by Claire Dunn
Was I going to cope without soft furnishings for a year? Without a kettle? A fridge? Was it naive to think I could go a whole year of lighting fires only with sticks? Perhaps I would be slowly worn down by the small things – no 3pm chai, no Thai take-out, no weekend paper. While still living in the land of cars and phones, it was hard to fathom what it meant for the bush to be home, not some place I went to sometimes for inspiration and dirt-under-my-fingernails fun. The idea of it sounded great, but as the moment loomed when idea would collide with reality, waves of doubt started rolling in, usually in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t the encouragement of friends but the doubting of naysayers that was most helpful in keeping me to task. Their jokes about “Claire vs Wild” and Lord of the Flies, and their not-so-subtle hints that they would see me much sooner than I planned, switched on my stubbornness. I pushed the nerves aside and buried my head in the lists.
After all, I reminded myself, there was no plan B. This was it. Operation Freedom. One bold leap in the direction of peace, stillness, wholeness. If I couldn’t find it here, I wouldn’t find it anywhere. This had to work.
*
“COOOOOOO-EEEEEEEEEE!” The call to regather echoes off the gravel mounds. I’m too shaken to send the cooee out further, as we were instructed to do. A whole morning gone and not only have I not found anything worth calling home base, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I’m not welcome. I bet any decent spots have been taken now. I head back towards the Gunyah, camp central, eyes on my feet, my heart somewhere in that vicinity.
The Gunyah is a tin roof over a sawdust floor in the middle of a gravel clearing. The only other shelter on the property is the “kitchen” that Kate and Sam use when they run short courses – a smaller tin roof (on the edge of another quarry) that collects drinking water in a tank, and a few benches where we have stacked our bulk dry food and some wilting veggies.
The others are back already, the girls gathered around Sam, leaning in to gurgle over Bella, who has woken up.
“Okay, let’s see these shelter sites,” says Kate jovially. She’s enjoying being on the other side of the equation, having spent a year in the woods a while back, at the tracker school where Ryan and I studied.
“I’m still looking for mine,” I say, the only one it seems.
“Oh, really?” Kate looks surprised. “Well, I guess you’ve got ’til dusk.”
Refilling my water bottle, I tag along at the back of the group. Shaun strides ahead, leading us to his site, or rather to his mound, set amongst the youngest, spindliest regrowth on top of the ridge. Shaun excitedly describes his plans to convert this pile of pushed-up quarry gravel into a grand treehouse. He clearly has more imagination than me. “I’m going to use these two trees as poles, sink two more poles in here,” he says, jumping to the other side of the mound, “build a floor up here,” indicating with a hand pointed way above his head, “maybe an underground storage space too.” I can see images spilling out of his brain almost too fast for him to keep up with. I grimace enviously at his youthful confidence. Sam nods, masking a smile, I notice.
“Well, it’s a bit bloody close,” Dan says, hands on hips. He picks his way further west to what has to be the hottest spot on the property. Forgetting the proximity to his neighbour, Dan sweeps his arms wide to explain his vision of a sprawling homestead. “I’m going to put my kitchen here. I’m thinking a lean-to with bark guttering to collect rainwater, maybe with a detachable reed-matting shade curtain facing south-west to block out the afternoon sun. My fireplace, right here,” he says, scratching out a circle in the leaf litter with his thong. Gushing with plans, Dan looks up at Kate and Sam for approval.
“And what about your shelter?” Kate asks, shielding Bella with her hand from the sun.
“Oh, yes,” says Dan, “I’m thinking a square log-cabin number over here, you know, kinda Brokeback Mountain-style.” He peals with laughter. Jessie mirrors his enthusiasm, jumping all over me. I push him away.
