by Paul Theroux
My problem lay in trying to stay upright in the kayak with the wind and waves beating against me on one side. Being heavily loaded was a help – the kayak moved slowly but smoothly; and just the thought of leaving Cooktown, the last settlement of any size in Queensland, lifted my spirits. Most people I had met in Australia regarded Cook-town as the limit, the real bush, the Land of Wait, the Never-Never – few had actually been there. Now I was going beyond it, and going north of the Never-Never was like going off the limit of the known world.
I paddled in this beam wind until early afternoon when the gusts became more frequent, and then taking a compass reading, I was caught broadside by a boomer that turned the boat. Before I could recover – I was bracing myself with the paddle – another wave sent me surfing towards shore. I struggled to balance on the wave and shot down, picking up speed. To my right were the spiky rocks of the headland, but just ahead, on shore, there was sand beneath the breaking waves. Nearer the beach, I managed to slow myself and turn, and I went into shore backward – doing a backshoot, a surfer would say – and beached the boat without a wet exit.
It was too surfy at that moment to re-enter the ocean and go around the headland – anyway, what was the hurry? I dragged the boat through the shallow water, found a sheltered spot to sit and rest in and beached the boat, tying it to an enormous log. I walked to Saunders Point and climbed high enough to see where the good camping places were – and I also saw a beachcomber’s shack (or was it an Aboriginal’s humpy?) which I decided to avoid. Walking on I came to a cluster of logs, a sort of picnic site, with a fire smoldering at the center of it. This was obviously where the Aboriginal fishermen cooked their food. The fact that the fire was still smoking unsettled me – it seemed to indicate that whoever had lit it would be back fairly soon and might object to my presence.
There were rusted cans near the fire – food cans, beer cans – and bits of plastic. Looking closer I saw that on every yard of this stretch of beach there were bottles and fragments of plastic debris: sandals, torn nets, lengths of line. There were cast-off aerosol cans, rubber tires, hunks of cork and wedges of styrofoam. The plastic net-floats were inevitable, but what of all the plastic bottles, the beer cans, the empty oil drums? They had obviously been chucked off boats sailing the Coral Sea, they had been blown from the islands of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and the trade winds had swept them to this shore. There was an enormous and ugly tidewrack of this indestructible stuff that gave this long windward coast a look like the rim of a junkyard.
It was too depressing to camp within sight of the junk, so I walked down the beach, found a good camping place behind a dune and set up my tent. It was so hot, and I was so tired from the effort of paddling in the high wind, that I crept inside and napped for an hour. Afterwards, I removed all my gear from the boat and got organized: hung up my water bag, set out my stove, unpacked my sleeping-bag and let it swell and loft, sorted my food and hung that out of the way of foraging pigs.
There were pig tracks and lizard tracks all over the sand beneath the trees. In the cool of the later afternoon, I assembled my rifle, filled my pockets with bullets and looked around. Fred had assured me that I would meet an enraged pig. At least I had protection from that ignominious end – not that I relished killing an animal. I had owned a gun of some kind since the age of ten, but I had not shot any living thing since my early teens and I hated anyone who killed animals for sport. I regarded this rifle as a form of self-defense and recreation. I practiced on a tin can and then walked on, listening for the snuffling of pigs.
This is perhaps the place to say that in a year and a half of traveling in the Pacific I did not kill any animal and only ate a few – I remained a fish-eating vegetarian except on the rare occasions when it would have been an unforgivable insult to refuse to eat meat (“We killed this pig in your honor, Mister Paul”). Why should any animal have to die in order for me to make my trip?
Beyond the coastal fringe of trees there was a huge stinking swamp, and this I guessed – from the tracks and the situation – was where the wild pigs lived. Overhead and in the trees were birds of all kinds – fish eagles and kites, plovers and whimbrels and curlews, and nameless whistlers and twitterers.
