Birdbrain (13 page)

There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination — you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

Even though the Moo lager I had in the pub at the Lark Distillery microbrewery was the best beer I had tasted since arriving in Australia, I was still pissed off. Big time.

She asked me why I was so down in the dumps.

I showed her the guidebook. South Coast Track looked like a hell of a trip, I said, but there was one fundamental problem with it. If we wanted to get there we’d have to fly.

I showed her the rough map in the book. As the name suggested, the route wound its way along the southern Tasmanian coastline with a couple of diversions deep inland. One end of the track was at Cockle Creek, the southernmost point in Tasmania — and the whole of Australia — that could be reached by car. The other end was in a place called Melaleuca, eighty-six kilometres to the west. Melaleuca had a few trekkers’ cabins and a bird-watching station, but there was no road link whatsoever. It did have a runway — the story goes that a light aircraft once had to make an emergency landing there, and the only way to get the thing out again was to clear enough space for an airstrip.

If you wanted to start at Cockle Creek, which was at least reachable by bus from Hobart, the only way to get from Melaleuca back to civilization was to fly or to trek back the way you came. It would have been madness to try to hike there and back — I can’t think of anything more boring that covering ground you’ve already seen but backwards. Repetitive stretches of the journey become even more mind-numbing if you already know how boring they’re going to be. Dangerous and exhilarating spots are no longer any kind of challenge but are simply a nuisance because all the excitement has gone. It doesn’t take long before your motivation drops below freezing.

However, if you wanted to start from Melaleuca the only option was to fly there.

I cursed the arseholes that come up with these sorts of schemes.

She offered to pay, thinking it was just a question of money. She was always waving her traveller’s cheques around every time we talked about making decisions, as if money were the answer to everything.

I told her I wasn’t planning on burning any more fuel, given the amount I’d already burnt in getting here.

I felt hot, and I had ants in my pants every time I thought about the route. I’d gone online to find out more about it. Back at the tourist information centre in Hobart National Park I had bought a map of South Coast Track. It was no joke: the path really was in the middle of nowhere, just like Jonas and Mike had told us at Overland.

She looked at me quizzically.

I said that at Narcissus Bay I had decided that Overland would be the last time I ever went out on a route that was designed for amateurs crawling in ten- kilometre legs. I reminded her that all the guidebooks and tourist leaflets had split Overland’s sixty-five kilometres into six one-day hikes. We covered it in four, and we would have done it in two or three if the cabins had been sited a bit more sensibly along the route and if bus timetables had been coordinated with our plans.

I read her a section from the
Great Walks of Tasmania
leaflet:
This is a coast where one’s place in the universe is never in doubt. Money, position, education and status don't count and don’t help.

She asked me whether I thought South Coast Track was going to be terribly difficult.

I told her it was recommended for experienced trekkers and that there were a couple of people around this table who met that description.

She shrugged her shoulders uncertainly.

Fuck it.

At least out there we wouldn’t bump into any more hen parties.

I took a deep swig of Moo and opened out the map of Tasmania again, as if staring at the southern coastline would offer some kind of solution.

Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ was playing in the background.

Jyrki was flustered and talking non-stop; in his excitement he had forgotten all about his pint as he scribbled notes in his jotter of squared paper. He had found a faint line of dots on the map, leaving Melaleuca and heading roughly to the north-east; it was a four- or five-day route, an extension of South Coast Track. This route, Old Port Davey Track, seemed to run through areas even more remote than the main route and looked as though it ended up where no man has boldly gone before. OK, it appeared to meet up with some kind of dirt track, but even that was still a good few hours’ arduous drive from civilization. A Tassielink minibus operates a service between Hobart and the Scott’s Peak end of the track three times a week. That way we wouldn’t have to get a flight, and we wouldn’t have to double-back on ourselves. Jyrki had already fallen in love with his plan.

It felt so silly. Here we were, in Tasmania, an island no larger than Ireland, and we were about to become more isolated from civilization than you could ever get in Finland, no matter how remote a place you found in Lapland. Except maybe if you got lost around the Russian border area.

Jyrki was talking like a man possessed, his overly long limbs thrashing around. He was sure, he had decided, he had found an extra sugar coating to the enthusiasm that Jonas and Mike had planted in him at Overland. He was already calculating the number of days these two combined tracks would take; he counted how many hours it would take per day and stared at the contours on the map in the hope that they might give him some idea of the route’s degree of difficulty. The trek from Cockle Creek to Scott’s Peak would apparently take us about ten days.

