My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  *

  The day dawns blessedly cool. I’ve been dragging my swag outside at night to stargaze. It means I end up burning the candle at both ends, though. Venus had me up an hour or so before first light again this morning, shooting its arrow into my dream world and asking me those recurring questions – what will you do in this wild life? On this precious day?

  Packing some lunch, I follow the creek south, leaving it to head uphill along the eastern saddle. By mid-afternoon I stand atop a rock platform, looking out to where the sea glimmers in the distance. Skirting along its edge is a long black snake in constant motion – the highway linking the country’s north to south. The speed of the cars shocks me. That will be me soon. It won’t be long until I’m no longer up here, traversing the ridges barefoot, but down there in the fast lane. I track one red car as it darts in and out of the lanes, trying to get ahead.

  I’m suddenly panicky. What if I forget this? If I never again take my shoes off in the rain? Forget how to spin a fire into being? Get so caught up in the traffic that I lose the feel of words and images that arise with a wide horizon and unmetered time?

  I sit and nestle myself between rock and sky, as if anchoring myself here, etching my shape into the stone. As I lean my head against the granite, the shadows of the lone tree next to me flicker over my face. The pattern is familiar, five leaves fanning out from a single point. I look more closely. A brush box, the first I’ve seen all year! It was a field of fallen brush box that I first saw with Daniel, when I stood upon a tabletop stump and my world crumbled. Small cream buds dot the spindly twigs. It’s almost unrecognisable from the rainforest giants I’m used to . It could have been that but instead has ended up here, clinging like a limpet to a rock. We both have. Right now, I could be anywhere in the world, and yet I choose to be here, listening to the rustle of leaves, the croak of the friarbird. In a blip, though, I will be gone. The highway life is reaching in for me. I feel like a caterpillar newly emerged from its cocoon, wings damp and folded, the patterns not yet visible.

  A stand of old-men grasstrees below me sway their heads in the breeze. What these old fellas must have seen on thousands of afternoons just like this one, with camps lit up like fireflies along the river, bands of travellers making their way up the valley from the coast.

  Further south, denuded farmland gives way to a forest pockmarked by logging coupes. In one, the tracks left by the bulldozer have created the outline of a tree, the central trunk the main trail in, the canopy sketched out by the to and fro of the machine as it hauled out the logs. A few warm tears roll down my cheeks. No wonder I bulldoze through my life trying to do so much, when so much is at stake. But that is just as unsustainable, a similar kind of violence to the one eating up the Earth.

  Tears splash onto the rock, the lichen turning a deeper green. What can I do with this life, while precious, wild lives are being extinguished around me? How can I know what to do when there is so much to do?

  I imagine myself back in the office, the falling trees heavy on my shoulders, the dull ache behind my eyes from staring at a computer screen. I can’t go back to that. It’s important work, but it’s the wrong direction for me. But what, then?

  Wind whistles through the needles of the grasstrees.

  Hollow bones, the needles whisper. Be hollow bones.

  Far below, the sun glints off an open bulge in the creek before drawing in sharply at an elbow bend. The bank is the bone, directive and strong, the river hollow within. Together they pulse the current downstream, expanding and contracting in an ongoing dialogue.

  Hollow bones. Be hollow bones.

  The river carries, receives. Grasping nothing, judging nothing. It accepts both the push and pull of the tides, the fullness of flood and the emptiness of drought.

  “To live from the place of the feminine is to follow where the energy is flowing,” Malcolm said. “Don’t question why, just surrender to where it pulls you.”

  I’ve been hollowing out my bones, clearing out the channels so that I can be a river for life to flow through, so that I can move and be moved simultaneously, animated by the pulsing of feeling and instinct.

  It’s like walking through life blindfolded – tuning my ears into the quieter sounds, treading with the lightness of paws. Rather than walking to a destination, I will weave my way towards it, each thorny thicket and sandy path another texture to be felt and navigated through. My bearing will be set not by some idea but by visceral contact with the world, nudged forward by experience’s wisdom, by sensation and, sometimes, the inexplicable impulse that I will know not to argue with. My slow pace will be of little consequence; there is nowhere to get to but where I am. I’ll know that it’s right by the leap in my heart and the willingness in my walk. I’ll know I’ve arrived not by what it looks like, but by the feel of it underfoot.

  Standing to straddle two boulders, I feel the straddle of these two worlds – one whose slow dance I have been learning, and the fast ride I am soon returning to. I have the urge to take a giant step off the ridge and be down there, cruising along the highway, the wind teasing back my hair. Do I need to leave, or can I somehow live in both? The image of myself with a foot in both worlds lands with a thud of rightness in my chest. A bridge! That’s exactly what I want to do, be a bridge between worlds, bringing the city to the wilds and the wilds to the city. I don’t know what that means yet. My feet will guide me. I can trust them, just as a migratory bird trusts its wings to carry it back across oceans to the same valley, the same tree.

  I followed my feet here to the shifting light of the forest; to the deep, cold chasms of water, where the river loops back on itself like a ribbon; to the spaces between bare feet falling on dew laden trails.

