101
" I saw our familiar stomping ground in Windorah through the eyes of our American visitors, who were as astounded as I had been at Steve’s ability to bring the desert to life. We searched and searched for fierce snakes, but to no avail. Then Steve’s sixth sense kicked in. At five thirty one morning, after days of fruitless searching, he said, “Hurry up, let’s get going.”
Our Dateline host was keen. This was what she’d traveled halfway around the world to see. “Where are we heading?” she asked.
“We’ve got to get out on the black soil plains,” Steve said. “We are going to see a fierce snake at seven thirty.”
The host looked a bit surprised. Even I teased him. “Oh, yeah, seven thirty, Stevo, we are going to see a fierce snake at exactly seven thirty, right.”
But off we trundled to the black soil plains, camera crew, host, Winnebago, Ute--the whole convoy. Steve scanned the landscape. I monitored the temperature (and the clock). Seven thirty came and went.
“So, we’re going to see a fierce snake at seven thirty?” I said. “Let’s see, oh, yes, it is seven thirty, and where might the fierce snake be?”
After a little bit of teasing, Steve gave a good-natured grin, but then a look of determination passed over his face. No lie: Precisely at 7:32, he spotted a fierce snake. We ended up filming not one but two that morning.
The rest of the NBC crew looked upon Steve with new respect. This guy says we’re going to see a snake at seven thirty and he’s off by two minutes? They were checking their watches and shaking their heads.
Always give Steve the benefit of the doubt in the bush. I had learned that lesson before, the last time we had tailed fierce snakes on the black soil plains. But his ability to sense wildlife continued to strike me as uncanny. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
104
" In a remote area on the western side of the island, near the town of Marrawah, a pod of sperm whales was stranded on the beach. One big male came to shore first. Over the next twenty-four hours, another thirty-four whales stranded themselves, including calves and pregnant mothers.
Whale stranding is one of the heartbreaking mysteries of the animal world. It is little understood. At this moment no scientific reasoning mattered as we encountered the tragedy unfolding on that Tasmanian beach.
I felt so helpless. All I could do was be there as the huge, gorgeous sea mammals fought pitifully to stay alive. The weather was cold, even though it was officially the Tasmanian summer, and the seas were too rough to get a boat out to help the whales. We put our arms around the dying animals, spoke to them, and looked into their eyes to share in their pain and grief. By the end of the day I was so cold that I had trouble getting my pants off over my pregnant belly. It took me half an hour of struggling in the car park to strip off my soaking-wet clothes and get into some warm, dry gear. Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually, it had been an exhausting day.
I pondered what communication the baby inside me would have gotten from the event. The dying whales had sung among themselves. Steve and I spoke back and forth over their stranded bodies. What did baby Igor pick up on? Through our experiences, we were beginning to form our very own tiny wildlife warrior, even before the baby was born. Igor had only just begun his education. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
106
" He convinced John Stainton to agree that there would be no CGI (computer-generated imagery) wildlife in the movie. We didn’t want to pretend to react to an animal in front of a green screen, and then have computer graphic technicians complete the shot later. That was how Hollywood would normally have done it, but that wasn’t an option for Steve.
“All the animals have to be real,” he insisted to the executives at MGM. “I’m doing all of my own stunts. Otherwise, I am not interested.”
I always believed that Steve would excel at anything he put his mind to, and a movie would be no different. The camera loved him. As talks ground on at MGM, we came up with a title: Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. But mostly we had phone calls and meetings.
The main sticking point was that no insurance company would touch us. No underwriter would write a policy for a project that required Steve to be working with real live crocodiles.
As negotiations seemed to be grinding to a halt, we were all feeling frustrated. Steve looked around at John, Judi, and the others. He could see that everybody had gotten a bit stretched on all our various projects. He decided we needed a break.
He didn’t lead us into the bush this time. Instead, Steve said a magic word. “Samoa.”
“Sea snakes?” I asked.
“Surfing,” he said. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
107
" Steve loved the Singapore Zoo and always considered it a sister zoo to our own. Bindi and I enjoyed being in Singapore with Steve, because he had spent so much time in Southeast Asia and really knew his way around.
Every morning Steve would head out into the streets of Singapore and discover a new and yummy local curry for breakfast. Bindi watched her daddy carefully. She would eat her mild curry while Steve ate his spicy one. She followed along with everything that he did.
One morning at the hotel, Bindi came out in her pajamas while I was trying to get her dressed. She was halfway there and was prancing around in her little pajama top, with no bottoms.
Suddenly she spotted the tea set in the room and decided to make tea. I helped her out. She made green tea for all of us, carefully poured it, and took it over to Steve with a big smile, bare bottom and all.
“When was the last time you had a girl with no underpants fix you tea?” I asked Steve, laughing.