Trying to pin Nikki down is like trying to catch a falling leaf, so it’s no surprise to see she has chosen a site with many escape routes, near the quarry I stumbled into. “It doesn’t have as much shade as I would like …” she says dubiously. That is one sizeable understatement. I crouch under the speckled shadow of a grasstree. The real reason for her choice reveals itself in a loud cackle. “I really want to be close to my chooks, and thought the best place for them would be next to the garden,” she explains. Chooks? A dog is bad enough, but chooks? I was picturing us going off on adventures, hunting and gathering food, not backyard farming. I assumed that everyone wanted the same thing from this year, but maybe not. The thought unnerves me.
Chloe takes us to several dead ends before finding her site nestled amongst the thick wet scrub near the creek.
“Well, you’ll have a bit of clearing to do,” Sam says, stating the obvious.
I pick a leech off my ankle. “You don’t think it’ll be a bit damp here in winter, Chlo?” I ask.
“Shade, I really wanted shade,” Chloe says, her face flushed. “Maybe I’ll incorporate the trees in my shelter, I don’t know really.” Her voice trails off.
“Hey, we’re practically neighbours,” drawls Ryan, as he leads us up the trail a little way and into his site. “It’ll be one small sleeping room with a big verandah, kind of like a Queenslander,” he says, already having picked up some of his host country’s vernacular. Some of his considerations are not so sensible. “The fallen logs were the clincher – perfect for balance work.” I look up to smile and catch his eye in recognition of the time we spent blindfold-walking across logs at the US wilderness school, but he makes a point of looking away. Okay, I’m not imagining it. He is avoiding me.
Maybe he’s regretting his decision to come. I feel a bit guilty now, remembering how I described the land to him after the single orientation day I had spent here last winter. “It’s got a great waterhole,” I said (if you like brown billabongs); “The paths are sandy – great for tracking” (the topsoil has long blown away); “It’s kind of open forest, so you don’t feel so claustrophobic” (it’s been hammered by logging and it’s hard to find good shade). Spoken like a true shonky real-estate agent.
We walk back up to camp, the others joking together. I am quiet, aware that I’m the only homeless one. Sam clears the whiteboard and starts going through shelter design ideas as we munch on sandwiches.
I try to focus on the sketches, but can’t. The muscles in my legs tense involuntarily. I knew this bit would be hard. Any time someone tries to show me something practical I seize up, too busy stressing out about not getting it to have any chance of actually getting it. Lashing knot – what’s that? Concentrate. My eyes blur and the bread lodges in my throat. Come on, get a grip; it’s only the first day. It feels like a week has passed already.
I tell the water welling in my eyes to dry up with some fierce blinks. Everyone else is intent on the lecture, taking notes and sketching. My chest tightens. Maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe I really can’t do this.
I sink back onto the sawdust and close my eyes. The faintest of cool breezes caresses my cheek, releasing a strand of sweat-glued hair. I breathe in and let it out with a loud sigh. “Simplicity,” I vaguely hear Sam say. “With primitive shelters, it’s all about simplicity.” There’s that word again. The very sound of it echoes a sweet calm, like a pebble dropping into still water. I bob along in its ripple, remembering why I am here.
2.
I’m lying on the floor of my office, staring blankly at the rainforest images flashing up on my screensaver, photos of the forest I am campaigning to protect. They zoom in and out just long enough for me to register a snatch of dripping green foliage, cold mist hovering above a clear, flowing creek, the slippery skin of a fist-sized snail. In one, a group of people join hands around an enormous trunk, their bellies pressed against its mossy bulk. They
wear beanies and gloves, heavy hiking boots and daypacks. The image dissolves into a single figure standing atop a stump in the middle of a still-smoking clearfell.
I blink.
The blue carpet I lie on is thin and stained with splashes of coffee, the underlying concrete slab cold at my back. My body is at a slight angle, wedged between stacks of unopened boxes. Inside are thousands of fliers and postcards. “Stand Up for the Forests,” they urge. Stand up. My limbs are pinned to the ground, as if held down by the weight of the boxes, the gravitas of their message. The hum of the computer grows loud in my ears and my eyelids droop.
