First formal contact

There wasn’t always a dragon in the valley. When he was around eight years old, Caleb’s family upped stumps and moved from the suburbs of Morphett Vale to the back corner of Tatachilla Estate, itself at the back end of McLaren Vale. Known locally just as The Vale, with The Flat the next town along, and where he knew the area since first days of primary school. He didn’t want to move, and right at that time was sad of leaving what came before. He’d feel this a number of times again, but not until he was an adult. In the middle, there was The Vale, which maintained the title of ‘home’ for him, even if some other places also came to hold the title as well in years to come.

It was here in The Vale that he definitely for the first time knew that he had seen the dragon Augustine. In one of his larger forms as well. Seen huge and full on the wind, gliding mostly stiff-winged across the front face of the Sellicks Hill Ranges, in the distance just north of the town of Willunga.

At that time of year Willunga could always been seen in the distance. He just had to walk out beyond the natural corridor of trees behind the house, across the dirt track and look to the right and across the empty paddock that dipped downwards in the back corner in that direction. A blip heart of pink and white almond blossom to the south-east, spreading and gently tapering out on either side of the town, at the bottom of the hill range.

The next week in talking to other kids, listening their parents, and to the teachers, he did some detective work. From this, he was sure that before they arrived, or more likely, as he would slowly over a much longer stretch of years grow to believe, before ‘he’ arrived, there wasn’t a dragon anywhere in along the stretch of Fleurieu Peninsula near where they lived.

The Vale itself was further south-east of Morphett Vale, where he was also pretty sure of memories involving Augustine. Ones on the tip of blurring into toddler age, and even feeling to be before that age. Fulcruming on the point of too long ago and being too young to legitimately be remembered and to trust in that. Especially having been told for so long to not trust in that.

Rather than a dragon as such, these touchstone hazy memories were more of looking calmly into old, sharp eyes. Points of dusty, gently glowing light, with a fire sitting underneath them, itself mostly being of the red orange yellow range, but sometimes remembered with dancing blue tips. These memories were conjured up again to mind with this first site of the dragon named Augustine, alone and out the back of the house at age eleven. Standing quiet and connecting to this large and not-meant-to-be-able-to-be-there shape flying north away from Willunga’s almond blossom. Mostly from that far away a silhouette with shape and form, but definitely a green that twig-snagged at least one of what he knew were a range of memories.

There in front of him, a green dragon, although black when silhouetted, and with brown – not quite best described as patches, but rather shapes morphing like clouds rippling along the long body and tail. He stood still and tried to collect this assurance of this image into his brain. Contrasting with the familiarity of hillside where most months of the year there was brown dead grass, but with current season now instead being long and green. The late afternoon sun adding an orange glow. The colours working together, looking across that paddock, tying him to the assurance of the vision of Augustine on the wind, there and then and definite.

No existential angst about the moment for Caleb, at least not there and then. It was the same view from climbing those very trees behind him, and walking the dogs along the dirt track, and exploring the ruin down the way to the right. Connection to place is defined like that for a reason. It can anchor, have tap roots, or hold gravity or meaning or memory. All of which Caleb had standing right there, and which gave him an assuring certainty as to where he was at.

It was only the dragon large in the distance that he hadn’t seen there hundreds of times before. That dragon resonating fact-of-existence, but also with this something else that struck Caleb as significant. Something about time. Or more specifically the moment. There being ancient but still embedded firmly in the present. The dragon seemed to emanate a pulse-throb outward of how to serenely soak in the beauty of the moment in the afternoon sunlight. To be warmed by it, and to share that warmth. The dragon was huge and obvious, and Caleb could only reason that he was letting himself be seen by whoever could see him, although they had to be looking just there, just then.

As it happened, no one else saw him except for Caleb. His parents and siblings were surprised at Caleb bringing up the green dragon thing again. He raised it in a moment of forgetting where the topic stood with his parents, which he knew required him letting it drop. So he swallowed the feeling, and held his tongue any further until the next week, when he asked some friends. Against his better judgement, he also wrote it in a story at school. Wanted not to, but the clock was ticking and he just had to write something and nothing else could input through past that.

It was read in class, and it was liked rather than required to be buried. From the reaction though, no one had seen Augustine but him. However, he also described the feeling of serenity and warmth, the feeling that he said he felt watching Augustine soaking in the late afternoon moment. Many classmates and even his teacher said that they felt this that same late afternoon, even if they hadn’t seen a dragon.

He realised that his granny and grandpa were visiting that next weekend, and this was the next opportunity. His granny couldn’t ever see Augustine but could see different things. However, she only let on about it on a few occasions. More after this moment than before, but still not often between then and when she passed away a little over a decade later.

