"Feel how humid it is?" he asked me. "They're calling for storms the next three days."
"Oh? I haven't checked the weather forecast."
The man's name was Daryl, and although I didn't ask, I'm glad he told me his story.
"I sold my house in Bundy (Bundaberg), and now I'm traveling all over Australia, trying to see as much as I can. I was in the army until I had a seizure on the firing range. Damn near cut a lance corporal in half with my rifle." He tapped his forehead with his index finger. "Caught him right there, on his helmet. After that, I was diagnosed with Huntingdon's. It's terminal. My C.O. told me I had two options - I could leave voluntarily or they'd find a way to get me out. I told him, 'Show me where to sign.'
I've been traveling all over Australia ever since. I always wanted to see America, but I'm not allowed to fly. They gave me medicine, but it makes the seizures worse."
"So, you've been driving around Australia?" I asked.
"No, I got rid of my car, too. I'm not supposed to drive because of the seizures. So, I've just been taking the bus usually.
"I was staying at another YHA in Western Australia a couple months ago, on a nature walk. Just me and another Aussie girl named Stacy, and a bunch of backpackers - English girls. So, Stacy and I get to talking and decide we want to have a bit of sport with the English girls. We're walking behind them and start telling stories about dropbears. 'What's the biggest one you've seen? Where was it?' All that sort of stuff.
"Well, we get going for a good half an hour, back and forth, and finally this one English girl turns around and walks up to us, mad as a wet hen, and starts yelling at us. 'You cut that out,' she says. 'There's no such thing as dropbears, you're just trying to mess with us. Now shut up or I'll clobber the both of you!' Well, all of a sudden, I hear this crash from above, and I sort of recoil instinctively. It was a koala! All that shouting I guess startled him and woke him up, and he lost his grip and fell out of the tree, and he landed right on this poor girl's back!
"So, she's on the ground, screaming. The koala's scared out of his mind, holding on for dear life, scratching up her face in the process. Her friends are even more scared and have run off to God only knows where. Stacy and I are standing there looking at each other like, 'Did that just really happen?' So, I pick up the poor koala and set him on a tree, give him a little pat on the head, and off he goes. By now, the girl's run off and left her backpack on the ground.
"Stacy and I take it and spend the next couple of hours walking through the woods trying to find these girls, with no luck, so we go back to the YHA and find them all there. By now, the girl's already been to the hospital and back and she's got mercurochrome all over her face and she's all bandaged up. We're trying to keep it together, and she keeps saying, "That's not funny." Over and over again, that's all she can say to us. She goes up to the receptionist and says, "I don't care about my packs, I don't care where it's going, I want the first bus out of here.
So later that night, she's gone but the other girls are sitting around a campfire, and I turn to Stacy and say, 'Let's have a bit more fun with the girls. Find me a bucket.' 'A bucket? What do you need a bucket for?' I says, 'You'll see, just find me a bucket and be quick about it.' So there's a couple shops nearby and I buy a little stuffed koala and we fill the bucket up with kerosene. And I soak the koala in kerosene real good and say to Stacy, 'Okay, watch this.'
"So the girls are all sitting around the campfire and I walk up with the little koala under my arm and I say, 'Look girls, I found this little koala in the trees. Do you want to pet him?' And as I'm walking over to them, I make like I've tripped and throw him into the fire, and poof! up he goes. And the girls are all screaming and saying what a jerk I am, and Stacy's just sitting there and laughing her ass off."
Reminds me of a Tom T. Hall song.