I jump at the ring of my phone and fumble to take it from my pocket. Local ABC radio. Wanting a comment on the protest today, no doubt.
It’s an election year. Following a tip-off that the prime minister, John Howard, was opening a building nearby, I had rallied the troops before dawn for a snap action. To the delight of the TV cameras, as his dark car pulled up, a Lord of the Rings “Ent” tree person extended a green gloved hand to greet him. I delivered the key campaign messages to the cameras as I had been trained to do – with a measured pace, pausing in between suitable sound bites, my tone rational and considered, never raised or shrill. Too much feeling is to be avoided; it makes you sound desperate.
My thumb hovers over the answer key. I really should take this. I try to clear my throat in preparation but it’s clenched tight, as if blockading the sentences.
I can’t do it.
I push the phone away. It vibrates and squirms on the carpet like a two-year-old in tantrum. Stop, I plead silently. Stop asking me.
My head releases back to the floor and I sigh deeply.
Words. I’m sick of them. Oh, I can play the role alright, deliver the radio grabs, create spectacles for the evening news. I can talk the talk, but that’s all it feels like now. I’m a cardboard cut-out reading from the cue cards. It’s a predictable script and an even more predictable ending. Politicians throw us a few tidbits to make it look like they’re doing something, while business as usual continues and I’m left wrung out at the end of the greenwashing cycle.
Things aren’t really going to change. I used to think that if people only knew, if they were shown what was going on with the forests, they would be as indignant as me. They wouldn’t let it happen. It was just a question of ignorance and I could correct that. I could be the forests’ messenger.
But I don’t believe that now. I see how the words are deflected, shrugged off. There’s just no space for them, no attention to spare. I spew the words out, hoping they will find a welcome place to land, to take root. But few do. How can I expect people to believe me when I don’t believe myself anymore? I’ve become one of those pale-faced greenocrats – the ones who say the right words but have hollow voices, cut off at the stump from the very places that once inspired them. One of those people I vowed I would never become.
Right now, I’m too tired to care.
A few weeks ago I went to see a naturopath, worried about my flagging energy. “You could well be on the brink of chronic fatigue,” she said sternly, writing me a list of supplements. I pictured myself tucked up in bed, a cup of tea and a pile of books on my bedside table. A broken leg might be even better – I’d be laid up for a couple of months. I couldn’t believe I was thinking this.
My gaze falls on a column of photos pinned to the window frame, a messy album of the last decade. It rests on a close-up portrait of me, one corner ripped and curling. A necklace of threaded gumnuts hangs loosely around the neck of my rust-coloured woollen skivvy. Morning sun reflects the lighter streaks in my mousy brown hair, tousled from a night of sleeping rough. Gloved fingers wrap around a steaming mug, a wisp of campfire smoke curling from behind one shoulder. I look at the camera with my head slightly tipped, as if questioning, my eyes sleepy and soft. A smile plays at my lips.
I remember that photo being taken, almost eight years ago. Daniel was sitting behind me, our backs touching. Moments before, I had pulled the brown hoodie over his eyes as he quartered an apple in his hand, and laughed.
It was Daniel I fell in love with first, then the forest.
A friend introduced us. I had never encountered anyone like him, certainly not in my small-town upbringing, nor within the black-clad North Sydney crowd who were my journalism classmates. Instead of the cool apathy I was used to, he spoke quietly, passionately. He sang and danced without apology, showed me edible berries and named the wildflowers as we walked. He took me to my first logging operation. I stood next to him atop the remains of a brush box tree ringed with hundreds of years of growth, the sawdust still pungent and damp between my fingers. As I looked out over the field of stumps, a sharp pain shot up my legs and into my chest, where it became an ache of sorrow. I burst into tears and cried with the sudden realisation that we are destroying the very life-support systems we rely on. Daniel said nothing, but drew me to him.
I followed him to forests all over southern Australia, to where owls flew across starry skies as we lay huddled together in the leaf litter; to blockade camps, where we hung suspended like spiders from ropes high in the canopy as loggers swarmed below. He took my soft private-school hands and ground into them with dirt that couldn’t be washed away.