On being taken aside by him that visit, she just said “Augustine is back, then?,” although more enigmatically than how his parents despondently said it. She hugged him and said that she believed him, and to relax and wait, and like he just said about Augustine, that they should enjoy the here and now. A lovely sentiment immediately lost when she took him to do the dishes with her.

She washed, he dried and put away. She said that people loved that she seemed to be able to make them feel better. Right cup of tea, or food, or word of insight. She was small and in some physical ways frail by then, but all wanted to have a back rub with her “healing hands.” She said to let the dishes drain for a moment, and turned to say “in a way that they won’t accept or be able to truly understand, they are correct. These here, they are healing hands. The how of it doesn’t matter as much as that they let me help if it’s needed. I love our family dearly, like nothing else, but I don’t talk to them about this. There’s some things that I don’t talk about with you either, alright.” To which she eyeballed him with her authority and told him that he can love his parents without expecting belief from them. And to help finish the dishes.

Later, when his granny did talk about what she could see and what she could do to help, he saw her bright incandescent raw emotion, which was also laced with obvious experienced knowledge of fact. Messages of awe as well as respect and things to be wary of and fear. She saw different things to him, but she was also an excellent storyteller, and places and the characters and memories held vivid to his eye through hers. Importantly as well, he could see that she believed it in a way he did for Augustine and some other of his own not-meant-to-exist memories.

He didn’t have to dredge into memories or hope that they float up to know that his sister had an intuition that spooked even him. But that was something different again. People just thought she was smart, which she handily was also, but every now and again she acknowledged granny and her also having these chats. Her advice to him when he’d told the family about seeing Augustine was practical but too mature for him at that age, being that telling others didn’t help, and instead he should just know when something felt right if and when it was around. She trusted her intuition and it had helped, and that he shouldn’t overthink it.

Apart from his sister and granny, to most others his was an imagination to be managed and at times chastised, even if sometimes, until he stopped talking much about it all, they enjoyed being carried away on his imagination. Until he saw the dragon there in The Vale, what he had was everything about multiple repeat memories, except certainty in them.

In this first definitive ‘this is no other thing’ moment for Caleb, Augustine was riding a gentle breeze that was picking up slowly heading towards evening. A prevailing wind, felt many times, coming in from south west from out over the gulf and across the plain. Hitting the lower southern ranges that were closer to the beach and feeding along the ridge and fanning out along the broadening coastal plain. Again familiarity, with a dragon as the only incongruity, heading north along the front face of the range, skimming the bottom of the viewable blue sky as Caleb was looking on, just high enough for him to be able to distinguish a clear form, and size.

His mind when feeling the sun and the calm and seeing the dragon conjured up a recurring dream from being a (younger) kid. There were a few of these dreams he was confused about whether to belief in or not and which he had been mostly chastened away from. The green dragon though, he had always been in among there. Saying that, to throw white noise into the mix of unconvincing memories was that this was also the form of his favourite soft toy as a kid, who he named Augustine before Caleb could put anywhere near that many syllables together elsewhere for any other word.

Their first formal meeting was also down in The Vale. There were a couple of pertinent elements to Caleb’s mindset around the age of this moment of first ‘formal contact’, as he came to think of it - formal seeming apt for a dragon setting down and introducing itself. A dragon he thought he remembered, but with self-knowledge enough about his vivid imagination, on top of from being so young. In among those thoughts, Caleb was certain about this warranting a bit of formality. This mindset was bought to the occasion by both sides. A formal introduction, a confirmation, and for Caleb, if not for Augustine, a need for a head and heart re-assessment to fit this new fact into the mix.

Even though it was only a few months before that he’d definitely seen this dragon flying north away from Willunga, Caleb had somehow found a way to forget Augustine until that moment having him sitting there in the driveway. Although much smaller here, it was the same dragon sitting on the ground and facing him now. Augustine this time was no bigger than Caleb’s dads green Mazda station wagon. Not there to talk, but to have front and centre acknowledgement of the fact of his existence.

He was letting Caleb be in his space for the first time. Just to hold the reality of it and blink and still have a dragon there, to open them again and settle his eyes on something that isn’t meant to be. Or isn’t still meant to be, perhaps. Dragons were meant to never be, or to be legend and extinct. Not imitating his dad’s car. Later Caleb would understand it as thoughts of worlds or dimensions interlaced with our own, folded with many other scraps of science or story in creating his own personal ontology, in an attempt to accept what he already knew. It was always going to be a work in progress trying to stitch such things onto his lived reality with any semblance of continuity. He was never sure if this was correct, but knew at least over time that it was growing to be more accurate.

He’d started with memories of Augustine at Morphett Vale with the (mostly patiently) explained belief that he was attaching too much to his soft toy dragon. As well to the dogs who were dogs, and not also at time hosting wolves. To his mum’s favourite angel Christmas tree ornament, that topped the tree instead of a star, and other component parts where the memory would bubble up later again than this moment of meeting.

