EVOLUTION
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(2)
The Age Of Cleverness
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It’s 1967.
He’s 28.
His year is up so he bequeaths the
moon-buggy to his mate and they move back into their old lives, finds work in a
ski-boat workshop. The place is – well, unpretentious – a scabby heap of galvo
that was once a fibrous plaster factory, perched on the edge of a cavernous
brick-clay pug-hole. But they do meticulous work, have a decent lathe, a
camshaft grinder, and a reputation. A reputation for excellence and innovation.
Speedboat and hydroplane addicts, and vintage car restorers in the know, all
bring their engines here.
Surrounded by so much high-end engineering,
he breathes in, lustily, and his hands and his head find new skills, as their
trailer-maker and engine converter-fitter. He comes to know the euphoria of
taking a pristine Holden 186 mill from its factory crate, breathing on it
gently, slipping it into a sleek 16 foot fibreglass ski boat, hearing it make
sweet music.
He goes on to be initiated into the heady
world of the two great small block V8’s – the 289 cu inch Ford and the 283 cu
inch Chevy. When he hears these two beasts sing he touches the hem of Heaven,
and he’s fired by far more sophisticated dreams than is good for him.
Just when there seems to already be bliss
at every hand, he takes over the camshaft grinder, and goes deep into the
arcane world of high-lift and long-dwell, and the boss designs their own logo
and decal and the word goes out over the high performance wire that there’s a
new player in town.
And so he rises to a whole other level of
dreaming and scheming, of wheels, wheels that once, for him, could only exist
in some distant galaxy, and he conceives of a rear-engine dragster, and the
design harmony begins to flow and the boss is so impressed he chips in a
Peugeot 203 engine and space to work after hours. The boss understands what’s
happening.
He hunts down a Volkswagen transmission and
marries it to the motor, and there seems to be no end to the new-found
cleverness that streams from his head and out of his fingers, as he fashions a
svelte frame of lightweight steel tube, with its unique (even revolutionary
many say) front end and steering and sexy wire wheels, roll cage fully to specs
that fits like a steel hoodie. And the way he shortens the Vee-Dubs half-shafts
is a joy to see, and the frame’s mountings for the power unit would be a classic
piece of work in any gas welder’s handbook. He finds it hard to believe he has
this in him. Workshop spectators are seriously awestruck. He grows noticeably
taller. Maybe a touch more arrogant.
He gets the dragster to the point where all
it needs is some decent carburation - preferably fuel injection - and a slinky
fibreglass shell, done out in jazzy ‘I’m A Serious Drag Racer’ duco of course.
But two things happen.
He runs out of play money, and he gets
steadily sucked into the world of Associations and Federations and
nitro-powered entrepreneurs and serious business management, because,
surprisingly, they ask him in, and that’s when he finds he has something of a flair
for that too. This primitive organism is surely evolving.
He leaves the ski-boat place and goes
chasing after a siren, a promiscuous siren, who promises him a successful
career in national motor racing management, salary, office, and secretary
attached, trips interstate to control and steer the frenetic energies of a
sport that is becoming the worry of the cloth-cap and driving-glove adults who
seem to believe it’s trying to push them aside, which makes them quietly
manoeuvre, bringing their toffy connections in The Establishment to bear.
He steadies the ship before it flounders,
does it so well that fifty years from now, when they themselves are the adults
and have become respectable, they will hunt him down and bestow on him “Legend
Of The Sport” (but spell his name wrong on the presentation plaque, but by then
he’s old enough and wise enough to find a laugh in just about anything).
It's around here that he learns the true
nature of moving fast, of true velocity, but not on his beautiful wheels. His
beautiful and arrogant wheels are about to come off.
< >
It’s 1969.
He’s 30.
There’s three kids now and they think
they’re doing well, so they move a touch up-market. It’s a sort of Californian
Bungalow Aus-style, in a new foothills suburb, and has a big back yard, so up
goes a double garage like a statement of permanence.
He installs the dragster, in its trailer,
but now he doesn’t have time to get back to it. So he tells himself. He will in
fact do nothing at all in this shed, and in his few quiet moments he will sense
that something is slipping through his fingers, as if he’s only passing
through, transiting to somewhere else, transiting to some-one else.
