Читать книгу My Life in the Sea of Cars - James Murray - Страница 10

If Australia’s Top End – the squarish top of the continent, bounded by the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Arafura Sea and the Timor Sea, not the pointy Cape York to the east – is an old breadboard, buckled and gouged but still basically flat, then the Arnhem Land Plateau is an old rough-hewn slice of bread lying in its middle. The escarpment is the golden brown crust standing perpendicular to the breadboard.

Geologists tell us a story of a long, long time. First, the erosion of mountains, the sediments flowing down rivers and settling on the ocean floor in layers kilometres deep, and over time being compressed and compacted by the ocean above it into stratified sandstone. Sea levels change. One afternoon, earthquake yanks the plateau up a few hundred metres. And then, over a long time, the plateau is eaten away by water, wind and sun. At one stage ocean waves are crashing against the escarpment.

Aboriginal people tell different stories, but they are always stories of a long, long time.

The first Europeans to come this way had a story about God making the universe in six days about six thousand years ago.

I wake at dawn stiff and sore and I don’t want to get up. If you are walking in this climate it is a very good idea to get up at first light and walk as much as you can early, before the crazy heat, but this morning I linger, sleeping some more and then walking about stretching, scratching and shaking my head, looking about me.

I’d slept on a patch of sand at the bottom of a wide gorge, a minute’s hop up from where this creek – let’s call it First Night Creek – falls off the Arnhem Land Plateau. It goes through a series of waterfalls and a gorge, then is out across the plain and joining the bigger creek to the north. I am eighty metres above the plain and I can see a section of it to the north-east, out to where I was yesterday. I work out where the highway would be, then I turn my back on it and pick up my pack and walk upstream.

I follow the creek for half an hour. I make good progress on the rock shelves that dominate the banks, breaking my stride for the occasional rock hopping or for the few little climbs that are necessary. I keep glancing over to the hillside on my left – to the east – because that is where I’m going. When the creek turns to the west it is time to leave it.

I have a quick swim in the shallow pool at the bend. I have not seen the sun yet, but I was wet with sweat after walking a minute. I drink as I swim, and fill up two of my three water bottles. I swing my pack from the ground to my shoulders, and with that momentum I head for the hill.

For twenty minutes I push across flat open woodland, following wallaby tracks through the long grass, then another twenty hauling up the stony ridge before me. Then I am standing on the top, breathing hard, basking in the view and the first rays of sun. I drop my pack and get out a bottle and drink. Then I get out my map, and I climb with it onto a little rocky peak nearby where I get a panoramic view.

I use 1:50000 topographic maps. Each map covers an area of twenty seven kilometres by twenty seven kilometres and has a grid of black lines two centimetres apart marking out square kilometres. They are big maps, and I keep them folded into a handy size, the area I’m working with on top. Blue lines mark water. Brown lines mark altitude contours at ten metre intervals, so brown lines close together indicate a steep slope. Dark green indicates the occasional ‘dense vegetation’, with light green for the rest. Splotches of brown on top of the green indicate ‘distorted surface’, corresponding roughly to what we call ‘stone country’: country dominated by stone.

To the south and south-west lies the flat, long, broad valley I’ve just left, its floor one hundred and sixty metres above sea level, and it is the first tier, bordered definitively by the second tier another hundred metres higher. I’m on that second tier now, and its warped and weathered demeanour stretches before me to the east.

The map is useful in some ways but not in others. It tells me the ‘distorted surface’ starts a couple of kilometres away, but the immediate east of this ridge is definitely stone country. It tells me there is a little creek running north several hundred metres away, fringed by ‘dense vegetation’. What it doesn’t tell me – what wasn’t picked up by the aerial photography the maps are derived from –- is that the creek lies at the bottom of a narrow gorge that has vertical, unclimbable, fifty metre walls; the camera was fooled by the gorge’s narrowness and by the height of the rainforest towering within it. But I’ve been there and I know how it is, and though I’m wanting to go east I pick up my pack and make my way south-east.

