Wanderlust (26 page)

We spent the rest of the day driving around Port Moresby picking up supplies: rope, more mosquito repellent, rice, dried food. At one point we traversed a wide and chaotic intersection that swarmed with people. Pedestrians surrounded the car, moving like atoms to their destinations in an inscrutable flow. It was a sensation I'd had before, in Pakistan especially: I was in a fragile glass pod of Western culture—of air-conditioning and pop music—submarining through an ocean of foreign bodies. I looked at Justin, who was literally wide-eyed. I squeezed his hand and felt something I couldn't identify, something I decided must be what mothers felt. There were things I couldn't experience for the first time, but I could enjoy someone else's discovery.

That night we stayed with friends of Patricia's who had a swimming pool. Taking a dip after dinner, Justin and I couldn't see any surrounding landscape because of the high cement walls, which were topped with shards of glass, but we could look straight up at the stars. I propped my elbows on the edge and leaned back. It all felt so good: the coolness of the water, the stars, a scent of jasmine on the air, and Justin. I tried to keep my mind focused on the pleasant present, but now my fear was coming on full bore. The jungle? For six days? What had I been thinking? I wanted to be the sort of person who would hike the Kokoda Trail, but that was different from wanting to do it, which I now wasn't sure about at all. I'd dared myself and now I was stuck. I was trying to prove something, but I wasn't sure what it was, or whom it was for.

chapter twenty-one

W
e entered a high-vaulted
tunnel of green. We were a party of seven, the four of us plus the three porter-guides Paul had hired, Godwin, Samuel, and Yepuku. They wore T-shirts, long shorts, and flimsy-looking sneakers, and each one carried a machete. We wore T-shirts, long shorts, and heavy-duty hiking boots, and each of us carried a day pack—except for Justin, who had insisted on carrying
all
of his own equipment, tent, sleeping bag, and everything.
Of course he would,
I thought.

The trail began to climb right away. In these parts there were supposed to be blue-necked cassowaries, horn-billed kokomos, and bright little frogs that lived in the trees. That first day, though, the jungle passed in a blur. Trekking on muddy, root-gnarled ground, I spent the next few hours looking at my feet. My thick white socks poked out of green and brown hiking boots, and gradually took on the tone of the mud underfoot. Within just a few square miles, New Guinean mud came in a rainbow of nuanced shades. Back on the road it had been russet red. Here in the jungle it was more yellowish, with stripes of beige and deep orange. Below my shorts my legs gradually became streaky with sweat, dirt, and Bullfrog, an ingenious Australian concoction that contained both sunscreen and sufficient DEET to kill mosquitoes but not, I hoped, humans, which had a sticky,
viscous consistency, and which I smeared on my exposed skin every time we paused. Light dimly penetrated the canopy overhead.

We ate ham sandwiches we'd made the night before on a cluster of smooth gray rocks by a stream, and after lunch set off uphill again. Then down. Then up. Calves stretched, thighs burned, shoulders ached. Ferns and twisted roots closed around us, and the whole jungle seemed to be a series of ridges. The trail was entirely unmarked by signage, and often our narrow path would come to what might or might not have been a fork. We would peer down these alternate routes, just as narrow and tangled and unmarked as the one we were on, and consult our map, but they never added up. After a couple of hours we had no idea if we had passed a major turn indicated on the map, or if it was yet to come. We consulted Godwin, Samuel, and Yepuku whenever we came to one of these choice points, and it was Yepuku who usually gave us the most confident-sounding answer.

By dusk, though, it was apparent that our “guides” had no better idea of the route than we did. We began to acknowledge that we were completely lost.
What are the chances,
I thought. But that's the beauty and terror of a natural place. On sidewalks and highways, even strange ones, you can make any number of mistakes and still be at your hotel in time for cocktails. Here, mistakes had real repercussions. The pressure of the wild made things matter.

A hard, pounding, tropical downpour began, powering right through the canopy. The trail became slippery underfoot, and so when we came to a stream we decided to stop. There was no clearing in which to set up camp, and while the tall trees were widely spaced, the undergrowth of ferns and vines was dense.

Suddenly Justin had a machete in his hand and was hacking at the undergrowth with big swinging arcs. I watched him for a second, then took Godwin's machete and started hacking too. The rain
beat on our faces, soaking our clothes and washing off the sweat and dirt and Bullfrog, and I was amazed at the sharpness of the knife in my hands. One swipe and a solid mass of vines was gone, another swipe and another square foot opened up.

When we'd beaten down a square patch so that it was just a flat tangle of vines, Justin and I laid down our plastic tarp and set up our tent, still in the pouring rain, then threw our belongings inside and crawled in, leaving just our hiking boots outside under the fly. We laid out foam pads and sleeping bags, and took off one wet item after another. It wasn't dry inside, what with our pile of wet clothes and what seemed like 110 percent humidity, but it was less wet than it was outside. I lay down and reached for Justin tentatively, just to kiss his forehead. But I felt his erection against my thigh, and the incongruity of the situation—sex on the one hand, and on the other being lost in the encroaching, devouring environment—turned me on. Making love felt urgent, and while we did, images of our machete attack on the vines flitted through my mind, spurring me on.

