Marysville

We finally got up there: Marysville. I put it off all this time because I wasn't sure if I could cope with what I would see and my reaction to it. It had quite a substantial amount of value to me. My partner used to get up at 6:30 in the morning to wait on tables up there. I'd been going there regularly for the full seventeen years I'd lived in the Yarra Valley and used to dream of moving up there to live. In some ways, it was a kind of idealized utopia for me -a higher, almost archetypal dream place that I aspired to. A piece of heaven in the clouds.

I had already taken a few trips around the valley and the fire damage I had seen was minimal compared to what I knew Marysville to be, and even that was enough to shake me up. Although the fire was long dead, the path it had left was like the orb of a ghost. You could see where the fire had skipped and chosen its path as if it were almost a being with thought and intent. I worried that the full decimation of Marysville would be too much for me. I'd hoped to wait a full year, when the township and nature was beginning to thrive again.

I was also worried about the reaction of locals. Some local business owners were begging us to go back up, but there were hostile reactions to the idea of tourists on the news, and I could not blame some people for feeling that way. Sure enough, on the drive up we were honked off the road by a young guy in a four wheel drive who gave us a look of daggers as he passed.

But I had stayed away for so long out of respect in the first place and now I had a reason to be there. I wanted to see first hand for myself, what I may possibly find myself in one day. I do not want to be completely unprepared if that day ever happens. I wanted to look at the orb of the ghost and try and understand its movements, if that's even possible. It was study, it was understanding, it was resolution. It was imperative to my training, in my own mind, to take the advantage of seeing first hand the worst ravages of a fire before I began to fight them.

In Narbethong we saw a tree still smouldering, eleven weeks on. It astounded us.

The truth is, I dreaded siting Marysville the whole way up, but I felt nothing once I got there, because it was not Marysville anymore. My brain could not grasp that I was even looking at Marysville. Marysville was somehow still out there, with its lolly shop and beautiful church and motorbike jumping out of the cafe wall, existing in a parallel universe - perfect and complete and idyllic. I looked out my car window and did not understand, and was glad that I could not understand.

I was happy to see the hotel on the corner had survived. My partner and I often talked about going there for a honeymoon. I remember the sheets on the line out the back that would flutter in the golden light, the sound of the nearby creek and the trees we shaded ourselves under.

Now it was nothing more than a dirty, ashy, muddy field of nothing but fenced off areas. It really was as if a bomb had been dropped, "plonk" onto it.

There was no way of understanding this fire, or studying it. Some places were so burned out that they were still nothing more than bare dirt and tree trunks like giant sticks of charcoal. At training we were told how to look for wet gullies, drains, fallen trees or logs or rocks to shelter under or behind if ever caught on foot in a fire, but it was starkly apparent that there would have been no way of surviving this fire in any of those ways.

Still, to our amazement, houses stood that the mind told you shouldn't have been standing. There were little weather board houses that should have gone up, and yet survived. There was no way of comprehending how or why. Of course there was a reason, but we could not make it out. The wind changed suddenly in a pocket or peak or trough? Did someone stay and defend? Was it the deciduous trees? There was no doubt that some lines of deciduous trees clearly stood, with only a little scarring at the bases, when all the natives around them burned fiercely.

On the way home, I realized that I had did it; gone up there, and come back and been OK. We came back to our town, and the autumn trees and greenery stood testament to a place that was untouched and still beautiful in its innocence from the ravages of fire. God, I was glad to get home. I felt so sorry for those people up there who had to continuously look at that oppressive scenery, reminding them everyday of what had happened. I wish the best for them. I wait with them for the day when the scars of the fire are just a terrible memory. Even when the landscape heals itself, the trunks of the trees will keep telling the story.