  I followed mine to this place of absence; to the stripped-back rawness of sinew and bone, feather and stone; to the smell of sticks rubbing together moments before combustion; to the swelling of bark, the ripening of berry; to the softening scrape of my thumbnail down the backbone of a reed; to the awareness of blue flame leaching to white.

  I followed mine to this nondescript ridge, to the company of this small tree. There is so much to do but it starts here, with this simple exchange of breath, this moment-to-moment offering of life to one another.

  I reach out and pick a leaf, crush it between my fingers, and breathe it in, a long slow breath. It starts here with this, bearing witness to both the scars below and the humble beauty of this tree pregnant with flower. Breathing it in and breathing it out. Breathing and being breathed. We can’t think our way out of this mess, we need to feel our way. Facts and figures won’t move us, only hearts in love with this world will. Rewilding of our world needs be simultaneous with the rewilding of our hearts.

  There is so much to do, but right now this is enough. The next step will come, will fill my hollow bones and urge me on, so long as I keep listening, keep one eye out for her tracks and an ear pricked for her song. So long as I continue to feel the beating of the wild heart within.

  Epilogue

  I’m sitting inside a bustling cafe, my hair still wet from an early morning ocean dip. A steaming pot of chai arrives and I wrap my hands around it while the laptop boots up. It’s easy to take for granted now; three and a half years have passed since I had to rub sticks together to earn my morning cuppa.

  I was ready to leave by the end – craving human culture, flyscreens and occasions to wear a dress. Still, I found it surprisingly hard to return. I tried living in inner-city Sydney – impossible; I could hardly sleep for the stimulation overload. I lived for a time in a cabin on the outskirts of a small creative rural village. It was beautiful, but disconnection of another kind. There’s been an underlying sense of dislocation wherever I am, as if I’ve been uprooted from my home country. Currently a beach house with friends in Newcastle seems to be striking a happy medium, the ocean’s wide horizon nearby, a bush reserve not too much further, with
cafes and yoga studios in between.

  Last night I lay on a picnic rug in the backyard, staring up at the few visible stars. My family laughs at me when I unroll my swag on the floor next to the guest beds when I visit. I sleep better closer to the ground, I tell them, and it’s true. I haven’t got used to four walls. They continue to feel claustrophobic, blinkering me from the ever-changing world outside. Sometimes I imagine the walls vanishing, the neighbours looking around at each other from their couches for the first time, gathering together to build a circle of shelters, to cook over a fire at night and tell stories. How much more fun we’d have. How we’d come alive.

  The Blady Bunch quickly scattered to the directions. I miss them, even wishing sometimes for the sound of Dan’s van blaring Kylie Minogue up my driveway. Nikki flits between various bush properties in the Hunter Valley and runs bushcraft courses. Chloe still lives with Niko on the mid-north coast and is almost a psychologist. Ryan followed his long-held dream of living for a year in a Zen monastery in Upstate New York. He now lives in New York City and can be found riding his bike across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn and dusk on his way to a Zen temple. Dan is homesteading in the Byron hills and has started his own gardening and landscape business. Shaun was shepherding tourists on horse rides for a while in the Victorian Snowies and up in the Daintree, and is now in Sydney, cashing up before he works out where he’ll go next. We are generally all better friends than we were during the year – well, except for Nikki and Ryan, who aren’t on speaking terms.

  I have missed The Block even more, especially in that first year afterwards. The feeling would at times sweep over me strong as the ache of a lost lover. I missed my shelter, my fires, my sit spot, my birds, the silence. It felt wrong not to know whether or not the powerful owl still haunted the lowlands, the platypus the river. It was another layer of getting to know it; by what I yearned for, what memory revealed to me in thousands of snapshots throughout the days – the wisps of smoke rising through my fingers as I held them above a fire, the flinty black tails of the baby drongos. They would be bringing up their own young now. The ache was bittersweet. It told me how much I had fallen in love. How much I belonged.

  A year or so ago I returned to The Block. After the birth of their second child, Kate and Sam decided to hold off on any more programs. It had been empty since we left. I parked down at the bridge and walked up the main trail. It was eerily quiet, only the friarbirds rebelling against the stillness. Dan, Shaun and Nikki’s shelters had been razed by bushfire. Chloe’s had fallen down, Ryan’s was as solid as ever. I left mine until last, approaching the trail with trepidation.

  Ducking under the banksia umbrella I could already see the space where once was my shelter. It was pancake flat, bar one stubborn sapling refusing to give in, a bent elbow trying desperately to hold itself up off the ground. The lean-to had fared a bit better, and I crawled in under the sagging and frayed roof. Shards of pottery lay half buried in the sand, a basket swinging lopsidedly from a kitchen rafter, memories so thick on the ground I found it difficult to walk without tripping. The whole site was saturated with the presence of that young woman, all her hopes and dreams and joys and struggles. It was all still there, the emotions snap-frozen in the grains of sand she walked upon, in the timber of the trees she lived under. I wasn’t expecting this. It catapulted me right back there again, into the intensity, the ecstasy. My knees buckled and I reached for the sitting log.