When Patricia told her father she planned to do this hike, he'd tried to dissuade her. When that proved impossible (was she any more certain about why she was doing this than I was? Was it to be with Justin? To prove something to him?), he gave her a handheld GPS. She pulled it out the next morning to try to figure out where we were. We learned that, as a device that functions by picking up a signal from a satellite, it was useless under a thick layer of foliage, and therefore would be useless along much of the Kokoda Trail. She put it away.

We packed up and retraced our steps up the skinny, slippery thread we'd followed down to our campsite the night before, to a
point where the path was wider and better trodden. Using our maps, from there we regained what we thought was the trail. In the heat of midafternoon we came to a wide river and ate lunch on the shore—tinned tuna, onions, sliced tomatoes on bread. Afterward we laid out wet clothes from the night before on the rocks, and James lay down on a rock and closed his eyes. Justin busied himself building something with sticks, rocks, and a tarp that looked like a very large funnel. I asked him what it was. “It's for rainwater collection,” he said, crouching down to adjust a stick. I reflected that this was exactly the sort of thing Stu would do, and that they would probably get along well—not that I would mention this to either of them. It was the sort of self-serving thing a bigamist wants to believe.

Patricia and I stripped down to our underwear and waded into the clear water to cool off.

“What's Justin doing?” she asked.

“Making something to collect rainwater,” I said.

I shrugged and she rolled her eyes, which made me laugh.

“Boys will be boys,” she said, and I felt like the ice was broken. Up until then we'd had only brief exchanges about rope, rice, and her GPS. Now we were in this together.

“When did you move back to New Guinea?” I asked.

“Three years ago,” she said in that sleepy drawl. Any stress the trek might be causing didn't come across in her demeanor.

“And you want to stay here?” I asked. I couldn't figure this out. The place that to me was the most exotic in the world was, to her, home and safety and comfort. But it was so isolated, her community so small. Why didn't she want to leave, I wondered—move to Sydney or Melbourne? Didn't she want to meet men who weren't misfits, missionaries, or miners?

“I wasn't planning to at first, but business is good.” She sold
software systems. Her degree was in computer science, which suggested that maybe she'd always planned to come home and work for the family enterprise. She mentioned that she had a boyfriend, Rupert, in Lae, which answered the unspoken question I had about her relationship with her tent mate, James: definitely just a friend. I wondered if it was awkward sleeping side by side with him. But I was beginning to think that social awkwardness was a luxury of civilization, of which we were in short supply.

After Patricia got out of the water, Justin came in and joined me, and without discussion we swam upstream, beyond an outcropping of rock, so that we were out of view of the camp. I wrapped my legs around him like we'd been separated for years, and we kissed cool wet faces and shoulders, limb slipping on limb. We stayed away from the group only for a few minutes, but I swam back feeling reassured—that out here we still felt this affection and desire, and that even semilost and sore and tired, there was this basic pleasure in having each other.

After our swim, Patricia, James, and I studied the maps. The “guides” leaned over our shoulders, clueless. They were citified young men, bereft of that special radar that jungle residents were supposed to have. Like cannibalism and the loincloth, the ability to find one's way through untamed nature was a fading tradition in PNG.

We figured out that this was the place we'd meant to camp the first night—and that the village we'd hoped to gain by tonight was therefore still a day's march away. We decided to stay put for the night.

In our tent at night, I pressed Justin for details of his relationship with Patricia. I gobbled them like a soap opera, like they had nothing to do with me. They'd met on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane. She was spending a week there for work, and they met up a few
times. They slept together. They parted, he said, on the understanding that they would just be friends.

Lying on my back in the dark, I smirked at all the careful little agreements we articulated in relationships, about how “things” were going to “be.” To Justin I just said, “Right.”

To her, at least, it must have felt like a whirlwind romance: the speed, the disinhibition of impending separation. Maybe it had felt that way to him too, but if so, he'd forgotten or was hiding it from me; he sounded disinterested as he described their history. After their first meeting, they exchanged a few letters and phone calls. He really did want to visit Papua New Guinea one day—maybe this was the real basis of his interest in her. I could see myself doing the same thing, latching on to someone because he promised adventure. Six months after they'd met, she called and said she was in town. She summoned him to the Hyatt, the most luxurious hotel Justin knew, the place where his parents had entertained clients. He met her in the restaurant, and they had a sumptuous lunch, her treat. It dawned on him that her only reason for being there was to see him. The lunch—the whole visit—was her attempt to make him see that she was the one for him. He was too unnerved, he said, to savor the compliment. He'd been chased before by women, but he was alarmed in this case by the whiff of desperation he caught, the degree to which Patricia had inconvenienced herself to make her case.

He declined to come up to her room, and she flew back the next morning to her home in PNG.

“I think she wanted me to be a reason to move to Australia,” he said.

“But what was it?” I asked.

“What was what?”

“What was it that”—I wasn't sure how to put this, but I
thought it might somehow answer questions I had about myself—“what was it that drew her to you?”