A Few Fine Furphies

Now, if you ask me what a ‘Furphy’ is, I could tell you or you could look it up on the Internet. Gosh, that Internet is ubiquitous and you can find out just about anything in a few seconds; the future of knowledge is very different from when we were kids! However, I will not tell you right away. I will let you figure out what a furphy is after reading this story. If you don’t already know, I would strongly advise you not to look it up before reading my furphies. All I will tell you is that it is a typical Australian expression for something that is found in all parts of the world. If you are Aussie or already know what it is, I still feel it is worth reading through this. These are among the best I have come across.

I was sitting with a few friends one weekend, around the ‘barbie’- (Aussie for barbeque). The beer was flowing freely, the sausages were sizzling, the veggies cooking and giving off a smell that gives you an appetite, even if you did not have one, and if you did have one, multiplies it many times over. We had all had bit to drink. Mostly, the men had beer and the women wine. We had people from all parts of the world or that had travelled around the world. The kids were all gathered around the big screen TV and playing a game.

It had been hot day and there was relief forecast for the weather – a passing thunderstorm, to cool things down in the evening. Sure enough, the wind started to pick up. The clouds rolled in overhead, lightning flashed nearby, thunder boomed, shaking the house. Suddenly, the electric power went out! The kids groaned. The candles were brought out, set up around the large area around the kitchen and living room which were part of an ‘open plan’ design of the house. The adults too streamed in from the outside. The gas BBQ was shut down with the food already cooked.

Everyone served the kids and oldies first, then got themselves a plate and gathered around, sitting where they could find a place around the kitchen, dining and living room, all open to each other.

“What a shame, the power going out,” started one of the teenagers, “Wonder when it will be back. Will be boring until then.”

“Well, let’s do some interesting then, by ourselves,” suggested an older man.”

“Like what?” challenged a kid.

“So many possibilities,” answered the oldie, “What would you suggest?”

“I don’t know,” came the response from the youngster.

“How about you, young lady? What would you like us to do to entertain ourselves?” the older man went around asking the kids, one by one.

“I don’t know!” seemed to be the most common response, followed by ideas that ultimately required us to be plugged into electric power outlets, or have Internet connectivity, which we could not in the present situation. Kids these days seem so conditioned that they cannot visualize a life without being connected or plugged in with some electronic gadget.

This “I don’t’ know” seemed to be a common phrase in the vocabulary of most children, in response to most questions, including to those like “Why did you try to drown the cat?” or “Why did you and your friends try to take apart the car and try to put it back together?”

The apparent lack of imagination and ideas among the next generation and its seeming lack of capacity to survive one dark night without electricity did not bode well for the future of humankind in this part of the world. The elders all sensed this and it sort of became a challenge to try and get the kids going. We all tried to coax something out of them, from within them.

Someone started about how they managed without electricity, running water, cars or paved roads in the good old days and bemoaned the sad state of affairs with today’s kids.

The kids started to rebel and then came back with a reverse challenge. “What did you folks do when the power went out?” one asked.

“Or before electricity was even invented?” giggled another. Laughter broke out.

Now the gauntlet had been thrown down.

“We sang, played instruments or told each other stories,” one old soul said,
“and everyone participated. We made shadow puppets in candle light.”

“Please don’t everyone sing!! I and Amy and Ryan are terrible singers,” pleaded one youngster. More giggles and laughter broke out.

“I can listen to stories,” said one, “ but please, not one more about how difficult, great and fun life was without electricity, running water and video games.”

“Fair enough!” said one spirited oldie, “We older folk will try and tell interesting stories of the most unusual situations they have been in.”

One old local farmer Ed, in his eighties now, had been to India once in his younger days. He reputedly had a steel plate in his head from an injury during a war. He decided to tell us an unusual experience he had during his travels around India after he had recovered from the head injury.

“I will tell you all how the steel plate in my head and the fact that I do not move at all while sleeping, saved my life from a deadly cobra,” he said.

There was a hush followed by a rush of everyone settling down to listen. The story teller moved forward to the middle of the dining area, sat down on the floor, next to a couple of burning candles. The light and shadows on his face his bushy beard, eyebrows and unkempt hair added to the effect of the mystery and danger in his story. The shadows of those around the candles danced on the walls of the house. The picture would not have been out of place in an earlier time when humans lived in caves. The mood was not very different.

“In the late sixties, I had just recovered from the injury to my head, resulting in a metal plate inserted in it, covering this area of the right side of my head,” said Ed, pointing to his head, “ I was backpacking through India. We were a group of seven – two Aussies, two Kiwis, two Americans and an Indian guide. We had walked all day and made it to a village in the forests of southern India. We had carried our belongings in a rolled up sleeping bag that we set down as a cushion or a seat. We were hungry and tired. The locals had prepared dinner and set aside a few rooms in a large hut. It was raining, had rained for a few days non-stop and we were all soaking wet.

