From my house it's just a quick flip to Manning Road, and then a couple blocks down you turn off onto Fleming St. This brings us into Wilson, a nice suburb. My flat is in a low income area, we get a lot of broken glass around and you have to keep an eye on your car sometimes. Down this street though we hit very nice gardens. The people who live here are in the main quiet, mostly elderly - people's grandparents. The gardens are well kept and we passed a few people out watering lawns. There was also a lady speaking with one of her neighbours. They were both immaculately dressed, from the printed chiffon blouse and scarf right down to the grey suede walking slippers. One of them had three children oscillating around her like balls on a piece of elastic. The children were all barefoot. The lawns down this street are nice to walk on - only a few are being allowed to brown off in the heat, and most have all prickles carefully removed. The houses are plain and a little ugly - the suburb is around 30-35 years old at most. But you don't feel like the people in them mind.
You follow Fleming to Kent St, where there's a works depot on the corner and signs for buses. The kerb down Kent st is of a type I haven't encountered before. It's flat topped instead of angled, and wider than normal. The concrete is also almost like silk underfoot - so smooth it could almost make you cry for the feel of it. I tried to chase my beloved along it but he didn't want to run, so I followed his bare feet along it instead. Near the end of the depot there's a fire hydrant marking on the road, followed by several more. We finally decided that a truck must have run over the marking just after it was painted, leading to the even spacing along a long curve down the road. That was verified on the way back when we found the truck tread marks pressed into the smooth paint.
The depot ends with a big green fence, after which you hit the Canning River Regional Park. There's a concrete bike path heading off to the right, and the weir is straight ahead. Just down the path a little ways is a lookout tower, so we ran to that across the grass. The lookout itself is old. The steps leading up to it were built by taking four pieces of wood and nailing them to two cross pieces, then anchoring the two cross-pieces to the sides of the stairs by one nail in the middle. Consequently with time the steps have loosened so that they swing back and forth on the centre pivot, making walking up them a careful experience. Some steps are also missing slats, and the centre and side rails sway back and forth by at least twenty centimetres (one of my handspans) so not on the whole too stable.
The lookout itself is fine, and only about a metre off the ground. It looks out over part of the river, I can't see beginning or end - I could be looking at a small lake as the entrances and exits are hidden. The vegetation around it is lush and bright green, mostly tall reeds with some taller (but small) paperbarks and tea-trees. I watched the birds on the lake for a while. Most I couldn't recognise from that distance. Some though are easy - like the pelicans. They were gathered on one old stump just out of the water, at one edge, grooming themselves the way pelicans do all over. I like to watch pelicans fly - their ungainly landlocked waddle becomes such dignity in the air - but these ones would stay grounded for a while. As I watched some black swans came out. These are our state bird and emblem, and as such I see so many abstracted and symbolic versions you start to forget just what the real thing is. But here were a wild couple in front of me, and I was glad.
We kept walking to the weir, across a springy mat of some plant I don't know - a ground hugger with tiny yellow flowers. At one point the ground was bare, revealing a soft and cool, fairly solid mud. This showed clearly the tire tracks of the tractor-mower - big hexagonal prints that were just going crumbly on the edges and were a delight to walk on. We got to the tall trees by the rugby league club and the grass and yellow mat disappeared to be replaced by dry leaves, broken glass and bits of half-degraded "Warning! Construction" tape mixed up in the sand. Cars park under here frequently during the season, but that's not on now. I know, because the rugby guys have a show during my Saturday morning duty shift at the radio station where I volunteer. Then you hit bitumen, and paving stones, and come to the weir area itself.
My beloved was aghast at the bridge across the weir. Turns out he hasn't been here since primary school. We walk across it and he shows me where he used to play "when this was a *real* bridge" - when it was a series of wooden slats only wide enough for one at a time, just barely out of the water. Now it is a raised, solidly built wide wooden bridge with a long metal grate running through it that you can look through and see the water. It also has big safety rails. On the far side a bike path heads off into another section of the Park. Just at the edge where bridge meets path the water circles around in a little, flat but not still inlet filled with paperbarks. The water is shallow enough for wading, but there's an old barbed wire fence in the middle with the wire disappearing who knows where into the murky water. The paperbarks are all twisted and in many places their bark is worn down to the wood. My beloved told me that this was a road to play on - you could go quite aways from tree to twisted tree without ever coming down. You can see that road in the shiny wood showing on the trees. But the water is too high now for us to jump to the first tree, so we don't take it and follow the edge of the river downstream instead.
The ground on this side is very crumbly clay, getting drier as we go on. The she-oaks have flowers up near the tops of the trees. I stop to look at a mudhole showing many footprints, but don't go in as the sword-grass has recognised how nice a spot it is too. A stream comes down to the river, sort of - more like a choked and stagnant bit of flowing mud. We cross via some fallen branches, which my feet tell me are coated with a thin layer of clay from many other feet. On the other side there is a tree that leans way out over the water, balanced by a big pile of roots worn smooth where the path crosses. My beloved smiles and jumps up the tree. I follow, carefully, glad for my barefeet as the trunk has been worn so smooth I doubt I could get a foothold in any shoes. I don't like heights, even heights of only two metres, and like to feel secure when climbing. From up here I watch the people at the weir playground. Those who are passing by on bikes and walking are almost totally shod. Those who are settled in for the occasion are almost totally unshod, some wearing thongs or light sandals. There are a few kids wading in the river below the weir. A group of little kids on bikes accompanied by some adults appears. They are all shod except for one scruffy looking teenager in tatty clothes. We hop down from the tree and go to explore this side of the river further.
As we come out from under the trees by the bridge and head further into the park we see the kids bike group setting off upstream. The scrawny scruffy teenager isn't (hi Andrew!) - it's the guy on whose home page I first heard about the Dirty Sole Society. We head downstream smiling. The path has a thin layer of incredibly soft dust, and is a real delight. Further on there is some gravel, the usual sort of stuff from our scarp - bauxite and stuff, but remarkably fine and rounded, much smaller than peas. This is thick enough to sink into almost to the ankles in places - it's great.
Eventually we leave people behind, and it gets quiet enough to hear silence. Well, mostly. By now it's around 5:30 in the afternoon and the rack of planes are taking off, from the runway that heads straight over us. There's also a trail bike somewhere. And the traffic never quite goes away - river parks are not usually very wide. But it is fairly peaceful, the birds seem to think so. The ground now is mainly scattered crunched she-oak needles. We follow the path until we reach a confluence, and find that we're in the centre of it. My beloved goes to jump over a log, and a woman yells in surprise. She tells us that she'd been hiding from her dog (who was engaged in some bushes a little further back), as part of the process of trying to teach her dog to come when she's called. We wish her luck - the dog seems quite uninterested. She leaves, and we sit and watch the river and all its associated life until it's time to go home.
By now my feet are a little sore on the soles - the dry clay scratched them a little. But it's not hard to walk, the galvanised tin covering the edges of the metal grate on the bridge is fun, and the trip home was uneventful apart from a few prickles on the lawn outside the commercial nursery and a bottlebrush tree that had piled its flowers high on the footpath. At one point I wished I had a camera. As we passed the three oscillating children on Fleming St, they'd found a new game - kite flying. The two boys were still barefoot but the girl had put on sandals and was balanced on top of an old rusty tricycle, holding the diamond kite above her head while the two boys tried to get the length of string for the wind right. We got home just before sunset, feeling very glad for the afternoon outside with nature - something that is all too precious.