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2a. The Conception, Birth and Life of Death

Shall I insert here a long section here regarding the founding and, later, the growth of The Communion Islands? Sure, I could do that. Isn’t living a lively industry?

We could spend some time talking about the building of buildings, towns and such, and then a formal section about transportation and communication, a glossary of local words with a neat historical index, a clever investigation of agriculture and pesceculture, fishing that is, a typology of island employments from sweeper to builder to butcher and baker, a nod to the arts, with a thumping local dance routine, a rollicking yarn about the power we have generated from the falling waters of streams and rivers. Perhaps for effect show the young clerk weaving himself through the scene, full of his own impending demise.

Dramatically, we could have Death flying around the islands in her shiny black cape, her memory of her own birth floating on her shiny black shoulder like a sprite of forest sunlight, perhaps a medical degree in her pocket from some prestigious school in London or Berlin or fine old Prague, to make that somber connection with her dear old ma whose body was undoubtedly preserved in a dusty glass case in a oak lined room (I make this up, but it can be imagined).

I like that idea, actually. I think if a woman comes to an island and brings about something, anything that would have otherwise not existed, something that her presence invests and inflects and bears boldly onto our island landscape, then she should be lauded for that effort.

Oh, I am a great believer in life, don’t get me wrong. I celebrate the origins of people, the foundations of civilizations, the real as well as the mythological essences that thread through island undergrowth and make their way into rocks and so forth.

“Without life,” I say, “where would we be?”

It’s true. And, of course, Death had connections to island life, whatever else might be said of her past absence. Death, you might say, presupposed life. If I were to be philosophic about it, Death was the dedicated daughter of life.

Excuse me while I historically digress! What we had here in the islands was like living in a communal home in which was located the vast hidden foundations of the universe, among the bubbled grey mortar, that is, the strong and hefty regal red beams, the creatures that thrived on the pure earth of entirely covered human reason. It’s impossible not to admire the importance of all that, as it was. It’s impossible not to relate to the human importance of our living foundations. Without which . . .

There’s a story told here about a wharf—what some people, in some parts of the world, apparently refer to as “a pier”, and others elsewhere in the world apparently refer to as “a jetty”. Strange. No matter! This wharf-pier was over on the North side of the islands near Yool Bay and Lower Yool. A Yooling jetty it was, regardless.

This was a wharf over which much timber was travelling. By which I mean, an off shoot of some famous imperial Timber Company, traders in timbers for several crusty generations, had sent in visiting teams who were working strappingly over there, bringing down from our pristine higher forests great swathes of blackwood and thropthorn, acres of brewt and those enormous philfond trunks, stripped already of their poisonous and spiky and somewhat historic branches. Those traveling timbergetters used their imported oxen in those days, not horses; and certainly not jigging trucks, whose painted, motorized growls were still some years away.

Two white sailed and foreign ships had been loading for what was said to have been almost two days. Sunburnt visiting men were moving back and forth, steering oxen teams of eighteen or twenty, up into the forest, the crack of their leather whips and the crunch of trees under wooden wheels was all you could hear. Night as well as day. That and the oxeneers’ shouts:

‘Whackah!”

“Fell yack!”

“Fooooowhist!”

The language of those traveling oxeneers is now a lost piece of history.

All day and all night. You can imagine the volume as mighty imperialing team upon sinewy team dragged down from our closest hills each log, the conjoined twins of blackwood, each bright bushel of brewt. Onto their ships all this was going. Along the wharf. Being lowered on ropes to the jetty.

And all would have been fine, or as fine as it might have been. Today you could probably visit courthouses in other parts of the world that are lined in the swirls of blackwood that were brought down from Upper Yool at that time. Convicted thieves in Germany, perhaps, and Sweden maybe, where crime is almost unheard of but when it is heard is monstrous (something of the northern heritage, some say), would at this very moment be hanging their condemned heads in the presence of those swirls and feeling from their radiating wisps the depth of their malfeasance.

You could go out now and purchase from an antique store in Chipping (near prim Piping and Lively Limping, in lovely outer London town, down by the parlor and the palace and other things), china cabinets of fine yellow brewt, one join melding so perfectly with another (because the brewt from that part of The Communion Islands was, indeed, the most usable brewt of all). You would barely even see where one length ended and another began. And you could still detect the aroma of camphor in the wood. You could watch as the Senate in Silesia was meeting around the government’s giant philfond table and know on its sturdy legs an entire Silesian population could be held up against the flow and tempests of time and economics.

But all this is impossible, because of lack of foundation, an absence of true life. To cut a long story short, that wharf collapsed.