There was no electricity in the village. There were no doors to the hut, the water was flowing like a creek outside the entrances. Little dark creatures seemed to scurry to and fro, their shadows flitting across walls in the faint light of the fireflies and a weak kerosene lantern.

We went in to the dark hut, dumped our ‘swags (backpacks)’ and got ready to eat after changing into some dry clothes that the locals offered. They took away our wet ones to dry them out for us. There was a little feast of many dishes, which we could not make out what they were, in the kitchen. We were done eating soon and went to the other rooms to our sleeping bags, spread out on the packed dirt floor. We were exhausted totally but hunger had just been sated.  It made us feel so sleepy that everything seemed a vague dream.

Now you must know this – I do not move much at all when sleeping. I grew up with seven siblings in a little shack myself and we used to sleep four or five to a bed, lying sideways on the bed, for a long time, packed like sardines. You could not move once you were in bed, until it was time to wake up. I was used to falling asleep quick.

Sure enough, that night, I hit the bed, lying on my right side. I just set my head against a lump that made a pillow and went to sleep straight away. I do not remember anything at all until I was woken up by screams and shouts next morning. I woke with a start to see my friends and some locals with sticks, all around me. There was a big crowd and they all were looking at me strangely. Some shouted and asked me not to move. Others said, hold still and move quickly when we tell you to…

Anyway, I felt it all to be some sort of dream.  I felt a flurry of blows raining down on the sleeping bag, next to my head and suddenly I was yanked off to one side.

When it was all over, this is what I discovered. A local snake, a deadly cobra had been found with its coils next to my head. It had probably escaped the flooding of its home and found its way into my sleeping bag in the darkness. Strangely enough, it was already dead. What had killed it was the weight of my head on it, through the steel plate in my skull, its fangs had got buried in the floor and I had simply crushed it to death by sleeping on it and not moving at all, I sleep so still. If I had moved but an inch, it could have escaped and probably bit me to death!”

There were gasps of awe at the story.

Next we had a story from an American backpacker who was living in the area. He asked the gathering, if we had all ever skimmed a stone over water to make it bounce a couple of times before finally sinking. All of us shouted, “Yes!!”

“Have you seen a kangaroo do that?” he asked.

“What??!! Seen a kangaroo skip stones over the water?! No, I have never seen anything like that!!,” answered old Ed.

“No, I did not mean a kangaroo skipping stones, but a kangaroo skipping over the water, like a stone?” said the man from USA.

A hush fell over the crowd.

“Oh, I was trekking in the bushland in NSW and we were camping beside a creek. One evening, I saw a mob of kangaroos all sitting beside the creek on the sandy bank. It had rained a fair bit the previous couple of days and the creek was flowing strong and deep. We suddenly heard a couple of loud noises like gunshots or a motor backfiring loudly. Suddenly the ‘roos all took off and bounded seemingly into the deep flowing creek, but took a step right into the middle of it, and then up again from the surface of the water, like a stone skimming, onto the other bank. I swear the water was too wide for any of them to make it across in a single leap,” swore the American with true belief written all over his face.

“That would have been cool!!” said some kids, turned believers.

There was a silence while this was pondered over by the gathering.  Then there were very discreet and indistinct murmurs about the creek being shallow in the middle, or a rock in the middle that the kangaroos knew about, but not the visitor. No one said anything aloud, but some thought it was possible, since they had seen Chinese monks in the Shaolin temple do something like this in a movie.

“We’ve seen the Shaolin monks do it in the movie,” affirmed some kids.

Now, since the Aussie had told an Indian story and the American had told an Australian story, I, of Indian origin, decided to tell an American tale to complete the circle.

I started.

“I lived in Alaska during my days as a graduate student. I lived in the middle of, almost  in the centre of the largest state in the USA. My first winter there was an unforgettable experience. For one who had lived mostly in the warmer parts of India, I had never seen snow, barely seen water freeze over in nature. For many days during my first winter in Alaska, every day was the coldest day of my life. That particular year, nature decided to put on a show. After a long spell of years of average, expected cold, it went to minus 55 degrees (in Fahrenheit of course, and it is still below minus 40 degrees in the Celsius scale). This was at my university on the hill (the warmer areas of the town) and remained below minus 50 degrees for a whole two weeks. Sometimes, it gets to minus 60 or minus 70 in parts of the flat lands around Fairbanks where I lived.”

There was an awed quiet around the house. Surely, the moment the word “Alaska” is heard, people seem to get impressed and the most asked question is “How cold does it get?” I tend to tell the temperature measure first.. While it sounds properly impressive, the real questions come a bit later, usually and sure enough this day was no exception.

“When it gets that cold, what happens?” asked a young teenager, echoing what was in many minds. The best way to describe how cold it got in Alaska was to tell what happens at that temperature that you would not see happen here in Alex on the coldest day.

I had a proper impressive list, ending with a grand finale!

“You get the square tyre syndrome. The rubber in the tyres of vehicles parked for a while, freeze in their resting shape, with a flatness where the touch the ground, due to the weight. It also gives area for traction. Normally, the flexible rubber regains the curved shape when the tyre moves. In the cold of Alaska, rubber freezes solid, until it is sufficiently warmed up, so when you first drive, you have vehicle that seems to go thump, thump, thump at regular intervals when the flat portion comes down on the road.”

