions.  House after house, lawn after lawn, was being watered by the residents.  I expected to see crispy grass, or at least dried out weeds for lawns, but some had manicured, verdant yards.  I stopped to watch a few from a distance, an older lady stood in her tattered, battered bathrobe, smoking cigarette held between two fingers of one hand, nozzled water hose in the other hovering over small patches of grass hydrating it inch by inch.  Another man stood, hand on hip, staring up at the sky as he waited for the water to spew out.  At first it appeared as if he was relieving himself, and perhaps that is the right way to emotionally think about what occurred, but he seemed to be imploring the heavens to once, just once, open and flood the town.

Literally flood the town.

It happens, sometimes, and the locals will talk about it, but as I asked one of those locals, Trader Schmidt, a friend of ours who I will describe him and his family in detail the next time, about the water usage, he said, "We don't get any rain, but there is a vast source of water underneath our feet.  We just need to pump it out."

Vast resources just out of reach, but takes some work to retrieve it.  Sounds like most of life, doesn't it. 

So, in this desiccated world, just below the surface is a reserve of the rejuvenating source of the elixir of life.  I think that's what God would say lies beneath the scratched surface of who Christ is when he proclaims, "I am the water of life - the one who comes to me will never be thirsty again."  Underneath the surface of God in Jesus, beneath all the detritus and sediment that our dried out, shallow theologies that have buried the essence of true life, we find a source of fulfillment for this life and the next.  We drink deep and find another Bible verse...

Psalm 34:8

Taste and see that the LORD is good.  Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.

My sisters-in-law are right again.  The water does taste.

A Hero

Very few people know the name Nguyen Sy Huy.

He was twenty-four years old when he died; he was carrying an AK47 and passing out of the jungle when a young twenty-year-old Australian shot and killed him.  It was wartime, of course - casualties occur, but for Tom Williamson, the young man who fired the shots that ended Huy's life, casualties come in many forms.  For Tom, it seems he lost not only his innocence that day, but his sense of peace.

Samantha Hawley pens the story for the ABC News Service in Australia.  Her main objective was to give a narrative of the devastating effects of war on those who are called into its sphere.  This young man, Tom Williamson, has never forgotten that day, nor will he ever.  After Huy was pronounced dead, Williamson's commanding officer helped him strip the body and bury it.  Later, the officer gave Tom the Vietnamese soldier's effects: his compass and his hammock.  Williamson brought them back to Australia, put them in his lock box and never took them out again.

Not for forty years.

But Tom could never feel that sense of peace.  So, with the help of Ngo Thi Thuy Hang, the founder of Marin, a Vietnamese non-governmental organisation committed to searching for information about Vietnamese soldiers missing in action, he returned to Vietnam to return Huy's effects to his relatives.

Can you imagine it?  Can you imagine after so long returning to a family whose life you destroyed?  It's different for war, I suppose.  In mankind's ceaseless attempt to overpower, pawns are used to pivot the world's struggle for supremacy - pawn's like Tom Williamson.

But what about the war that is raging in our quest for escape?  What about the war on drugs?  Who are the prisoners of war that are tortured?  Who are the generals who send the napalm of ice, cocaine, heroin and LSD wiping out swaths of young life?  Who is the enemy and how should they be punished?

Certainly, it is the drug dealers, but even moreso, it is the drug makers - the cartels of the powerful who create the essence of evil which erases the minds of so many young people worldwide.  Would it not be of the greatest importance to let the punishment fit the crime?  Even as I imagine young Tom Williamson's greatest regret of taking another life, of living with the guilt and unimagined grief in another country far away; and even as I imagine his return to that jungled land searching for the tormented souls who never have known what happened; and even as I imagine him asking for forgiveness in the midst of the tear streaked faces...

Would this not be fitting for the drug dealers and the drug makers?  Would it not be duly appropriate that for their punishment, they would have to journey to the home of every person who has experienced the thievery of life because of these drugs?  Would it not be the best form of pain for this axis of evil to sit in the midst of the tormented mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, wives and husbands who have had their lives obliterated by drugs?

