“Beverley sits on a magnetic field.” Jenny Foster was standing in her garden, pointing beyond the orchard draped in netting, towards the hills to the west. “You can watch the rain coming in, the clouds as black as can be, and suddenly, before they get to the town, they just disappear. It happens all the time. It will rain over there, and over there, but it will miss the town.”
At sunrise a couple of days later I stood by a canola field out at the end of McKellar’s Road, watching a belt of fog descend from the distant escarpment. It was the colour of steel and as sharp as a blade against the already overcast sky. Wisps of mist drifted in towards Beverley, the fog’s advance as relentless as it was inevitable and in minutes it must envelop the town, but as it tumbled down the hills and spread forward it also began to lift, gently at first until suddenly it merged with the clouds and vanished. By the time I had ridden back to the main street, a kilometre away, there were already patches of blue breaking through the clouds.
How to explain what looked like the weather’s studied avoidance of the townsite? A meteorologist would know at once it had something to do with a conflict between surface heat and air temperature but, without one standing by, a field of unique and specific magnetic resonance was completely within the bounds of possibility. And the fog’s disappearing trick was timely. I’d been talking with Jenny Foster about Edwards’ Crossing and the first white settlers in the area. She didn’t say that they were sensitive to the Earth’s geo-magnetic forces, still she thought they must have felt something protective and reassuring as they entered the area.
