Wellmania

by Brigid Delaney

  On the boat on the way over, our skipper spoke about a woman who’d managed to call the mainland to be rescued because she’d had a sore foot during this hike. We on the boat hooted with derision, then wondered – isn’t it a criminal offence to get rescued for a minor ailment?

  On the first day, I am preoccupied with the heaviness of my pack. I’m huffing and puffing as I walk, and have a fear for most of the day that I will have a heart attack. The ranger behind me, Evan, tells me, ‘It’s going to be a struggle but we’ll get there in the end.’

  At the rest stop, the others take off up a hill where there is meant to be incredible views of the coastline. I rest, hurling the pack off in disgust. ‘Fuck this shit,’ I say. Bright blue and black butterflies circle us, round and round and round they go. They are preferable to the sandflies that bothered me as I walked along the beach.

  Evan tells me that some people do the walk in a day. But ‘three nights and four days is the most comfortable time’. He sits beside me and we eat some muesli bars and nuts. We’ve only been walking for an hour but I’m starving. The island has no shops so we had to bring in our food – bags of dehydrated, powdery stuff that is too bizarre to contemplate closely: lamb and red wine risotto, beef rendang, satay chicken, apple pie, yoghurt and muesli, all of it looking the same. Stopping at a clearing for lunch or dinner, we boil up water on stoves we brought in (no fires allowed), then put a bag in water for ten minutes. To open the package and look at the food while it is still in utero is to confront an existential horror – the lamb growing and expanding inside the bag, the colour and texture of cement, the risotto bloating but somehow not softening, and tasting of soil.

  My fellow hikers compete with each other about whose meal is the most disgusting. Chicken tikka masala, roast beef and the cooked breakfast are frontrunners. The worst, though, is not finishing the meal and having to carry it, half-eaten, around in your pack due to the absence of bins on the island. I’ll never forget the sensation of sticking my hand into my backpack in the middle of the night, reaching for toilet paper but instead groping the remnants of sausage and mash.

  Somehow I manage to get through day one without dying, doing my ankle or collapsing from exhaustion. Stopping is the best bit. We camp at Little Ramsay Bay, on the beach. It is lovely, just like I imagined an island paradise to be. I even enjoy a furtive swim, despite the warnings that there are crocodiles in the region. Sitting on the beach as the sun goes down, we pass around a bag of goon, and stir our dinners in their little bags. I fall in a creek while filling my three-litre drink bottle with stagnant water that has algae floating in it. One of the other hikers has to put up my tent for me, as I’m too feeble and weak to stake the poles. I am asleep by 7pm but at around 3.45am I wake from a nightmare about jail cells and the jungle and midnight executions.

  Day two is 10 kilometres, and the ‘more difficult day’, Evan says. And so it comes to pass. My pack is adjusted and I am strapped into it like an astronaut about to be launched into space. But the take-off, such as it is, is wobbly. As I set off, something is happening to my legs. They are like jelly. I quickly drop behind the group.

  The two rangers stay with me, one closely behind me, one closely in front. There are many boulders to clamber over and the only way I can get through it is for someone behind me to boost, or sort of throw my pack forward, propelling me onto the next rock, while the ranger in front grabs my arm and hauls me up.

  What is the point of this? I wonder, finding it impossible to take in the beauty of the island under such stressful circumstances. I am not anywhere near achieving my goal of serenity. There are scheduled stops at waterfalls and swimming holes. There are trees to sit under while drinking ginger wine and gazing up at butterflies. There are powdered beef satays to eat. But by mid-morning I have fallen well behind the other hikers, and don’t even have time to stop for breaks. The rangers – who are walking slowly with me – become worried that we will be stuck out here at night. They’ve had slow walkers before – a group of elderly Indigenous women who were the area’s native-title holders. They plodded along but eventually they made it to camp before dark. That is the crucial thing – to get to a safe place before dark.

  The ground underneath us in the lower, more tropical parts of the island has a curious stench, one I have never smelt before. ‘Excrement from carpet snakes,’ a ranger explains.

