Strangers - Cassidy Rivers - 2

When he escaped Ranch Rivers, Cassidy was 23 and the world was changing in ways that wouldn’t hit rural Australia for years. The 1980s were in full swing and not since Marco Polo was the eastern hemisphere as commercially important to the world as it was becoming now. Japan and the Asian Tigers were leading the way in shifting the focus from the west, and Australia too was benefiting from increased trade and an easy supply of cheap goods. Increased mechanization of agriculture also meant that the young Mr. Rivers was not the only former farm boy leaving his life behind for the big city.

Cassidy moved into a new world when he rented that small, entirely over priced, shack of an apartment in Melbourne. Modern living may have meant he had hot water at his fingertips in a moment’s notice, but it also meant living like a sardine that managed to fit a toilet, bed and kitchen sink in one can. After finding work in construction in the rapidly growing business of building life-sized monopoly pieces, Cassidy took the lease with some self-goading.

“The world is my abode. My apartment is just my bedroom.” he once commented to a fellow countryside transplant turned laborer, with a grin. That coworker ultimately couldn’t put the spin on his life Cassidy did, and in longing for wide open pastures, and a house one can walk through in more than 5 steps, eventually abandoned his new life.

Perhaps the years of maintaining a nearly consistent high off marijuana finally burned a hole in his head, (he still enjoyed a more than occasional toke) but Cassidy felt no discontent about his housing situation and his strenuous, grunt work. To ask him if he was a happy man (and have him respond in earnest) might have set him off balance, forcing him to reevaluate his life, his mother, his future, and all those mops of hair in-between. This was something he was completely uninterested in doing. Life is unpredictable, changes in a moment. What is the use in looking at the path that got you there? Far more important to take life as it comes.

As a side effect to the Asian Miracle, xenophobic Australia was subjected to a new threat for the first time since English prisoners made the continent their new home: foreigners who looked funny. They came mostly as businessmen, but familiar American and European tourist faces slowly but surely were being subsidized by the faces of the new Japanese rich. And with them came their strange language, and their strange food, and strange mannerisms.

Unlike many of his peers, particularly those in parliament, Cassidy rather liked these new comers. They mostly avoided eye contact with him, they didn’t wear those god-awful Hawaiian t-shirts, shorts and sandals, they didn’t find his “accent” cute and he didn’t find their “accent” obnoxious. Most importantly, they were short and had nice, uniform hair. It was mesmerizing to look at a tour group.