When the storms come, pull your hat low and set your horse free

Lightning tore the drenched night, thunder cracked, and my father rode out of the forest, his hat pulled low, rain sluicing off his oilskin.

He removed the saddle and bridle from his horse, shrugged off his oilskin, tossed them in the boot and climbed into our car with his border collies, Bounce and Daisy, all of them steaming up the windows.

A mob of cattle on the move.Credit: Fairfax Media

His horse ghosted away among the trees.

I was a child, then, of maybe five. It did not seem strange, this apparition of a father emerging from a storm. He was given to driving by horseback cattle from our farm through the bush to fatten them through the winter down by the coast.

Sometimes he pushed a mob of our Herefords north through deep timber to meet stock buyers who had contracted to take possession of the cattle once they were out of the bush.

Always he was alone, stockwhip curled and a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lip.

My mother drove later, at an appointed hour, to meet him when his ride was done, taking me along with her. She knew he’d never get bushed.

My father wore no watch, but I don’t know that he was ever late to the rendezvous, even when it meant riding through a night’s storm.

And so, once he had delivered the herd, he set his stockhorse free and climbed into our welcome.

The horse – a big, calm bay gelding – knew the way home, however dense the forest. He’d turn up at the front gate within a day, nickering and keen on burying his snout in a nose bag of oats.

It took me years to understand that when I was a child, we lived close to the earth in ways that others might not experience.

Our water came fresh – and too often scarce – from a tank fed from the roof when it rained. Milk and cream came in the mornings from Buttercup, a Jersey cow with soft eyes.

My mother made butter from the cream, baked bread in the oven of a slow-combustion stove, and preserved fruit each season in sealed jars. Her pantry was an adventure.

We collected eggs from chooks enclosed by netting against foxes. Vegetables came from a garden fertilised by the chooks, who faced the indignity of the cooking pot when they stopped laying.

My father butchered our meat, suspending from a big old tree the carcass of a sheep here, a steer there, cooling in the breeze. When we hungered for a change we bartered leg roasts and racks of chops for fish and crays from fishers down the coast.

Some of the paranoid people featured on Doomsday Preppers.

Sometimes we caught eels in a creek and my father smoked them in a contraption of his invention.

He spliced rope, plaited leather belts and stock whips, and fashioned new spines for old books from a roll of pigskin he kept in the shed.

We were preppers without having heard the word.

Preppers, you understand, prepare.

A TV show called Doomsday Preppers gave the concept of getting ready to survive Armageddon its modern kick.

Everyone from wild-eyed gun-nuts to hippie vegie-growers has taken to the idea, stocking up on supplies against an uncertain future.

Some of them build secret bunkers and turn their homes into fortresses ahead of the day when everything goes to hell.

The prospect of economic and societal breakdown, climate catastrophe, plagues, energy collapse, war spilling into nuclear destruction, worldwide famine, surging tides of refugees – choose your own disaster – tend to focus the imagination of today’s would-be preppers.

Some days, you don’t need much of an imagination. You need only turn on the TV.

My parents, however, would have been confounded by the idea that their daily lives had anything to do with preparing for doomsday.

Tony Wright learned from his father to ride a stock horse and to wear a hat against the chance of a storm..

They were optimists, doing what they knew to get by, and they were quite a lot more skilled at it than a lot of those who have separated themselves, fearful of the future, from the world today.

There’s nothing new about the urge to get ready to face down looming ruination, of course.

Survivalists of all manner were preparing themselves to ride out calamity long before the Book of Revelation introduced the four horsemen of the apocalypse to apprehensive readers of the Bible. Cave dwellers harnessed fire not just to cook, but to alleviate their dread of the dark.

Yet, the world in just the last century and a bit has managed to survive two world wars, a great depression, pandemics and an assortment of vicious conflicts and murderous despots, among other travails.

My parents lived through just about all of it, preparing always for tomorrow in the belief something better awaited there.

Modern preppers prepare for the worst, and might turn to Joseph Heller’s book of the angriest humour, Catch-22, for a response to optimists: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Though they never put it into words, my parents’ approach was straightforward.

It was, I think, simply this: when the storm is upon you and you’ve done everything that you started out to do, pull your hat low, shrug off your oilskin, and settle into the warmth of those closest to you.

And yes, set free your horse, trusting that given its head, it will find its way through the deepest forest – and given a bit of luck, home will still be there when it arrives.

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