Russell Working
20th Annual Solas Awards Silver Winner in the Adventure Travel category
The weather was hot when it was supposed to be cold, the tinnitus of cicadas drowned out every thought, and the sand on the beach was the wrong color, a pale reddish gold. The birds were too mad or too bright: kookaburras issued jungle cackles unheard in America outside TV cartoons, while rainbow lorikeets in tie-dyed T-shirts fluttered through trees with bluish leaves.
And as I spent my first week in Australia at an orientation camp near Sydney, I kept thinking I had made a fatal mistake, leaving home to be an exchange student here. I was going to die at any moment, probably drowned in the thundering Tasman Sea or bitten by an eastern brown snake, a wormlike viper that did not raise a clamor to give you fair warning, like our rattlesnakes, but simply struck, and you fell over dead.
I was seventeen when I left my home in Los Angeles in January 1977 to spend a year with the Bishop family of Pennant Hills, New South Wales. These were not the days of convict transports or three-year whaling voyages, nor was I enlisting to go to war, as my dad had done when he shipped out for Korea at eighteen. But for me this was momentous. Distances were greater in the seventies. There was no email, no Facebook, no WhatsApp to keep us in touch. International phone calls were costly; I spoke to my family in the States just four times all year. Our primary means of communication were aerogrammes, those slips of pale blue paper one wrote on and folded up into their own envelope. And I had arrived under a sentence of death.
Before I flew out, my mother told me how hard it was to let me go.
“I had to deal with your death,” she said. “I told myself seventeen years of having you as my son is sufficient, if that’s all I am given. It’s been a blessing every day.”
Auuugh! Now my death was foretold. Our family had always jokingly attributed prophetic powers to Mom because of her uncanny ability to anticipate random trivial events. Once, as we drove in a forest in the Washington Cascades, she said, “We’re going to see a beaver,” and we did.
The squat little creature was trundling alongside the gravel road. Such predictions were in good fun, and I had never taken them seriously. Why would I do so now? But in those last weeks before I set off for the Fatal Shore, my excitement and sense of adventure had given way to a deep depression that I could not disclose to anyone, lest my parents cancel my year abroad. Just why was I leaving my loving home? And now our family soothsayer had received a vision.
I would die in Australia, or perhaps on the trip over or on the way home. Yet I could not let myself chicken out.
Seeing the shock on my face, Mom apologized. “It’s just a mother’s worries. The year will go quickly, and you’ll be back with us before you know it.”
I have a wonderful mother who loved us deeply, and I had grown closer to her as I approached adulthood. Every parent sometimes says the wrong thing to children; I certainly have. If I made more of her comment than I should have, that speaks more to my own anxieties than to any claims to powers of divination.
I had suffered a bout of depression at age thirteen, and I tended to bottle up my fears, rather than share them with someone who could have helped me laugh them off. But at the time I believed Mom had uttered a Prophecy which could not be unspoken.
Friends said their farewells. Relatives threw a party. I broke up with my girlfriend— it had to be done. We had discovered we bored each other except when we were kissing. I was trying to work out how to exit gracefully when a friend told me he had seen her at Disneyland with another guy. Ah-ha! A way out! Her fault!
I rang her and asked how she could do such a thing. Still, even if we hadn’t both been relieved to part ways, why should she maintain a long-distance relationship only to learn that her boyfriend had given up the ghost in some faraway land, perhaps pushed under the wheels of a locomotive by a gang of roving larrikins, or pummeled to death by one of those buff kangaroos?
I still have a letter signed by several relatives: line after line of humorous doggerel that one of my two Uncle Georges, the nice one, wrote in multicolored ink.
Dear Russ—
How we will miss you! But ….
Be careful of—
Native cats
Australian rats
Kangaroos
Painted flooz(ies)
Koala bears
(Tasmanian) Devils in pairs
Hunters of heads
Spiders in beds
Wallabies
Sharks in the seas
We all laughed when Aunt Betty read it aloud at the farewell party. But a poisonous knot hardened in my diaphragm. She and Uncle Georges didn’t know about the Prophecy, or they would have realized this was no joking matter. I was a walking dead man.
All the way to Australia I was sure the Qantas 747 would crash in the Pacific. Twelve thousand miles of sea we crossed with nowhere to touch down if an engine started spewing flames. Not a speck of land interrupted the curve of the planet, black by night, hazy blue by day. We would drown, burn alive, or be devoured by sharks, as in the stories Uncle Pete told when he got drunk and began weeping at the family Christmas Eve party.
