He has barely any teeth but that's not what's upsetting him today. He fears he's to bear the brunt of another vituperative tirade spewing from the driver's side window because it's his task to regretfully inform travellers the road is closed due to the bushfires.
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People don't like surprises, especially when a cunning plan has been so thoroughly thwarted by a gingival lollipop man guarding the last feasible access to the coast as if he's St Peter at the Pearly Gates or a door bitch at a nightclub.
With scant authority, certainly no badge or uniform (bacon and egg roll-encrusted high-vis shirt notwithstanding) our hero stands his ground. He knows that look. They pause vacantly as they scroll through the ramifications of their pickle as if speed-dating the stages of grief denial, anger, depression, wasted petrol.
Their situation now in sharp relief, he also knows the motorists will generally launch into fight or flight mode, neither particularly advisable given one will deliver you the existential hell of a circular argument with some guy in torn sneakers who says "I'll be buggered" a lot and the other a subpoena because of your eminently legible number plates.
Gun-shy, he becomes visibly relaxed when I produce my licence to prove I'm not rat-running to Moruya, I am in fact just trying to get home. The road is open to "local traffic" as if we live in Royston Vasey (some days, not far from the mark) and because I'm deemed an insider, the assiduous warden sidles up and feels comfortable divulging the awful time he's had of it ever since they plonked him out here and casually revealed that, today, instead of mowing verges he'll be holding back anarchy.
I shake my head empathetically, "tsk" at the abuse he's absorbed and peer down the road, toey at being stopped because all commute home I've worried fate will intervene (again) and block me from getting to my family. It's in such moments I can be prone to prodding the worst-case scenarios and begin wondering if I should leave the ute where it is and just hoof the final 14 kilometres to the house; the revelation of what's truly important now pellucid and flowing through me like morphine. I'll trudge forward with the stoicism of William Hurt in The Accidental Tourist when he abandoned his suitcase and limped off to choose Geena Davis over Kathleen Turner (a bloody tough decision circa 1988).
It's fitting my apocalypse is happening under a baleful evening sun shaved pink and hairless by the smoke swooping in from all points. Indeed, the place has that end-of-days vibe and if the sun isn't at least Arnie's cyborg eye, it's certainly Fitzgerald's Doctor T.J. Eckleburg's casting judgment over the Anthropocene, which, obviously, we deserve because well, you know ...
I'm far from the only one.
As the enormity of the fires hit home, most of us have been swaying kelp-like in a half-life, literally taking stock; deciding what to rescue and what to leave behind. It's as if Marie Kondo has risen from the dead (she is dead, isn't she?) and cursed us all with an evil decluttering spell and now we can't look at any collection be they underpants or LPs and think "Geeze, these are all crap."
This weirdness extends across the entire community. We've been shunted off our axis.
Overnight, we've become expert in meteorology, geography, cartography, actuary. In a matter of seconds, the local community radio station morphed from the jaunty home of fledgling DJs and an overabundance of Aussie country rock to a slick, vital operation imbued with Cronkite-ian trustworthiness. No self-respecting ute or trailer owner would be caught dead driving through town without the kit-dujour; a cube three-quarters full of sloshing dam water and a veteran firefighting pump attached to a hose with a nozzle that drips on to the hot bitumen as if afflicted with some venereal disease. And as Christmas approaches, Sikhs, yes, of the turban-clad variety, have visited us after journeying many fathoms north through the night bearing gifts (presumably to be deposited at the manger which stands unused because all the farm animals have been evacuated to the showground).
Of course, tagging along, absorbing all this flux with apparent equanimity are the kids.
It's very much their community too more so in our case because unlike their parents they were born here and in times such as these, we tend to assume they become inured to our slow-burn concern and our paroxysms of anxiety but one can't help but wonder what impact this will have long term?
On one of the days when we were really worried, a volcanic plume just over the ridge, we stood in our dusty backyard agape at the arrival of that other skywhale, a DC-10 water-bomber banking directly above and incredibly close to the house.
I'm sure one of the kids was clearly masking fear with curiosity when they asked how such a slow, heavy plane could possibly stay aloft?
Then again, that might've been me.
