My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  I’ve never before considered taking to paperbarks with a sharp implement, but here I go. Shaun and I silently signal to each other our first victims – the straightest, largest trees in the swamp. I place my hands on the bark, which feels tissue-soft on my fingertips. Sorry, I say silently, picturing my imagined roof by way of explanation. Thwack. I bring my machete down hard, making a horizontal incision across the top of my chosen piece. Thwack, a parallel cut down the bottom. I nervously stick my fingers in the crack, relieved when I feel the inner bark layer still intact. I don’t want any ringbarking. Thwack. I wedge my fingers in the thin wound of the vertical incision and begin peeling back the skin. It lifts easily for the first few centimetres, then stops. The bark is stitched to the trunk by a mass of rootlets. I tug at a root. No give. I tug and pull and tug, my feet almost lifting off the ground. It snaps suddenly and I fall backwards with a splash, the bark ripped and hanging. Shaun hoots with laughter. The image I had of sheets of bark falling at my feet like wrapping paper sinks alongside me in the mud.

  I move to a tree closer to Shaun. His dark curly hair is stuck to his forehead, his biceps pulled tight against his T-shirt. He’s quite handsome, really.

  I try a different tack with the roots this time, trying to pull each one through the bark without ripping it. A flock of lorikeets lifts up in a noisy cloud and departs. In their absence, I can hear the low creaks of frogs spread out over the reed beds.

  “Hey Shaun,” I say, easing the pressure off a rootlet just before it snaps, “why did you decide to do this year?”

  Shaun leans forward on his embedded machete and looks up, as if struggling to remember. “Well, it all started with 60 Minutes – you know, the TV show,” he says, pausing to thwack the tree before continuing. “It was a story about a Danish prince who left his castle, carved himself a canoe in Polynesia, paddled to far-north Queensland and lived completely off the land for forty years. Well, I decided then and there that I wanted to build my own log cabin in the mountains and live in it.”

  “As you do,” I say, my right arm disappearing under flapping bark.

  “I calculated that I would need about $5000 for the gear and I didn’t have a cent. So about a week later, I was walking near my dad’s house and there was a blank envelope lying on the ground right in front of me, and, no joke, inside was $5065 – exactly the money I needed for gear and a bus ticket to the Snowy Mountains.”

  “Are you serious?” I stop, mid-rootlet removal. Shaun returns my stare with a quick smile and nod in my direction.

  “I figured it must be for me,” Shaun says, his voice thin as he strains up to the top of his bark slab. “So I bought all the gear I thought I’d need, managed to get my parents in the same room, played them the 60 Minutes recording and told them I was leaving the next day.

  “Mum put me on the bus and I got off in a little town, paid a taxi driver to take me as far into the mountains as he could and then started walking uphill. That night was absolutely freezing and I didn’t have a sleeping bag. I realised I had bitten off way more than I could chew, so I rang Mum and got her to buy me a bus ticket home.”

  “What? You didn’t buy a decent sleeping bag?” Having seen Shaun’s collection of high-tech solar gadgets, I knew where the money went instead. Shaun doesn’t answer.

  “Well, after that, my parents nailed me into getting a job, and so for the last year I would leave the house in a suit, hide in the front yard, then change after they’d left and head out to a camp I had made in some bushland nearby.”

  “Ha – an urban bushranger!” I laugh, looking for signs that he is lying or joking but finding neither. “So when you heard about this, you just jumped aboard?”

  “Pretty much,” Shaun says, giving me his lopsided grin and sloshing off to find another tree.

  I’m glad he didn’t ask me the same question. All the reasons are still there, and I could probably articulate them, but now that I’m here, the story doesn’t seem important anymore. Perhaps if he asks, I’ll just tell him the dream I had the night I handed in my resignation: I’m walking through a forest, looking for “the power tree”. I suddenly see it; it’s the oldest and largest by far. I approach it slowly. Around the other side, a red-bellied black snake is curled at the base. It wakes up and begins to wind itself around my leg. I’m scared and push it back down. On a nearby rock ledge, I reach into a crack and pull out a stone tablet. There’s an Egyptian symbol on it and a word carved across the top in large letters. The word is “FREEDOM”.