Without missing a beat, Steve said, “The last time I was in Singapore.”
“You’re a dag,” I said, knowing that the last time Steve was in Singapore was before we were married. Bindi didn’t get the joke, but Steve and I laughed and laughed. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
108
" Crocodiles have been on the planet for some sixty-five million years, looking just about like this one. They’ve evolved to be the most complex apex predator in their environment. They have a life expectancy similar to ours, and their physiology is surprisingly similar to ours as well: the same basic type of four-chambered heart, and a cerebral cortex. I marveled at the sixty-four long, very sharp, peg-like teeth. Here was an animal able to capture and kill animals much larger than itself.
How ironic, I thought, that this-top-of-the-food-chain animal needs our help.
As we motored up the river, I restrained the croc on the floor of the boat. I could feel Steve’s reverence for her. He didn’t just like crocodiles. He loved them.
We finally came to a good release location. We got the crocodile out onto a sandbar and slipped the ropes and blindfolds and trappings off her. She scuttled back into the water.
“She’ll be afraid of boats from now on,” Steve said. “She’ll never get caught again. She’ll have a good, healthy fear of humans, too. It’ll help keep her alive.”
Forever afterward, Steve and I referred to the Cattle Creek rescue as our honeymoon trip. It also marked the beginning of Steve’s filming career. He was gifted with the ability to hunt down wildlife. But he hunted animals to save them, not kill them.
That’s how the Crocodile Hunter was born. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
110
" We left the beach to track Tasmanian snakes inland. Steve was feeling particularly protective of me.
“Whatever you do, don’t grab any of these snakes,” he said. “They are all venomous here in Tasmania. You are pregnant and you’ve got to be careful.”
“No problem,” I said. But it did turn out to be difficult just to watch. Over and over again, Steve got to wrangle a gorgeous venomous snake as the crew filmed. I wanted some of the action!
After a few days of this, we tramped through the bush and encountered a great big tiger snake. It glistened in the sun at the edge of a stream. Steve turned around and motioned to the cameraman to start rolling. We made minimal movements and whispered, even though snakes have no ears and can’t hear (instead they sense vibrations).
We approached the tiger snake as it drank in the stream. It raised its head slightly. It knew we were there. My heart started pounding, but I had made a decision. I knew we had one take with this snake. Once we disturbed it, it would never go back to drinking, and the shot would be lost.
I moved forward, waddling my pregnant body in behind the snake, and tailed him. He was a huge snake, but slow and gentle, just as I had anticipated. I told the camera all about tigers, how they could give birth to thirty young at once, and how the Tasmanian tiger snakes are special, tolerating some of the coldest weather in the country.
As I let the snake go, I looked sheepishly back at Steve. His eyes had grown large, and he didn’t say a word. I’m not entirely sure if he was angry with me. I think he realized that I was still the same old Terri, even though I was pregnant. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
111
" As negotiations seemed to be grinding to a halt, we were all feeling frustrated. Steve looked around at John, Judi, and the others. He could see that everybody had gotten a bit stretched on all our various projects. He decided we needed a break.
He didn’t lead us into the bush this time. Instead, Steve said a magic word. “Samoa.”
“Sea snakes?” I asked.
“Surfing,” he said. He planned a ten-day shoot for a surfing documentary.
Steve loved surfing almost as much as he loved wildlife. The pounding his body had taken playing rugby, wrestling crocs, and doing heavy construction at the zoo had left him with problem knees and a bad shoulder. He felt his time tackling some of the biggest surf might be nearing an end.
In Samoa, Steve didn’t spend just a few hours out in the waves. He would be out there twelve to fourteen hours a day. I didn’t surf, but I was awestruck at Steve’s ability to stare down the face of a wave that was as high as a building. He had endurance beyond any surfer I had ever seen. Steve had a support boat nearby, so he could swim over, get hydrated, or grab a protein bar. But that was it. He didn’t stop for lunch. He would eat breakfast, surf all day, and then eat a big dinner.
I knew this was the best therapy for him. Surfing at Boulders was downright dangerous, but Steve reveled in the challenge. He surfed with Wes, his best mate in the world. I sat on a rocky point with my eye glued to the camera so I wouldn’t miss a single wave. While Bindi gathered shells and played on the beach under her nanny’s watchful eye, I admired Steve with his long arms and broad shoulders, powerfully paddling onto wave after wave.
Not even the Pacific Ocean with its most powerful sets could slow him down. He caught the most amazing barrels I have ever seen, and carved up the waves with such ferocity that I didn’t want the camera to miss a single moment.