The Japanese had sunk his ship, the U.S.S. Astoria, in a night battle in 1942 in the Solomon Islands. Sailors leaped off the burning cruiser, only to surface, screaming, in lakes of fire. Others were yanked under as dorsal fins sliced the dark waves. Every stop (Honolulu, Suva, Sydney Kingsford Smith) put me through forty minutes of ear-popping terror, followed by what Dostoevsky must have felt when he stood before a firing squad and a courier from the tsar galloped up with a pardon.
Whoever booked the flight had placed me across the aisle from the smoking section. Before we left, AFS International, the sponsoring organization, had warned us that it would send us home immediately for committing either of two sins as unforgivable as blaspheming the Holy Spirit: 1) allowing the tiniest dram of tipple to cross our lips, or 2) driving a motor vehicle of any sort. (I would commit both transgressions by the time I flew home.) I declined a plastic cup of sparkling wine offered by a stewardess, as one called them before “flight attendant” became mandatory.
Naturally, the plane lurched, and she dumped the entire tray all over me.
“Oi, sorry, mate!” she said in her fetching Aussie accent.
“It’s OK! Haha!”
She toweled my shirt with a rag. “I’ll bring you another cup.”
“NO!”
Now I was sure that, even if I survived this trip, I would be turned back in Sydney as soon as our AFS minders got a whiff of me, a teenage sot and disgrace to his nation. They would shunt me onto a plane home before I even had a chance to set foot on good red Aussie soil.
The shame of it—phoning from Los Angeles International to ask my parents to pick me up at the same place where they had cried and hugged me goodbye two days earlier. The Valley News and Green Sheet, which had published an article about me, would have to retract it. STUDENT ALKY DISGRACES SELF, COUNTRY. AUSSIES JEER. Maybe it would be better after all to vanish in the limitless territorial waters of Kiribati.
To escape my soggy seat, I trod several miles up the aisle, reeking of airline grog and cigarette smoke. In those days there used to be a piano bar upstairs over first class. I sneaked up a spiral staircase and found a seat. Well. This was the height of sophistication, and hardly anybody was up here. I thought of plinking out a fragment of one of the tunes that remained of my childhood piano lessons, such as Tchaikovsky’s “March Slav.” Another stewardess came over carrying a tray with cups of bubbly.
“Would you like—?”
“NO! I’m a kid. I don’t drink.”
Her nostrils flared as she sniffed the evidence to the contrary, but she brought me an orange juice instead.
Even then I recognized why a mother would grieve over letting a child go. My parents are exceptional people who were raising five rowdy boys, three of them disabled, two of them adopted orphans. My dad was a Presbyterian pastor and my mom a Christian author, and faith was at the center of our family life. I was known as the peacemaker who broke up fights among my brothers and smoothed over quarrels.
Mom still remembers, incorrectly, that I came home from school one day to announce, “Hey, I’m going to Australia,” and then vanished within days. In fact representatives from AFS visited our home as part of the application process, and I went through weeks of interviews as they winnowed dozens of applicants to one lucky winner: me.
I now understand that for my parents’ generation, born in the Great Depression, life was fragile. A son goes abroad in search of adventure, as young men had done for eons before Mom’s Viking ancestors sailed off in longboats to pillage Normandy and Kievan Rus, and you cannot take for granted that he will return. My grandparents outran the Pale Horse and Pale Rider of Spanish influenza that claimed fifty million lives in 1918-1919, but Mom’s parents were dead by the time she was twenty-nine. Her beloved sister succumbed to heart disease in her forties. Death had claimed several of her siblings’ babies. Her elder brother, Carter M. Skare, was an Air Force captain who had survived thirty-two B17 bombing missions over Europe in World War II, navigating a tin can through airborne junkyards of shrapnel, only to be shot down over Korea in 1951. My dad had had nearly died in the same war when his Jeep hit a landmine and flipped over on top of him, crushing his chest. The wreck threw his buddies out on the road. He heard an enemy patrol come along and shoot the wounded. They never noticed Dad under the Jeep.
I knew I would not see my parents and brothers for a year—or, actually, ever again this side of Paradise. I had given them up for—whom? Who were these people that would be taking me in?
