When It Rains It Pours

As anyone that has spent a Wet season in the Top End will tell you: When it rains, it pours. There's something beautiful about the Wet though. Depending on where you live a big dumping could render you immobile for a few days or even weeks or months in some cases or it could make driving down the driveway that much more interesting. Wheels in lock and high range four wheel drive all the way! Even then the road conditions could see you moving forward at a 45 degree angle.
The rain on the first night started at around midnight. The night before I was due to go to town of course! It pelted down and did a fabulous job of keeping me awake. Damian though could sleep through a 21 gun salute but not I. I laid awake for its entirity.
Over the roof of our two bedroom, transportable house is yet another roof. Quite common in the Top End for those who don't want the inhabitants of their dwelling to become baked goods. Our second roof is about a metre and a half deep on the back of the house and five metres deep with a wooden-slatted verandah on the front of the house. It's all one big structure and all made of corrugated iron so when it rains the sound is amplified ten-fold.
The lightening up here always puts on a good show... for someone. On this night it was for us. When it struck it illuminated our surrounds as far as the eye could see then returned to pitch black. A good lightening show always reminds me of Legune Station. The homestead was positioned alongside some ranges that contained iron ore which in turn attracted the lightening. One strike of lightening would make the middle of the night seem like it was as bright as the middle of the day. I used to love watching it from the breezeway of the quarters. But the rain gradually got so heavy here that night that when the lightening hit it just revealed the downpour.
The thunder was steadily rumbling above us. Always there with the occassional slightly louder boom. I waited and waited for the boom of thunder that would have me jumping out of my skin and cause my heart to skip a beat... or two.
When the rose I got myself ready and headed into town. I only got a few metres down the driveway before I thought it better continue on my way in high range four. It was a steady trip, sliding slightly in big patches of mud. The Dilinya gilgis weren't up so I thought it was going to be easy going for the rest of the drive. I was wrong. I kept travelling onto the bombing range only to be met with a large body of water covering the road. Oh dear. I slowed right down to second gear and prayed that the ground was hard enough underneath all this water for me to be able to get through. I picked out where the road was by seeing where the pea bush was sticking out of the water and where it wasn't. Steady, steady I entered the water. Not too bad. Only a little bit of a struggle towards the end. Next thing you know I was out the other side. I got through 100m of water, 2 foot deep on a relatively hard track underneath. Lucky! As soon as I got to the bitumen I took the wheels out of lock and kept on going.
The second night of rain wasn't such a downpour but the rain drops seemed huge! Like they were molten hail. It didn't rain for as long this night either. In the morning I only recorded 19.5mm of rain in comparison to the day before's 82.5mm.
This days task was to head over to the neighbours to switch off the bores and check on the animals. They brought over their work ute with a quad bike on the trailer just a few days before so I jumped in it and headed off to run these errands. I only got one kilometre down the road... till I went sideways... and got bogged. It's not easy to get out of bog with a trailer hitched. And I tried. I put small logs underneath the wheels so the tyres had something to grab. I tried getting a rocking motion up. I tried unhooking the trailer but it was too hard from being jack-knifed. All I managed to achieve was to have the ute facing the road a metre away from where I originally got bogged.
With great difficulty I unloaded the quad bike off the back and quickly noticed that one of the tyres were flat. Back to the station I went to pump up the tyre then finally I was able to continue on with my way to the neighbours place.
After half an hour with only one kilometre to go till I reached the house I came across yet another hurdle. Their creek was up, it was flowing and I had no idea how deep it was in the middle. Since I'd already got the ute bogged I had no intention of drowning the quad bike too. I decided to take the long way round.
I turned off the bores, got bitten by the dog, slightly perplexed from an attempted intimidation by the chook and wondered about the whereabouts of the cat who was supposed to be locked inside. I started questioning whether the cat that leapt out in front of me over a kilometre from the house was the one that was supposed to be inside it.
It took me 3 hours to get to the neighbours, get everything done and return home. If it wasn't so wet I wouldn't have got bogged, had to get the quad bike off the trailer without ramps or gone the long way to get all tasks completed. Damian can haul his butt out of bed at a decent time the next day that the neighbours place needs checking. Not me, my bit is SO done!

Achieving great things... like getting bogged.

Slumming it Station Style

You know you're slumming it when a horse tub becomes a bath tub. Our solar hot water service is currently on the brink. I was hoping it would be fixed by the time I returned to the station but alas it was not. So we've been braving pathetic, tepid showers but this morning I drew the line. I couldn't fix the hot water system myself so I came up with an alternative.
I was up at the crack of sparrows this morning as at half past seven we had to head over to the neighbours and I was not going over there dirty from yesterday because my bravery for cold showers had waned. So in the dark I headed over to the shed to where all my horse gear was parked and lugged a horse tub back to the house. I positioned it in a nice litte spot on the verandah and slowly filled it with the garden hose whilst boiling the kettle 4 times. It was cramped but quite nice.
I got to enjoy the morning like no other person who had ever passed through Providence ever had. Not even Skye.
The first caretakers when Providence was still at the beginning of being developed had a little girl. There was no house when they first came here, just haybales to block off the nasty winter wind. Showering for the adults was cold water coming out of a poly line but for Skye it was a warm bath in an esky filled with the water warmed on the fire. My friend who was out visiting there at the time said she was very jealous of Skye and her esky. I don't blame her!
But my little horse tub was slightly envious too. As I sat in the warm water I got to watch the sunrise cover everything with a soft, yellow glow. There was a rainbow arching across the Western sky from the rain we'd had all night. I got to watch the wallabies loiter around the house paddock nibbling on grasses, the ibis' fly over on their way to the dam and the plovers chirp on the front lawn.
Though it wasn't long before my peace was interrupted. The phone rang. It was our neighbour asking us to hold off coming over till 10am when the roads will be more dried out. Hmm, I have more time to kill! So I boiled the kettle again and got back in the tub. This time the chook came to visit me (ultimately she wanted her morning feed of bread) and Damian crawled out of bed and laughed at me. Finally the water grew cold enough for me to want to get out.
All clean and not one bit cold, until the hot water service gets fixed properly I think I'll keep slumming it in my horse tub!