Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  A week passed, then two. By the third week I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to hear from my Australian action hero ever again. But there wasn’t a day that went by when he wasn’t the first thing on my mind as I woke up, and the last thing on my mind as I went to sleep. It was almost as though he wasn’t real, and everything that had happened had been a dream.

  After four weeks of waiting for a call from Australia, I became convinced that it wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to call him; it would be pointless. I didn’t have the time or the money to flit off to Australia again. If Steve wanted to talk to me, he would have found a way.

  I really missed him.

  In mid-November of that year, a call came in at ten o’clock at night. Late-night calls back then always made my heart skip a beat, because my first thought was that it might be Steve. It wasn’t. A woman had discovered a kitten that had fallen down a storm drain and was now trapped beneath an impossibly heavy grate. Could I come?

  I was tired, and it was late. It was another disappointing phone call—it wasn’t Steve. “Take a long piece of cloth, something like a bedsheet,” I told her wearily. “Tie knots in it every few inches and lower it down. See what happens. If it works, the kitten should start climbing up the bedsheet and come to you.”

  The woman promised to try it. I grabbed a quick shower and went to bed, falling into a deep, dream-filled sleep.

  The phone rang, jolting me awake. Not Steve this time, either, but my friend the kitten woman.

  “It worked,” she gushed. “She’s okay!”

  I looked blearily at the clock—it was approaching midnight. I shut my eyes and let myself drift back to Australia, the warm sun, the tropical nights, and the huge fruit bats flying across star-studded skies.

  Once again, the jangle of the phone jolted me upright. Not again! Now what did she want? Reluctantly I picked up the receiver.

  “G’day, mate,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “It’s Stevo calling from Australia. How you going?”

  Well, for starters, I was going without breathing for a few moments. “Good,” I stammered. Luckily, I didn’t have to talk, because Steve started right in on what was going on with the zoo.

  “The weather is heating up and the crocs will be laying soon,” he said, and I could barely hear him over the pounding of my heart.

  “I’ve got a chance to take a little time before summer hits,” he added.

  I waited for what seemed like a long beat, still breathless.

  “I’m coming to Oregon in ten days,” he said. “I’d really love to see you.”

  Yes! I was floored. Ten days. That would be…Thanksgiving.

  “Steve,” I said, “do you know about the American holiday of Thanksgiving?”

  “Too right,” he said cheerfully, but it was obvious that he didn’t.

  “We all get together as a family,” I explained. “We eat our brains out and take walks and watch a lot of football—American football, you know, gridiron, not your rugby league football.”

  I was babbling. “Do you want to come and share Thanksgiving with my family?”

  Steve didn’t seem to notice my fumbling tongue. “I’d be happy to,” he answered. “That’d be brilliant.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Great,” he said.

  “Send me all the details, your flight and everything,” I said.

  “I will,” he promised. Then he hung up. As suddenly as he was there, he was gone.

  I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time that night, trying to convince myself that it hadn’t been a dream. Steve had called, and now he was coming to see me.

  This was going to be fabulous.

  Thanksgiving Day finally arrived. I remember feeling so proud to have my family meet my Aussie man. We had just eaten an epic feast of deviled eggs, turkey and stuffing, lots of gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and soft rolls with stacks of butter. We took a break before the desserts came out, and the menfolk headed into the living room to watch football. But Steve wandered back into the kitchen where I was helping to clear the dishes and clean up. He took the time to talk to each of my sisters and my mom, getting to know the whole family.

  I thought he was very considerate, because I knew instinctively that this wasn’t so easy for him. He was a bit shy, and totally out of his element. He had never visited the United States before, or been this serious about a girl. We had spent only a few days with each other, but both of us seemed to know that his visit was more than just a casual meeting. Being together felt more and more like destiny.

  We went everywhere. I gave him the grand tour, the best the Pacific Northwest has to offer, which is nothing short of spectacular. Everything revolved around wildlife. We hiked the Coast Range out of my parents’ beach cabin to look for black bears, and traveled to eastern Oregon to see white-tailed deer, coyotes, and the eastern Oregon antelope, animals that Steve had never experienced before.