On the beach in Samoa, while Bindi helped her dad wax his board, I caught a glimpse of joy in eyes that had been so sad. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
112
" We hit the Maldives for a surfing break. The islands are right on the equator, and the heat was incredible. Bindi didn’t understand traditional Muslim clothing. The women wore black burkas, with just a small panel to look through, and Bindi worried about them in the heat. Somewhere along the line, she had picked up some verbiage that she then blurted out loudly in the street when we encountered a heavily swathed Muslim woman.
“Mummy, is that an oppressed woman?” Not wanting to cause an incident, I hustled us both away. I tried to explain about differences in cultures and religions, how sometimes what you wore was an indication of modesty, rather than oppression. But in the back of my mind was the thought, Out of the mouths of babes. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
113
" The next day was Sunday. In Australia we celebrate Father’s Day in September, so it was natural for us to try and get in touch with Steve. I knew he was filming somewhere off the Queensland coast.
On board Croc One, along with Steve and Philippe Cousteau, was a toxicologist named Jamie Seymour. They planned to study several species of dangerous sea creatures, with the double goal of understanding their place in the environment and teaching people how to frequent Australia’s waters more safely.
We tried to get through to Steve on the phone, but of course he was out filming. I spoke via satellite phone to another Kate, Kate Coulter, a longtime zoo employee, with her husband, Brian. We all took turns talking to her.
“Steve captured a huge sea snake,” Kate said. “He said it was the biggest he had ever seen. He said, ‘Thick as my arm, no, thick as my leg.’”
Kate knew Steve well, and she conveyed his enthusiasm perfectly. She told us she would pass along our messages.
“Tell Daddy how much I love him and miss him,” Bindi said, and Kate told her she would. Robert wanted immediately to go see the big sea snake his father had caught. He didn’t quite grasp that the Cape was thousands of miles away. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
114
" Meanwhile, I was still an out-of-her-element novice from Oregon. Steve wanted to help me feel as comfortable with snakes as I was with my mammal friends. I’d had some experience with reptiles before, but it certainly wasn’t my forte. Since I was living every day with about a hundred and fifty snakes, in a country that was home to the top eleven most venomous snakes in the world, it was time for a Stevo snake education.
He knew just the right teacher. “Let me introduce you to Rosie,” Steve said to me one day, bringing out a beautiful boa constrictor. She was eight feet long, as fat as my arm, and very sweet. But when I first met her, I was a bit more nervous than I wanted to admit.
“The first step is to get to know each other,” Steve explained.
I tried. While Steve cooked dinner, I sat at one end of the sofa. Rosie lay coiled at the other. I eyed her suspiciously. She eyed me the same way, both of us hoping that we each didn’t just suddenly fling ourselves at the other in attack. I was worried about her, and she must have been worried about me, too. Friend or foe? Back when we first met, neither of us knew.
Finally there came a revelation. I watched her, curled up on her end of the sofa, and I realized Rosie was actually more wary of me than I was of her. That’s when I started to understand the thought process of the snake. Snakes are very logical: If it’s bigger than me, I’m afraid of it. If it’s smaller than me, I will eat it. Fortunately, I was way too big for Rosie to think of me as a snack.
I inched closer to her. Rosie tentatively stretched her neck out, flicked her tongue a few times, and slid into my lap. It was a monumental moment and a huge new experience for me. We began to check each other out. I stroked her soft, smooth skin. She smelled every little bit of me, and since snakes smell with their tongues, this meant a lot of flicking and licking. She licked down the front of my knee and flicked her tongue at my shoelaces. After a long day traipsing around the zoo, my shoes must have smelled…interesting.
Up she came. As she approached my face, I felt myself instinctively recoil. Incredibly, even though I betrayed none of my inner thoughts, Rosie seemed to sense my anxiety. She slowed down and hesitated. As I relaxed, she relaxed.
As time went by, I was able to tolerate Rosie around my shoulders. Soon I did the dishes with Rosie around my neck, and paperwork with her stretched out on the table. We began doing most of my household chores together. She preferred small indoor spaces where she felt secure, but she became braver and braver as she trusted me more. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
115
" 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. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
116
" We didn’t know what to do. It was as though we were being hunted. Steve went off to the back block of the zoo to try to get his head around everything that had been happening. He built a fire and gazed into it.
I didn’t have to think about it. I knew beyond certainty that the most important part of Steve’s life was his family. His children meant everything to him. All of a sudden, my wonderful, sharing, protective husband was being condemned. His crime was sharing wildlife experiences with Robert, exactly as he had done for the last five and a half years with Bindi.
The media circus escalated. Helicopters hovered over the zoo, trying to snag any glimpse of the crazy Irwin family. Steve erected shade cloth around our yard for privacy. We soon realized we couldn’t go anywhere. There would be no visits to the zoo, no answering the phone, no doing croc shows. The criticism and the spin continued.
