Читать книгу My Life in the Sea of Cars - James Murray - Страница 12

I had been heading towards a particular place: a creek, a gorge, falls. I see it on my map but I’ve never been there and I can’t imagine it. What is it like, this Mystery Creek, this missing piece of the puzzle, surrounded by country I know, by creeks I’ve followed?

I went to sleep intending to wake at dawn and walk, but at dawn, in an instant, I change my mind. Mystery is too far away and requires too much walking. I would have to walk six or eight hours each day for the next seven days to get there and back to the highway, to get back to town. There is no scope for a rest day. I’m not fit enough to do that without it being too hard. I turn in my sleep and see the sky lightening in the east. Oh no! The next time I look it is lighter and the birds are starting up. I suddenly reject the idea of the race against time, and accept, with great relief, a week of freedom: now I have time for everything. I don’t have a schedule dictating my actions. If I wanted to, I could spend five, six days here.

I sleep for a while longer, dreaming exuberantly. I get up and wander about the beach and rock shelf. I sit cross-legged on the sloping sand at the water’s edge, watching the fish in front of me, and slowly getting through a bowl of muesli. When the sun rises above the ridge behind me and I need my hat and shirt, I pack my bag and set off.

I leave Relief, which here runs south, and walk directly towards the sun. I’m heading for Halfway Creek, which runs north three kilometres to the east. I have done this crossing eight or nine times, and I’ve never gone the same way twice. The terrain is so rugged and diverse that within it I’ve been surprised and confused and lost – thinking I’m somewhere I’m not – many times. While trying to find an easy passage, I’m constructing a picture of the country in my mind, and I’m understanding why no easy crossing has been found.

For half an hour I clamber through labyrinthine stone, then settle into a stretch of high, flat, sparse woodland. Occasionally I catch glimpses of escarpment several kilometres away to the northeast.

I gradually descend into a little creek – let’s call her Gully – which I remember from other times. Later in the year Gully will be dry with occasional pools, but now she is flowing, and here is a two metre waterfall, an exquisite, small but deep pool and a shaded patch of sand. The countryside oozes out its moisture. Gravity pulls it down, into trickles into gullies into creeks into rivers. This is a great time of year because there is water everywhere: cool, clean water to drink, and cool, clean water to fall into, to dissolve into.

I’ve always been comfortable in the bush. I spent the first five years of my life in a semi-rural outer suburb of Melbourne, and my earliest memories are of the creek, pine forest and cow paddock within toddling distance of home. Then we shifted to a beach and bush outer suburb of Brisbane where I spent the rest of my childhood. Bushwalking – the kind of thing I’m doing now –was a natural progression from the out-of-school activities of my youth.

I cop flak for bushwalking alone – ‘weird’, ‘wacko’, ‘oddball’, ‘selfish’ – but I’m happy to be alone. I’ve bushwalked with many friends over the years, happily, successfully. Walking with my children has provided me with the best weeks of my life, and Seb was great for a few weeks twenty years ago. But being close to someone for days on end can grate on the nerves.

Phil was always singing the jingles of television commercials or TV shows. I was annoyed by a particular song for canned fruit on day one. I walked with him for two weeks, and by the end I wanted to throw a can of fruit at him. And he was always shouting for echoes. I felt we were intruding, wearing thin our welcome.

Jeff was inordinately bothered by flies. There are always a few flies about, and later in the year there can be more than a few, and I wave or blow them away from my eyes and mouth unconsciously. Jeff was forever loudly cursing them and chasing them away from his legs and arms. He’d look over to me and angrily ask, ‘How come you don’t have any flies on you?’ then realise I did but wasn’t bothered by them. He would rise late, and wanted to bolt from one campsite to another. If I stopped to look at anything he would ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ He was up ahead calling out, ‘What’s wrong?’ every two minutes.

At least those guys enjoyed the country because some friends don’t. Everywhere is ‘dreary’. They are disappointed. They ‘didn’t think it would be like this’. They ‘can’t get comfortable’. Robert cut the walk short due to junk food addiction. Mel worried about her dog. Scott was incensed by the lack of man made paths. Before he came out with me he had imagined he would be walking on paths thinking about his business, and I was sorry to disappoint him.

Alone, I am my own man. I stop and start without consultation, without thought. Alone, things are very simple. And after a few days the aloneness becomes a great theatre for revelation.

People wonder about me being ‘scared’ by myself. Ann went camping by herself once: she walked along a designated walking path in a National Park, and had stopped at a designated camping area in the middle of the afternoon. There was no one there but she was sure other people would arrive. When no one had come by dusk she freaked out. She considered walking back to her car but it was too dark. She got into her tent but didn’t sleep a wink because she was ‘scared shitless’. To her great relief dawn eventually broke, and she packed up and rushed home. She said it was the worst night of her life.

