A Camel Named Sky in Austria

My life changed the night I met a camel named Sky. We met as I led him from the trailer in which he crossed the German border, under an Austrian winter darkness blank to heat and shattered with stars.

I arrived at the camel farm, in the miniscule town of Eintental, Austria, around midnight. Gerda, the camel lady, collected me from the train station, wearing a rainbow-colored beanie decorated with strands of straw. We would wake again in just a few hours, ready to muck out the stables of twelve horse and fourteen camels roaring for their morning feed.

Sky the camel arrived the night after. He was squat and fat compared to the lanky dromedaries craning their necks over the fence to scope the new arrival. He feared bridges (cause unknown) and loved children; within a month the two-humped teddy had become the star of the riding for the disabled program that was the basis of Gerda’s operation. Most of the camels she took in had been abused by the traveling circuses they featured in, whipped and tormented by ringmasters.

It all sounds like fable, which exactly why I chose to go there. I was in a hedonistic headspace: my mother was dead, my family fractured and the path I had anticipated was obstructed. I emailed my father, all the way back in New Zealand. I’ve decided to go to Austria and work on a camel farm. There was no reply.

But with Gerda I learned what strength really is. I had never undergone such hard physical labor. I mucked out stables for three hours each morning with hands puckered by blisters, until they grew calloused and my muscles gained sinew. I learned the precise art of flicking sawdust from a bucket to coat a stable, and how to shimmy feed under a camel’s nose without being bitten.

In the few months I spent on the farm I managed to saddle and ride a baby dromedary who came to Gerda so tortured that the mere sight of a whip would make him rear onto his hind legs and spit, thrashing around his stable and into the concrete walls. I thought that carrying a whip would help me to protect myself. But hurt things don’t need to be fought. They need to be won.

One night Gerda and I packed into the car and drove along the edge of the Danube. She refused to reveal our destination. We arrived in a neighboring town, at the house of an old and stooping man. Gerda wrapped an arm around him and tucked him into her side, and together they led me up the road to the cemetery.

We arrived at a particular headstone and the man began to speak, with Gerda translating. “This is the grave of my son,” he said. “He was paddling across the river in a boat with his fiancé when they were caught in a current. The boat flipped and they tried to swim away, but the water was too strong and he drowned.”

Gerda placed a candle on the grave, and lit it.

“If I had known that was gone,” she said, “I never would have kept swimming.”

On the drive home Gerda pulled into a pocket by the side of the river. “I don’t know what happened to you,” she said, “but you carry your sadness and it’s too heavy. I have so many animals because each time I see one that is lost, I think it might be the soul of the man I loved. When I realize it’s not, it’s like loosing him all over again.”

“Don’t become a sad old woman like me,” she said, pulling back onto the highway. “You are alive, and whoever you lost wants it that way. So live.”

I have come to believe that it is in the strangest moments that we discover who we have the potential to become. Not the worst: I knew exactly who I was when my mother died, even if I didn’t like it. What her death lacked was definition: I had to ask if she was gone. My grandmother was crying and said nothing, which I took as an answer. She brushed the hair back from my mother’s forehead and folded into herself with resignation.

My grandmother has forgotten most of this. I think that’s when she gave up. In her new, strange wilderness of memory she is discovering what she has the capacity to be: happy.

I am grateful for each fragment of my life, carried as a universe within. Once, I was an assistant camel farmer to a woman named Gerda, who taught me everything. Like, how to let my parallels coexist. How to be strong without being hard.

How to grieve without forgetting.

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