  On we walk until it becomes more like a march. The rangers fashion me a stick, which I use to heave myself up goat tracks and slow my progress as we go down the other side. When the path pitches steeply it sometimes feels safer to slide down the track on my backside. I am wearing my favourite orange yoga pants. The material ladders as I slide down rocks.

  The creek crossings are the worst. I fall in maybe six creeks, sometimes multiple falls each creek – to the front, to the side, on my back, getting wet, cut and bruised, my lower lip trembling as I almost but don’t quite cry. Walking through the jungle I can feel my chest tightening and my breath becoming shallow. Is this it? Heart attack time? My friend Erik walked the Kokoda Track and two men in his group died of heart failure while hiking. My chest tightens even more, the prospect of a heart attack creating further anxiety.

  Maybe it’s simple biomechanics and my straps are too tight. But if I loosen my pack it pulls me backwards, and that could result in me falling and hitting my head and dying. The rangers would have to stay with my body until daybreak, then climb a peak and signal a passing ship …

  The rangers – tough Queenslanders who know and love this island – walk ahead, cutting through the thicker areas with machetes. The conversation keeps my mind off the inevitable heart attack: we talk about the cultural relativism of female genital mutilation and witch burning in Papua New Guinea, whether people in cities are unfriendly compared with country people, what happens to the people who wander off-track and get lost. I like them a lot and can’t help but feel guilty about what a drain I am on their resources. They are now hobbling a little as well, after being forced to walk so slowly (it’s apparently harder on the body to walk slowly than it is to walk fast).

  Finally we arrive at a beach. Surely this is the end? Dark is falling. I am bent over my stick, like I am a crippled ninety-year-old. My socks and pants are soaked from falling in the creek. My back hurts. Everything hurts.

  The other hikers, who have had a lovely break for a few hours at a waterfall, put up my tent. I collapse inside without any supper. Day three is meant to be harder still. The rangers are worried. Can I complete day three? The various falls into different creeks have had a cumulative effect.

  A ranger comes into my tent at 3am. Due to the weather and the currents, there is only a small window of time to contact Search and Rescue. Can I keep hiking? Can I make it across the boulders and down the creeks that await tomorrow? Can I get up from where I have sort of collapsed in fetal position, too tired to even remove my muddy hiking clothes? If not, I will need to be rescued.

  Around 4am a distress call is placed to the sea rescue crew on the mainland. The forecast is for rough seas, and there are only a few hours around dawn when it will be safe enough for a vessel to rescue me.

  I pack all my things back in the enormous, hated backpack. I smash and mash up the tent in the bag. It doesn’t matter now – I won’t be using it again. I don’t know where the rescuers will take me or what will happen when I get there. I have no money or ID or wallet. They are locked in the ranger’s car in the town of Cardwell.

  I walk down to the beach in the weak pre-dawn light. Everything looks watery and unreal, like an impressionist painting seen from a dirty window. I wait to hear the motor of the boat chopping through the water. I am sore and ashamed, like maybe I only deserve to be rescued if something massive, bloody and bad happened to me – a leg bitten off by a crocodile, for instance, or an actual heart attack, rather than some falls and an anxiety attack.

  I sit on a big rock facing the heaving sea and watch the sun come up. It is the first time I have stopped and looked
up. This corner of the world really is beautiful.

  *

  Hiking is enjoying something of a moment. It’s not simply exercise, but also a tonic for your soul. Just look at Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling hiking memoir, Wild (and the Reese Witherspoon film that followed). She shot heroin the night before she started hiking, and in the hard graft of the walk, she worked her life out.

  The narrative creeping into hiking is something different from the daggy bushwalking tropes from the ’70s and ’80s, something our fathers and mothers with their long socks and tins of insect repellent and non-hiking boots (indeed their lack of any expensive kit) wouldn’t necessarily recognise. It’s not just the hero’s journey – human versus the elements. It’s the metaphysical aspect of hiking, the fact that when you walk, you work things out, that things become unknotted. The longer and harder the track, the more your physical labours will start healing the wounds that might lie in your soul. To stay at home, watch television or sleep is to fester or remain inert. To walk, particularly to walk hard somewhere isolated, is to take action, to somehow beat the thing inside you.