AFS had mailed me a packet of information, along with a black-and-white photograph of the Bishop family posing in front of their two-story house. Laurie, the father, was a senor tutor completing his doctorate in biology at Macquarie University. His beard, mustache, and piercing eyes were those of a nineteenth-century scientist or Russian novelist. Robin, dark-haired and youthful, was a senior lecturer at Milperra College of Advanced Education. Their son, John, sixteen, had long hair (like my own), and wore a striped blazer and tie from Normanhurst Boys High School, which I too would attend. But—uniforms! And an all-boys school! How did you get through the day if there weren’t girls to shoot withering glances at you when you flirted with them or annoyed them by asking to borrow a pen? Linda was pretty and blond, womanly and self-confident though not yet fifteen. She proved to be something of a tomboy, alarmingly willing to leap into the scrum when John and I wrestled on the floor. It would also be a shock for one who had grown up in a household of boys, to be standing in the kitchen toasting a crumpet, only to have a girl in a bikini march through on her way out to the pool.
And then there was Margy, a five-year-old in blond pigtails. She became my little buddy in the absence of my youngest brother, Tom, a preschooler with whom I had roomed at home. The quintessential photo of Margy at that age was of her sitting on the lawn with her pet duckling in her lap. After orientation week, the students heading elsewhere caught a bus to the airport. Those of us staying in greater Sydney gathered nervously in the parking lot, waiting for our host families to arrive. A yellow station wagon pulled up. Dostoevsky was at the wheel. A little girl sprang out, scanned the crowd, and sprinted for me.
“I’m at home now,” I scrawled in an aerogramme home that afternoon. “The Bishops picked me up around 1:30 today. Margaret ran up and gave me a hug. All the AFS people cheered.” We piled in the car, and as Robin wrote to my mother, “Margaret immediately took over and filled him in on what she thought he should know.”
The Bishops lived in a two-story house of a traditional Aussie style, with a red tile roof that slanted up toward the peak from all four sides. Bookshelves strained under the weight of literature, two-deep, so that when you pulled out a volume, a second one peeked out from behind it. It was Laurie who introduced me to the Oxford English Dictionary, shrunk to two volumes and accompanied by a magnifying glass to allow you to read a font scaled for the eyesight of a gnat. I now own a hardbound copy and consult the online version many times a day. I would have my own bedroom for the first time. John and Linda kindly initiated me into their social circles. Margy became my little shadow, following me everywhere, so that I sometimes had to hide from her to do my homework. She loved the cartoons I drew her, among them a sixth birthday card featuring Felix the Cat serenading Betty Boop in a rowboat.
“I might visit Narnia while I’m here because I have a large wooden wardrobe,” I wrote home. “They’re putting bookcases in my room soon.”
The Bishops were generous beyond expectations. They had asked that I be supplied with grey trousers, several white shirts, and black shoes for my school uniform. My parents gave me hand-me-downs from my dad, who outweighed me by forty pounds: buckled shoes, trousers as ill-fitting as Charles Chaplin’s, baggy shirts with crosshatch patterns in white thread.
Robin looked over my clothes, shaking her head. “These won’t do,” she said.
She took me to a store and bought me everything I needed, right down to the striped blazer and school tie. Over the course of the year Laurie and Robin expanded my cultural horizons, taking me to performances of Ben Johnson and Anton Chekhov, and if there was a pistol on the wall, it didn’t go off and it didn’t kill me.
We caught a train downtown to cheer the queen, and John and Linda took me to watch a camel race at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. If these races still occur, I am guessing that the riders no longer dress in Arab kit, but we laughed as one daft camel took a short cut across the center of the track. The Bishops took me camping near Sofala and spelunking in the Jenolan Caves, where I did not get lost and did not fall into a crevasse, leaving my skeleton to be discovered a century hence. We stayed in a rambling old farmhouse full of fireplaces in Mudgee, where the adults toured wineries. John and I decorated our bedrooms with cow skulls we found lying about, like talismans to ward off a soothsayer’s evil spell.
Suffice it to say I didn’t die in Australia. I wasn’t pushed under the wheels of the train I caught every day to Normanhurst, where I was known as the Lanky Yank. There was a terrible train crash in Sydney shortly after I arrived, killing eighty people, but although my parents panicked when they read about it back in the States, I wasn’t on that train. I bought a surfboard, wiped out more often than not, and managed not to drown in the thundering Tasman Sea. When I ended up at the bottom of the ruck while playing rugby, all those cleated shoes failed to stomp me to death, though they tried. I didn’t catapult off a cliff while skiing at Mount Kosciuszko, or fall from the Sydney Harbour Bridge when a friend’s father who worked there took us up top. I zipped around rural New South Wales on a motorcycle, and didn’t die that day, either, despite my best efforts. As I buzzed along the tarmac, squinting in the wind, a grin plastered to my bug-pelted face, it dawned on me that that I was driving in the right-hand lane. I swerved left and safely navigated back to the farm where I was staying without slamming into an oncoming lorry. (Possibly there was a good reason for AFS’s prohibition on driving.)