I asked him whether it might be smarter to trek the opposite direction, to start at Scott’s Peak and make our way towards Melaleuca and from there onwards towards civilization, to Cockle Creek — how much nicer it would be to end up somewhere with other people and some traffic. But that wouldn’t do, that simply wouldn’t do, because we only had a finite number of days left down under, and we had to use them cost-effectively, and as there would be a bus from Hobart to Cockle Creek tomorrow morning, why wait? Now we had to buy food and ask about getting seats on a suitable return bus.

But because this is Jyrki we’re talking about, that really meant only
asking
about seats, not actually reserving them. Jyrki found out that some seats had already been booked on the buses leaving around the time we should be arriving in Scott’s Peak, which meant the bus would definitely be running.

‘They won’t leave paying customers in the middle of the woods,’ he said. ‘It’s too big a risk to book seats and pay for them in advance, then end up missing the bus because of some unforeseen change to our schedule. If that happens, you’ll never get your money back. If we know the bus is running we can always get a ticket from the driver; we’ll always be able to get away. It might mean sitting on the floor of the bus for a few hours, but so be it.’

‘Ring of Fire’ started blaring out of the speakers once again. The tape loop in this pub must only have been about ten minutes long. It was as if the same obsessive bird had taken flight, singing at the top of its lungs in an attempt to protect its territory once again.

I was still at school back then; it was a while ago. The bus stop was on a slight slope. Snow was packed hard across the surface of the road. You could see the bus’s skid marks in the snow. The tyre tracks were hard and shining, and if you slid back and forth along it with your shoes it soon felt smooth and frictionless.

Sprinkled some fresh snow on top.

The bus arrived and the driver braked. Jesus, you shoud’’ve seen the way it lost control, sliding and swerving at speed towards the embankment of snow. Like watching a mammoth keeling over.

This one comes to mind quite often. Nobody thinks about what’s hidden somewhere out of sight. Nobody knows which packet of porridge oats has a needle pushed in through the seam, or where exactly the shards of glass are buried in the kiddies' sandpit.

Nobody can see.

If I kick a white stick out of your hand, it’s your own fault for being blind.

As I’m taking down the tent the next morning I see that the left guy rope at the back of the tent is dangling loose. The rope and its knot are lying casually on the carpet of leaves.

She must have pushed the tent peg in too deep when we put the tent up last night; the loop of rope has managed to come away from the hook. I’ve shown her a hundred times how you’re supposed to leave the tent peg sticking out between one and one and a half centimetres above the ground, then it’s at the right angle to make sure that the guy rope is taut and stays in place. Either that or she stepped on it when she went for a piss. The peg has been pushed into the ground, and the rope has come loose.

I ask her.

She says she hasn’t trampled on any of the hooks.

I let out a few uncontrolled buggerations. First of all, they’re called tent pegs, I say, and now this particular one is stuck in the ground.

By pulling the guy rope tight and holding it to the ground at slightly different angles, I try to find the spot where the tent peg must have sunk into the earth. The layer of dried leaves and detritus on the ground is pretty thick. I brush the rustling scrub to one side, but I still can’t see the tent peg.

If it’s gone in so far that we can’t even see the top; we’ll never find it.

She doesn’t seem to appreciate that tent pegs are equipment. You don’t go around losing them.

She claims she put the tent peg at the agreed height and asks whether we couldn’t make a replacement peg out of wood. Then we could buy a new one at the Mountain Design store once we’re back in Hobart.

I ask her whether she’s ever seen the heavy, cumbersome lumps of metal they sell as tent pegs around here. Hilleberg’s pegs are light and compact: aluminium, European, smart.

Really. A wooden peg.

Eventually I’m forced to admit that I packed a spare peg. But only one, and that’s why this can’t happen again.

She nods with that bloody-minded look on her face, as if she genuinely doesn’t understand what’s really important.

When I crouch down for a morning piss I notice something.

I pull a piece of pamphlet from my pocket, soften it for a minute by rubbing it between my fingers and gently press it between my legs.

When it comes back into my field of vision it’s a reddish colour — or what was the biblical term?
Though your sins he as scarlet.

Great. I knew this would happen.

