My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  Back along the bank, I notice five-leaf water vine, the native grape that we made into jam during summer. Maybe this could be the material to make my kitchen basket with? Closing my eyes and holding one leaf, I extend my awareness into it, asking if it would like to be transformed into a basket. I remember back to shelter building, when my efforts at gathering materials in an intentional manner felt contrived and perfunctory. Nothing has sprouted lips and talked to me yet, but I enjoy the ritual of it now. If nothing else, it makes the world around me, and by extension me as well, more alive and imaginative. The leaf offers no resistance. I pull on the vine, coiling it around my elbow and thumb like a rope, feeling a bit Tarzan-like, as if I’m about to swing out over the creek.

  I settle into a grassy spot by the creek instead and strip leaves from eight of the sturdiest lengths to be the warp for a simple woven basket. Laying them crossways, I attempt to secure them at the base with two thin strands. The first weaver snaps at the leaf node. It’s definitely not cane.

  Over and under, over and under. My hands soon learn the amount of give the vine can offer, gently persuading it to bend without breaking. I relax into the weaver’s mantra. The burble of the creek washes over me, a river stone caressed by the shallow rapids. I am absorbed deeper and deeper in the task until all movement – hands, fingers, thoughts – merge into one action. And yet as I am sucked into a single point, so too do I expand out in wider and wider circles, catching distant birdsong, small movements of cloud.

  Over and under, over and under. It’s like shelter building, the same experience of being so physically engrossed in a project that my awareness enters my hands, bypassing my conscious mind and communicating with the materials so that I intuitively know how they want to move.

  Over and under, over and under. Time warps and weaves in on itself, marked only by leopard spots of light moving across my body. We have structured our world to avoid the time-consuming tasks of simple living. If this is how it feels to be consumed by time, then I’m willing to be eaten alive. I’m relishing these days of repetition, the over-and-under involved in creating house and home. I feel as if I’ve stepped into the “chop wood, carry water” koan, glimpsing the joy that follows when path and practice are synonymous – when life is meditation and meditation is life.

  Yesterday I started on my “couch”, lashing branches together to form an A-frame backrest, which I wedged against one of the shelter poles. A flat basket for drying tinder hangs from a rafter above the end of my bed. Behind it is a small bookshelf, which holds select texts: Women Who Run with the Wolves, Bill Plotkin’s Soulcraft, a Robert Johnston dream interpretation manual, Tom Brown Jr’s Awakening the Spirits, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a bird-ID book and my journal. My kitchen is also in the throes of primitive redecoration. I’ve dug a hole in the ground at the back for perishables and have hung three wooden shelves with hibiscus cordage along the wall of one side, filling them with tins and glass jars of grains and legumes. My shelter is starting to look seriously homely.

  Over and under, over and under. The sun flickers on my back. This is so lovely down here; I really should be enjoying this more. I wonder what time it is. Butterflies suddenly take flight in my belly, flapping around desperately in search of a solid perch.

  My mind latches onto future home-making projects. A blady grass mat for my backrest, a large basket for my clothes. Mulling over this list is comforting, soothing, a familiar old blanket. I know how to do this. Doing, that is. The plans protect me, distract me, are buying me time.

  Over and under, over and under. A family of wrens dances in close, the male so blue it makes the sky look pastel. Flicking his tail feather from side to side, he watches over his harem foraging in the grass. My weaving hands pause as I view the visitors.

  Hurry up, you need to get this done so you can move on to the other baskets, and then the bowl, and the spoons. You haven’t got all day.

  The wrens suddenly scatter as if frightened by the thought. My fingers stiffen, quickening. The lengthening shadow of a tree looks like it’s waving me a disingenuous greeting. Adrenalin courses through my body. Small lines furrow my forehead and my awareness retracts back from my hands to my mind.

  And what is this homemaker business, anyway? Baskets aren’t going to keep you alive. I thought you wanted to be a tracker? A skills guru? An awareness ninja? You’ve hardly even started night walking. This is your one opportunity to apply yourself to something extraordinary.