  I was suddenly struck by the magnitude of that year, by an overwhelming love for the girl who had brought herself out here, her passion, her dogged determination. What a beautiful, crazy thing to do. It was nothing less than an initiation, a threshold she created to cross over into her power as a true adult, as a Wild Woman, as an integral part of the Earth’s community. And she did it. She did it a bit tough sometimes, but she did it. She loved it.

  The bush year cracked me open, and the years since then have been a process of learning how to live the lessons while back in the land of the busy, how to live in the material world and yet stay connected to the spirit that moves through all things, which permeates life in the forest so viscerally.

  The commitment I made at the end of the year to be a bridge between the wilds and the city started with words on a page, which (gradually, painstakingly) took the shape of a book. It was (in hindsight) the perfect way to keep me from forgetting, the backtracking over the story embedding it deeper, allowing it to expand and touch all the sides. The writing life triggered similar struggles: for being, surrender, and trust in a process of uncertain end. The letting-go muscles have stretched longer and wider. These days I’m taking the poet Rilke’s advice and learning to live the questions themselves, with his promise that one day I may grow into the answers.

  People ask me how I’m different. Friends tell me I’m softer, more present. In some fundamental way I feel stronger, like the foundations under me are more solid. I sense more of the subtleties of my experience, as if seeing life through wide-angle vision. It’s a perspective that relies on regular immersions in wild nature. When life threatens to suck me into the whirlpool of endless “doings”, I feel myself grow thin and brittle. It takes conscious effort (and often some initial resistance) to turn and swim in the opposite direction. I have discovered it doesn’t need weeks or days. A regular afternoon or even an hour in the bush is enough to pick up the conversation and plump up the feathers. I’ve started a new basket, a kangaroo hide is salted under the house, and although I’m out of form, my palms maintain a rough scaly patch reserved for hand-drill. I’m studying plants more intently and my binoculars are never far from reach. As these last words are being written I can hear the wilds calling me out for a longer visit. I’m already spreading out the maps, planning the next adventure.

  My intention is to keep building bridges: writing, and guiding others on their wild journeys.

  The fire is still burning. I’m going to keep tending the coals, keep fanning the flames.

  Picture Section

  My favourite time of day was watching wildlife at my sit spot atop the root ball of a fallen tree. Over the year the birds came to know me and flew in closer. (Australian Geographic)

  Time is of the essence as I transfer a tiny coal from my fireboard into a pre-prepared tinder bundle of blady grass, banksia, stringybark and bracken fern. (Australian Geographic)

  Nikki, Lorry (the Lorikeet) and me after a day of gathering bush tucker for a community feast, including lilly pillies (in the bangalow palm basket), native scaevola, dianella, pandanus, pigface fruit, bungwall fern, bulrush and warrigal greens.

  The heath was a treasure trove of grass tree stalks for hand-drill and sandy trails full of animal tracks. This tree gives me a great view of the area. (Australian Geographic)

  Ryan, Nikki and I show off our tanned hides in this primitive fashion parade.

  The Blady Bunch (clockwise from top left) Ryan, Nikki, me, Shaun, Chloe, Dan.

  My quest for hand-drill fire caused painful blood blisters on both palms. Here I hold a fire-kit of grass-tree flower stalk and wild tobacco board. (Australian Geographic)

  My shelter was littered with handmade baskets, pottery and cordage in various stages of completion. Sporting my deer-hide top, I sit and weave string with the inner bark of native hibiscus. In the background hangs the wallaby-hide firestick bag. (Australian Geographic)

  A glimpse through the arched door of my shelter reveals me sitting on my swag and writing in my journal by the light of the central fire. An underground air channel from outside helps oxygenate the flames to keep the fire burning bright. (Australian Geographic)

  My smile lasts until the next rain when I discover my first hopeful layer of paperbark is not going to keep my lean-to kitchen dry.

  My parents responded to my shelter-building SOS call with gusto. By the end of three days we have created the frame of my shelter and are about to commence construction on the chimney wit
h wreaths of wattle.

  Even the most carefully laid plans can go awry. Overnight our primitive pottery bowls, pots and mugs turn to shards in the fire.

  Without matches, fire by friction was the only way to light a fire. Here I attempt the indigenous method of hand-drill using a grass tree flower stalk. (Australian Geographic)

  It took three layers of paperbark to waterproof my lean-to kitchen. The fun of swamp missions was marred by vicious mosquitoes. (Australian Geographic)

  Immersed in the creek, I re-bait the lawyer-cane eel trap with meat. Unable to swim backwards, the eels find themselves trapped – in theory. (Australian Geographic)

  Making and maintaining fires in winter took up a good deal of the day. Here I relax by my alfresco dining area to work on a coil basket. (Australian Geographic)

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of this book was immersion in another kind of solitary wilderness, one that I almost certainly would have lost myself in were it not for the generous and loving support of my friends and family. Sometimes the thought of being able to thank you all was enough to keep me going.

  Arian Bloodwood: there from the start, there at the end and every step of the way. Over twelve campfires you listened to my tale and reflected back to me a narrative that I couldn’t have seen myself. Your insight, wisdom and indefatigable belief and encouragement not just in the book but in me infuse every page. It simply would not have happened without you. I am deeply grateful for your friendship.