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.