  In some ways it didn’t feel like I’d really made a decision. It was more as if one day I turned over a rock to find a decision I’d made long ago, waiting for me.

  *

  After a couple of hours my arms are shaking with exhaustion, fine paperbark powder stuck like asbestos to my every moist and dripping crevice, my exposed skin shredded by mosquitoes.

  “Come on, slow coach, the rains are coming,” Shaun says, giving me an affectionate tap on the back. I run my fingers over the inner sheath of my last sheet. It reminds me of my grandmother’s skin the last time I saw her.

  She had fallen ill and I drove straight over, parking out the front under the pine trees I used to climb after school. The green hammock sat lifeless at the back door. It’s where we would gather on winter afternoons, sun streaming down on us through the hydrangeas. I would lie, my head on her lap, and close my eyes, listening to the slow click-clack of her heels on the wooden verandah as she rocked, her fingernails on my back sending shivers up my spine. Gran was the only grandparent I’d ever known, but I hadn’t needed any others.

  At her bedside I watched her breath rise and fall in shallow spasms, her skin so translucent that the veins were blue rivers down her sunken cheeks. I smoothed back the fine wisps of white hair around her face and took her hand in mine. She opened her eyes, and said loudly, “Hello, darling.” In that hour I was everyone to her but myself. Her mother, her daughter, someone she had never met before and shrank from, scared. Her breath grew more rapid.

  “It’s okay, Gran,” I reassured her, patting the back of her hand as she gripped mine tightly. She travelled back through her ninety-nine years, plucking memories like fruit from a tree, the sweetest and best. Unearthing potatoes with her father from his prized veggie patch; clutching the mane of her pony as she rode to school each morning; the round, aproned form of her mother handing her the spoon from the Anzac biscuit batter to lick.

  I prompted her to recall my favourite of her stories. How she had turned down the richest man in town to marry Papa, the young parish priest with the horse and sulky, who gave half of his modest stipend back to the church. The one about her Aboriginal nanny, Gracie, who liked to hide behind the curtain and listen to Gran play piano. Her voice squeaked with emotion telling me how she had waited for Gracie to arrive one morning, ready for her customary bear hug, but never saw her again. “The moon went and so did they,” Gran said, explaining how Gracie had disappeared, along with the whole mob who camped on the river, on the night of an eclipse.

  She was bright enough to nibble on a few of her favourite ginger chocolates and sip a sweet Milo. I promised to return in a few days, not knowing this was to be her last.

  I was almost out the bedroom door when Gran shouted to me with lucid urgency, “Darling!” I spun around. Her thin frame was straining forward, struggling to prop herself up with one hand. All the fog in her eyes was gone. She looked at me with an expression of pure love and said quietly, “Thank you for being you.”

  I registered the words in slow motion, hearing each one as if spoken within a cave. I pulled myself together enough to give her a shaky smile, blow her a kiss and lurch out the front door, where I collapsed on the swinging hammock and wet the green canvas with my tears. I cried because I didn’t know who I was anymore. And because one of the few people in the world who did wouldn’t be here much longer to remind me.

  A
few days after Gran’s funeral, I called Kate. “That year in the bush, I want to do it.”

  *

  Back home, the day’s largesse equates to barely a third of a roof, which would be fine if it was watertight. An afternoon storm quickly destroys this illusion. The rootlets are like little water slides, giving the rain a free ride straight in. I reluctantly unfurl a new blue tarp over the roof.

  Night creeps in like a robber. I crash out before the mischievous night elves can start playing tricks on me.

  4.

  It’s either me or the grasstree. I hoped there might be room in this lean-to for both of us, but it’ll only work if I’m willing to be poked in the eye with a sharp needle every time I reach for the salt while I’m cooking.

