I am not my childhood anymore. It has gone like a puddle from a street, after a freak
thunderstorm. There are dried up areas inside me crying out for rain, hard on the edges,
soft in the centres. Drought-affected in my early thirties, I have been no match for the
sun. The rain comes in to fill the patches and it floods.
When I try to see where I have come from, everything seems a long way off. It's seven
Adelaide beaches away. Telecommunication wires cannot reach that far, only the wind
can. There is no use stepping into a coastal phone booth. Screaming rage into currents of
hot dry air is the best you can hope to do.
I am turning back for what I have left behind. Imagine being caught in a fire or a flood
and leaving yourself there to die. A disaster, my childhood has been destroyed. The last
time it happened, there was a nuclear bomb in the loungeroom, glowing softly behind the
venetian blinds, cooking the fishtank.
You left your handbag on a country train and felt panic, your house keys, wallet and a
photograph of your past. Somewhere part of you hurtled south to Colac station. Mexican
wolves take their first steps from the cage. The female and her nine-month-old pup
return to Arizona, for the first time in decades.
A wolf pad falls on silent earth. They have been here before. This whole land has old wolf
songs stored inside it. It has waited for their comeback. They have left the zoo and
captive breeding program behind. The Apache National Forest extends before them for
hundreds of miles. They are small grey dots in space.
In 1976 this great grey wolf had been placed on the endangered species list. Not long
after, the last wild lobo seen in that area was found dead at the southern tip of the
Arizona-New Mexico line. The sun bleach-dried the body, whose jaws ate sand. In this
country there was enough room and space enough for a wolf.
"I grew up in this country," he said. "I always had a sense that something was missing."
The Mexican grey wolf is being returned to the wild. A bright eye devours the landscape.
Maps of mountains, valleys and rivers, with scent as the borders, were already built
within them. It is hard to keep from shouting.