To have them kneel in the ocean of pain that they have created because of their thirst for money and power.  This is what they should receive.  This is how they should spend the rest of their days.

Instead, though, most drug dealers and drug barons leave the treachery of their potions to others and the havoc that has ensued, especially the devastation that occurs when drugs take a young life, creates a life of difficulty for the real heroes.

The police officers. 

They are left with the lonely task of crisply walking to the door, rapping in the pitched night after all have gone to sleep; they stand, hat under arm, waiting with heart beating loudly in their throats to tell one more mother, one more son, that someone they loved has had their life stolen from them.

Unfortunately, all helping professions have come under attack from the Apache helicopters of our media.  In the ever-present hunger to scoop the headline news of negativity, the media chooses to report the singularities that occur in the high stress occupations of saving and protecting lives.  And now, these doctors, teachers and especially police officers must protect themselves at all times - record every single moment of their working lives - so that they aren't pulled apart at the seams by the very people they have pledged to protect.

This police officer, this hero, that we worked with, was not what I was expecting.  Sarah is a quiet and demure woman and mother of two.  She lives in the town of Charleville, her house is across the street from a park.  In their backyard is an inflatable water castle situated in the middle of charred grass.  Sarah is a good cook and a doting mother and partner.

And yet at the same time, she is a senior constable, on a team of many heroes, in charge of promoting a drug prevention program aimed at eradicating the very thing that is erasing the future of so many young people in Australia.  If you were to approach Sarah in her uniform, you would see a tall, confident woman proudly wearing her dark blues, utility belt rife with protective items.  On her head is a billed hat with the checkerboard white and blue.  She is fit and if you were to see her from a distance, she is a solid force to be reckoned with, but as you get to know her, she is an easy-going, personable citizen of Charleville.

She cares.  I think that's the thing that blew me away.  She really cares about people; it's not fake whatsoever.  She desperately wants to see people succeed and even in the midst of the tragedies of the job, she seeks a better future. You can see it when she runs a boxing class for young kids or she speaks jokingly with high schoolers.  You can see it in Senior Constable Grayson's life.

She's a hero.

As project W.A.S.T.I.D. took shape, it became increasingly more evident that this project was not about the present but about the future.  That's what heroes do: they preserve the future by protecting the present.

We would hear stories of the Charleville Police Service in the upcoming days.  Some great stories from her partner Mark, who drove the bus with me and a group of primary school age kids on a trip through the desert.

Ice

Everyone's addicted to something.

We all try to hide it; sometimes we succeed, sometimes the mania boils over like a pot of potatoes.  The heat produces a by-product that we can't explain.  We don't like to admit that we are addicts because it means that something else has power over us, in quasi-Lutheran terms, instead of alien righteousness, we encounter alien powerlessness.  That which produces the chemical effect in our brains, a euphoria, or a rush of adrenaline, cannot be contained or countered by anything else.  The addict must find a way to inject the foreign substance to escape from whatever form of life that is presently occurring.

I am an addict. 

It's part of the program, the first step is to admit that you have a problem.  I am addicted to baseball.  It might be kind of cute, I suppose, to put that in the same breath as alcohol or drug addiction, but there are times when I act like a drug addict.  Sometimes I wake up early in the morning to check the scores of my New York Mets.  It has been accentuated in the last few weeks because the Mets have made the playoffs, but there have been times throughout the last couple of years when I will sneak away from my family, phone in hand and connect to the constant source of info-addiction, the internet, and check the latest messages by other Mets fans on Metsmerizedonline.com. 

Sometimes when I jog, I think about who will be pitching next year, what the stats will mean, how will the Mets organize their budget for an extended dynasty after this year.  Just today when Christine reminded me that we are going to take Elsa to Toowoomba on Thursday to have her wisdom teeth pulled, what's my first thought?  Elsa's nervousness about the anesthesia?  Her pain management afterwards?  Maybe even organizing her homework from missing school for a couple of days? 