When I finished university, the career goals of journalist and writer now seemed so flimsy. My blinkers had been removed, and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen the destruction.
Daniel and I hatched a bold vision across rolls of butcher’s paper. Together we would save the forests. We magnetised an ever-larger crew of activists and trundled out to logging coupes in beaten-up vans, documenting breaches in harvesting laws and finding the right noses to put them under. We ferreted in the dirt for koala scats and identified the V-notches left on trunks by yellow-bellied gliders. We talked with fiery eyes at rotary clubs and rallies, and staffed market stalls on our weekends. We shined our shoes and trawled the corridors of parliament and the press gallery. We were voices for the voiceless, for the creatures that howled and cackled around our campfires. It was the hardest I had ever worked, but I wasn’t going to stop until we’d won. Which I had no doubt we would.
Daniel broke my heart not long before the government announced protection for the 65,000 hectares of forest between Sydney and the Queensland border that we had fought for. He told me his love was so large it could not be contained within one relationship, and that in fact it had spilled over already. I had won the forest but lost the boy. I went overseas, my backpack heavy with heartbreak and my parents’ hope that I would return to the life they’d mapped out for me. I got as far and as foreign as I could. But still, sitting in the dry heat of the Syrian desert, I felt the wet tendrils of the forest tugging at me to return.
I was offered a paid position by the national environmental organisation that I had been volunteering for. It was perfect: I could assuage the guilt I carried about abandoning my career aspirations, as well as continue with my real vocation. I ignored the sticky feeling as I accepted the job, not wanting to acknowledge how tired I had been after the last campaign.
Everything changed once I was on the payroll. Gone were the spirited bush missions, the tribe, the magic. This was city campaigning by computer, sensible and sedate. The goals grew hairier as the ground crew grew thinner. Until it was just me. I tried to bring the magic back, upping the pace, working longer hours, telling myself what a privilege it was to have this job. I owed it to the members paying my meagre wage. I owed it to my parents, to the forests, to Daniel. To myself.
But the truth was I didn’t feel passionate anymore. I just felt employed.
I shift and roll on to the other hip. The image from my dream a few nights ago flashes back. A white dove is soaring into a clear blue sky when a cage ensnares it, its journey thwarted. It’s a gilded cage I’m living in, not just the job but my whole beautiful life: my fantastic friends, my boyfriend, the web of connections an
d commitments I am woven into.
It’s just the busyness of it all. The relentless onwardsness of everything. Nothing’s ever finished. Nothing ever stops. I fulfil one round of societal obligations and a new round begins. One guest leaves and another arrives. I tick something off my to-do list and another entry takes its place. The life that was once a consuming passion is now consuming me. I’m running around trying to keep all the plates spinning. If one topples, I know the rest will follow.
I could open the cage door at any time and fly out. But what else would I do? Who would I be?
I’m gripped by a sudden urge to kick off my shoes, walk out the front door and not stop until I feel the city streets turn to leaf litter under my feet.
*
“You need a break,” my flatmate Jo said, noticing my staring out the window one morning a few months later, a bowl of porridge growing cold in front of me. She pushed a flier across the table. “Survival skills and nature awareness,” I read.
I took Jo’s advice and we signed up for the workshop together. When we arrived, Kate greeted us with a hug, wearing nondescript loose Levi jeans and a faded T-shirt. She glided rather than walked us over to where a small group crouched around a large wooden frame, rubbing away at what looked like an animal skin strung tautly across the rack with rope. Squatting down next to Jo, I stifled a giggle as she wrinkled her nose. The hide smelt like the day-old meat my brothers would use to bait yabbies. I scraped gingerly at one corner.
“Don’t hold back,” Kate said. “He’s a tough old red, this one.”
I leant into it, sprays of amber dandruff fluffing out into my hair and eyelashes.