At sundown I made couscous and had it with beans and tuna, and a pot of green tea. I regretted that I had no beer, but beer cans were heavy. As I ate I listened to the radio – and when darkness fell and the night grew buggy I got into my tent and, by the light of my overbright flashlight, read The Sexual Life of Savages. After that I listened to the BBC World Service in the darkness: news of the other world, all of it sounding inconsequential.
The wind blew all night and it reached me even in this depression behind the barrier dunes. My tent flapped, and the boughs above me, which were all thin pines, swished and howled. The wind affected everything here, living and dead. It washed junk and driftwood onto the beach, it whipped up the sea and made it beat the rocks into spikes, it piled the sand into dunes, and it made those trees grow at an unnatural angle – all of them leaning away from the wind.
Dreaming hopelessly, I slept until dawn, when certain birds – I never found out their name – began their wolfwhistles.
The strong wind made cooking difficult – no matter where I placed my stove the wind reached it and blew the gas jet sideways. I peeled an orange and ate it and eventually the water boiled for my noodles and a pot of green tea, a nutritious breakfast vouched for by farmers all over China.
While I was eating, sitting crosslegged on the dune, my tent rose up like a kite and blew into the boughs of a small pine tree. I intended to look for a new place to camp that day so I packed and stowed the tent with the rest of my gear, hung it from a tree, and set off with my rifle. I saw pig tracks, but no human footprints. In the shadows of the trees at the edge of the denser woods I sometimes heard a giggle or a loud squawk, but I never saw the birds that produced these sounds.
Beyond Saunders Point was a steep hill – Mount Saunders – and dotted on its slopes were giant boulders. But after I climbed halfway up I saw that these boulders were in fact ant-hills, seven to ten feet high. There was no path; I scrambled from one rain gully to the next, and in a shallow one a dark snake crossed my path, taking quite a while to do so. I tried to calculate its length, as I watched it slowly sliding through the depths of the tussocky hill grass. I am not afraid of snakes but I cannot rid myself of the African notion that it is very bad luck for a snake to cross your path once you have begun a journey. Caving in to this superstition I changed direction and almost immediately stumbled upon an Aboriginal’s humpy hidden in some bushes in the saddle of the hill, out of the wind.
“Hello,” I called out, startling myself with my own voice. All around me were bees and butterflies. I looked closely at the humpy. (This small windowless shelter made of sticks and rubbish is also known by other names – a mia mia, a wurley, or a gunyah.)
There was no one home.
From here I had a wonderful view of Indian Head farther on and the long crescent of white sandy beach beneath it. One of the greatest features of Australia were these tropical beaches all the way north of Never-Never – miles of lovely sand and surf, and no one swimming anywhere near them. There are many large empty countries in the world, but few are as lovely or as habitable, or in a certain sense as happy, as Australia.
The beaches were nameless, because people so seldom used them. Anyway, this was all Aboriginal territory. If they had a name for it they had not divulged it to the cartographers. The mountains and headlands had all been named by Captain Cook, two hundred-odd years ago: he had only been able to pick out the higher ground from his ship.
Back at my camp I carried my gear to the kayak and went farther along the coast, looking for a less windy spot. I struggled to get free of the surf zone but I saw – with dismay – that there were breaking waves all the way to the horizon: a wide foaming sea. Nearer shore I dragged the kayak along and, just ahead, was a four-foot shark – the sort of sand shark that turns u
p every now and then on Cape Cod beaches. I splashed my paddle and he took off: no need to spear the poor creature.
I had lunch on a sandy shelf on the steep back side of a dune: no wind at all, but because it was so still the dune was very hot and rather smelly and it was teeming with mosquitoes.
Kicking along the beach, pondering where to camp that night, I saw a figure in the distance coming towards me. When he came nearer, I saw it was a small grubby man, moving slowly, looking down: beachcombing. His shirt was torn, his trousers rolled to the knees. Every so often he picked up something, examined it, then either put it into his satchel or chucked it away. A dejected-looking dog trotted beside him.
