with shallow water spreading in translucent, jade-green fi ns between them. The crocodiles sleep on the warm sand just above the surf, deadly and serene.
Inland, forested bands of sand ridges dissect the grasses and flats. Low ridges appear and disappear across the plain, sections of old waterways left a few feet higher than the surrounding country after millennia of erosion. Tall waving grasses sweep several feet high in faded gold between open forests, brackish lagoons, and murky bogs. Saltwater mangroves line the coast and saline rivers; freshwater mangroves grow on stick legs along the swamps. Water lilies raise white and purple palms in the lagoons in rare, delicate gestures. Sea wind blows in from the coast, cool on the winter mornings. Sea eagles haunt the line between sand and sea while wallabies fidget and nibble and bounce, a foot tall and easily frightened. Huge lizards—goannas—prowl the scrub and snakes trace wandering lines into the sand.
Deeper still, the forest country begins, a savanna of tall bloodwood trees, weeping coolibah, broad-leaved cabbage gums, white-trunked ghost gums, and shorter tea trees. A year turns the grass between them from a lush green to a bleached brown.
There are only two seasons here, and there is no mistaking which is which.
The wet thickens the air with heat and moisture until it bleeds into drops, the pounding monsoon storms turning the country into a hammered sheet of water—half flood, half ocean. Thundering herds of clouds give the sky more topography than the land has known for eons. As the rain falls, the sea invades as far as it can reach, and the crocodiles follow. Animals crowd onto the jungled sand ridges, which afford them only a few inches of protection above the surface of the water. Violent cyclones crack the trees, and animals huddle against the rain. Many don’t escape. Roads become impassable, and the mail plane can rarely land. Mangoes ripen and fall in rotting layers on the lawns. Heat turns viscous and the shallow sea of rain and gulf rises under the metal stilts of houses, isolating the inhabitants for months at a time.
Eventually the rains stop, and not a drop falls for nine months. Water recedes and mud hardens slowly, along with remnants of dead vegetation and animals. For a shuddering moment, the country blazes in neon green. Small flowers bloom. Then the green follows the water, receding, the sun bleaching the savanna. Grasses dry into a dead sea. Dust releases from the clay-hold, ready to scatter with any hint of wind. The sky reaches an unobstructed, piercing blue and haze rings the edges. The sun shifts imperceptibly, warmth and light losing their tone. A subtle chill invades the night. Few clouds tear against the thorny crown of stars or temper the incessant sky. Months in the dry, like those of the wet, stretch on and on, demanding either patience or surrender. All weather intercepts and seems to pass right through the skin.
When I was twelve I quit school and began working as a ranch hand on rough-country mountain ranches in Arizona. More than a decade later, when I learned of North Australian cattlemen and their strange lives on the edge of an edge, I thought that my years on horseback might have prepared me for the extremes of wilderness they call home. At the least, they sparked a longing in me for a place that was wilder and more remote than what I had known. And because I was more at home in a sleeping bag under the stars than among people and had a driving motivation to be away, beyond borders clear to me then, I decided to travel to their country.
I wrote to my great-uncle’s wife’s stepmother’s cousin, who lived in Central Queensland. Tara responded, eventually, with enthusiasm. She was pregnant with her first child, and her husband needed help in the “muster,” or roundup, of cattle. I could ride her horses and stay as long as I wanted.
I flew to Central Queensland and landed in the land of kangaroos and billabongs and coolibahs. I worked there for a month, and in exchange, the small family bought me a plane ticket to Cairns to see the Great Barrier Reef. This plane was a tiny passenger plane that serviced the Aboriginal towns in North Queensland. On the return trip I simply got off in one of these towns, Normanton, and from there kept moving north, farther toward the edges of that harsh flatland. I was female and not yet twenty-five, and I traveled alone.
The path I took would eventually lead deep into that world at the edge of wildness. It would forever crease strange lines into my skin. I made arrangements to work for a season as a ringer, or ranch hand, on a thousand-square-mile cattle station called Stilwater that lay northwest of Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Stilwater Station would be the beginning of the end of my journey.
Stilwater Station
THE PLANE WAS A SMALL PIPER that made weekly runs to several outback stations carrying mail and sometimes passengers. The desert we had just crossed still rose and fell within me as the pilot handed my backpack across, riding boots strapped to the outside. The moment I turned away, dust, heat, and light assailed my body and my mind. I stretched my neck to ease the tightening in my throat, blinked, and saw a cluster of buildings not far away. A figure in a stockman’s hat climbed out of a truck that was apparently waiting for me. This was Angus, the station manager. Short and heavy on the hoof, he ambled over and took my hand in his grip. He had a wide wrinkled face, and he eyed me with reserved suspicion.
“Angus Sheridan,” he muttered.
“My name is Rafael. Nice to meet you.”
He indicated I should get in the truck, and took a sack of mail from the pilot in exchange for a few gruff pleasantries. I turned back to watch the plane gather speed, lift, and take with it my only chance of escape. Angus did not bother to say anything more as we crossed the short distance to the station compound kitchen and Claire, the other half of management. She had wispy graying hair cropped against her neck and wore a plain blue denim shirt and skirt. She nodded and turned back inside with the mailbag Angus handed her. I would be their responsibility for a few months at least, and they had little sense for my use. I too was unclear about what I could do, so far from anything I had ever known.
Angus showed me to a small yellow house facing the lagoon at the edge of the compound—a gesture of subtle, unannounced generosity: a space to myself. I arranged my clothes in a drawer, dusted the spiderwebs, rubbed rust from the sinks with a rag, and called it home. My meager belongings didn’t even take up the space of one room in the two-room bunkhouse: boots, a few pairs of jeans, and shirts. A wooden veranda, perched just off the ground with the rest of the house to keep it above the summer floods, extended out back, overlooking the brackish lagoon.
I lay down on the old mattress, which released a faint smell of mice, and stared up at the low wooden ceiling. Faded blue paint flecked from the sheeting. Claire would be serving a meal in the kitchen, Angus had said, though at that moment I had no desire to meet any of them. I had little enough to protect me from what would happen next, and, though I had chosen to come here, I was stuck in the middle of the outback. Stilwater Station lay beyond me on all sides, reaching for what might as well have been forever in all directions. The immensity I had sought out brought nothing like solace now.
A section of coastline thirty miles long between the mouths of the Powder and Solomon Rivers defines the western boundary of Stilwater. But in summer, when the ocean moves inland and the flooding freshwater pushes a slurry of mud and land out to sea, who is to say where that line really lies? The eastern end is more clear-cut: a rusted, barbed-wire fence, worn through in places by the corrosive tea tree branches, running a semi-straight course from one river to the other.
The rivers form the other boundaries, the Powder to the south and the Solomon to the north—the S of its name a suggestion of the river’s track across the flat landscape. Stilwater lies in suspense between, its borders ephemeral as the rivers seek out more intriguing courses through the flat savanna. They loop and twist and eventually touch the gulf, two steely blue serpents, so perfect in their meandering that from the air they suggest an artist’s hand at work. Maps show them running straight courses directly to the sea. I decided that the cartographers in this country had never ventured this far; no river here had such a focus, no river in this country was so honest. The result is a hypothetical rectangle of about one thousand square miles.
Stilwater has been a cattle station as long