  What does it mean, then, to be beaten by a hike? (Or rather to be beaten by yourself, unprepared for the hike.) People who go on these things are meant to return triumphant – sore but elated by a sense of accomplishment. I return feeling embarrassment and shame.

  I’m discharged from the hospital without any money or ID. After a few phone calls some very kind people at a motel in Lucinda agree to take me in until the group returns. I stay in my room during the day and read, scratching my sandfly bites, and drink wine with the motel owners at night. They’ve had interesting lives: a rancher in Texas, a cardiac nurse in Brisbane. They try to make me feel better by saying, ‘Well, I couldn’t do that walk.’

  Two days later the group returns after completing the hike and they tell me that day three wasn’t too hard and day four was a short dawdle down the beach. ‘You could have made it,’ they say.

  I return to Sydney to a massive ambulance bill and regular physiotherapy sessions, and the sense that serenity doesn’t always appear after a struggle. And you can’t always work things out by walking.

  *

  The years dissolve as quickly as sugar in hot tea, and by 2016 I am still searching for serenity. But after the terrible hike, it has become a more gentle search – enjoyable even. There is no rush, I think in my more Zen moments, it will unfurl and unfold for me in exactly the way it is meant to. I’m doing Vedic meditation most days, which helps. When I get into a routine with it, I feel like it is giving me that peace the world cannot provide. But I’m curious to see what else is out there.

  I keep coming across the writing and the teaching of the same cadre of spiritual writers. But none seem as prolific as Deepak Chopra – an author, public speaker and all-round New Age modern guru who’s been around forever. He’s written more than eighty books and is frequently on television. His appearances on Oprah made him a household name. At almost seventy he is one of the wealthiest and most successful figures in the alternative medicine scene. He is wellness personified. So when I hear he’s coming to Melbourne to give a weekend seminar, I’m curious.

  I want to unpack Deepak, so to speak.

  I don’t know what to expect at the live event, but I’m surprised that it’s this low-key. The crowd is in the hundreds, not the thousands, and they are subdued and focused. Chopra himself is understated, the cadence, volume and pace of his voice unchanging – soporific, even.

  At the more tent revival–style events, the perfect pause, the dramatic emphasis, is everything. It whips up the crowd and lets them know that if they send POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS – YES! AFFIRMATIONS! – TO THEIR CELLS, THEY. WILL. LIVE … FOREVER! (And the crowd goes wild.)

  But Deepak Chopra, veteran of thousands of public appearances, is not a pulse-raiser. For the whole two days it’s just him on a bare stage with a screen at the Melbourne Convention Centre, talking in a monotone, covering a vast amount of ground, from how to slow the ageing process to how to have more interesting dreams.

  This is New Age lite, suburban spirituality – the pack of angel cards on the mantelpiece next to the Pixie portraits of the grandkids, the consulting of newspaper horoscopes. And this being Melbourne, and winter, most people are dressed in black puffer jackets and big scarves – a group that could have been scooped up at random from Chadstone Shopping Centre.

  I’m here with two friends, all of us Chopra first-timers. They went to the Melbourne Convention Centre last year to hear the Dalai Lama speak and the vibe was ‘very different’, my friend Sophie says.

  ‘Lots of Tibetan prayer flags, and all these colours …’, says her sister.

  ‘People wearing hemp.’

  ‘Monks.’

  ‘Dreadlocks.’

  ‘People looked like they were really living it.’

  No one here looks like they are living it – this is spirituality sotto voce.

  ‘I’m going to be talking about almost every aspect of healing,’ Chopra tells us from the unadorned stage. He’s wearing black pants and a sleeveless jacket, with bright-red sneakers. His glasses have diamonds embedded in the arms. Chopra is in Australia to promote his ‘six pillars of wellbeing’: sleep; meditation and stress management; exercise; healthy emotions like love, compassion and joy; peace of mind; and good nutrition and hydration. All sensible stuff.