  Grasstrees are incredibly slow-growing creatures – the turtles of the plant world, busting out not much more than an inch a year. If you’re lucky enough to stumble upon a clump of blackened grasstrees that reach over your head (do the maths on a six-metre one), you may find yourself spontaneously dropping to your knees and bowing your head in respect for the gathering of elders who pre-date you by a few hundred years. This one is a mere babe, a head with no legs. I can’t help but think of Grug – the big-nosed bush wanderer of Ted Prior’s kids books. A favourite of mine as a child, Grug is a gadabout grasstree, the epitome of a laid-back bush hermit, waddling around in non-verbal equanimity. If he could say anything, I’m sure it would be “no worries”, but Grug junior in front of me has a whole lot of worries as I reach for the mattock. He seems to have grown overnight, defiantly stretching his wiry needles as far as possible, as if in protest. You can’t halt progress, I explain.

  There is a silver, if somewhat starchy, lining to this massacre – a chance to finally try what is apparently a bush-food delicacy. My bush-food guide says that the grasstree was a rich source of carbohydrates for the Aboriginal people in this region, who would beat off the head with a stick and then roast or eat raw the starchy pith where the trunk joins the leaves. It was a heavy price – the death of the grasstree for a few inches of starch, but judging by the plethora of them still around, the stocks were well maintained. I’m not about to go beheading grasstrees to find out, but being an opportunivore by nature, I’ll be dining on grasstree hors d’oeuvres tonight.

  The communal fire’s already going by the time I arrive on dusk. I wonder who lit it, and how. Waving to Shaun in the kitchen, I pull up a log and begin Grug’s preparations. It’s a rather gruesome operation, requiring me to scalp him and dig out the grey matter with my knife. A kookaburra looks at me curiously from a low tree nearby. Smiling, I offer out some Grug on the end of my knife. Amber spreads in an arc across the horizon as the first star appears. I pause and take a deep breath of the first wisps of cool night air. The land does the same, scribbly trunks blushing a pale pink, leaves perking up from their daytime wilt, swaying gently in the imperceptible breeze. It almost looks pretty.

  I hear Dan and Chloe guffawing loudly from down the main trail, and I stiffen.

  “Hey, where have you guys been?” I ask as they enter the firelight, arms full of shopping bags.

  “Town mission,” says Chloe, glancing at me nervously as if gauging my reaction.

  “Oh … already?”

  “Yeah, needed some things.”

  “Like chocolate,” Dan laughs. Chloe turns her head sheepishly. I try not to look disapproving. I’m carefully planning my supplies so I don’t have to go into town more than once a month. I thought we all were. I wonder if that counts as one of their thirty days allowed out of camp.

  Chloe glances briefly at what I’m doing, faltering for a second before heading off to the kitchen. I’ve been hoping we’ll just slip into our old friendship, but we haven’t reconnected much at all yet. Chloe used to be the only one who didn’t think it strange if I screeched to a halt on the side of the road to gather the fluffy flower heads of bulrush for tinder. We sneaked into park gardens at night to harvest basket-making plants and almost burnt my house down practising primitive fire making in the backyard. Together we discovered books that mirrored our mutual call to the wild, exclaiming over passages that felt like someone had stolen the words from our hearts. Chloe and I were the original recruits for the bush year, signing up with the excited agreement of, “I’ll do it if you do.” With Chloe equally enamoured of bush skills, it didn’t seem so crazy. In the year since we’ve seen each other, I’ve been overseas while she has been finishing a uni degree and delving into a personal development program. I have the distinct feeling that she is having serious doubts about wanting to be here but doesn’t want to tell me. I haven’t asked, either. I just want us to go back to how we were.

  Baked-bean toasties and Shaun’s just-left-home special of a bucket-load of pasta and mouldy cheese jostle for flame space. Ryan makes space on the log next to him when he sees Nikki coming.

  “Way to go, Nik,” he exclaims, giving her a high five when she produces two eggs.

  “Grasstree brains, anyone?” I say, offering the head around the communal fire.

  “It’s good,” says Dan. “If you like munching on Paddle Pop sticks.”