That image of a bumpy car ride perked up the crowd. I slowly took a couple of bites from my plate to let the picture sink in. I knew more questions would come up.

“I have heard you need to plug-in your vehicles to heaters and power points in parking lots,” said one obviously well informed kid.

“True,” I replied, impressed.

“What else? Tell us something more, oh you Indian who came in from the cold,” asked an old lady with a smile.

“Well, if you take a “Walkman” like tape recorder, that cool people had before iPods, playing inside your pocket, out into the cold at minus 40, you can hear it slowly go all weird and stop working as it cooled down to the temperature outside and it froze up.”

Awed laughter erupted from some of the kids..

“What else did you see in the cold?” everyone wanted to know.

“I have eaten beer,” I said, “Students in my university used to hang out a 6 pack of beer from their windows to cool it in the early days of fall (autumn) and if they forgot about it or the temperature dropped suddenly, you would have to eat your beer rather than drink it.”

“Anything else that is interesting in the cold?”

“Sure, there is more! You must have heard of a glass of water thrown in the air freezing before it hits the ground. Men are able to perform an interesting version of this experiment and usually every curious male does in their first winter. Have done it myself. Apparently the human skin gets frost-bitten within 30-40 seconds of exposure to temperatures below minus 40 or 50 degrees. So, it is usually a real quick experiment.”

That brought out some laughter and cheeky remarks.

“What else? Tell us something more.” came from somewhere in the back of the crowd.

“Did you know, Alaskans put their meat in the freezer to warm it up?” I asked.

That one had a few puzzled.

“You see, the temperature in your freezer section in the refrigerator is about minus 18 degrees, whereas the outside temp is minus 40 or minus 50 degrees. So, if your meat was left exposed to the outside temperature, you could put in the freezer to warm it up first, and then thaw it from there later on!”

Some got the joke and there were some “oh!s” and “aha’s”.

“Go on,” some pushed me.

“Fairbanks has an underground water supply in town, through the permafrost and the water never freezes, because it is kept moving constantly at a certain minimum speed, in a closed loop system. Did you know moving water may not freeze at zero degrees? The faster it moves, the lower the temperature at which it freezes,” I was nearing the end of things I could come up with.

Some sounds of impressed exclamations came out.

“But the most interesting thing I have seen in the cold, is how music is taught,” I continued. It quietened down again.

“What about music in the cold of minus 50 degrees?” asked a local musician?

“Well, it is like this,” I explained, “You see, when the temperature goes below minus 35 degrees or so, something happens, all the moisture in the air freezes into ice, even that around particles of dirt and soot from unburned petrol, fires etc and we have something called ‘ice fog’ in which all the particles are ice, not water. It hangs around the town, in the valley in the still air, when there is no wind. It looks a bit like normal fog or smog, but the difference is that all the particles are ice and the air is very, very dry.”

“If it is ice close to the ground, won’t it fall to the ground?” asked someone.

“Apparently, not if it is small enough and light enough,” I continued, “And this ice fog happens often during the coldest months. That is when the music teachers test the singing of students.

Here is how they do it. On a sufficiently cold and windless day, the teacher gets all the students to stand about 5 feet apart from each other in a line, facing the teacher. You know even our breath freezes as it comes out. All the water vapour in our breath becomes ice instantly!

So, everyone is quiet, breathing silently into their mittens to keep the fog from escaping as they stand in line. The students take turns to remove their hands from their face and sing the note or song. The moist air from their lungs comes out with the force of the singing and instantly freezes in the air forming ice fog of a certain pattern. The experienced teacher can look at the pattern tell where the student hit the right or wrong notes, because the sound is recorded in the air, like on a tape recorder.

The teacher can then take the students around and ‘show’ them what was right and wrong and get them to practise. They can compare their different attempts at singing until they get it right. The teacher can also grade and mark the singing in the air, but saying “Right” or “Wrong” or give out marks next to the pattern. You can tell your grade by the difference in their patterns. One can take a picture of one's singing and the grades! This is how they conduct some singing exams in Alaska!!”

Now, that stunned most of the listeners. There were local musicians and singers too in the group. There were exclamations, excited discussions and debates…

I had said enough. I decided to stop. It was getting late and I had had a bit more to drink than usual.

Then a teenager arose to share her story. All her friends had conspired and put an identical profile picture on their ‘Facebook’ pages and had driven an elderly aunt crazy and confused.

That brought out some good wild cheer and laughter from the younger crowd and from some older ones. Others laughed tentatively since they did not quite get what it was all about and what was funny about it, but did not want to appear ignorant. Many of the other elders did not get it all.

It is interesting to see what the furphies of the future will be like. We got a taste of it. It went on late into the night. I sat back, down, quietly and looked around, soaking it all in.

A good time was had by all.

Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2012
All rights reserved