In half an hour I’m veering around the southern edge of that sheer-walled ravine, and soon after I’m at the top of an east-flowing creek. I know this creek, but I’ve never seen it flowing, and I follow it for a kilometre as it tumbles and gains through a series of waterfalls, rapids and pools, then I step out into open skies when it enters the much bigger gorge of the much bigger creek gushing down from right to left. The sun is bathing the top half of the gold-grey ramparts about me, and I stand for a minute and marvel.

There is no name for this creek on the map, and I know no name other than the one my kids and I gave it when we were here. We called it Mama because she is big – a river, really – and because her four big tributaries stretching out across the country upstream are all on one side and they reminded my children, when they saw them on the map, of a litter of feeding puppies. The metaphor doesn’t work perfectly because here the flow goes from the babies to the mother, but my kids didn’t care.

I follow Mama upstream to Dog Leg: a big open bend in the river, with a couple of beaches, broad rock shelves, and caves with paintings. I’ve spent many happy days here over the years. I let my pack slip from my shoulders, hang my sweat-drenched shirt in the sun, put my sunnies in my hat on the ground, and swim. I make a fire and boil the billy while I eat my muesli, looking about me at this familiar place, this magnificent place.

I unfold my map. Further upstream are the blue lines of those four tributaries. I know them all, their gorges, waterfalls, pools, shady beaches and sunny beaches. I place my left hand in the centre of the map and cover Mama’s catchment. My right hand hovers beside it, above the area to my east. Then I get out my other map and join it to the first one. I trace out my intended journey with my finger, making a sweeping loop that covers half of both maps.

I make a big decision now: I will loop clockwise. When I pick up my pack and walk I don’t continue following the gorge further upstream – I would if I was to loop anticlockwise – but instead leave it for a thickly-forested side gorge. I clamber and climb and push my way up its eastern wall, and then I’m on the plateau again, looking down on Mama a hundred metres below me. Then I begin the short cut to Relief Falls.

I’ve walked this four k through stone several times, and I know the landmarks, but I’m mostly in the small stuff, when I can only see fifty metres ahead, and I’m always plotting a path, looking ahead five metres, then ten metres, then thirty metres, then I look for a place to put my foot down carefully under my heavy pack. Each step involves a decision, and it is hard work. The heat becomes more and more intense, and it radiates off rocks, becoming a surreal personality in certain places, and I regret my late start. I stop in shade a few times, and three litres go from my bottles. I snack on an apple and a biscuit. It is midday before the vision of Relief Falls and Relief Pools appears.

Relief Creek! Relief Falls! Before being here with my kids I hadn’t thought of naming these places, but it is handy for me now, talking to you.

I drop my pack, hat and sunglasses, peel off my clinging shirt. I dive in and swim underwater, ten slow clean strokes through the cool green sunlight, drinking. I breathe beneath the waterfall, then glide ten clean stretching strokes back, drinking some more. The water is freakishly clear; I feel I could reach down and touch the bottom, but it is twenty metres away. I watch a falling stone take forever to hit it, then I wait for the chink sound to reach me.

I love swimming, and here I’m in heaven, but I’m getting burnt and there is no shade at Relief Falls and I know shady Relief Beach is upstream. So I get back into the hot air, repack and climb the spinifexed hillside to get above the falls. What I want is the pool/ beach/shade package; a waterfall is an optional extra, not available this afternoon. I follow the creek up for five minutes. It feels much longer because I’m so sore and exhausted, but it is only a couple of hundred metres.

I hang in the pool at Relief Beach, slowly recovering. Little fish swarm about me, nibbling. After a while I feel cold, so I get out and lie on shaded sand for an hour or so, dozing.

I open my eyes to see a fly walking about on my hand. I watch it for several minutes: its amazing eyes, the rainbows in its wings, the grooming actions of its tiny legs. Eventually my awareness shifts from the fly to a crow in the tree above me, talking with its mate nearby.

Soon I’m standing and walking about. The pool is wide and handsome. A little waterfall and rock shelf separate it from the pool behind it. Banksia, grevillea, wattle, paperbark, pandanus, palms and cyprus pine fringe the pool and adorn the beach. All about me are stunning rock formations: the stone country at its most contorted, most spectacular. Finally, after days of nonstop movement, I stand and stare.

