Birdbrain (11 page)

Thank God.

I suppose this must make me an ‘experienced hiker’. That's the yardstick Jyrki had used before we came out here.

Is that how it happens, in just a few days? Is walking a certain number of kilometres sufficient to make you experienced, although there will be some sorts of terrain you’ve never hiked through? If you’ve spent ten years trekking through the backwoods of Lapland, does that make you an ‘experienced hiker’ in the Dolomites? Or vice versa? Or does ‘experience’ mean that you’ve learnt to appreciate certain theoretical rules of play (Jyrki’s rules, that is, from which, in his vast experience, he often strays because a sufficient understanding of the rules naturally gives you the freedom to break them) from which you wouldn’t dream of deviating: never leave the marked route or try to take a shortcut; be realistic about how much ground you can cover in a day’s leg, and leave yourself plenty of time; drink lots of fluids; eat enough; learn to read a map and use a compass; learn the basics of first aid; learn to read the weather.

Is experience the fact that I've now picked up the masculine habit of hacking up the saliva in my mouth and spitting it at the side of the path, a habit that has become so routine I’m afraid I won’t even notice I’m doing it once I’m back in the city?

I’m beginning to understand. My experience is in my toughened calf muscles and my breathing, which flows better with every day’s walking. Without Kepler and Nelson Lakes — as piss-easy as Jyrki claimed they were — I would never have been able to cross Ironbound.

No matter how much I’d thought of Daddy Dearest.

Had I, in some unfathomable way, been given back my freedom after all?

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

We were sitting with Bill on the terrace of Tim’s Place drinking God-awful canned Fosters. We’d got off the bus from Adelaide and jumped on Bill’s minibus. Bill’s company ran nature and sightseeing trips lasting a few days at a time, and they were also a handy way of getting from place to place. The next day his minibus would take us to the western end of the Great Ocean Walk. That was to be our first leg since arriving in Australia. Further inland it was still far too hot and dry to think about going on any of the bush walks. Along the coast it would be cooler, and we would be more certain of a regular water supply.

All the guidebooks had sung the praises of the Great Ocean Walk. It was one of the newer and most breathtaking of the average-length treks in mainland Australia, over ninety kilometres of national park coastal panoramas. The route featured climbs, dunes, caves and a few small villages that were worth seeing in their own right.

Here in the pass at Hall’s Gap the night was pitch black.

By the time we had arrived in the forests of the Grampians it was already dark. Bill told us to look out of the windows for wallabies illuminated in the bus’s headlights. He gave his passengers instructions. If you see a wallaby on the left, you shout out
‘Leftí
If you see one on the right, shout
‘Rightl’
What if we see one straight ahead?’ someone asked. Apparently then you shout
‘Oh shit!

We’d bought food and drink on the way. Bill had told us that none of the restaurants in Hall’s Gap would be open by the time we arrived. In any case, he said, there were far fewer than there used to be. It didn’t matter: the backpackers’ hostel had the usual shared kitchen.

The other minibus passengers had already hit the sack, but we had stayed up sipping our lagers. Bill had sat down to join us. A thick candle flickering in the breeze lit our table.

Bill was in his fifties, and he clearly had the gift of the gab. He was just telling us about how he had dealt with a couple who had started getting down to business on the back seat of his minibus (accelerating then braking until the couple fell off the seat and took the hint) when the night was pierced with a high-pitched, electronic noise.

Bill groaned and fished in the pocket of his khakis for his mobile phone, the screen of which gave off a ghostly phosphorescent glow. I was surprised when he handed it to me. He asked me to read the text message he had just received — he had left his glasses inside somewhere. I took the phone and told him the message was from someone called Lisa. Bill nodded. I pressed the button to bring up the text. I looked at it, then at Bill, then back at the message. My voice went hoarse as I read it out.

Bill pressed his hands against his eyes, just for a moment, then took them away, caught his breath, and all of a sudden the wrinkles beneath his eyes and around the edges of his mouth seemed deeper than before.

In 2006, a year ago, starting on 20 January, the Grampians had caught fire and burnt for two weeks solid. The diameter of the affected area was 360 kilometres.

It was hard to comprehend, until you realized that back home it would have meant the whole of southern Finland being ablaze right the way up to Jyväskylä and beyond.

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest had been destroyed, but, as if by a miracle, only two people had died, a father and son who had been trapped in their car by the flames. Around 60,000 sheep had perished. Nobody had bothered counting the wallabies.

It was no wonder that the flourishing tourist trade in Hall’s Gap had started to fall apart.

And now Otway was on fire.

Otway was on fire, villages had already been evacuated, and Bill had no choice but to choose an alternative route.

The Great Ocean Walk would be closed off to us.

We were supposed to see koalas there, wild koalas living in trees.

I clenched my fists.

Although I’d known all of this beforehand.

How the soil was impoverished, how the hooves and trotters that this land should never have known trampled the soil, making it lifeless and barren. How the small furry animals tilling the land in search of food ended up in the mouths of rats and foxes artificially introduced into the country’s ecosystem. How the ancient forests were decimated to such an extent that there were no great fire-resistant trees left, leaving fragile new growth all the more vulnerable to every spark.

That’s how Australia will blaze.

That’s how the world will be burnt.

She asked me what we should do now. I told her we were in the wrong part of the continent to bother with Bibbulmun Track. Of its impressive 900-kilometre stretch, there were a couple of hundred kilometres that ran along the coastline, which meant, theoretically, it would have been suitable for us given the time of year. But because Bibbulmun was a long way from the southwestern corner of Australia for the time being we were through with mainland Australia.

It was just a question of distance. We could take Bill’s minibus as far as Melbourne, jump on the Spirit of Tasmania ferry and chug all the way to Devonport.

It was time to go, a little ahead of schedule, to Tasmania and the Overland Track.