‘But what were you scared of?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, seriously. Why were you scared?

‘I don’t know.’

She was enclosed in her tent, safe from the ‘creepy crawlies’ that people can fear. I pressed her. ‘You must have been scared of something.’

‘I was! I was scared shitless,’ she said again.

‘But of what?’

She didn’t understand the question. She said she was amazed that I’m not scared when I ‘camp’ alone.

‘But what would I be scared of?’

She didn’t know.

‘So, you were scared because no one was there? How about if a bunch of drunk footballers turned up? Would you have been scared of them?’

‘No. They would have protected me.’

‘From what?’

She didn’t know.

And then they wonder about me being ‘bored’ by myself. Michael was visiting Darwin, and his friends had taken him to Litchfield National Park, about one hundred and fifty kilometres from town. The three-hour return trip – chatting and listening to music in the plush, air-conditioned interior of his friends’ new car – was probably the best part of the day.

‘Where’d you go?’ I asked.

‘Florence Falls’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Had a swim, then read the paper,’ he said, and he saw something in my face because then he said, ‘Well, what else am I going to do? Matt starts reading the paper, then Audrey starts reading the paper. What am I going to do?’

Here, so close I can touch it, is a wattle, less than a metre tall, with perhaps one hundred leaves. Several leaves are old and yellow, about to fall off. Several leaves are new: small, unblemished, a more vibrant green. Some leaves have been significantly eaten by insects. I look at one particular leaf: its backbone and its fine veins, and about twenty little light-coloured circular blemishes and several other dark squiggly blemishes, caused – I think – by organisms. And there, a beetle. I look at it closely: tiny eyes, tiny legs. I look at its wings. Each wing is composed of twenty or so segments. I look closely at one segment, then another, then another, and in each segment I can see a rainbow.

I nod to Michael. There is nothing he can do but read the paper.

I follow Gully downstream – north – for a while. I’ve not done this before, but it’s easy walking and I want to meet Halfway further downstream from where I normally meet her. I recognise a big bluff ahead. The Spot – a place on Halfway – is to the right of this bluff and Gully continues past it to the left, I’m sure. The recognition makes me feel good: I’m getting to know this country. When I get closer, I leave the creek and go east through stone, then make a steep but straightforward descent to the bottom of Halfway’s gorge. I hop a few hundred metres downstream and I’m at The Spot.

There is a particular feel here that I recognised the first time I came through. I didn’t stop that time – I had camped half an hour upstream and was on the move – but I’ve slept here several nights over the years, and I’ll sleep here again tonight. I shed my pack and hat and sodden shirt, and the pool takes me in like I have never been gone.

Hours and hours later, the pendulum that throws me into the water to cool, then drags me out to warm, is losing momentum. I’ve been into every nook and cranny of this pool, and the crusty surfaces of beaches – until today disturbed only by lizards and birds – are now trampled with my footprints. I went upstream for a while, and swam up the long narrow gorge to the bottom of Halfway Falls. The walls of the gorge are so close together I’m careful not to kick my feet against them as I breaststroke, and so high and narrow that in the half-dark I cannot see the bottom. Eventually they open, and I tread water beneath the fifty metre falls. I can’t climb up anywhere – I’ve tried, but there are no handholds – so I slowly glide back to The Spot.

It is an hour before sunset – I don’t have a clock so I’m always guessing – and the shade from the western ridge has crossed the pool and crossed the beach I’m on, and is spreading away from me like a slow-burning fire.

Overlooking me are huge bluffs, cliffs and hillsides, their grey-orange-brown becoming brilliant orange-red in the late light, or darkening in shadow. My map tells me they are about one hundred and fifty metres higher than me, and they sprawl magnificently and chaotically around me. Above them, overlooking them and much more, high in the bold blue sky – if you look long enough you will see them – are the specks of soaring eagles.

I am alive, a speck of creation, a fluttering feather, a gathering storm, a clenching and unclenching fist, a receding tide that gradually reveals, that gives air.

I’m taking my time with this car thing, aren’t I? I’m getting there, my friend. It is a big thing I’m giving you, and I want to make sure you can take it in. I feel you’re waiting at the crossroads, revving your engine, ready to run me over.

Jude always lets me know that she and her husband use their car sparingly. She often points out they have only the one car between them. I feel uncomfortable when she does this. I’ve never talked to her about cars. What has she been told about me? A few weeks ago she said to me, ‘You don’t have a car for environmental reasons. Is that right?’

‘Oh, for many reasons. I might write a book about it one day.’

‘But you get lifts in cars, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there is a flaw in your argument.’

‘Hey?’

‘If you get lifts in cars there is obviously a flaw in your argument.’

My dear friends. My dear car-driving friends. I don’t want to hurt you. Ease up. I’ll be gentle with you. I’m preparing the way for you.