  He starts off talking about the healing power of sleep, ‘a fundamental pillar of wellbeing’. It’s hard to argue with this. I’ve had particular trouble sleeping and am now getting ill. I sit down the back of the auditorium, my body racked with coughs, my ‘area’ a mess of tissues and water bottles.

  Sleeping is the most efficient way to improve health, he says. It will ‘aid in the elimination of toxins, provide order from chaos, encourage renewal and repair, increase immunity, memory, unconscious processing and creativity’ – among other things. ‘Ask yourself any question before you sleep and it will be processed in sleep and you will get the answer in the morning.’

  So far, so good. But then Chopra goes off-piste, and all ‘science-y’, talking about his new book, Super Genes. Chopra reckons 95 per cent of disease-related gene mutations are influenced by how we think, how we feel, and our relationships. In other words – we make ourselves sick. And not just sick – but terminally ill.

  *

  A few years earlier, at a meditation centre in Ubud (just before my disastrous ‘healing’ session with Riki), I met a group of women who were all on the alternative healing circuit. My curiosity was piqued – they looked less Eat, Pray, Love, than suburban mums who had got on the wrong plane and ended up on the wrong holiday.

  Over dinner, I discovered that three of them had cancer and one had Parkinson’s. They were sick, but well enough to travel. They had a window of time, a grace period, and they were spending it in Bali.

  They had read Deepak Chopra and motivational author Louise Hay, and over dinner they told me how they had caused their own illnesses. This was not through lifestyle choices that we associate with cancer – they were not smokers, and were only occasional drinkers – instead it was their emotions that had caused their cancer. Their anger. Their repressed sexual drives. Their unexplored trauma, going back to when they were girls. All the things they could have been but weren’t. All the things they could have said but didn’t. These things caused their cancer, were their cancer.

  Pad Thai and pots of ginger tea. The heat and wetness of the night and the beads of sweat on the bottles of mineral water and the driver booked the next day to take them to the place in the countryside where someone they called a healer would, manually and in a machine, shake the cancer out of them in eight-hour stretches. I argued with them, like Robin Williams does with Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting: ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.’ The bill came, my case doomed – they weren’t even listening. They had read the books and listened to the tapes and this was their firm belief. But to me it seemed
like just another way of being a woman, another way of blaming and hating yourself, of giving yourself the smallest lamb chop, of not making a fuss, of the quiet voice saying again, as it’s always said, ‘Sorry, it’s my fault.’ Or maybe it’s just that we need to tell ourselves a story. A rogue cell dividing and dividing and dividing and dividing and dividing does not in itself a good story make.

  *

  Chopra does not move explicitly into this dark territory over the weekend but it’s a philosophy coded into much of his materials. Pacing the stage, he tells us, ‘95 per cent of your genes can be influenced by you – your consciousness, your being, your soul. By changing the activity, you can change your body – and this is related to how we age and how we get sick.’

  ‘Awareness is the key to transformation and reinventing the body,’ he says. And the key to this key is affirmations, which involve repeating a positive mantra or expression until it sort of ‘seeps’ into your body. The affirmation that Chopra recommends is: ‘Every day in every way I am increasing my physical and mental capacity. My biological set point is …’ and at this point he tells us to pick a number. ‘If you are sixty, make it forty; if you are forty, make it twenty. Go back fifteen or twenty years. Don’t make it zero – you’ll disappear into an orgasm.’

  Everyone laughs, a little grossed out. But I am confused, as if I’ve walked in on a physics lecture when I am meant to be in a politics class. It doesn’t make sense. Do our bodies really behave this way? Can we really influence the behaviour of our genes? Affirmations don’t sound like they’d really cut the mustard. Aren’t they just words said to ourselves in a mirror? Prayers to a nameless god about how we wish things could be?

  The next question is from a woman who stands up and asks, ‘I arrived from Singapore last night and I couldn’t sleep, even though I was very tired. Why is that?’