I stood by Steve’s side and watched his heart break. I couldn’t believe the mean-spirited, petty, awful people in the world. Editors manipulated film footage, trying to make the croc look bigger or closer to Robert than it actually was. What possible end could that serve?
I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, an adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.
It was about to get worse. We stepped off a very dark cliff indeed. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
117
" On our return from the bush, we went straight back to work at the zoo. A huge tree behind the Irwin family home had been hit by lightning some years previously, and a tangle of dead limbs was in danger of crashing down on the house. Steve thought it would be best to take the dead tree down.
I tried to lend a hand. Steve’s mother could not watch as he scrambled up the tree. He had no harness, just his hat and a chainsaw. The tree was sixty feet tall. Steve looked like a little dot way up in the air, swinging through the tree limbs with an orangutan’s ease, working the chainsaw.
Then it was my turn. After he pruned off all the limbs, the last task was to fell the massive trunk. Steve climbed down, secured a rope two-thirds of the way up the tree, and tied the other end to the bull bar of his Ute.
My job was to drive the Ute. “You’re going to have to pull it down in just the right direction,” he said, chopping the air with his palm. He studied the angle of the tree and where it might fall.
Steve cut the base of the tree. As the chainsaw snarled, Steve yelled, “Now!” I put the truck in reverse, slipped the clutch, and went backward at a forty-five-degree angle as hard as I could. With a groan and a tremendous crash, the tree hit the ground.
We celebrated, whooping and hollering. Steve cut the downed timber into lengths and I stacked it. The whole project took us all day. By late in the afternoon, my back ached from stacking tree limbs and logs. As the long shadows crossed the yard, Steve said four words very uncharacteristic of him: “Let’s take a break.”
I wondered what was up. We sat under a big fig tree in the yard with a cool drink. We were both covered in little flecks of wood, leaves, and bark. Steve’s hair was unkempt, a couple of his shirt buttons were missing, and his shorts were torn. I thought he was the best-looking man I had ever seen in my life.
“I am not even going to walk for the next three days,” I said, laughing.
Steve turned to me. He was quiet for a moment. “So, do you want to get married?”
Casual, matter-of-fact. I nearly dropped the glass I was holding. I had twigs in my hair an dirt caked on the side of my face. I’d taken off my hat, and I could feel my hair sticking to the sides of my head.
My first thought was what a mess I must look. My second, third, and fourth thoughts were lists of every excuse in the world why I couldn’t marry Steve Irwin.
I could not possibly leave my job, my house, my wildlife work, my family, my friends, my pets--everything I had worked so hard for back in Oregon.
He never looked concerned. He simply held my gaze.
As all these things flashed through my mind, a little voice from somewhere above me spoke.
“Yes, I’d love to.”
With those four words my life changed forever. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
118
" I noticed the crocodiles before I noticed the man. There was a whole line of crocodilians: alligators, freshwater crocodiles, and one big saltie. Amazing, modern-day dinosaurs. I didn’t know much about them, but I knew that they had existed unchanged for millions of years. They were a message from our past, from the dawn of time, among the most ancient creatures on the planet.
Then I saw the man. A tall, solid twentysomething (he appeared younger than he was, and had actually turned twenty-nine that February), dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, barefoot, with blond flyaway hair underneath a big Akubra hat and a black-banded wristwatch on his left wrist. Even though he was big and muscular, there was something kind and approachable about him too. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
120
" The whole project took us all day. By late in the afternoon, my back ached from stacking tree limbs and logs. As the long shadows crossed the yard, Steve said four words very uncharacteristic of him: “Let’s take a break.”
I wondered what was up. We sat under a big fig tree in the yard with a cool drink. We were both covered in little flecks of wood, leaves, and bark. Steve’s hair was unkempt, a couple of his shirt buttons were missing, and his shorts were torn. I thought he was the best-looking man I had ever seen in my life.
“I am not even going to walk for the next three days,” I said, laughing.
Steve turned to me. He was quiet for a moment. “So, do you want to get married?”
Casual, matter-of-fact. I nearly dropped the glass I was holding. I had twigs in my hair an dirt caked on the side of my face. I’d taken off my hat, and I could feel my hair sticking to the sides of my head.
My first thought was what a mess I must look. My second, third, and fourth thoughts were lists of every excuse in the world why I couldn’t marry Steve Irwin.
I could not possibly leave my job, my house, my wildlife work, my family, my friends, my pets--everything I had worked so hard for back in Oregon.
He never looked concerned. He simply held my gaze.
As all these things flashed through my mind, a little voice from somewhere above me spoke.
“Yes, I’d love to.”
With those four words my life changed forever. "
― Terri Irwin , Steve & Me
