This time of the year, it's impossible to get a decent coffee on the weekend in Alice. That is, from an East Coast (specifically Melburnian) perspective of what might constitute decent coffee. The Silver Bullet, Alice's idiosyncratic premier cafe, which only opens on the weekends and refuses to advertise in case it attracts tourists, is closed. The laneway to Bar Doppio ('lesbian cafe') is permanently closed until the end of January. La Pep's, 'Alice's answer to Pellegrini's', is always closed on Sundays, anyway.
So there's nothing for it but to take your newspaper home, brew another coffee, and read on the balcony. I'm tempted to say that Alice looks like a ghost town at this time of the year, with its empty, sun-blanched streets, but that's a cliche so I wont. It's the heat and the diaspora of East and Southern coast expats, the relative unattractiveness of the place to tourists that makes for this external emptiness.
Because I moved here at the beginning of December last year, I originally mistook this Alice, with its heat and emptiness, for the main Alice. At present, I'm leaning towards seeing this as an aberrant, extreme Alice (when can we get back to the more representative early '30s Autumnal weather and all the activities that go with it, etc?) When will all the people come back?
But I'm also wondering if this kind of weather might play a certain seasonal role like, say, hibernation in bears. Up in the Top End, it's the wet season, the silly season, when the combination of high temperatures and high humidity is meant to make people go troppo. I'm not so sure that's the case here, but I wonder if the retreat inside to air-conditioned climes, is similar to what people in extreme cold temperatures, like the Arctic Circle, might experience in reverse. I'm beginning to think it's not such a bad idea (in the way that I think siestas would also be a good idea) -- a period of almost enforced retreat at the end of one year and the beginning of the next, in which you can take stock of things.
And then there's the macro-insects, geckos and grasshoppers. Last year, there was a plague of grasshoppers, which looks like being repeated this year already. A co-worker joked with me as we watched a dust storm brewing and darkness about to cover the earth, that summer in Alice was like living through the plagues of Egypt. Today, a cloud of red dust has hung over the town, like a skullcap of fine orange dust. I thought of going for a ride but wasn't too keen on inhaling the dust, and sometimes, if these things get out of hand, you can hardly see a metre in front of you. The dust has definitely contributed to the atmosphere of quietude.
The other thing is: they've graded the Todd, as in the river bed. Perhaps this is a yearly event that I missed last time. I'm not sure what the point of this exercise was, perhaps they were laying power cables and I missed it?
They are grading the Todd to prepare it for the next flood. If you talk to people who were here in the 1930s they'll tell you that the banks of the Todd were so steep that it was impossible to ride a horse down them. The rider had to dismount. The arrival of the Rail and the Road through the Gap meant that the egress of water and sand was slowed and now the sand builds up on the north side of the Gap causing the river bed to be quite shallow. This means that when it floods water will invade the CBD. Grading the Todd river bed to a lower level lessens the chance of water getting out of the river! Simple as that. Tjilpi.
Posted by: Tjilpi | January 30, 2005 at 06:29 PM