Nope - I grew morose because I was going to miss the first pitch of the third game of the National League Championship Series. 

So, I proclaim - I'm an addict.

True enough, addictions take all forms; the Greek words, so I've been told for 'addiction' is mania.  There are all sorts of manias:  Egomania (addiction to self), kleptomania (addiction to stealing) philomania (That's Robert Palmer's' addiction - to love), but the addiction to drugs that is sweeping the planet is the one that most frightens me. 

There are also sorts of reasons to be mortified about what drugs do to people: here are my top five just looking at the 'ice' (a form of crystallized methamphetamine.)

1.  Symptoms of ice included paranoia, schizophrenia, hallucinations, and violent, almost Hulk-like outbursts of rage.  The stories told in hospital emergency rooms would make Stephen King novels seem like Roald Dahl books.

2.  The devastating effects to the brain that occur from ice use actually creating holes, or gaps, in the brain that cannot be restored.  Unlike some drugs which the user, once reformed, can recover from, ice doesn't offer that 'self-healing' solution.  Kids don't understand this.  Adults don't recognize it.

3.  Drug dealers do not care whatsoever what happens to the user.  According to one of the police officers we worked with in Charleville, one thousand dollars of ice ingredients can make a product that can be sold to the general populace for a seventy-five thousand dollar profit.

In two weeks.

That being said, once hooked on ice, there is almost no return.  The time, money and resources spent on acquiring the drug are not the dealers' problem. 

4.  Drugs are becoming more and more glamorized in our media.  As of yet, ice isn't seen as the 'popular' drug like alcohol, tobacco or caffeine, but with the legalization of marijuana in some places and the eventual normalization of the drug culture at parties typified in almost all teenage movies, sooner or later young people begin to realize that drugs are simply the 'best way to escape from an increasingly desperate world.'  In the TV series, Breaking Bad, which has been described as a digital drug also, the main character, a science teacher, turns making meth and selling it to fund his cancer treatments.  This is one of the darkest (and most violent) TV shows ever produced and judging by the viewership, it has hit a chord.  The problem is, the viewer is left with the option for rooting for the 'common man' who has to sell drugs in order to survive.  Everyone else is the bad guy: the insurance companies, the school, the police - we are left to wonder...

Maybe selling drugs will make me a hero also.

5.  Everyone is doing it.  Perhaps the biggest lie of all.  The problem remains, though, because of our own technomania, we see the worst of the world every second of every minute.  Our social media encourages constant checks and updates regarding the world and its collision course with Megiddo.  What humans do best is to avoid fear and pain; it's a natural tendency, and drugs offer that momentary surreality - a false sense of well being that seems to give a rush of hope and pleasure followed by a crash into the abyss of pain and terror. 

Everyone is not doing it!  In fact, the statistics would prove it.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2014, seven percent of Australians had tried ice.  That's definitely not a majority, but think about it: seven percent of the Australian population, even rounding it to thirty million people...

Is two million people. 

Imagine two million people displaying the symptoms in #1.


So, we've got this ice problem in Australia and it has nothing to do with global warming or cooling.  Ice is invading not only the cities, but the Outback also.  For those small town residents who assumed that distance would somehow create a buffer against the problem, their assumption is wrong.  Even in the villages of Cunnamulla and Charleville, the drug has spread like a disease.  Horror stories resonate in the Outback hamlets and the residents, even knowing that the plague is coming, seem to hope as if tomorrow will show up just like the yesterday of fifty years ago.

So in order to combat the problem, it seems that we need a superhero.

She wasn't what I expected.