Those traveling timbergetters had built their structure on nothing. Nothing was sunken before it, and nothing was built on nothing to create, despite the physical appearance, absolutely nothing. That structure was little more than a bunch of sticks jabbed determinedly into our grey ocean mud. By the end of the first day it began to sway, back and forth; but those crazy sailors only took this as evidence of a rising Communions sea and simply worked faster, brought more wood to the wharf, continued on regardless.

The captains of the two ships—the Prince Leonard and the Clipper Monteroy, so called - were asleep in their mahogany cabins. It is said (By whom? Who knows!) that their plan was to sail right through the next days to deliver their loads to their faraway homes. There’s a nice turn of phrase! The swaying wharf only reminded their slumbering be-hatted selves of the lolling coast around Och O Loon Reach and the outer (or is it Inner?) Hebrides, where there are no reefs and there are no calms, and the water is abundant and icily welcoming. Chances are they were dreaming, so content they must have been with their plans.

But that wharf with no life, built on nothing, had other ideas. So it collapsed. And it took those ships down with it.

First that Monteroy went down, and then that Leonard was sucked into that swirling, wet, distant, grasp. The collapsing wharf took several teams of sailors too, who had stopped on the plank walk in the early evening, no doubt to contemplate their transient work and, no longer sending their huffing steam into the night air, were soon sent plummeting toward their ultimate destination in our Communion Islands sea.

Some of those visiting ax-wielding sailors did survive, though. Back on the land. But with their ships sunk and being hundreds of tangled miles from our then small township of Panapoon, and even the tiny outposts at Store Cove and Yawl. All succumb to deprivations we today can only begin to contemplate.

We still find their bleached skeletons propped against philfonds and down beside babbling brooks, to this day. And why? Why is that? Because theirs was a modern construction built with no attention to origins, no address to the life of the Communion Islands which, not to put too fine a point on it, was all around them. Had those fine trees they were busily felling been given their voice they could have told those visitors plenty.

“Live!” they’d have said. “Life!”

And: “While we trees may not speak, we just as well could as we declare what might be, or how existence grows.”

Something like that. Lord knows, I wouldn’t deem to speak on their behalf.

Likewise, had the redstone cliffs of The Yool been consulted, instead of just ignored, except by the Communions Golden Gulls that nest there and hatch their goldlings in sun kissed seagrass beds, and feed them on errant crabs and string weed and so forth, they could have reeled out enough evidence to build an entire stable metropolis. But no!

So what, I wonder more generally, of all the travelers and chance merchants who have made their way here to the Communions over time, the fortune hunters, the speculators, the opportunists? What is their role in our story?

If we each are not inherently evil - and my evidence suggests this has to be true: that we homo sapiens are good by inclination or inherited substance and it is only circumstances that . . . —suffice it then, that Death already had her assigned role too, and a no less human one, I might add.

I think of her there in my small plane seat, tall black pompadour beneath a bright green bergère hat in that case, turned toward the rattling window, her shoulders narrow and bony but undoubtedly sturdy. I hear her voice lassoing the sand around Panapoon and the slippery wet rocks of that mighty shore. I see her firm dark index finger pointing down at the Burdekin hills as I tip the plane on its aft wing and swing us slowly, elegantly, to the West, me in the sun and bat-loving Death in the shadowy dark.

I see her stride, her black case bulging abruptly, the suited men she meets, their earnest discussions, the cusp of hands, the furrowing of brows, her radar eyebrows twitching, her looks to the horizon as we stand on the edge of the runway and a tropical storm teems now over us. I think of the young clerk and his mountain dwelling family below. I think of our new town buildings being built down by the sea and up in the mountains.

I could pretend this can be captured in preliminary sketches and serious meetings: “Mining at Cuuk Town”, “Establishing a Tourist Center at Panapoon”, “The Future of Spiny Lobsters in the Bay of Constance”, “An Airstrip for Residents of Finch Hole”. The inevitable zonings and committees, the issuing of contracts, island developments near and far (such as in Cloud Mountain, cloudily and Old Town, venerably, and Cape Constable), the digging of clay, the bringing of stone, the news stories, “Communion Islands Rise”, ‘Houses Built in the Hills”, “Young Future”, “Healthy Here in Shelton Valley”, the rising façades of our futures, the coral shell crusts for the seafront benches, pink and black and white, the peaked arch thropthorn doors of the rising hotels, the smoke of tree loggers, the seafront small against the now towering cococan marble of the Regional Council Offices, flaked gold and deep blue as it is, the white brick, the iron gates of and, the basalt foundation stone of a brand new elementary school.

I could describe this languid, stumbling rising of a future, arriving day by day, week by week, month by awe-provoking month. But I best be reminded, as others have been reminded, that we are confronting Death.