I said hello. We talked about the wind. He was eyeing my boat.
“Collapsible,” I said.
He said, “Want some home-brewed beer?”
One of the warnings I had received in Cairns was: “Don’t trust anyone who’s very friendly. A mate of mine did. He ended up with broken bones.” At the time I had put it down as just another strange Australian warning, in a class with the fat man shouting: “Those mackerel are bigger than me!”
But this beachcomber was small and weedy. “Lead the way,” I said.
He blundered straight up to the dune and through a dense thicket, going a very circuitous route. “There’s no proper path,” he said.
We walked on, bush-bashing.
“I don’t want to make a path.”
The pine boughs were snapping in my face and even the dog looked confused.
“Then everyone visits,” the beachcomber said. “Especially officialdom.”
He had a rather formal way of speaking, and I thought I caught a whisper of London in the way he swallowed the “L” and said, Offishoodum.
Finally we came to his camp. It was a patch of disorder in the bowl between two dunes. At the center was a pallet, with the dimensions of a queen-sized bed, with a tattered canvas canopy suspended over it by guy ropes. This sleeping place was surrounded by immense clutter, but what looked like junk and debris at first glance was, if you looked closer, a collection of glass bottles and containers arranged by size and shape – stacks of them, and ones in long rows set up against the sand banks, cups and tubs nested together. There were also net floats – the large plastic balls that broke free from the wicked, turtle-strangling, dolphin-killing drift-nets of the Japanese. A rusted wood stove had been set up next to the bed – I could see how this beachcomber might recline and cook at the same time – the beachcomber’s economy of effort.
“This is what I call home,” he said.
There were blackened bones, animals’ bones, on top of the stove’s grille. To the side of the stove a heap of magazines – the Reader’s Digest dominating the heap; and on a log, looking prim, a large pink plastic radio.
The man fossicked among the bottles and drew one out, while the dog yapped at me. I hated being barefoot here; I had thought that the camp was nearer the shore. But it was quite a distance from it, obviously to avoid the scrutiny of officialdom.
“Try this,” the beachcomber said, and jerked the cap off the bottle.
I said, “Oddly enough, I’m not thirsty.”
He took a swig. “Not bad.” He took another, and wiped his mouth. “I made this batch last week.” He swigged again. There was froth on his lips. “Thing is, the bottles have been exploding.”
I distinctly heard him say bottoos.
“You’re English,” I said.
“From Kent,” he said. He licked the froth from his lips. “Which is near London.” He took another swig. “I was born in Gravesend. It costs six dollars to make about forty bottles of this beer. You just use a tin of this” – he indicated an empty can – “and a few pounds of sugar.”
He became very intent on finishing the bottle of beer. He drank the rest of it in sips, neatly, staring between sips at the mouth of the bottle.
“And now you live here?”
“That’s right,” he said, and glanced around at the clutter. “In actual fact, I’m constructing a raft. That’s why I have those pipes and those plastic balls. That’s all my flotation, see.”
Any purpose or design of those balls and pipes had been hidden by all the clutter.
“What will you do with the raft?”
“I’m aiming to build this raft and sail it in a northerly direction,” he said with a certain precision.
“How much more northerly can you get than where we are now?”
“Around Cape York.”
Good God, I thought. “Through the Torres Strait?”
One of the worst currents in the world – twelve turbulent knots of ocean rushing like white water squeezed between New Guinea and Australia.
“Yes. Through there.”
“Any particular reason?”
He was smiling. His hair was wild. He was unshaven.
“That way I can go to Darwin.”
“On a raft across the Gulf of Carpentaria.”
“And the Arafura Sea. Yes.” He had finished the beer. He put the bottle neatly away with the empties and said, “I’m not in any hurry. I’ve sailed rafts before. Down the Cabrera River in Colombia. I spent six months in South America. That was about eight years ago. Lots of adventure. Some dangers, too.”
