In the late 1990s, I received a gentle ultimatum from my housemate: I was welcome to stay, but my cat was not. Prince, my long-legged tabby, was at war with Stanley, my housemate’s much smaller, black and white cat. While Stanley just sat around, comfortable and insouciant, Prince was furiously, ineffectively, trying to mark some territory. The best spot for this, he felt, was the new carpet just below the cat flap. The house was soon dominated by the smell of cat piss, wet carpet and the sound of giant fan dryers.
So I moved, with my cat, to one last share house, then bought a house in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. This was 25 years ago, when a single woman without much money buying her own home did not seem outlandish.
I was commuting to work in Sydney, getting home at 9.30pm and getting up at 6am to do it all again. I had achieved my goal, but I was utterly exhausted.
I should have spent time looking for a local job but I was drawn to an online dating site instead, because that seemed easier and more fun.
That’s how I met Steve. He was a national parks ranger based in Bathurst, a further 1.5 hours west of where I lived. Our first meeting in a Katoomba cafe was top secret. It was 2002 and online dating still carried a lot of stigma.
I already knew – it was in his profile, just text, no pictures – that he wore thick glasses and was bald on the top of his head with a thin ponytail at the back. I’d found his self-description funny and refreshing after scrolling through samey walking-on-the-beach profiles.
For our second date, we went on a bushwalk. I found myself looking at his well-shaped calves, no doubt from walking up and down trails.
Afterwards, we sat on my back verandah as the light faded. I thought he’d be impressed by my bit of the bush, where birds – magpies, currawongs, sulphur-crested cockatoos, the odd galah couple – swooped past or sat on the railing. But Steve was seeing something else. The house and surrounding bush added up to a serious fire danger.
Within weeks, fire was lapping at the bush not far from my house. I had a backpack of essentials, plus the cat cage, ready beside the door.
I was dithering. Should I stay or should I go?
A knock at the door. I thought it might be emergency services with some clear advice. But it was Steve in his national parks uniform. He wasn’t officially on duty in this location, but he’d been waved through the roadblocks. My own personal fireman!
The cat and I didn’t have to evacuate. Steve went to work clearing the gutters and hosing the back of the house. The fire began to behave itself, not coming up the creek line as my neighbours and I had feared.
A few weeks later, Steve was back again at my place. I had four pet chickens that were good layers but susceptible to scaly leg mite (SLM). My handsome glossy black chook had developed crusty, gnarly legs, her skin cracked with deep ravines. One way to treat this was to slather the legs of the bird with Vaseline.
When I mentioned the SLM to Steve, he sprung into action. I held my black chook to stop her from struggling while he worked the Vaseline, giving each leg a nice thick coating to kill the mites by depriving them of air to breathe. Treating chicken lice is messy and difficult, with no obvious heroic vibes. It was clear to me that Steve was a safe pair of hands, whether wielding a jar of Vaseline or a fire hose. I was charmed.
I moved in with Steve towards the end of 2003, about a year after we’d met.
Steve continued as a ranger. I got used to receiving messages stating “All ops normal” sent out automatically to spouses when rangers were doing dangerous stuff such as being winched into fires from a helicopter. I encountered a possum in the freezer: Steve said it was roadkill, but in good condition, so he was going to send it to the taxidermist. I was delighted by all of this, and learning a lot. Steve may have been safe, but he was never boring. I found work at the local newspaper and teaching journalism at the local university. We travelled to Europe, South America, India and made our way around Australia, camping.
In 2010, I discovered I had the BRCA1 gene mutation; I had risk-reducing surgery (breasts and ovaries removed), then got ovarian cancer anyway, in 2014. I had 8.5 years’ remission beforethe cancer came back in 2023. This has been hard, but Steve has been steadfast. I knew he would be, from the moment he smeared Vaseline over the legs of an unhappy chicken.
And Prince? He died of kidney failure a couple of months after I moved to Bathurst. He was a little bugger, but I’ll always thank him for nudging me in a westerly direction.
Tracy Sorensen is the author ofThe Lucky GalahandThe Vitals(Pan Macmillan)
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