The landscape was incredible, a surreal mixture of black and green, so bright that it hurt the eyes.

Fresh shoots seemed to burst forth from the blackened, truncated stumps of the eucalyptus trees. The clumps of grass stood out so vividly against the pitch-black ground that they looked as though they had been lit up from the inside.

‘There are some species sprouting here that have never been seen before round these parts. Some seeds apparently need the heat of a fire before they’re able to germinate.’

Bill had driven through die Grampians a few days after they had finally managed to put the fire out.

‘Imagine,’ he said, his voice low, and I didn’t know whether it was with anger or admiration, ‘imagine this landscape, reaching out as far as the eye can see, and not a colour in sight. Nothing. It was as if you’d just taken a car and driven into a black-and-white film. All around you, nothing but black and grey. Residual smoke even blocked out the colour of the sky.’ Bill coughed. ‘Some of the eucalyptus trees were so old they didn’t catch fire at first, but they have a habit of going hollow in the middle. The living part of the tree is just a thin layer beneath the bark. It was only a matter of time before the fire was sucked into their rotten insides and shot upwards. The upper branches were destroyed, but the trunks survived. The trees were like factory chimneys, black and sturdy, and you could see gloomy dark-grey smoke billowing out of their tops long after the fire itself had been put out. And there were thousands of those chimneys, thousands of them, stretching from here right to the horizon.’ Silence descended for a moment, as now we could envisage it and understand why this forest was so low and stunted.

‘What was the name of that bloke? The European guy that used to draw pictures of hell?’

‘Gustave
Doré?’
I suggested.

‘Doré.
That must be who I was thinking of. We should have invited the guy to take a look around. His drawings are pretty lame compared to what it was like out here.’

‘The
Land of Mordor?’ some Tolkien fan shouted from further back in the minibus, and Bill nodded.

‘Whatever you can think of that represents a land of the darkest imaginable shadow of death. Perhaps the worst of it was that, along with the colours, the sounds disappeared, too.’

Bill paused, and for a moment we all sat listening to the hum of the minibus motor.

‘People always talk about the silence you get in the forests, but that silence is made up of thousands of little sounds. Birds singing and rustling in the trees and on the ground; the sound of a wallaby munching the grass somewhere in the distance; insects buzzing and beetles waddling across the leaves; worms crawling around in the soil; the hush of the wind in the grass and the bracken, the leaves and the branches. But out here in the Grampians it was like you’d walked into a soundproof room. It was utter deathly silence.’

Bill flicked on the indicator and turned left towards the B160 highway. We would drive around Otway far to the north.

‘Don’t get me wrong. I still think this is the greatest country on earth, but sometimes you can’t help thinking that.. .’ — he gave another cough — ‘... that people, us humans, we’re just swarming parasites on Mother Earth’s skin, tickling and teasing, irritating and provoking her until the only thing she can do is disinfect herself. She whips up a fever, and it probably hurts like jumping into a bath of acid, but at least it does the trick. She’s just got to do it.’

And I couldn’t help thinking about the same thing happening in the north: a fever rising, the snowline retreating, the glaciers melting. As the winters become warmer, people’s livelihoods will disappear.

Lapland is being raped right now just like Australia was in the past. Giant hotels, more and more new skiing resorts, shopping centres, health spas. Come and enjoy the untouched nature of Lapland!

All common sense has been lost. Every day at the Rabid Reindeer we arranged enormous buffets for the guests. The majority of the food was brought in by lorry or aeroplane. Every day the food that wasn’t eaten — and there was plenty of it — ended up in the rubbish bins, ladled off serving trays, bowls and plates left on the tables and into giant black bin-liners by the kilo, by the tonne.

Now it’ll all be spewing methane somewhere.

At some point things will come full circle.

I remember descending the Col du Palet Pass in the French Alps. After days spent surrounded by untouched natural landscapes I was so shocked that it hurt.

Maybe during the winter season Val Claret is a real picture-postcard landscape of snow, dark-blue skies and continual Christmas lights. But during the summer months seeing the place is like listening to nails scraping down a blackboard. Do these slalom hotshots have any idea what their skiing hellhole looks like during the summer?

The mountainsides have been skinned alive, so much so that their immune system is now irreparably compromised. The whole valley is now a persistent sore on the landscape. I couldn’t help imagining what it would look like in another ten years’ time: the bottom of the valley would be nothing but a bed of gravel, furrowed by the occasional trickle of water and dappled with a few brave tufts of grass. From amid the deserted wastelands, roofs, chimneys, the upper storeys of tall buildings would sprout. The twisted, rusted remains of cable-car pillars would protrude from the moraine slopes like the half-buried bones of dinosaurs.

Once the snow starts coming down as rain — something that is happening more and more at this altitude — tourists will vote with their feet. The waters of the melting Grande Motte glacier and the endless rainfall would continually push soil and earth down the slopes, hoed bare by the bulldozers, and before long nobody would want to prevent or slow down the inevitable decline and fall of the Val Claret.

They 're red and dotted around the place. When you take care of the glass and turn the switch it starts ringing in every room, so loud your skull rattles.

People look at one another thinking this must he some mistake, soon there’ll be somebody on the Tannoy telling everyone to chill out. But when there’s no announcement they start shifting restlessly and whispering and nudging each other. Then the idea of smoke and burning gases pops into their heads, that and the image of everyone uncontrollably barging their way out of the doors, shoving people, falling over, trampling on each other.

And then that’s exactly what happens.

If it’s a kiddies’ showing, Mummy’s and Daddy’s sleeves will soon be covered in snot. Are we going to die? they ask, bawling. And all the while there’s the ear-splitting sound of the alarm, PRRRRRRRRRRRR, that’ll eventually strip their nerve endings raw.