Chasing Amy-Lou

On Tuesday night we had a fire.
Don’t worry though, it wasn’t an actual “my house is burning down, save the kids and that photo of Aunty Beryl” kind of fire; exciting things like that don’t happen in Marvel Loch. No, this was a pit fire. A pit fire in the bush…with alcohol!

Trine and I went to work at 5pm as usual, and the pub was positively rammed from the minute we opened the doors. Just kidding. It really wasn’t. There were however, a few shift-changers in; a good crowd of about five or six blokes, all with decent chat, and one whom my boss likes to describe as “a really good cunt”, which when translated from Aussie means he’s a very decent man indeed. Anyway, these guys were on a mission. With the prospect of not having to work until 6pm the following day, the beers were flowing, the spirits were getting thoroughly abused, and jovial banter quickly turned to talk of a fire.

Fires out in Marvel Loch are a regular occurrence among the miners, especially if debaucherous behaviour is on the cards and especially if after hours outdoor drinking is the name of the game. They usually take place a little off the main drag, not too far into the bush, and involve a pit, some wood, fire, and lots of booze.

With the idea of a Tuesday night flame festival quickly becoming a reality, we hastily shut down the bar, purchased our carry-out grog and headed down the road, carefully following our new mining friends through the bush.

When I think of a fire involving booze, I always imagine something overtly romanticised – a moonlit beach with women in bikinis, men in board shorts, free-flowing cocktails, and hedonistic dancing round a perfect little orange flame. This fire however was more akin to what one would expect on bonfire night in some sub-zero temperature country…England for example – a haphazardly constructed pile of wood, a few cans, and a group of mates all huddled together wearing bobble hats and gloves, furiously trying to keep warm by the glow of the dwindling if not slightly pathetic looking fire while tanking their cans of booze more quickly than usual.

But don’t take my aforementioned description as a sign that I thought the experience was shite, because despite my facetious ramblings, my first ‘pit fire’ in Australia was actually pretty great. There was laughter, conversation, a lot of falling over (not me by the way, I only had six beers and a gin. Promise) and it was a lot of fun getting to try something new, something authentic, and something that perhaps is not unusual for the guys and girls who work in Marvel Loch. It was also nice to mix with some of the miners in a more social capacity rather than just serving them grog and helping them get smashed.

So yeah, the fire was great. The morning after, not so much. We rose, bleary eyed at 6am on Wednesday after not nearly enough sleep in order to go yet again to ‘The Big Smoke’. Weekly trips to Merredin don’t usually happen; we’d be lucky to visit the place once a month, so this uncharacteristic journey down the road would be the last in a while and of course, we had to take advantage of it. Besides, I needed tampons.

Six long hours we spent in Merredin. Six. Let’s just put this into perspective: in a city like Melbourne you can easily while away six hours productively window shopping, hopping from one store to the next, checking out the museums and getting lost in the laneways; in Merredin, six hours feels like a stretch on death row. Ok ok, it wasn’t that bad; Trine and I had a lovely chat over coffee and we managed to get to the bank to sort a few things out, but after a slow walk around the circumference of the town which took, oh, all of twenty minutes, we were bored, and we still had an hour to kill. It did help matters somewhat that on this particular Wednesday it was sunny for a change (praise the Lord), so while we waited on a park bench for our lift back to Marvel Loch, looking like a couple out of town vagrants who clearly weren’t supposed to be there, we happily soaked up some much needed Vitamin D and had a bit of a snooze; life in the country ey, it’s so God damn rock n roll!