Out Back

In some ways, the continent/country of Australia appears from space to be a heart.  Or, as I peruse the globes and world maps that frequent many Australian schools and homes, that's what it looks like to me.  The arteries are the major water sources - the great rivers - of the continent, which crisscross the borders of states, joining and disconnecting on their meandering to the sea.  But if you were to take a closer inspection of this cardiac continent, you would probably notice that almost all of it has a bad case of angina. Roughly seventy percent of the continent is arid or semi-arid desert which means that the Outback, anything further in than five hours from the coast, is basically on life support.

In much of western and central Queensland, rain has visited about as often as Martians. Of the great deserts of the world, central Australia is not as well known as the Sahara or the Gobi (or even Antarctica - the driest place on earth - for that fact), but it is in the red center of this country that we find such an incredible life force.  There is an indelible resistance to fatalism, that no matter what people do, they will conquer.  The people who live in these places, in the middle of the wilderness, are some of the toughest and most amazing people I have ever encountered.  As I gazed at their weather beaten faces, their eyes permanently squinting from the ceaseless sun that pounds down from the bright blue skies and reflects from the red sands underneath, I see a fixed determination that the lack of water will not dampen their joie de vivre.

It took us a while to get to them, though. 

We began driving on the last of the school holidays day.  The girls curled up in the back seat huddled underneath the keyboard that poked over between the two back headrests; they began reading book after book and every once in a while I'd glance over my shoulder to see if they were still breathing.  I sat in the front passenger seat digesting the baseball game on my phone that was about to become inconsequential in vast stretches of our drive.  Bars of activity would be sources of amusement and for some reason, as the game dragged into the later innings I believed that if I could just hold my phone closer to the roof of the car, I would somehow get better reception.  Kind of like how we used to think that if we put enough tinfoil on the rabbit ears of our televisions, we would somehow get better black and white screen results.

That's the wilderness for you: a place away from home that does not offer the creature comforts that one is used to.  The wilderness is a constant source of frustration, of heat, of comparison, of complaint.  It didn't take me long after we left the friendly city limits of Toowoomba when I thought, "Are we there yet?" 

But Charleville is a long way past Toowoomba.  The sign read Charleville, 551 kilometres.  That's how they spell it here - kilometres, centre, metre, -  it took me a while to get used to and I always pronounce it wrong just to annoy Christine.   It's a long way and not far past Toowoomba did I start to see a difference in the landscape.  I don't know if it's just me, but when the green stops, a sense of hopelessness starts to set in, like a one page newspaper blanket on a homeless cold night.  As I peered around at that which assailed my senses, I hoped beyond hope that our tyres were going to hold up.  (that's how Australians spell radial tires. - I did it again.  I'm annoying Christine.)

The names of the places are as strange as they landscape.  Dalby, Chinchilla, Morven...  We passed creeks like the Wullambilla and the Bungeworgarai (I know you all tried to pronounce them, but don't.  It's like beginning to gag.)  The scenery passed from heartland scrub to sparse vegetation.  The trees and the grass were as hardy as the people and each inch of it seemed to be sharp.  I don't know how to put it other than that - just sharpness.  The grass had evil points - spinifex, it is called.  Only kangaroos eat it when they have to.  The trees are so dense and distrustful of the environment, that they shoot up quickly and thinly, like spikes to heaven, miraculously green in the midst of the dying desert around them.

There is a desperate sense of hopefulness in this dire desert, that somewhere, somehow, somewhen, the rain will come.  The clouds will overshadow the iridescent blue blotting out the scorching sun and drench the red dirt with rain and it will bleed.

The desert will bleed and it's heart will start again.

I can't even begin to imagine the Israelites wandering through the wilderness journeying to a place that they'd only dreamed of.  Like we with Charleville, only whispers of the futre (that's not really how Australians spell 'future' but I like to be cheeky), the Israelites, could not help but wonder where this journey into the desert would take them.  They complained about the lack of water, the lack of food, the lack of normalcy of life.  They forgot that it was God who was trying to filter their collective soul to put their trust in him - in the wilderness.  Sometimes it takes the spinefex and the dry Bungeworgarai to help us recognize our utter and complete dependence on the benevolence of a gracious God.  Sometimes we have to leave behind the 4G of Gatton and recognize that in the wilderness, the only connection we will get to the outer world is a look into the cosmos and the immensity of the stars above.