  He skied Mount Bachelor. I wasn’t much of a skier, so I went off to track down wildlife while he had a great time on the slopes. Meeting him at the lodge afterward, I had to head off a leggy blonde who was intent on teaching Steve how to use an American pay phone. Not the kind of wildlife I was interested in him experiencing.

  We returned to Eugene, and I showed him where I worked part-time at an emergency veterinary hospital. He was particularly impressed with an injured porcupine that had come in, shedding some quills. Instead of just looking at them, Steve, with his usual enthusiasm, jabbed one into his arm.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, even though it was obvious.

  “I just wanted to see what it would feel like,” he said.

  “So how does it feel?”

  “Really painful,” he said. He sounded impressed. I couldn’t help laughing. He felt the reverse barbs on the quill work themselves into his skin. It was quite a flesh-ripping experience to pull the quill back out.

  Then, too soon, our time was over. I felt the familiar ache, the pressure in the middle of my chest. Ever since I’d met Steve, I had experienced the same ache whenever I left him. It was a very real pain, one I’d never felt before.

  “I have to see you again,” I said. For the first time, I was very open about my feelings for him. As he was leaving, I was already making plans to see him again in Australia.

  I left the icebox cold of Oregon for the tropical heat of Cairns in early January 1992. As I got off the plane to catch my connecting flight to Brisbane, I found it almost difficult to breathe, it was so hot and muggy.

  My mind was working in funny ways. It’s just too hot here, I thought. I could never live here. Then I caught myself. Hang on a minute. What was that? Why would that even be an option, living here? I’m just coming over to see this guy. But that Cairns moment was the first time I actually thought about leaving my Oregon life behind to join Steve in his Australian one.

  On my final approach to Brisbane, I had an excited feeling again, a sense of coming home. It seemed like I was the only passenger eager to get off the plane. Everyone else was moving as though they were underwater. I stepped out into the airport. There was Steve, back in his khakis. It was nice to see him in those familiar shorts again, after having to bundle up in Oregon against the cold.

  We embraced, and I had the sense that we were one person. Apart, we weren’t whole, but together, we were okay again.

  We immediately got lost in conversation. The crocodiles were nesting, Steve said. It was stinking hot, the perfect time of year for all things reptilian. Steve Irwin’s time.

  At first we stayed close to home. Steve put me up at the Irwin home on the zoo grounds, rather than the little motel up the road. We hit the ground running. Twenty-four hours after I stepped off the plane in Brisbane, Steve was showing me how to raid croc nests to retrieve the eggs so they wouldn’t just die in the nest.

  He showed me how to feed venomous snakes that were hot and loaded, how to get in with the cassowaries and retrieve their food bucket without
getting kicked in half. Steve could gently lift a python out of its enclosure in order to clean it. I would reach in, in what I considered to be exactly the same way, and immediately get bitten three times before I knew what hit me.

  I slowly got to know the staff, who were more like extended family, and Steve’s remarkable parents. They had founded the zoo nearly a quarter century before. Steve’s father, Bob, still did the books. His mom ran the food kiosk, and she delivered up delicious sandwiches and the most incredible raspberry slices on the planet. Steve’s best mate, Wes Mannion, was working as his right-hand man.

  As much as I enjoyed it, we weren’t going to stay at the zoo for long. I was about to experience a life-changing event: Steve Irwin in the Australian bush.

  Our destination was the Burdekin River, on the coast, eight hundred miles north of Brisbane. The Burdekin is a magic river, dependent on the wet season, which brings floods of epic proportions. The rainfall in the area is massively unpredictable and wholly cyclone-dependent. The Burdekin was the closest habitat to the zoo for the big saltwater crocs, so off to the river we went.

  Dams were planned, Steve explained. The river wasn’t terribly well known, and its crocodile populations weren’t well understood. He wanted to go up and survey the crocs, see where their nesting sites were, and gauge the success of their breeding.