I’m easing up here, and easing down, easing into this sandbank. I can feel my heart and mind slowly unwinding. If I stay still, the cloudy water inside me settles and clears. Over the days, my consciousness gains a focus on things I didn’t know existed.

I live near the tidal estuary of Rapid Creek in Darwin. At low tide there is a vast expanse of exposed wet sand, and I like to walk out to the water’s edge and watch the sea retreat or advance. There is a rock island, bigger than a football oval and about three kilometres from the foreshore, that people call Old Man Rock. At high tide it is submerged, and boats can run aground on it, but Darwin’s big tides – often six or seven metres – reveal it for half the day. On the lowest tides of the year, if you have a spare two hours at the right time, you can walk out to it and back without getting your knees wet. Whenever I’m at the beach I look to it. If I’m travelling down Chapman Road through the suburb of Rapid Creek, heading to the beach, I look at the ocean, and if it isn’t high tide I see Old Man Rock. Above the black road is green sea, brown island, green sea, blue sky. If the tide is right out, yellow sand goes between the road and water.

Beth and her family have lived on Chapman Road for fifteen years. I was in her house and I mentioned Old Man Rock in passing.

‘What’s that? Old Man Rock?’

‘The island out there,’ I said, pointing in the right direction through the living room wall.

‘What island?’

‘You know, the island out there. The rock island. It’s about three kilometres out to sea. Submerged at high tide.’

But neither Beth nor her daughter knew what I was talking about. They frowned and shook their heads. Eventually I led them out the front door and out the gate and onto the road and I pointed again.

‘Oh!’ said Beth. ‘I suppose I’ve seen it …’

Of course she’s seen it. She has seen it ten times a week for fifteen years.

‘… but I’ve never really noticed it.’

What does she notice? She is a lawyer, and notices details at work. She notices the mess her daughter left in the kitchen, and what her friend was wearing last night, and what happened in the TV show. She would notice if someone in the office had odd socks or mismatched earrings. She can’t notice everything. Now Old Man Rock has been pointed out to her she will start noticing it.

You can’t notice everything and sometimes you don’t see something until it is pointed out to you. It might be too big and too close and you can’t get perspective. You might look past it, distracted, preoccupied. You might be blinded, or fooled, or somewhere else, but you know you don’t know everything, and that you could be surprised.

There might be a favourite drawing you see every day on your waIl, a drawing of a staircase. You’ve always seen the staircase going up. One day someone says it is going down.

‘No, it is going up!’ you say, but he points out why he sees it going down and suddenly you are seeing it going down, and you never see it going up again.

I make my fire and cook my dinner while there is enough daylight to see into the billy. I don’t keep the fire going after dinner. A fire is attractive, mesmerising, and gives me good visibility in its ring of light, but its brightness kills my night vision for outside the ring. Without a fire, the starlight is perfectly adequate.

I walk up to a rock platform overhanging the sky-reflecting water. I let these words out silently, not disturbing the surface, going directly to the stars.

I love being here. I love the free and easy lifestyle. These pools! This pool, fifty metres long and twenty metres wide, curls around a corner and is mostly very deep. To swim with goggles through the great sunlit space beneath its surface! There is a section of huge submerged boulders and fallen trees, and many fish as long as my arm. Today, a turtle mooched beneath me, oblivious. Halfway is a long string of immaculate gems, of pools, beaches, gorges and falls, of salubrious abundance and ease. No mozzies, no crocs. No worries.

It stays warm at night. I’m freckly and burn easily so I wear a hat and big shirt in the sun, but when the sun goes down they come off. I rarely wear pants. I am entirely alone so my nakedness can’t bother anyone. I sleep naked on the bare sand.

My skin comes from my seven Celtic great-grandparents. Independently of each other they all left their ancestral lands and language in the second half of the nineteenth century. That great uprooting was passed in convulsive shocks through my grandparents and parents to me, and is manifest in my rootlessness, the rootlessness of white Australians.

I can’t be in this country without being aware of the people who were here before me, before the whitefella came.

I’ve spent many days on this creek over many years, and I’ve never seen a person here. In other years I have seen boot prints, and I know a bushwalking tour group has come this way. I don’t see footprints other than my own and I don’t run into blackfellas, but there are paintings here and there of turtle and fish and emu, and their presence screams at me.

I don’t want to tell you exactly where I am. I have permission to be here. I come to this ancient aboriginal land as a tourist, a bushwalker.

Over the years I meet people of this country, but I meet them in towns and communities and not out here. Their parents and grandparents and fifty thousand years of ancestors would have come here occasionally, to fish and hang out, to sleep on the beach. The beaches by this pool could sleep fifty people, their dreams intermingling, solidifying into culture, seeping into rocks, rising like smoke to the sky.