Our seven and a half hour drive from Gatton to Charleville past the sign at Roma that proclaimed we had reached the Outback of Australia, out back of the constancy and normalcy of every day life, in the midst or the sharpness and harshness and aridity of the dry heart of Australia, was an opportunity for us to recognize our utter dependence on God's willingness to lead us to places that we'd never gone before.

We reached Charleville before the kangaroos hit the roads...

The Outback

"Land Down Under," by Men at Work, arrived on the top 100 charts in 1980.  I still remember when the American TV show, Solid Gold (and their amazing Solid Gold dancers) blared this new sound by an Australian rock band that pretty much no one north of the equator had ever heard of.  On Saturday night as those same Solid Gold dancers grooved out to the tunes of the '80's, I tape recorded the song with the help of my trusty tape recorder where you had to push both the play and the record button at the same time to transfer the sound onto the cassette tape.  At seven years of age, I had no idea what in the world they were talking about, but it sounded cool.

So, I've got this image of Australia planted some thirty-five years ago that resounds in Australian lingo with drug references and Australian stereotypes that would have made no sense to me as a young American boy, but as I grew up and listened to that tape occasionally, it became apparent that Men at Work was speaking about a country and a group of people that longed to be noticed.  They want to be recognized for their commitment and participation in the world, not just for traveling outside of their aquatic borders, their amazing ability to ingest the bottom scrapings of a beer vat (vegemite), and their propensity (as the band proclaimed) for glowing women and puking men who are well over six feet three inches and have been pumping iron for years.

It's in the lyrics, I promise

But as a young American boy from Iowa where I didn't even see the ocean until I was thirteen, I couldn't really fathom an island country the size of the United States.  I didn't visit Australia until I was twenty-one and that was with the jazz choir from college.  We saw some of the sights and did the tourist thing, but the song, "Land Down Under" would continue to haunt me.  It wasn't until I saw Crocodile Dundee that I knew that I wanted to experience more than chundering and thundering.

It was in this movie, probably the first American attempt to bring to the forefront Australian culture (however fake it may have been).  Crocodile Dundee, in my opinion, was probably the platform from which all American's understanding of Australia came, whether it was the launching pad for the Crocodile Hunter or the Big Red Car of the Wiggles.

Now that Christine and I have been married for eighteen years, we have had various opportunities to travel inside the borders of Australia.  We have visited the major cities and all the capitals of the states except Darwin; we have been to Tasmania, to Perth, to Uluru, but staying in a drought stricken Outback Town, that is something we hadn't done...

Until this last week.

Sarah Grayson, a police officer in Charleville, Queensland, invited our family to come out and be part of a drug prevention program in Charleville and the surrounding area.  The program, W.A.S.T.I.D., (Wasted Adolescence Spent Taking Illegal Drugs), is a response to the epidemic dis-ease related to the drug, ice, better known as methamphetamine much popularized in the American TV show Breaking Bad.

I'll get into the some of the statistics later and some of the stories that the officers shared with us regarding ice, but I wanted to lay a foundation for the journey, like the Israelites who were heading off into the unknown desert wasteland.

We left our home town of Gatton on a Monday morning.  We bustled around the house making sure that all the windows were shut, the toilet lids were up, the power points were turned off.  It's still one of the things that I have to get used to in Australia that you don't just turn the lights off, but you actually turn their power sources off too.  We made sure that everything was tucked away and we packed into our car like the Australian Griswalds heading off to the Australian Wallyworld of Charleville. 

Charleville - population roughly 3,500 about five hundred kilometers west of the nearest big town of Toowoomba. Welcome to the Queensland Outback.

For a boy who came from the Land Up Over, the Land Down Under was about to surprise him.