  Extraordinary. The word catches like a burr in my throat. Skills and spaciousness, everythingness and nothingness. I want them all. How can I? I double over in a rasping cough as saliva dribbles down my airway. Slow down, I know what my real work is – feeling and following my heart. And right now I want to sit by the creek and weave a basket.

  Do you really? Or is this just another project to tick off the list? Maybe what you actually want is to sit in the hammock all winter. Look at you beavering away like you’ve done all your life. Nothing’s changed. You’re too scared to really follow your heart.

  A currawong flies to a low perch, looking at me from the corner of its eye. It reminds me of the day I ran from a mountaintop, currawongs flocking around me like prison wardens escorting me to the gate.

  After my trip to tracker school, I bought sacks of rice and lentils, and asked Dad to drop me at a forest hut on the edge of the Barrington Tops national park for thirty days of solitude. Rather than dreamily wandering through the forest, drinking in my own company with the thirst of a desert pilgrim, as I’d envisaged, I found that solitude was a fierce magnifying glass, bringing every nuance of my being into accentuated focus, blowing up every internal freckle, every blemish. Its stare was penetrating – everywhere I turned, there it was, or rather, there I was, in my face. I tried to outpace the voices of fear and judgment and doubt, hauling myself up a vicious five-day mountain climb in scorching heat, the only thing slowing me down a tiger snake camouflaged on the trail. Perhaps if I had stayed long enough, I would have found a friend in myself, but back then my company was too stark, too sharp. The relentless harassment had me scuttling back to civilisation after seventeen days.

  Get a grip, I tell myself. You’re not on the mountain now. You’re older and wiser. Trust in what your heart wants to do.

  But maybe it’s true, maybe I’m not following my heart. I suddenly feel as if I have sand in my eyes and can’t see which is the face of truth and which is that of the charlatan. How can it be this hard? Okay, I’ll just get this basket done and then I’ll get back to the flow, I reason, trying desperately to placate both sides of me.

  I pick up the pace, my face red with the knowledge that I am being seduced again by the false promise that there is a magic point in the future when enough will be enough, when I will tick the right number of boxes to give me permission to slow down. The two weavers whip against my legs as I fling them over each other.

  Over and under. Gotta keep going. Over and under. Justify your existence.

  Over and under. When this is finished. Over and under. Then I’ll have time.

  One of the weavers breaks.

  Oh, look what happens when you rush. You’ve come all this way out to the bush, pushed everyone away to get your precious time alone, and you still can’t rest. You will never find peace.

  “Stop!” I yell and throw the basket on the ground. “I don’t believe you. You’re an imposter.” The face of the judge steps out from the shadows, and it’s the pursed-lipped woman with coiffed blue hair from my dreams, shaking her head in stern disapproval. I turn and run, birds scattering. Faster and faster, anywhere but here, anywhere but in my head. Tripping on a tree root, I fall face down, furious tears staining my face. The wrinkled fingers of my stalker wrap around my throat in triumph. It’s no use: I’ve tried all year to ignore the judge, to tell her to pack her bags and leave, but there’s no escape. I lie limp on the ground as silent tea
rs fall.

  3.

  Perched atop my sit spot, I am listening, my entire body receiving sound as if it’s covered in tiny ears, a giant sensory organ. When I drop the string that connects the sounds to their sources, they become just frequency, just sensation: minor chords and cascading harmonies piano-tinkling down my spine. As if pushed from behind, I lurch forward. Moments later the sound arrives: a wave, slowly gathering momentum before crashing over me. I hold my breath until it passes. I open my eyes to dozens of white ibis flying north in a V-formation.

  The white-cheeked honeyeaters hold silent momentarily before exploding in a kerfuffle of squawks nearby. While there’s nothing unusual about that, this outburst seems particularly serious. Maybe I should investigate. Walking to the other end of the log, I jump down and creep up behind a thicket.