Life gets bumpy. The bawling brawling high
octane thing that has hold of his life is actually two hormone-driven teenagers
who share a deep passion for cars and superb engineering, but with significantly
different ends in mind, one aggressively active, one doggedly passive. And
they’re growing up rapidly, and no matter how well he dances, and negotiates,
and compromises, they seem intent only on pulling it all apart, as he hits the
reality wall of petty politics and the grand schemes of the money-men, who seem
to be at every hand, and he completely loses momentum, loses sight of the goals
he thought were the be-all and end-all of his new life. His fire goes out and
he steps aside.
He finds temp work in a local servo, and
he’s on his back once more, under mundane city cars that are without sex appeal
or pedigree.
So, why wouldn’t he think he’s a failure.
At career-making. At bread-winning. But the reality is, he’s actually laid the
first stone to his foundations, as a true Homo sapiens.
< >
It’s 1972.
He’s 33.
They sell up before the Bank does it for
them, go back to the bottom of the real estate ladder, start again.
It’s an 1860s rock-and-pug-walled cottage
in a small inner country town, simply four rooms in a row, lime-rubble floors,
no two window-frames quite the same, and a bucketed outside loo. It’s steeped
in time, but it’s suffering, so it’s going cheap, just block value. The locals
presume any new owners in their right minds will knock it down, build something
of value, enhance their one and only main street. But these two have nothing
but energy and practicalities, have never known how to be idle. He can fix most
things, and she – as he always tells it, with some pride – could make a home
with two quid and a piano crate, make a garden out of six rocks and a bucket of
dirt. They buy it and move in.
It's been partly derelict for some years,
the grass all around is lank, the roof leaks, and there’s bales of hay in the
“lounge”, as the owner has only been using it to doss down in on weekends, with
his mates, to escape their lives and their wives, and drinking more than is
good for them. So the rumours go.
Out the back there are ramshackle sheds and
an assortment of derelict out-buildings, on a huge block with fruit trees, from
an Age when people lived a simpler life, grew vegetables, kept chooks, ran a
cow, made their own butter. It oozes potential but little else, so in every
sense it’s time to re-build.
He buys a wheelbarrow, a post-hole digger,
and a crowbar, and they set about mending everything in sight, and for a while
they feel like pioneers, taming a frontier, creating a better world, and
there’s a simple joy in everything they do.
But the world’s realities are always just
over the other side of the fence.
When the last of their money starts to wane
he casts about for a job, but the idea of laying under a car’s belly again for
no more than a living wage fills him with a weird kind of dread. It’s like he’s
left his primitive roots behind, and now he needs to find a new version of
himself, a more civilised one.
So he goes back to school, and against all
odds and the narrow imaginings of his youth, he strives to become – of all
things – a Qualified Beancounter. And, as it turns out, his personality makes
him ideally suited – he’s a bit pedantic, leans towards the obsessive, can
juggle numbers, and imagination is a turbine constantly humming in his head.
And as he sees it, Double-entry Accounting and Manufacturing Costing are just
other forms of Engineering. But a bloody sight cleaner. With a wider career
potential.
One of the small local wineries takes him
on as Office Manager cum Bookkeeper cum Cellar Door Salesman, with an office
and a staff of three, and damned if it doesn’t pay well into the bargain. And
that’s when he feels it, feels his feet on the first rung of a whole new
ladder, like he’s a Professional at last, a Professional Something. Who shaves
every day. Wears a tie. Has clean fingernails. Drinks some of the world’s best
wines.
At weekends he ploughs on in his old
calling, of Home Handyman, even cranks that up a gear, because he has to,
because he feels himself being challenged, by this sweet old cottage that’s on
its knees and deserves better. What it really needs is one person with a degree
in Civil Engineering, and one person with degrees in Agriculture and Domestic
Science. But they step up like superheroes, because when they’re in sync and in
harmony, these two have always been a formidable team.
He installs a complete septic tank sewerage
system, resurrects the “bathroom”, adds a flush toilet, resuscitates the hot
water contraption, straightens and paints all the verandah posts,
re-whitewashes the walls, fixes loose roof iron, rejigs the gutters, builds in
the back porch, ceremoniously knocks down the outside loo, puts up his first
pergola. She waves her wand and the inside of the old place hums and shines, so
they set about landscaping the back yard.