  My first hurdle came before we even left. Steve’s little dog Sui was coming with us, and she realized that I would be taking her place next to Steve in the front of the truck.

  “Move over, Sui,” I said. She turned and glared at me, for all the world like a jealous woman. I couldn’t help but laugh. She was such a cute thing, and she looked at Steve with such rapture, joy, and love, that I had to forgive her for hating me.

  I hadn’t been much help packing for the trip. I was accustomed to America, where I was always within striking distance of a grocery store, gas station, or equipment supply. The Australian bush wasn’t like that. Parts of the Burdekin were dangerously remote, and these, of course, were the parts where we were headed.

  Steve had to pack his own fuel, water, food, spare tires, boat, engine, and extra parts. He loaded up the Ute. Swags went in, but no tent. We would be sleeping under the stars. As we headed out, it came to light that this would be a sixteen-hour trip—and the driving would be shared.

  “Remember one thing,” Steve said as he climbed over the seat. “If you see a road train coming, you’ve got to get clear off the road.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “But I need you to explain what a road train is.” I learned that long-distance truckers in the outback drive huge rigs—double-deckers that are three trailers long.

  “Okay, great,” I said. “Drive on the left, and watch out for road trains. Got it.” Steve climbed into the back under the canvas canopy and stretched out on top of one of the swags. I wasn’t worried about falling asleep while I was driving. I was too nervous to be sleepy.

  The farther north I drove, the smaller the roads became. Cars were few and far between. I saw the headlights of an oncoming Ute. Maybe I’ll practice pulling off the road, I thought. I miscalculated the speed of the oncoming vehicle, slowed down more abruptly than I intended, and pulled completely onto the soft gravel shoulder.

  The draft of the passing truck hit our Ute like a sonic boom—it was a giant beast with a huge welded bull bar on its front and triple trailers behind. The road train flew past us doing every bit of seventy-five miles per hour, never slowing down. I realized that if I hadn’t pulled over, I would have probably been knocked off the face of the earth. I imagined a small paragraph buried deep inside the Eugene Register-Guard, my hometown newspaper: “Oregon Woman Bites the Dust.” Road trains owned the road, but I had passed my first test. I could do this!

  I should not have spoken so soon.

  Steve drove the next morning as we made the turn for the Burdekin River. The single-lane dirt road, as small as it was, ended there—but we had another two or three hours of four-wheel driving to go. We navigated through deep ravines carved by the area’s repeated cyclone-fed floods, occasionally balancing on three wheels.

  “Hang out the window, will you?” Steve shouted as we maneuvered around the edge of a forty-foot drop. “I need to you to help counterbalance the truck.”

  You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. But there I was, hanging off the side of the bull bar while Steve threaded his way over the eroding track.

  As we pounded and slammed our way deep into the bush, Steve talked about the area’s Aborigines. He pointed out a butte where European colonists massacred a host of the Aboriginal population in Victorian times. The landscape was alive to him, not only with human history, but with the complex interrelatedness of plants, animals, and the environment. He pointed out giant 150-year-old eucalypts, habitats for insectivorous bats, parrots, and brush-tailed possums.

  After hours of bone-jarring terrain, we reached the Burdekin, a beautiful river making its way through the tea trees. It was a breathtaking place. We set up camp—by which I mean Steve did—at a fork in the river, where huge black boulders stood exposed in the middle of the water.

  I tried to help, but I felt completely out of my depth. He unpacked the boat and the motor, got it tied and moored on the river, rolled out the swags, and lined up containers of fuel, water, and food.

  Then he started stringing tarps. What a gift Steve had for setting up camp. He had done it countless times before, month in and month out, all by himself, with only Sui for company. I watched him secure ropes, tie knots, and stretch canvas like he was expecting that we’d have to withstand a cyclone. It was hot, more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but Steve didn’t seem to notice.