I didn’t fall and break my neck when I gave rein to a horse I was riding near Willow Tree, and it bolted across a paddock and executed a steeplechase leap over an earthen flood berm. I also didn’t shoot myself, or get shot, when I joined a group of farmers hunting roos that were trespassing in their crops. I think this was near Coleambally, New South Wales. We heaped the carcasses in the back of utes and hauled them to a pub, where we found several Aboriginals enjoying a pint and gave them our kill. They said thanks, mates, and we told them no worries. Somebody said, This one’s a Yank, and I grinned.
Nor did I buy the farm when I rode in a plane that swooped low over flooded paddies in the same region, sowing rice from the air. I didn’t join the choir invisible when a friend took the Bishops and me up in his glider, one by one. As I sweated behind him in the airless cockpit, staring across his gleaming bald head, I was sure he would suffer a heart attack, as pudgy grownups often did, leaving me to land this contraption seemingly made of balsa wood, drinking straws, and papier mâché. There was no petrol on board to explode, but so what? The glider would crash and drive a stake through my chest. So I reckoned, my pulse racing, but it didn’t. My pilot found an updraft over a warm plowed field, and we circled skyward, turning and turning, until we had a view of a magnificent swath of New South Wales.
I lived to see another day despite a foolish prank that several schoolmates and I played. On our Pommy friend Russ’s birthday, we pulled nylon stockings over our heads, showed up at his house, and kidnapped him for an overnighter at our pal Ian’s house. We were carrying toy guns. They must have looked real. Russ fought us, punching and kicking, as we shoved him into Ian’s car. It dawned on us that Russ wasn’t just playing along, he thought this was real. Some kind of narco-terrorist student kidnapping cell, I guess.
“Russ! Russ!” I said. “It’s us. It’s your birthday celebration.”
We peeled up our stockings to show him our faces. It took Russ an hour or two, and a couple of beers, before he could see the humor in it.
Next morning, to make up for it all, we gave Russ a stocking so that he, too, could join in the fun. We drove about the streets waving our guns out the window. The cops tracked Ian down via his license plate and showed up at his house. They had ways of making him talk, and he sang. He gave us all up, the rat.
Later the phone rang at the Bishops’, and I picked up. The caller identified himself as a policeman.
“This Russell Working?”
“Um, yeah. Yes, sir.”
He mentioned the incident under investigation. “I understand you were the ringleader.”
“I guess.”
“That was a very stupid little stunt you pulled. You could’ve got yourself killed.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Yet I didn’t cash in my chips that day, either.
In December 1977 Laurie’s biological research brought us up to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef, where I also didn’t die. As so often that year, the Bishops generously added the cost of one more traveler to an already expensive trip. We caught a mail boat to an island of loose coral rock corralled by mangrove roots. As I slogged about in the shallows, kicking up the white sand, something glinted on the seafloor. I reached for it and plunged my hand into the squishy meat of a giant clam. I leaped away with a squeamish yelp. The clam did not snap shut and trap me as the tide slowly rose and drowned me. It ponderously shut its fat gob. As the sand settled, the wavy-lipped bivalve gave me a look of exasperation.
Since that year I have clocked another five decades among the quick, not the dead, despite occasional acts of recklessness. I parachuted in Oregon, survived a stint as a hapless prole in a Pacific Northwest papermill, explored slums in Cairo and Chicago on foot, reported on illegal gun factories in the Philippines, survived home invasions in Jamaica and Illinois, and bunked overnight among armed robbers and an accused murderer while on an undercover assignment in a Washington state jail.
In the pre-internet era I lost touch with the Bishops after they moved from the home where I never quite managed to visit Narnia. Laurie and Robin divorced, and the girls married and took on new last names. Every so often I Googled them unsuccessfully, then figured, Well, there aren’t that many Russell Workings around; I’m easy to find. It was Margy who tracked me down on Facebook. She said she still had the drawing of Betty Boop and Felix the Cat.
In 2018 my wife, youngest son, and I returned to Australia for Christmas and New Year. For the first few days I was euphoric. Robin took us on a ferry trip across Sydney Harbour, and I seemed to breathe in the vistas of arid skies, crumbling blue seas, battlements of red rock, and skyscrapers that had sprouted everywhere in the forty-one years I had been away.