Her green fingers go about their God-given
magic, and they dig holes and hump boulders, and to cap it all off he carves a
house name into a chunk of redgum slab and hangs it out over their new
post-and-rail front fence. Like job done. Norman Rockwell Downunder. Tourists
start taking photos in passing.
And while all of this is going on, the
dragster, in its trailer, is parked in what passes for the main shed, and one
day he stops to take a breath, and feels an odd guilt, like he’s neglected
something that also deserved better. He sets about a major outbuildings remake,
turns the shambles of lean-tos and add-ons into one large garage and workshop,
fixes the doors, installs his tools in old cupboards and on shelves, lays a
massive concrete floor, as if he’s creating a new foundation.
He fiddles about with the dragster, sits in
it, tries to get enthused, but can’t, and the large trailer is just a damn
nuisance, takes up too much space. He packs the whole thing up and sells it,
feels only an odd sense of relief when it pulls out of the drive, like an
unburdening, and truly knows another Time has ended.
It’s then that he casts about, to fill the
empty space, and a mate gives him Kris Kristofferson as a gift, and something
shifts in his head and a big chunk of it will never be the same again, because
he grew up on ‘40s and ‘50s music, didn’t have time for the ‘60s, but the ‘70s
music of the living breathing singer/songwriters, with all the lyrics of life
attached, surrounds him here, and they stab him clean through the heart, make
him think he can be eighteen again.
But what the fool doesn’t understand is
that Time has no reverse gear, and you only get one shot at each Age.
He grows a beard, learns guitar, buys a
motorbike, reads Henry Miller and Krishnamurti, and tells himself he’s found
wings, and starts thinking about making new things, this time with words. Even
though he doesn’t understand it yet, what he’s really found is the shed in his
head, where there is no limit to what can be made.
But then, like Icarus, he flies too close
to the sun and he and his innocence crash, and burn, and on the ground he’s
stoned from all sides, and rightly so, because he’s been a bastard and a total
fuckwit. But, don’t judge him too harshly, he’s simply an evolving member of
the species, but one, for the moment, who is lost in a wilderness that has no
signposts.
But he’s not completely without currency,
as he has attributes that at least the Business World values, and so he’s
saved, saved by that rarest of beings, one of Nature’s True Gentlemen, who has
been watching from the sidelines all this time, and knows there’s good bits in
this wreckage, and steps in, and helps him to his feet, and tells him to be a
man.
< >
It’s 1979.
He’s 40.
The career part of him is flourishing but
the rest is still in the wildwoods. He’s well respected for his skills with
costing and calculating, and sorting crucial manufacturing data into such
orderliness that he can even predict the future, so he’s given a transfer to
Head Office. It’s back in the city, where the two of them opt for anonymity
amid some genteel old-suburb respectability, while they lick their wounds.
There’s a small toolshed already in the
back yard and he sets up his Home Handyman stuff in there. But it’s a touch
claustrophobic so he buys a garden-shed kit, then sort of cannibalises it, puts
it on top of the other, and adds louvre windows up high, tells himself
it makes it feel like a “studio”. Sort of. It’s as if he’s trying to get closer
to something in his head, but for the moment he’d be hard pressed to see the
connection.
He starts his new round of rebuilding with
two pergolas, but big buggers, one attached to the back of the house, covered
with glory vines, the other one out under the huge old nectarine tree. Once
again they are as an act of permanence, of good intentions.
But his “studio” in the back yard does
nothing for him. It’s his office at his new workplace that now becomes his true
studio, as he’s been head-hunted, and there’s nothing more uplifting to the
soul than being specifically sought out on the grapevine.
His new office has no windows, but
somewhere along the way he’s learnt to see through walls, and every morning he
starts early, and in this haven goes off into the past for half an hour, back
to when he was a kid, when his life was simple and he understood his position
in the universe. He’d touched this place before, in his moon-buggy, out in the
back country where the world was wide, and hugely uncomplicated, and the
distant ranges were an exquisite shade of pale blue. His heart place.
And so he begins to truly write, because
the genie has been coaxed out of the lamp and is never going back, and now
shows him how to write with a clear mind, to manufacture stories out of the
words laying about in the storage boxes of his memory.
And in this way he finds the rest of
himself again, and more or less how to love himself again, and so becomes the
two people he was always meant to be, one word at a time. It’s what sheds should
be for.
© T. R. Edmonds 2025
{ continued... }