Ironbound is still impressive when we see it in the Tasmanian dawn. The hillside rises up behind us high up into the sky. On the bare rock face there is a clear diagonal line, so thin it could almost have been drawn with a stick of chalk: the path we came down yesterday.

Compared with yesterday’s trek, today's path feels ridiculously easy, nothing but duckboards across the damp, even clumps of buttongrass; the same plain, reaching as far as the eye can see, that we saw as we were coming down Ironbound.

She starts talking about gaiters again; they wouldn’t have been completely redundant on Ironbound. I don’t say anything. Then she thinks about how the word is pronounced. Imagine sending someone off to buy some gaiters, she starts explaining, and they came back wearing a couple of alligators on their feet.

I can’t help but laugh. It’s like something straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon.

I tell her I’ve always wanted to come up with a computer game that’s really violent. It would be set in Australia, and its name would be ‘Combat Wombat’.

She laughs.

We can still feel the previous day. It’s lurking cold beneath our skin. You can tell because we’re babbling like idiots.

After yesterday’s exertion the even, undulating terrain here is a real treat. Now that we don’t have to spend all our time concentrating on our every step, the air is full of our incessant chit-chat and jokes that are abysmally bad but that, for that same reason, seem just right.

I have time to watch how she walks: full of energy, warmed up and finding the rhythm in her step.

Christ. She’s just crossed Ironbound, and there she is striding across the duckboards, one hiking boot marching in front of the other and trying to look serious as she witters on about some stupid wannabe wallaby story, and something inside me is deeply moved.

Ironbound was something that had to be shared. Nothing would have been the same if we hadn’t shared it, without knowing every step of the way that another pair of eyes and ears, another group of muscles, was sensing the same as I was; knowing that at any moment you could pull Southy out from between her ears like a box of treasure that only we could open. And, boy, how she’d already shared it. She’d come out here, her body almost entirely untrained, the reach of her limbs so much shorter than mine, without the benefit of a year in the army, with almost zero experience. And not once had I sensed that she was about to sit down on the nearest tree stump and say, ‘Listen, Jyrki, I’ve fucking had it. I’m never putting on this sticky shirt again, heavy with grime and stiff with spots of salty sweat. I want a foamy bath, a litre of perfumed moisturizing cream and a Greek salad, or I’m going to scream.’

I look at her, and I’m filled from head to toe with a strange rush of warmth. I imagine it wouldn’t be an altogether stupid idea to share paths with her from now on — always.

I almost say it out loud.

But I don’t.

Not yet.

_______

Somebody called Louisa had clearly made a big impression on the guy who originally charted this region. After setting off from Louisa River, the most significant place in the Louisa Plains crossing is — wait for it — Louisa Creek.

The creek is wild. The climb down into the gorge is a challenge in itself. There are only a few tree roots and rocks protruding from the embankment to offer you a foothold. The embankment itself is nothing but sheets of almost vertical rusty-brown soil. The force of the current in the river has carved out the gorge, making it steep and deep. You can clearly see how much water has rushed through here during the rainy months.

A ten-metre length of rope has been stretched across the creek. It’s at just the right height so you can grab hold of it if you reach your hands up. Holding on to the rope, you can wade through the water even when the river is slightly fuller. It would probably serve as a decent support if the water level were below waist height. If the creek were completely full, the surface of the water would cover the head of even a tall man; if it came up to your chest, the current would inevitably knock you off your feet. Now there’s just enough water flowing across the shadowy riverbed that you can cross with relative ease, jumping across the rocks.

It’s no wonder that crossing these rivers during the flooding season is ‘forbidden’ — meaning that guidebooks tell you not to try your luck. Lots of people probably do.

I would.

I’d take her over with me; I’d snatch her away so that the bubbling water wouldn’t even realize it was being cheated.

This place is a designated campsite, too. There are worn patches on both sides of the river beneath the trees. It’s no surprise really; people are forced to wait here, often for days at a time.

We fetch water from the creek as it trickles tamely by.

We clamber out of the bush and on to the beach only to discover the cove is adorned with a large rubbish dump: pieces of rope, plastic bottles, metal cans, chunks of polystyrene, plastic bags, floats.

I pick up a rusty spray can. It used to contain shaving-foam. I look over at Jyrki, whose cheeks are now covered with uneven stubble. His face reacts to the sight of all this trash, but he doesn’t say a thing.

‘Look, this must have belonged to someone who swears by the virtues of being clean-shaven in all circumstances.’