In his memoir, 30 Days in Sydney, Peter Carey opens with a quote from Trollope: “I despair of being able to convey to any reader my own idea of the beauty of Sydney Harbor. I have seen nothing equal to it in the way of land-locked scenery—nothing second to it.” Seattleites, surrounded by forests and waterways and snowcapped mountains, might insist on their own city’s preeminence. But no one could contest that Sydney boasts a gorgeous blend of urban and natural beauty unique in this universe. Aussies, do you understand what a magnificent country you have? Can you forgive yourselves the sins of your history, such as every nation has accrued in its own ledger of deeds?
I found my Aussie family—even little Margy—to be graying, as am I. She crushed me in a hug and reminded me that when I left, I had told her I would come back and visit. (Be careful what you promise to children. They take you at your word.) On Christmas Linda hosted a poolside party of multifarious iterations of Bishop relations. The children of my time abroad had grown up and brought forth a new generation, and they another beyond that. How was it, I kept marveling, that I had never returned to lovely old Oz until now? After living all over the United States, and in Russia, England, and Cyprus; after traveling throughout Europe, Central Asia, China, Japan, Mongolia, the Philippines, the Middle East, and other destinations, why I had never come home to Sydney? My year abroad was a gift from a family, an entire nation, which did not know what they were getting into by welcoming me.
I didn’t meet my Maker in Oz, thank God. Not even one sunny day in the beachside town of Bateau Bay. Threading my way down a steep trail to the sea, I planted my bare foot on a writhing muscular thing. A snake. My first thought, I wrote in a letter home that evening, was that I ought to take a picture as the creature squirmed to free itself. My second, coming instantaneously, was this: Let it go, moron. I lifted my foot, and the serpent slithered harmlessly away. Huh, I thought. Another day in the life of an Aussie, I guess.
What I didn’t tell my family in the States was what happened next. When I got back to the Bishops’ vacation home, I related my little adventure to Laurie. He snatched his pipe from his mouth in alarm. “What did it look like?”
Oh, brownish and scaly, I shrugged. A bit lighter on its belly, maybe a meter in length. It didn’t bite, it was harmless. Probably a garter snake or something.
“You just stepped on an eastern brown snake, mate,” Laurie said. “The most venomous snake in the world.”
And yet I was spared.
In January 1978 the Bishops saw me off at the airport, and at every stop—Auckland, Papeete, Los Angeles—we didn’t crash. The final, most terrifying descent, was through a California coastal fog as we approached Los Angeles International. Under the terms of the Prophecy, this was the Grim Reaper’s last chance to claim my scalp. I was sure the pilot would fly off-course and crash into the Getty Museum or the L.A. Coliseum in a fireball of jet fuel. Instead the plane banged down on the runway intact, as if someone had dropped a bathtub on wheels from a helicopter. The other passengers clapped for no reason at all. Because surely their mothers had not foretold their deaths as well.
And so I survived, even to this day, having learned that afternoon in January 1978 that our worst burdens, the torments hardest to bear, are often imaginary ones we create for in our own minds. Such as concocting a Prophecy out of a remark that my mother never meant as a prediction, only an expression of love. We cannot see what the future will bring.
A few decades on, we squint to see what we have left behind. And death stalks us relentlessly, whether we are fearless or afraid, and his aim is true and he always makes his kill in the end. What matters is how we live.
My family had moved to Washington state in my absence, and a gaggle of relatives was delegated to meet me at the gate in Los Angeles, as one could do in those days. They brought balloons and a sign with my name on it and the words, WELCOME BACK LANKY YANK. I felt an irrational joy at having outwitted the Grim Reaper.
Then strangely, as in a dream, all the welcoming family melted away but Uncle Doug, who threw an arm around my shoulders as we walked toward the baggage carousels.
He told me my Granddaddy Working had died.
***
Russell Working lives in Oak Park, Illinois, and is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of the story collection The Irish Martyr, for which he received the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award. His first collection, Resurrectionists, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. His debut novel, The Insurrectionist, was released by Freedom Letters in 2025. A freelance writer, he previously worked for the Chicago Tribune, where his stories included an exposé of the international trade in the cadavers of prisoners, homeless people, and psychiatric patients that supplied museum exhibitions of the dead. He lived abroad for six years, reporting from Russia, China, Japan, the Middle East, and Central Asia for The New York Times and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. He has won two Hackney Awards.