The sun sinks. Flying foxes cascade from west to east in the darkening air. I light my fire, cook and eat my dinner. I have my final swim. I try to cross the pool underwater with one breath, counting strokes: … ten, eleven, twelve …. a couple of times I almost make it but come up a few metres short, my lungs bursting, after fourteen strokes. I float on my back and see only stars. I get out and lie on warm, flat rock.

I wake. The stars have shifted hours. I go and lie down on the sand near my pack. I wrap the muesli up in my shirt for a pillow, mounding the sand beneath it, and for a while I lie on my back and stare at the sky.

I’ve given up on the dictaphone idea, the talking out loud onto tape. I like to be quiet out here. I figure I’ll put my words onto the stars, and they’ll be there for you when you need them.

Occasionally I startle myself with a laugh that barks into the still air and bounces off the auditorium’s stone walls. Was I on the bus only yesterday? It feels like that was long ago, far away. Was it me on the bus? Or someone who looks like me? I trace the movements – a continuous line – of that guy on the bus, and I’m led to me here, now.

The day before yesterday I was in Darwin, on my bicycle on the road. I visited Mbakeh, who lives on the second floor of a big block of units. He seemed depressed. We sat on his balcony and looked out to the world. There was a huge lawn below us and to the right were several magnificent giant trees, but straight ahead was the intersection of two roads. I looked at Mbakeh but his eyes were on the moving cars, and after a while I was watching them too. Only very occasionally a pedestrian or two, members of the carless underclass, humanised the scene by walking to the petrol station on the opposite corner.

When Mbakeh was in Africa, at home, and sitting outside, he was there with his neighbours, who were outside, and with the traffic, who were pedestrians. He saw these people and they saw him. The road was a free and easy place, a place for spontaneous exchange, for goats, gossip, football, chess, for life. And so it was in Australian cities before the car. Now the road is hostile, barren, alien: black bitumen and noisy, fuming, dangerous cars.

I left Mbakeh and put my bike on one of those roads. I know all the back ways, alleyways, shortcuts and quiet long cuts, but to get from Fannie Bay to Nightcliff you have to go on Dick Ward Drive for a few kilometres. Dick Ward Drive is a major engineering feat, built on reclaimed land through mangroves. Running along one side is a wide bike path sectioned off from the cars, so it is safe, conflict free riding. There are no hills and the surface is excellent. It was hot: late afternoon, late March, the black tarmac had soaked up heat all day, but the trees planted years ago were finally providing shade and I created a breeze for myself as I rode. It was an enjoyable, meditative experience.

There was a quiet minute when there were no motor vehicles roaring past me. I listened to the whirr of my tyres, to the birds and insects and the rustle of wind through the hundred shades of green. Then the cars came again. From hundreds of metres away they drowned out the sounds of life. Louder, louder, until they were screaming past me, ugly, violent, poisonous bullshit.

I’m a long way from cars here, and getting further away, but I still feel them. They’ve entered me with their ever-presentness in my life, with their centrality to modern Australian existence.

Cars are big. Step outside your door and there is a car. They rule the common thoroughfare. Great swathes of our cities are roads and car parks. ‘Cars are a given,’ my friend Hannah says, meaning cars are somehow beyond question, beyond analysis, beyond discussion.

I was with Louis when he suddenly flew into a panic. His car was at the Mechanic’s for repairs. He had an appointment in town in two hours time. He hadn’t forgotten the appointment, but he had been imagining hopping into his car and driving in and out, and with a shock he realised he couldn’t do that. He rang friends until he found one who could pick him up and drive him in and drive him home. The fourth call found its mark and he began to relax. ‘Damned if I know how you survive without a car,’ he said to me, shaking his head in disbelief.

But he knows me very well. He knows I go into town quite often. He knows I ride my bike or I catch a bus.

I’m talking to you, Louis, and to you, Hannah. I’m talking to you all. You’ve put car in my face for forty years. I’m putting it back into yours for a while.