  Craning my head into the low branches of a shrub, I see a grey butcherbird looking decidedly guilty. “Caught red-handed,” I grin. I’ve had a grudge against butcherbirds ever since one of them swiped my budgerigar when I was a kid. The bird flashes me an annoyed glance and takes off. Moving on from my summer frenzy of naming and labelling sit spot inhabitants, I’m more interested now in relationships – between birds, between birds and the forest, between birds and myself. Sound is the key to this study. According to Niko, all songbirds have five calls: companion contact, song, juvenile begging, aggression (usually male territorial disputes) and alarm. Identifying them is the cornerstone of coming to know the forest through the eyes and ears of the birds. Every event sends out a concentric ripple of presence, like a pebble thrown into a pond. I tune into bird radio every morning, then keep one antenna up and tracking throughout the day, sparking up when a disturbance breaks the still waters. It’s like having a cricket match on in the background, the mumble of the commentator a distant nasal hum until the hullabaloo of a wicket snaps me back to attention.

  A slight breeze stirs the tops of the trees, a wax museum come to life. I sling my water bottle over my shoulder in its new string-net holder and wander south, following a red clay trail out of camp. Nuggetty black stringybarks wave me on like royal guards. A wedge-tailed eagle circles above, panning for its breakfast. Overnight, patersonia lilies have thrown down a bedspread of purple to complement the mauve pea-like flowering vine that’s climbing over rocks.

  I come to the first fork. I remember this one, and take the right. The path divides again. They will keep peeling away like this, branching further from the original node, like a family tree becoming more distantly related. Both trails beckon with an equal mix of anticipation and trepidation. I wait until I feel a movement in my feet. They guide me left, picking up the trail that begins to ascend the yellowing backbone of the sandstone ridge.

  With my binge of home making subsiding, I’ve taken to hiking out in larger concentric circles each day, pushing the boundaries of my backyard. I now fill my pockets with dried fruit and nuts, knowing I won’t be able to resist the lure of the undiscovered around the next corner. Rather than setting an agenda, I let curiosity be my navigator and just wander. The focused bushwalks of my earlier years, shouldering a heavy pack from points A to B, bear little resemblance to these meanders. When bushwalking, there is a right way and a wrong way, a track to be followed or deviated from. When wandering, deviation is the trail, “lost” a relative concept known in shades of discomfort and excitement. It’s more of an exploration. And just like a good explorer, I return home to fill in the blank spaces on my map with the trails taken, treasures found, features noted.

  It’s starting to look like a map in a fantasy novel. There are the “goodlands” (grasstree stalk heaven, native raspberry avenue, clay cutting, far waterhole), the “badlands” (wild dog quarry, eerie night spot, quicksand swamp, blueberry clearfell), the creeks and features that demarcate them, the trails that cross and connect them. There are features known by events (mudfight river bend, vision quest site, powerful owl meeting), by who dwells there (death-adder trail, thornbill dormitory, eastern-grey kangaroo lay). There are those close by and well known (shelters, sit spot, power tree, big-toe tree, swimming hole) and those farther away and little known (paperbark-Ent swamp, full-moon sandstone boulders, bangalow-palm fairy glen). Day by day I am colouring in the spaces between and beyond, trying to connect the dots into a coherent whole, make the landscape familiar and known. It’s a way of befriending the land, building relationships and assigning meaning. I like to think I’m mapping the story of the land, but it’s as much my story that I reference: my impressions, my tracks, my landmarks. I map the land as much to know myself as to know it.

  Fresh bandicoot prints cross my path. I look around, half expecting to see a small furry mound goading me, like the White Rabbit, to follow it. The tracks lead me to a critter crossroads, the full extent of rush-hour traffic laid out on a sandy thoroughfare. I squat for a closer look.

  Tracking. If birds are the spoken language, tracks are the written word. They are the hieroglyphs of the land itself, an ancient code inscribed on the Earth’s slate. Very few are committed enough to decipher it, but I’ve met one who is.

  Tom Brown Jr is the founder and head honcho of the tracker school where Ryan and I studied. The first time I saw him, he was sucking down a cigarette in between slurps of a takeaway coffee. Pacing through camp like a disgruntled bear, his giant sun-browned arms protruding from a muscle tee, piercing blue eyes brooding and intense, Tom defied any stereotype his often doe-eyed students tried to project onto him.

  “If you think you’re going to sit under a tree with an old man and chew the fat of the land then you’ve come to the wrong place.” Dozens of shoulders slumped.