“Dangerous Indians?”
“No. I traveled with the Indians. In the South American bush you can’t do anything without Indians.” He seemed a little tipsy now. He struggled towards the bottles, rearranging them. “Kept a diary. I always said I should write a book about it.”
Somehow, even standing barefoot in his beachcomber’s camp on the shore of an Aboriginal reserve in North Queensland, it did not seem so odd that he should express this writing ambition. After all, I had the same ambition, and I was barefoot and whiskery too.
“Why don’t you write a book about your South American trip?”
“I would,” he said, “if I was in a hospital.”
He was scratching his dog behind the ears as he spoke, and looking into the middle distance.
“In a hospital, with two broken legs. Then I’d do it,” he said. He reflected on this a moment. “But I probably wouldn’t want to do it if I had two broken legs.”
“You seem to have plenty to drink here,” I said. “What do you do for food?”
“Fish. Plenty of fish in these waters. I’ve got a crab pot. That’s what I do with these bones.” He poked the blackened bones on the stove. “Put them in the pot. Crabs love them. Also onions.”
A bag of onions hung from the limb of a tree.
“Onions will keep for months.”
We both looked at his bag of onions.
“Also ‘roo meat,” he said. “Plenty of that around. Here – have some.”
He handed me a brown strip of meat that had the look of leather, exactly the shape and size of the tongue of an old shoe.
“That there is smoke-dried. Done it meself. Lasts for a long time. Years, actually.” He became reflective again. “I found some ‘roo meat under a box once. Forgot I had it. Two years old, it was.”
“What did you do with it?” I said, trying to egg him on.
“Ate it.”
“Two-year-old kangaroo meat?”
“Smoke-dried. It was delicious. Wonderful in soups.”
“You make soup here?”
“All the time,” he said. “Lovely stuff.”
“Do the Aborigines mind you camping on their reserve?” I asked.
“They don’t make a fuss. The ones in town are a bit rough. But the Abos here are good people. They’re losing their old ways, though. They caught a big turtle the other week down where your boat is. They took some of the meat and left the rest to the wild pigs. Years ago they would have eaten the whole thing.”
That was very much a beachcomber’s point of view, the obsession with other people’s wastefulness.
I told him I was camping myself, but that I was looking for a place out of the wind.
“Have you tried Leprosy Creek?�
��
“No. But I kind of like the name,” I said.
He gave me directions to the inlet. I paddled there and at a little bend in the creek, I found a good spot – no wind and quite sheltered and there I pitched my tent and spent the night. My only moment of anxiety came in the dawn, when I heard big feet crashing through the leaves. I grabbed my rifle as the noise came nearer – very loud now. I peered out of the tent flap and saw two wild turkeys – brush turkeys, with bald heads and yellow wattles, sleek black feathers, handsome, strutting past my tent.
“You can eat them, you know,” the beachcomber said, when I saw him at the shore the next morning. He had just checked his crab pot: nothing inside. “You pluck the turkey and put it into a pot with a brick. You put some water in and boil the whole thing, until you can shove a fork through the brick. Then you throw the turkey away and eat the brick.”
He did not smile.
“That’s very funny,” I said. “What is your name?”
“You can call me Tony,” he said.
I was sure that Tony was not his name. He was, in spite of his apparent friendliness, deeply suspicious of strangers, and from time to time he lapsed into silence, self-conscious because of my persistent questions.
He was very interested in my gear – my well-made tent and boat: he examined the stitching and the fittings. He looked closely at my pots and my stove, the water bag I had bought in Sydney.
He said, “That’s just what I need for my trip around Cape York on my raft.”
I said, “Where do you get your water?”
There was no drinking water anywhere to be found on this sunbaked coast; the pools of water I had found were brackish.
“I go to Cooktown in my canoe when the wind drops,” he said. He made a face. “But the Cooktown water is no good. They put fluoride in it.”