  Ryan takes a tentative bite. “Hmm, a bit like nutty peas.”

  That’s the most I’ve been able to drag out of Ryan since he arrived. I’ve been hoping we’d also fall back into the easy mateship of our US adventure days, but that’s clearly not happening. I was confident we were just friends when I joined him on a Rocky Mountains camping trip, underestimating the romance of skinny dipping in pristine alpine lakes and napping on sun-soaked meadows. I’d assumed that he also felt our brief roll in the wildflowers was situational. But I’m beginning to think that his decision to do this year might have had more to do with me than I wanted to admit.

  I’m a bit resentful about having to consider relationships at all. I left my boyfriend of five years to come out here. It had become not just him and me but a third entity – The Relationship – which was sapping ridiculous amounts of my energy to maintain. In some ways I wish I was anonymous here, free of the weight of past expectations. Then I could focus on the relationships I really want to foster, those of the non-human variety. I was surprised when Nikki told me the clincher for her to sign up was being part of a group.

  “Want some?” Chloe says, extending a bag of town-bought chips. I pretend to be deeply absorbed in Grug, noticing a slight tone of superiority in my voice as I decline. She inches away.

  “Hey Shaun, did you make the fire tonight?” I ask, passing around Grug’s young inner leaves.

  “Yep,” he says proudly, holding up chafed palms.

  “Wanna see my firestick?” Dan says, producing a lighter. “The sacred Bic.”

  Chloe laughs.

  “Still working on your kit?” I ask.

  “Nope, already done. I just don’t like rules. If I don’t feel like busting up my hands, I’ll use a lighter. Simple.”

  “But … that’s the whole point of the program … that’s why we’re here,” I say, looking around me for support.

  Ryan sighs, and looks at me pointedly. “It takes more energy to piss out here than most people use in a day. We don’t have to do it all right away.”

  “All?” I say, a fire igniting in my belly. Fire is not just any old skill. Fire is life. Fire is all.

  The first time I saw Kate kneel down and effortlessly produce a glowing red coal using a hand-drill, the same technique that would have been used on this land for tens of thousands of years, it felt like I was witnessing a birth – it was that intimate, that profound. The sheer simplicity of picking up one stick and spinning it on another to produce fire was the most improbable and stunning act of human creation I could imagine. I wanted it, badly. That was three years ago. Now I want it with a bone-deep hunger. I’d made a few hand-drill fires in tandem with one of the others since I’d been here, but none on my own. Not yet.
<
br />   Kate and Sam have strongly suggested that we use only traditional fire-making methods, such as the bow-drill and hand-drill, but are leaving the ultimate decision up to us. “The greater the need, the greater the result,” Kate told us. I didn’t need convincing. Fire defines for me whether we are serious about learning real skills or, well, just playing with fire. I wish Kate and Sam had set more ground rules, or were at least around more to establish some cultural boundaries. I understand the gentle approach but the slope could get pretty slippery. In the absence of rules I’ve made my own commitment to making fire only with sticks for the entire year. Matchsticks do not count.

  “Well, we’ll all have our own fires soon, once our shelters are built,” says Nikki, trying to break the tension.

  I take her cue and shut up. Like it or not, I am part of a tribe. A leaking shelter will be the least of my worries if I end up the misfit. Maybe Ryan’s got a point. It is still early days.

  “Look up!” Ryan yells. Six heads jerk upwards as a shooting star gobbles half the sky in a spectacular burnout. There is a moment of open-mouthed silence before Dan’s phone rings. It’s unbelievable, firstly, that there’s reception, secondly, that he’s happy to keep conducting his social life like this year is some kind of backyard barbecue.

  I bury my head in the task of shaving off the resin from the outside of Grug’s root-ball to use later as a glue. My knife work is fierce, shards of dark amber spraying violently into my upturned hat. I feel tarnished, as if the purity of my year is already stained. What we need is something to sew us together, something to help us let go of the past, let go of our fears and set our collective boat on course.