A Trick

Who doesn’t like playing tricks? I have a stock-standard April fool’s trick, which is to wake my missus at daylight and tell her it’s snowing outside! Sometimes, for variation, I whisper that there’s a campervan parked up our drive! That usually pickles her onions! The culture of playing tricks stems from working with my fellows, in close contact day in day out… But come to think about it, my siblings chide me, telling me I’ve had too much fun in my tail since birth! Unfortunately, at least in the circles I now frequent, everyone’s gone serious – more’s the pity. Maybe it’s something to do with age, maybe I miss my mates who’ve dropped off their perch!

They say antipodean humour is a bit different, and for sure the line between playful tricks and mischief is blurry. Back in the day my ratbag mates and I thought it was funny to catch eels in the river at night and release them on the lawns of people who owned nearby properties. The joke was on us though, because the eels were still very much alive and straight away slithered back to the river! Still, now I think it was pretty funny we hadn’t figured that out! My grandkids gave me funny looks when I told them about it. Guess they had to be there!

Jessie, my primary school buddy thought a funny trick would be to tie his dad’s torch onto a length of string and sit it in the middle of the road. When a car stopped to salvage it, his plan was reel it in. Well, Murphy’s law, the first car that came along flattened it! We were sitting behind a fence watching it unfold, he was distraught, I was laughing my head off!  The days of hard work in the bush go quicker when there’s a few laughs. Old Gib, the guy in charge of my early forestry crew, usually fell asleep at lunchtime. It was his role to call time, but the whole crew would invariably sneak off back to work, leaving him snoring. Sometimes, someone was game enough to tie his bootlaces together! Poor old Gib!

In a way it was a rite of passage where your reaction to being tricked was a test of your character. I was given a shiny new axe to take with me on my first day in a logging crew. It was going to be my job to trim branches and help the breaker-out. That’s the guy who hooks the log onto the main rope for hauling behind the dozer. Anyway, the breaker-out asked to have a look at my flash new axe. The guy could throw axes! And there it was suck twenty feet up a tree! I tried to show no sign of being perturbed and carried on lugging wire ropes, trying to keep up with him. At smoko time, I went back into the bush early and used his chainsaw to drop the tree and rescue my axe. Nothing was said. The next day, the cookhouse had given us trainees sandwiches, dry cheese and onion sandwiches – typical fare! On the quiet, I took a slice of onion and wiped it around the mouth of the breaker-out’s Thermos flask. At the next break, the guy hardly reacted, just a nod and a sly thumbs up in recognition. We were fine after that.

Hooks, Bert, Albert and I were notorious for playing tricks on each other, but the unwritten ethic was that the best tricks were when nobody let on that they had carried out the trick. Who did some of the tricks hasn’t been divulged in fifty-odd years, and half of the players aren’t around to tell anymore! It’s this ethic that’s behind this tale.

I was working in my home nursery when I heard a car going down the track to the river. Its public access, but you can’t get to the river these days because since a big flood, the access has been washed away and is overgrown. There haven’t been any dozers or diggers around that I could con into repairing it. So people wanting to go for a paddle, just turn around and exit. Some travellers come from the main road looking for somewhere to have a dump, and do, while others wander through my paddock willy-nilly as if they paid the bloody rates! The week previously I had left the gate open while I had lunch; some numbnut drove in and took the opportunity to do wheelies, around and around, damaging the grass! So because this particular car didn’t reappear, I strolled down to investigate.

It was a grandfather with his four or five year old granddaughter. They weren’t going to be doing any harm! But I wanted to tell them that every day, I’m down there shooting bunnies, so if they were going down there regularly, they’d best let me know. Granddad wanted to look in the river for some agate (stones). He told me that experts had told him there was no agate in this, the north branch of the river, but he wanted to look anyway.

So Granddad was a rock-hound. Hooks had been a rock-hound too, and I picked up some of the lingo - I’m also interested in geology.  Agate is a rock composed of cryptocrystalline silica, associated with volcanic rock.  If there are big crystals, collectors like them. Agate washed up at the beach can be made into jewellery as long as there are no cracks; experts call them flaws. I told him that if there was any agate to be found, it was likely to be downstream from the small creek we were standing beside. He had that ‘how do you know’ look. Well, I used to own the land from where we stood, right up to the township, which is half the catchment area of the creek. The soil is tarry volcanic, sticky when wet. I showed him basalt boulders not fifty metres away. I had found quite a bit of agate when I was digging postholes or doing earthworks on the property, so logically, any loose pieces of agate would, over the years, be washed down the creek and into the river.

I could see the girl was bored with our conversation, and the way she was wiggling she must have been busting! But Granddad didn’t seem to notice and wanted to prattle on about petrified wood. I told him to go through my gate and to a place where I have private access to the river. He should look there for agate and let the girl throw a few stones into the water. I didn’t think he was likely to find anything, but thought the girl might at least enjoy the experience.

Back at the house I selected a nice piece of agate and a large slither of petrified wood from among my ‘keeps’ collection and took them down to Granddad’s car. There was a large block of stone that I shifted to where he would have to stand when opening his door. I placed the agate and the petrified wood on top of it. Granddad would soon figure out where they came from, but he would wonder why. And he would have something to tell the experts at the Rock and Mineral Club, and hopefully it would mystify them!

My old block of land now belongs to the council, which they use for production forestry and have recently harvested the first crop. I wonder how long it will be before I see rock-hounds up there… Searching for agate?