At the time, however, these older half-excoriated memories were fighting for space in his mind, as they had recently been usurped by a much more recent influx of specific attention, one heightened at the times when he happened to be outside away from the house like that night. His antennae up and alert, vibrating though him and focused on dangers in the dark at that particular time. The base of this, which his imagination and fear got to feed from, is that he had recently watched An American Werewolf in London, in what was probably his first memorable experience of that thing of being told that he was too young to watch a movie, and it being right.

For many months after, there’d be times when he’d have to go get an armful more wood for the fire at night. To the right of the shed along the fence were two piles of wood, one needing to be split, and one split and drying. It was from this pile that they stocked up the woodshed leaning against the right of the shed, from where they wheelbarrowed it around to under the veranda on the other side of the lounge room. A good system that still somehow regularly needed someone to whip out half-way into the night and grab and armful more wood. Too often, in his mind, that someone being the youngest, most scared and quite comfy and warm inside him. Although in retrospect probably just his fair share. Especially days of forgetting to bring across the wood when it was his job earlier in the day, which wasn’t unknown.

The pattern for Caleb was to turn on the flood light on the top front of the shed, which would get him two-thirds of the way. Then walk out around the corner of the house, adjust your eyes to account for the floodlight beaming at you. Then to see ahead the death holding obstacle course, death here in the form or sharp shiny-in-the-dark werewolf teeth.

The centrepiece of the silhouetted diorama ahead held the face of the shed, with the green station wagon parked under cover on the left. The swung-wide open right-side door of the shed held a black cave gap to within, but to Caleb’s mind, this hiding space being risky, but the less likely attack point.

To the right, a sharp line extending out from the angle of the open door. This provided a neat, clear, immediately darkness which was the rest of the path to the woodshed. Ten or twelve steps through the dark on the right before getting to the doorless black cave woodshed. Both spaces that any old werewolf could just lurk, in close and at ease. The movie added the element of fear that was laced there already, giving it form. And visuals.

To which end, that night he was already looking stage right in front of him for what was playing out in his head. Dangerous monsters of legend were already sitting strong there in his mind, front of centre and full of potential. He generally kept his focus on the line just beyond the dark to the right. His dad’s car was over to the non-fear-focus side, until now an ever-familiar comfort that the brain didn’t have to expend valuable concentration on. It was however on his unsuspected left that he saw the long sharp teeth shining out the corner of his eye. Teeth he had already imaging he’d seen as a werewolf a couple of nights beforehand, to the extent that he dropped all the wood he was carrying. After which he’d then taken another twenty minutes of balancing that image with knowing what others would say, so as to build up to make a mad dash back in to grab them, toss them into the light and only then quickly pick them up and run inside. In among all this he had forgotten the definite real actual dragon and was instead fearful of the werewolf from the movie. For all that, on seeing Augustine there, and after a moment of five-odd seconds of freezing in fear and having cold sweat break out across his brow and back, and, in a detail that caught him later as odd, the tops of his forearms, he turned magnetised to the image, and he dropped the fear that had been hold of him for weeks.

The funny thing, he thought after, is that it took him a while to register that there was a second green car sitting there to the left of his dad’s. One that was definitely a dragon sitting there, but which has been able to sit there playing out as an unregistered numerological anomaly sitting in his psychological blind spot. At least until Augustine decided to get attention through a flash of death-delivering teeth. The very same death-delivery system as had been on his mind as belonging to a werewolf, and which had surged adrenaline through him recently enough. Again, even then for all this, and also that it most definitely was a dragon, it all had a sense of familiarity to it, and his fear melted.

The face of the dragon before him looked like it was holding its authority and potential menace, but also indicated that it didn’t like that it had frightened him before in that way. Not an apologetic countenance, more showing him not to be frightened anymore.

They stood there at a distance of about six or seven meters, just observing, feeling the air and the earth between them for about five or six minutes. It was then that Augustine lifted his front left clawed foot, turned it and without raising it any further, managed to indicate first Caleb’s eye, and then his own, the angle and shape of the claw reminiscent of the pupil centring the dusty, gently glowing eye above. He paused for a moment, again letting the gesture sink in, then turned and walked back through past where the back shed would be built soon after, through the line of trees and away.

Caleb watched the tail as the last proof of fact to disappear through the trees, then stood looking in that direction, not the slightest bit phased about the potential of any werewolf coming from behind him. By the time he got called inside, he was calm and warm. The ‘boy who cried wolf’ thought of telling anyone wasn’t going to happen this time. Nor was he prepared to lose for the telling the happiness of no longer being scared of what was a visceral fear born of imagination and accurate but ignored movie ratings. Instead, he just got the wood, and apologised for dawdling. A believable answer, he knew.