Part-time USM student, Dana Artz, writes about her travels in Australia where she is currently living and working as a waitress.
Australians call their country Oz-as in that exotic land peopled by Dorothy, Toto and the Tin Man. After just two weeks here, it’s clear that I’m not in Kansas anymore. First of all, they say the toilets flush the opposite direction. Second (and perhaps more important, considering the nature of this column) there are no white pines and chickadees. Instead, I see huge palm fronds waving in the wind and giant white cockatoo-their yellow crests silhouetted against a blue sky.
Yesterday I visited the rainforest. I stepped off the bus into another world. The mass and texture of the air was immediate and unavoidable-punctuated with the sweet smell of wild ginger. The buzz of so many bugs echoed off the leaves. And the colors: Crayola makes a forest green crayon-but it is not and never could be, the green of the forest. There aren’t enough crayons in the world to even begin to sketch the myriad shades of the foliage.
It’s the rainy season here. Everything is growing. The shadows of the forest floor are alive with glorious emerald fungi. I was hoping to find a whichity grub squirming through the pungent humus. Whichities are five inch long white grubs. Originally aborigines ate them. Today, tourists like me gobble up these protein rich grubs along with other authentic Aussi fare like farm raised kangaroo and crocodile. I didn’t find any grubs. But I did see rainbow lorikeets and Ulysses blue butterflies flashing their iridescent and many colored wings between the leaves. Banana, mango and eucalyptus abound, forming the second tier of the rain forest. Lorikeets cackle in the coffee branches. Their blunt beaks first pluck and work over the red fruit, then the birds spit out the cleaned beans. Originally all coffee was shade grown. Towering above the coffee and the lorikeets is the canopy. Teak, mahogany and other rain tree leaves weave together into a kaleidoscope of green. Hanging ferns and looping vines dangle down. If there ever was a Tarzan, he might have lived here in the northeastern corner of Australia.
Local Australians jog around me as I continue down a path literally paved in gold if you consider the price of shade grown coffee these days. Not three feet off the trial I see a brush turkey with huge yellow feet and a fiery red bald head. Its blue rimmed eyes glint out at me and I stare back. Three joggers pass. They run through the eucalyptus grove without even glancing up from the path to check for koala. Maybe they’re looking for grubs but I think not. More likely they’re calculating how many more minutes they have to run before they burn off their sticky-bun breakfast or maybe they’re planning what to wear to the pub that night.
How many times have I run around Casco Bay or through the wooded trails in Cumberland’s Twin Brook Park without admiring the cormorants drying their wings on a sunny rock or the fragile stems of Indian pipe poking up though the leaf litter after a rain? Maine has amazing sights and smells and sounds too. We have the snowy white death angel mushroom-one of the deadliest species in the world. We have yellow-shafted flickers whose feathers flash as brightly as any lorikeet’s. We have wild turkeys and moose and iridescent blue tree swallows. We have palliated wood peckers whose “Ka-Ka-Ka” reverberates through our forests. And we have paths of golden balsam needles that smell so good in the sun. These are our everyday backyards-the blur out the window as we drive to the mall. But to Australians our back yards are exotic-craggy granite mountains studded with wind-stunted pines are where they want to holiday.
Upon learning that I’m from Maine, an Australian asked me, “What’s it like up there? Do you have rain forests and all?” When I said no he then asked, “So do you have polar bears then?” To be wonderful does something have to be exotic? Traveling to the other end of the earth has opened up my eyes. Coming home, I am determined to keep them open. I want to see our forests and lakes. I want to hear our loons and to smell our marsh roses.