A Spot of Pothos in Caboolture ©

by Lauren Elise Daniels

All three faces of Eros landed me in Australia, but it was Pothos that drove me to the Caboolture Air Show on a dreary, rain-spattered Sunday.

The Greek god Eros, or Cupid, as the Romans later named him, is an ancient personification of desire. Son of Aphrodite, he was the inciter of passion and the patron of travellers and wanderers. The three faces or persons of Eros were devised by Plato. Himeros is physical desire, Anteros, relationship or communal desire and Pothos, a desire for contact with the Divine or the Unattainable. Pothos has been used to describe the yearning, the craving, the restlessness that we just cannot seem to put our fingers on. Alexander the Great, in an attempt to explain his conquering, insatiable way of life, coined the phrase, “seized by Pothos.”

These days we often hear people suddenly say they’ve had a revelation, that they need to find themselves, or that so-and-so’s having a midlife. We might feel great soul stirrings when we behold the starry, indigo dome of a night sky far from city lights, as we realize it’s been too long since we’ve seen so many stars. We might even feel an inner tug when our views divert upwards to the spread-finger-tipped wings of a hawk soaring overhead, while we sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There are moments when time seems to stand still, and we are filled with an elusive desire, one that transcends sexual or material solutions. We are still, after over 2,000 years, occasionally and intensely seized by Pothos.

However, on that rainy, Sunday morning, I wasn’t expecting him. I was expecting war birds. The Caboolture Air Show is held for one day in August every two years, on an airfield an hour and a half north of Brisbane, Australia. Sub-tropical Brisbane sits about 600 miles north of Sydney, lying just south of the Tropic of Capricorn and the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.

The rain poured that morning, hissing like a writhe of snakes against the windows. Outside our apartment, overgrown cypress hedges swayed within the coils of bougainvillea vines and spills of magenta blossoms. It is still winter in August in Australia and a winter in Brisbane is comparable to a very long month of April in New England. Cool, wet and grey in the forties and fifties, with occasional weeklong outbursts of sunny and seventies.

I called the Air Show info-line and waited for a recording about a rain date. No answer. No recording. I put on thick socks and old leather boots, stuffed a fistful of $2 coins into my pocket and left for the train to Caboolture anyway.

I’d tried to explain the pull of the planes that morning to Trevor, my Australian fiancée at that time, but as I spoke I realized I was trying to work it out myself. I was about to travel four hours round-trip in the rain to see some old, banged-up warplanes. Sitting in bed amongst his scattered university texts, he looked over at the drawing of a P-51 Mustang I’d hung on the wall and asked if I wanted an umbrella. I said no, I had a rain jacket. He lifted the blankets and I jumped back into bed for a moment, a few textbooks slapping to the floor. My boots hung over the edge as I wrapped my arms around him. “You’re sure about going by yourself?” he asked, brushing a few strands of hair from my mouth.

“I’m sure.”

While I stood at the train station, the rain faded to a spatter, then to a thick, blanketing misting. I felt homesick, away from the States exploring the Australian countryside and city where Trevor and I would live after we married. It hadn’t been the adventure I’d expected. Instead, it was a particularly trying time. Trevor and I were like two birds tethered together, trying to learn to fly in tandem over an open sea: inexpressibly grateful to have found each other after years of searching beguiling coastlines, but occasionally colliding and losing a few feathers over an unforgiving sea. There was also a searing silence between me and my family, who lived back in New England, burning with their inability to understand my rending choices of Australia over my country; of Trevor over my family. When we did speak, it was often explosive and riddled with miscommunication. The rest, as Shakespeare wrote, was silence. At night, I would often sit under the moon and cry, knowing that it was the same moon that passed over my family only hours before. I would creep back to bed when my nose stopped running, trying not to wake Trevor. It was the loneliest time of my life.

I wondered if the planes or the long train ride would dispel my quiet sense of despondence. I was realizing that I was a poor ex-pat with a great rip down my middle. I still loved my home and no war or political upset or great world tour had flung me from my shores. Love did. And through the steamy windows of love, I saw myself 20,000 miles away from my estranged home.

A crow flapped onto a lamppost while I waited alone on the train platform. He ruffled his onyx feathers in the rain, bleating his strange, Australian crow cry. Crows sound different here, their caws deeper and more resonating than the high-pitched American ones. They often sound like someone saying, ‘bleah,’ in a deep voice, and they usually end a caw-session with a final, breathy, strangled groan. The first time I heard a complete, Australian crow call, I waited for the bird to fall from the tree and convulse on the ground in a danse macabre. I wondered if the bird had its neck caught in a six-pack ring, but only saw a healthy crow bouncing from branch to branch above my head. I whistled to the crow atop his lamppost. He cocked his head and aimed an eye in my direction, shook the rain from his wings and flew away.