‘It wasn't a person that brought it here; it was the sea.’

I glance at the heaps of garbage. True, it will all float.

‘In the Pacific Ocean there’s a floe of rubbish twice the size of the USA, and it’s made up of exactly this kind of stuff,’ he says kicking a faded red plastic canister. ‘Ten metres thick, a hundred million tonnes of shit that smothers a million birds every year — and a few sea mammals for good measure.’

For a moment I’m utterly speechless. ‘Why does nobody do anything about it then?’

‘Because no matter who you ask about it, it’s always someone else’s problem.’

‘Oh. But why hasn’t this been cleared up? I mean, this would be easy to get rid of. You could take it by boat to Cockle Creek.’

Jyrki looks up at me from a bowed position; he’s taking off his hiking boots for the last few kilometres along the sandy beach.

‘Because if you clear up someone else’s rubbish then people really will start leaving their shit behind them. It would be proof that your refuse will always magically transmogrify into someone else’s problem.’

To my left the foaming, turquoise sea soothes the eyes. My toes dig into the sand. After days encased inside my hiking boots they are jumping for joy.

In the sand I can see a frayed piece of orange plastic rope. It makes me think of the dumping ground in the Pacific and the heaps of rubbish at Buoy Creek. Appropriately enough, there were plenty of garishly coloured buoys among the rubbish. Against the gentle colours of the Tasmanian landscape, they were like a slap in the face.

It’s mildly amusing to think of the innocent young first-time trekker girl we met in the first cabin at Overland who had packed a bag full of tinned food, bananas and apples, then came up to us old-timers, her head tilted to one side and both hands filled with rubbish, and asked where she should dispose of it.

It’s as if every piece of information about every national park, every document, hadn’t already made it perfectly clear time after time. Everything you bring with you when you arrive — that means
everything
— you take with you when you leave. Everything, every last sweet wrapper, every eggshell. The fact that some rubbish will eventually decompose is still no excuse for throwing it where it doesn’t belong. A strip of orange peel soaked in preservatives will catch your eye in the bushes for years to come. If you want to wipe when you go into the bushes for a piss, you pick up the paper and take it with you. The same goes for a used condom, a chewed piece of gum or a cigarette end. It’s a good job you’re not allowed to start an open fire in national parks, because then people would try to burn aluminium foil and even empty gas cylinders as well as any paper and plastic shit they might have. I’ve seen burnt remains like this before. How come people are strong enough to carry all manner of containers into the park when they’re full but suddenly haven’t got the strength to carry them away once they’re empty?

Back in New Zealand, when we registered at Kepler, in addition to various papers and receipts we were given a bright-yellow resealable plastic bag with instructions printed on the side about how to deal with your rubbish. So there wasn’t even the old excuse of not knowing where to put your junk when you wanted to wash your hands of it.

That’s it: it’s all about washing our hands. What would we do if nobody ever took care of our rubbish? How shocked we are when someone tells us to deal with it ourselves. Producing refuse is as natural as breathing. And it’s just as natural that this refuse is always Someone Else’s Problem. It's with this kind of logic that people dump washing-machines and fridge carcasses in the woods and by the side of the road, because eventually someone else will have to remove them to stop them being an eyesore.

Lay-bys are full of people’s construction waste, months’ worth of rubbish from the summer cottage and old redundant furniture. A skinned deer was even dumped in one.

Try collecting every strip of salami skin, the paper casing of every sticking plaster. Try flattening every empty tin of tuna, dripping in oil, so that it’s more convenient to carry. It’s a no-brainer that you take everything out of its double packaging, get rid of all cardboard boxes, clingfilm and plastic biscuit trays before you leave and make them someone else’s problem in the rubbish bins at the hostel or the local supermarket, wondering why on earth people ever needed these things in the first place.

And although we’d all been given the same resealable rubbish bags at Kepler we had only got as far as the picnic area on the first day’s leg before we noticed empty tins of sardines and chocolate wrappers left in the outdoor toilet. They had been neatly left in the corner of the hut, as if a diligent cleaner with rubber gloves comes past to collect them every day. Westerners’ brains are clearly programmed with the strong conviction that public toilets clean themselves.

Every person on this earth should be forced to collect all the rubbish they produce in a week and pile it in a heap on the living-room floor. You wouldn’t be allowed to take it away; it would have to be there all week. And for once it wouldn’t be Someone Else’s Problem.