  Brought up by Baptist parents in the conservative 1950s backwater of semi-rural New Jersey, Tom is an odd cross between hick and shaman. As told in his autobiography, The Tracker, at seven years of age he was playing by a creek behind his house when Stalking Wolf, one of the last great trackers of the southern Lipan Apache, stumbled upon Tom – apparently fulfilling a vision, and bringing to an end a 63-year solo walk across the Americas. Over the next decade, Tom and Stalking Wolf’s grandson Rick were tutored in the ways of the woods, in between cheeseburgers and school. As a young adult, Tom gained notoriety for his work in law enforcement, tracking murderers and lost children. He became an unwilling guru, with hundreds of eager apprentices knocking at his door.

  Decades later, his reluctance is still palpable. Tom sneered, challenged and pleaded with us to learn the ways of the earth as he crushed a disposable water bottle with one hand and tossed it over his shoulder. There is a less-than-subtle apocalyptic tone to his invitation, and I met more than one can-filled bunker-owning acolyte.

  On the morning we were to start tracking lessons, camp was jumpy. Tom seemed even more intense, if that was possible. He entered the Taj (the primitive teaching shed) quietly, outwardly subdued but crackling with energy. Narrowing his eyes, he spun around to face us.

  “Did any of you see the tracks this morning of the deer that walked up to the flintknapping pit and grazed on the new shoots of the blueberry?” He eyed the crowd, shocked, as if in disbelief at our ignorance. “He looked left, sniffed the ground twice, before walking right over the tracks of the raccoon that passed through the oak thicket an hour or so before.

  “And how many of you noticed the tracks of the feral cat, a large male that stalked along the far edge of the Taj? Perhaps it was after the mice, two of them, that scampered along this podium.” Silence. “After today, I promise you’ll never see the ground in the same way again. Follow me.”

  We filed along track after track, identifying the compression shapes paws and hooves make in the sand by deer, raccoon, dog, cat, fox, coyote, rabbit, bird and mouse. Tom moved into increasingly more difficult terrain, locating new tracks with an air of boredom. He saved the best for last – the trail of a mouse in pine needles. The skeptic in me spluttered. With a tired sigh, Tom directed me to where pollen on the leaf
had been removed, leaving the perfect compression shape of the left hind foot of a mouse. I gaped. He rolled his eyes.

  And that was just kindergarten stuff. The real deal was the ability to read the “micro and macro pressure releases” – tracking at the level of an individual grain of sand. This is where the practical science of tracking transformed into art, where the “who, when and where” questions sharpened to “How tall? How heavy? Moving how quickly? Bladder full or empty? Emotional state?” As if to lend weight to this seemingly unbelievable ability, Tom banned us from reading the tracks of our classmates. “An invasion of privacy,” he claimed. After hours of sketching my thumbprint in a cup of sand I was too cross-eyed to contemplate any recreational private-eye behaviour.

  As the training unfolded, we found ourselves tracking fox prints across packed gravel, deer prints in pine needles by moonlight. Our fingers held one end of the string, and at the other end was the animal we tracked. Sometimes you could sense it, as if the string pulled taut when the animal moved, jerked sideways as it changed direction. One day, struggling to find a deer print in pine needles, I stood back to take a break and the entire line of tracks lit up in front of me with neon brightness. It was then I understood what Tom meant by tracking being a window into the soul of the land itself. And why he had warned us that once you start tracking, you can never stop.

  “I have given you the key, but only dirt time will unlock that door,” he sniggered. “I can tell you now, only two percent of you will ever pick up that key. The majority will walk away today full of good intentions that will fade to dust when you return to your domestic lives.”

  I promised myself that I wouldn’t let this ancient knowledge die in my hands.

  On my belly now, my nose centimetres from the track of a swamp wallaby, I strain to remember the words to describe the micro landscape features of the track. Cliff, dome, crest. When Tom was a kid in training, his dirt time apparently formed calluses on his ribs. Mine are soft. I notice a smooth hill outside the print. Ridge. My gaze follows the change in direction it indicates, connecting the dots to nibbled blades of grass, the tattered ends still green. The string tugs in my fingers.