A nearly empty train arrived at the platform sighing that universal metallic train sigh. I opened the door to an empty car. The train took me through a few suburban towns on my way north and I looked into many wet backyards, almost every one seeming to have an in-built brick barbecue. The towns of Sunshine and Geebung and Zillmere had their 7-11’s and video stores, but after a while, the number of groceries and take-away shops dwindled, replaced by wet, sloping hills. There were light green washes of the various eucalyptus trees, some with leaves that hung like skinny string beans, others with sea-foam green stalks of stacked ovals. The landscape unfolded into wide, grassy spans. A horse grazing near a flat-topped ranch, shook his mane. Beyond the farms, a spine of bush-covered mountains faded into the grey-white wraiths of rain clouds. The wet soil continuously shifted in color, from yellow ochre to rust red to tawny brown.

A koala sat way up, near the top of a dead tree. Just sat there. It struck me odd, since I was used to the lolling image of koalas, slumped and munching among thick green sprays of eucalyptus leaves. Far above the surrounding treetops, this koala looked as if he’d climbed those barren limbs solely for the view. I craned my neck to watch him while I could through the train window.

I got off the train at the end of the line in Caboolture, and by the looks of the seething, damp-haired crowd in the humid train station, the Air Show was on, rain or shine. A cluster of kids bopped each other with inflatable jumbo jets as they made the tight descent down the staircase in the crowd towards me. An older man, presumably their father, reached down from behind the kids, caught one of the jet’s noses in his hand and growled, “Oi! That’s enough!” Oi, unlike oy vey, is an Australian expletive meaning, “Hey!” A teenager leaned against a brick wall while reading a brochure, “Becoming a Pilot,” while a group of senior citizens boarded a train.

A fleet of charter buses ran between the train station and the Air Show, so I jumped into one that had just emptied. I sat up front next to the driver and he told me all about the aerobatics, which I’d missed by ten minutes. I realized I’d gotten a later start than I’d thought. “Aw, ya should have seen them,” he said as he pulled on the steering wheel and bounced us around a rotary. “They were all over the place, it was mad fun to watch, if ya like that sorta thing.” Grey-haired with watery, blue eyes, he ended most of his sentences with, “if ya like that sorta thing.” He informed me that I’d missed most of the show, but it should still be good with the old warplanes on the field, if I liked that sort of thing. He dropped me off at the Airfield gates and I walked through the ticket takers who were no longer charging.

A crowd of wowed people were leaving as I headed through the gate. I thought I’d missed out, missing the mock dogfights, the barrel rolls and loop-de-loos of old triplanes and war birds. I looked up at an empty grey sky. Even though I’d managed to bypass the $15 entry fee, I wondered if I was teetering on disappointment. Over the loudspeaker, a man standing atop a truck adjacent to the XXXX, read as Four X, beer tent, called out that joyrides were still available. Jingling the coins in my pocket, I turned to watch a little Cessna with passengers zip along the ground, gathering speed and springing against the surface of the dirt runway.

Just then, I looked up and caught sight of an old, bright red biplane bounding up and over a ripple in the air. It wasn’t there a moment ago and surprised, I felt the poetic, airborne bounce within my body. My stomach responded, as if viscera and biplane were connected by an invisible, satin chord. I felt a glorious tug. I felt like a spirit slipping from all confines of the earth, and for one brief and delicate moment, my purest desires rose to the surface of my being. Despite all the struggle, conflict, loneliness and my awkward attempts at loving, my soul reached up towards the heavens and cried out with joy, drunk with the desire to be free and to love freely. My eyes blurred with tears. The biplane pulled me directly towards the deeper, unattainable reality. Gazing upward at the wires and wings of the old, red biplane, at its silver nose and hazy propeller, I mingled with that effortless freedom, allowing my desire to escape like a prayer. My sense of time drained away as I reached, with the fingertips of my soul, to touch the fabric of the Other, of God, of the Universe, of All Things Connected. And in that touch, I felt Benevolence. I felt a Kindness that returned my gaze, accepting all that I am, all that I am not and all that I wish I could be. I held my gaze until my neck ached. I found Pothos in Caboolture.

Wandering around the airfield, the sensation lingered with each pair of wings. A silver biplane sat on a giant flatbed. A Spitfire was cloaked by a silky red cloth that just barely clung to its tail like a draped sarong. Overhead a Cessna whirred upwards and three biplanes took off in tandem. Each plane seemed a hushed but persistent reminder of the desire to break free.

Sometimes it is better to remain with both feet firmly planted on the ground, and to simply bear witness to the stirring within; to feel the blurring of the lines, to grasp and comprehend these soul cries, to say to ourselves, I am fire burning, I am treasure yearning, and to embrace the sensation as we come to know who we really are. And sometimes it’s better to leap. But carefully, since leaping can land us in Australia.

I didn’t buy any souvenirs, no inflatable jumbo jets or biplanes made out of cut up beer cans, though I was sorely tempted with the latter. I knew a souvenir wouldn’t make any difference, even if I hung it from the ceiling. I walked home in the dark, no longer weighted by loneliness. Instead, I found myself slowly awakening on a fresh path.

Big, black, flying foxes swooped soundlessly on their bat wings overhead and disappeared behind the splintered silhouette of a palm tree. The moon broke through a shifting curtain of clouds and was swallowed up again. There were no stars that night, but the day had given a glimpse of a few things that so often remain in the dark.

####

Published in The Portable Muse, March 2002