MIKAELA NYMAN is a Wellington prose writer and mother of baby twins, who more recently has discovered the challenges of short stories and poetry. Previously she has had a biography, research on democratisation and civil society, as well as newspaper articles published.



IT’S SNOWING. The day is still young but heating up fast, heading towards forty degrees, but outside it is snowing. Big white blobs hit the cracked windscreen; bounce once, twice and off they go, caught by the jetstream funnelling around the Holden ute. Is it still a jetstream when you sit in a car; don’t you need to be in a plane to talk about jetstreams? We want to know, but there’s no way to google ‘jetstream’ at this moment. What did people do before Google? We argue over life BG and which one of us googled first, recalling a search engine called Altavista, ultimately united in a sneaking suspicion that we’re becoming dumbed down by the minute. There’s no memory required anymore, everything is a click away. A quarter century beyond Orwell’s utopia, perhaps this is what Big Brother was all about. Google. Wikipedia. We’ve been expecting the invasion from some other direction, vigilant about anything even remotely resembling data matching, resisting every attempt to systematically connect our digital shadow to our real life footprint. Ignoring what was growing in our midst. Now we blindly believe what someone else tells us, just because it pops up on our computer screen. The kind of truth once associated with the printed word and with TV news, before CNN and Iraq.
We stretch out our hands – identical hands covered with a myriad of fawn freckles – and try to catch the white fluff mid-air. Hands that know how to shear a sheep, how to pull onions from the sticky soil, but less adept at waterplay. Only the fingerprints separate the first born from the second born. Three minutes apart. That’s the furthest apart we’ll ever be. Boyfriends have come and gone; defeated by the closeness of souls, their own unwillingness to let another person share the happiness. Not even Anna..., but we won’t go there. We’re done with boyfriends and their stupid gifts.
Every time we catch the soft white clouds we scream in excitement. ‘This is as close to snow we’ll ever get!’ Harvesting machines tower like little houses on the prairie on either side of the road. In their wake the cotton fields lie naked, stripped bare of their bounty. Knee-high shrubs, dead to the eye, stretch in endless lines from the road towards the beyond where the blue sky and the red earth join. Between Roma and Chinchilla there are miles and miles of cotton fields and the road, straight as a yardstick, stretches forever into a landscape that a hundred miles from here will look exactly the same. There’s a certain amount of comfort in that thought: that some things won’t change. Anna would’ve liked that. She would’ve perched between us, her big sisters, Miss Muffet Chatterbox with a stubborn cherry on top. Not a second of peace, for sure, for sure. We could’ve gotten used to it. But no. Lured by tales of surfers and beaches. As if. In a corner of the country where there’s not a beach within a two hundred mile radius, where rivers appear on the heels of rain but mostly remain ghostly veins on a map.
Part of the road is a one-strip road. Whenever there’s a meeting vehicle approaching, we have to veer off the road, only two wheels remaining on the tar. Lucky there aren’t any deep ditches here. We make it a sport to see who can slow down the least, maintaining maximum speed as we veer off the road to the left, changing drivers after every meeting. Unfortunately they’re few and far in-between. Our screams and laughter fill the car; sunny minds on a sunny day, hurtling through our own winter wonderland. We can almost speak of swimming and inflatable crocodiles. ‘That day...’ would be all that’s required and we’d both know what would follow next.
At that moment we spot a red dust cloud rising in front of us, growing by the second. ‘Road train,’ we shout and start looking for a good spot to pull off the road. Road trains have no mercy. They’re a bit like rivers, crocodiles and boyfriends in that they can lash out with their tails and before you know, you’ve had it. We pull over and turn off the engine.
‘Thought they weren’t supposed to come further than Miles.’
‘No, the cut-off is closer to Toowoomba, towards Oakley. By that hill where the Farmers’ Market is held end of the month.’
We sit in silence holding hands – innocent hands with fingernails bitten down to the quick – awaiting the fast approaching road train.
‘We should’ve pulled over further.’
‘No go. There’s a ditch.’ And we laugh at the ludicrousness of someone having dug a ditch, out here, where the ballet of dust spirals never ceases.
‘Nine-eight-seven-six,’ we’re furiously closing the windows, turning off the fan and cranking up the radio, ‘three-two-ONE!’ And then the road train thunders by, only four trailers long since we’re close to settlements like Miles and Chinchilla. Still, the dust cloud is impenetrable, gravel pelts the ute. While we press our feet against the windscreen to avoid fatal chinks, we sing at the top of our voices for as long as it takes for the truck and trailers to pass. Then we collapse in a fit of laughter and wait for the dust to settle so we can see the road and open the windows again. Even the hot Westerly coming straight from the desert is better than stewing in our own juices in this tin box. It’s on days like this, with the hot Westerly blowing like a giant hair-dryer, extracting every ounce of moisture from your body, that the brain goes soft. Before you realise it, you’re severely dehydrated. You’ll do silly things like using floaties on a farm pond, green with algae.
Soon we’re on our way. We have to get to Miles by midday. There’s a shop just off the main street that sells inflatable toys. We have to convince the owner to get rid of those. Out here, they’re no good. Not even Google can teach farmers’ kids to swim.