  Sui found a little shallow place at the edge of the river and immediately plopped herself in. I saw Steve look over at her as if calculating her chances of being snatched by a croc. Crocodiles are the ultimate camouflage attack predators, striking from the water’s edge.

  There would never be “down time” for Steve. No time to sit down and unwind. We were off in an instant. We grabbed Sui, jumped in the boat, and headed upstream. White Burdekin ducks startled up in front of our boat, their dark neck-rings revealed as they flew over us. Cormorants dried their feathers on the mid-river boulders, wings fully open. It was magical and unspoiled, as if we were the first people ever to travel there.

  Steve knew the area intimately. As part of the East Coast Crocodile Management Program in the 1980s, he had been commissioned to remove problem crocodiles. People often wanted to frequent crocodile water, and the crocs were inevitably the losers.

  Crocodiles helped maintain the ecological balance, which meant that wherever there were crocodiles, there was great fishing. Therein lay the conflict. Fishermen didn’t seem to like sharing their favorite spot with a crocodile. All through the decade, Steve caught and relocated numerous Burdekin River crocs. He even had some at the Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park that he’d gotten from this very river.

  Burdekin crocodiles were special, and physically different from other salties, a bit more sleek and streamlined. Many of them had only four nuchal scutes, the osteodermal plates on the neck, while most saltwater crocs had six. As we motored up the river, Steve pointed out slides and footprints left behind by crocodiles that had been sunning on the bank. The farther upstream we went, the bigger the slides got.

  Steve explained the social hierarchy of the crocodile. Each group has their own territory: Females would inhabit a specific area to nest, and then there would be big male salties. The subadult crocs dwelled on the fringe, staying out of the way of the big dominant crocs. There were also “crèche areas,” where the baby crocs would grow up, catching small insects, fish, frogs, or baby birds.

  We returned to camp. Steve seemed calmer now that he’d gone up the river, gotten his bearings, and revisited familiar places. Just downstream from the camp, we hopped from one exposed boulder to the next, getting out into the middle of the river. I didn’t know what to expect. I still wasn’t completely su
re of what crocodiles could do. I was pretty confident that they couldn’t fly, but beyond that, I didn’t know. I relied on Steve.

  As we sat together on a mid-river boulder, the shadows crossed the water and the sun sank lower. We looked into each other’s eyes and talked about all the things we loved. I realized then that there was no turning back: I had fallen in love with Steve. As the sun set, we made our way back across the boulders before it got dark.

  “Nighttime is croc time,” Steve told me. “It’s important to get off the water before they are active and hunting.”

  Back in camp, Steve started cooking. I asked if I could help. He waved me off. “My trip, my treat,” he said.

  I sat with my lemonade and watched the river as it changed with darkness coming on, and enjoyed the smell of onions cooking and steaks frying. I could hear the soft flapping noise of the fruit bats overhead. At first there were just a few, then dozens, and finally hundreds, crossing above the crowns of paperbark trees and honey myrtles. In the last glimmer of light they looked surreal, spooky and beautiful, gliding across the darkening sky.

  I felt pleasantly tired, but Steve seemed more energized the longer we stayed in the bush. I would see it again and again over the years. This was where Steve belonged, and where he seemed most alive.

  We finished dinner, and Steve popped the dishes into the dishpan. “Right,” he said. “We’ll leave them to soak and come back to clean up later.”

  We jumped into the boat and headed back up the river. This was Steve’s favorite time. I hadn’t understood what he was doing on our first trip earlier that afternoon. He had memorized where he had seen the slides. While during the day we hadn’t spotted a single croc, almost immediately after getting on the water, Steve shone his spotlight across the inky blackness and picked up the red eye-shine of crocs.

  As we slowly idled the boat upstream, the red orbs would blink and then vanish as the crocodiles submerged on our approach. Suddenly I felt terribly exposed in the little dinghy. The beautiful melaleuca trees that had looked so spectacular during the day now hung eerily over the water, as their leaves dipped and splashed in the black water. Fish came alive too. Everything made more noise in the dark.