THE OWL AND THE PUSSY CAT

THE OWL AND THE PUSSY CAT

It's a quiet and starry night tonight.  Its 11h21 and I walk slowly around the garden at peace with myself and the world.  It feels like I'm the only one living in this house now.

In fact I'm only one of five who lives here presently.  The boy has gone to stay with his friends, the lost ones, who roam the empty spaces of their souls looking for a secret, which is themselves.

The young girl is lying on a mattress with her friends at the bottom of the garden, waiting for stars to fall from the sky.  The boarder who moved in today has gone away for the night and left her little girl gazing at the stars too.

I hear the chirpy crickets singing their nightly serenade and in the background REM is singing "Find me a River'.

I found me a river. It's at the bottom of my garden and how fine it is to go rowing there on a warm summers evening.

Two young men that we met today also found themselves a river.  A permanent one, a resting place.  Navy boys they were, thought they would go rowing too.  They procured a sturdy green vessel from the young girl and off they set promising to return in n a while.  They never did, well not alive they didn’t.

It's a general misconception that because the Navy goes to sea in great big boats every day, that the sailors can swim.  Well they can’t'!   Not the Indian sailors.  They say white boys can't jump – maybe so, but Indian boys can't swim.

"The owl and the pussycat went to sea,

in a beautiful pea green boat,

They took lots of money and plenty of honey,

wrapped up in a ten pound note."

The water was slightly choppy and not being river sailors or red Indians, they capsized the canoe midstream.  Panicking and frightened, they couldn't get back in the canoe and floundered about in the water.

Noticing their predicament, the young girl's friend, Gus, swam out to help them.  The one young man started swimming for shore as best he could, and assuming he would be fine, Gus turned his attention on the other, but he was nowhere to be seen, he had slipped silently beneath the water.  Thinking he had perhaps managed to get back into the canoe, Gus continued swimming and reached the canoe, but saw there was no one inside.  Unable to find the sunken man, he held onto the canoe and started pulling it in to shore and noticed then that the other young man had disappeared also.  He too had silently slipped beneath the water in exhaustion.

By this time a naval vessel was in the water, but could do nothing to location their lost friends, and also being non-swimmers, were not eager to launch themselves overboard in an attempt to search under the surface of the water.  So they too came ashore and radioed for help.

I was on my way home just about then.  As I got to the little bridge over the stream, I noticed a vehicle behind me towing a boat.  Red lights flashing and travelling at a dangerous speed for the dirt roads, they soon overtook me.

As they passed, I noticed a sign on the side of the vehicle, which read "Aquatic Rescue Unit".  I didn’t panic even though the young girl was at the water, I just thought they were using the red light as an excuse to drive like maniacs, and once they had convinced me that they had right of way, they would switch them off.

But by the time I got to the end of the road, I could still see the flashing red above the dust cloud and realized this was the real thing, perhaps I should panic.

I got to the boathouse and saw there was a small crowd milling about at the water's edge.  Gus was standing talking to Matt, the Ranger in Charge, and a couple of Navy personnel and the young girl came running over to meet me and recount the real life drama that had just taken place.

Within a couple of minutes, the police sniffer dog was put into a boat and taken onto the water to show us all that what man can't do, dogs can.  Once the dog had nosed out the exact search area, buoys were placed in the water as reference points and then it was the turn of the four divers to do their bit.  Two from the Navy and two from the fire unit.

Just as the sun sunk behind the hills, the first body was located and immediately retrieved and placed into a body bag whilst still in the water.  The body was then loaded onto the rescue boat and brought ashore.

We were all told to move away when they came ashore and loaded the poor young man into the police van.  I didn’t get to see who he was, closed up as he was in his shiny silver body bag.

I came home then, there was nothing any of us could do besides lend them a boat to die from, and that we had done.  Matt asked me, with a smile on his face, whether it was the same canoe that I had used a couple of years ago to steer myself across the water in the middle of the night.  "Yes", I said, "but I didn't drown."

Then the Navy man in charge, Andy, asked if we had given permission for the canoe to be used?  "Well, yes we had, but we didn't know that sailors can't swim!"  He just said, that if these boys want to go out in the water and do the things they know they can't do, then they must just get on with it.

It's too dark now, in spite of the clear starry skin, to continue the search.  No doubt they will be up early in the morning to continue their search for the second young man.

They say the body will surface in two days if they don't find it before then.

I went for a drive the next day to have a look at the water, and I see the lads have their flag flying at half-mast and the camp was very quiet.  A half-mast flag always saddens me, especially when it was some one that you knew, however briefly.

Methinks it's time to put two notches in the sturdy green canoe!

Cally

30 September 2000