Dear Steve,
Sitting by my lovely fire 150 miles from anyone or anything, billy’s singing tea shanties, camels returning from nightly munch a-jingling, Diggity farting silently but lethally beside me on the swag. I have found myself a magic place, fringed by delicate mulga laces, bottomed by soft red sand and protected by two red and yellow mesas. A little spot of heaven on the lonely desert trail, where I’m staying for a few days to fortify my ‘wā’. This morning before dawn (grey silk sky and Venus) I saw one crow carving up wind currents above the hills. Went hunting with the sun and saw one kanyala and missed. Thank heavens. But we are meat hungry. Came back and cooked a golden crusty damper and then had a wash — the first water, sudsy or otherwise, to touch my skin in weeks. Hooooeeeee. I’m surprised I didn’t find a cluster of mushrooms growing under there somewhere.
I just rushed off for a minute, raving at the camels who were once again raiding the food bags. Cheeky and impertinent beasts. How I love them though.
Now the cold is welling up from the ground and swirling about my be-socked and be-sandalled feet. Cuds are being chewed in rhythm and the bloodwood and sandalwood fire is jujitsuing with the cold. Oh zing zing zing go my heartstrings, it’s good to be alive. And words just can’t tell you what it’s like. Words are the memory twitching after the reality of the dance …
A few days later. Well, a few days ago in your time that is. In my time, I could just as well say I wrote that tomorrow or a thousand years ago. Time ain’t the same out here you know. Maybe I’ve gone through a black hole. But let’s not get involved in time concepts — I could really lose the thread doing that.
Today was a wham-bammer of a day — still is in fact. Although now as I stare out at the glinting gibbers and dead trees … but let me begin at the beginning.
Today began like most others except there were clouds in the sky. Two in fact, just pinkly peeping over the northern horizon. Rain, I think, was the first thing I thought as the first light slithered under my eyelids and blankets. The clouds evaporated in seconds though, and the next thing I thought was, ‘I can’t hear my camel bells.’ You’re right, mountain-man, the camels had evaporated also. Well, two had anyway, and the other one, I was soon to discover, didn’t evaporate because he couldn’t walk.
A very wise friend in Alice once said to me, ‘When things go wrong on the track, rather than panic, boil the billy, sit down and think clearly.’
So I boiled the billy and I sat down and I went through the salient points with Diggity.
We are 100 miles from anything.
We have lost two camels.
We have one camel who has a hole in his foot so big you could curl up and go to sleep in it.
We have enough water for six days.
My busted hip is still intolerably painful.
This is a god-awful place to spend the rest of our lives, which according to my mathematical calculations will be about a week.
So, having tidied all that up, I panicked. Many hours later, I found my lost beasts and brought them back to the fold. They were chastened. That only left the problem of the cripple. Now, Dookie is normally a quiet, reserved, dependable kind of fella. But when he has a hole in his foot, he changes into a raging demon. Well, he struck, he kicked, he twisted, he snarled, he vomited, he rolled, he gawped and he gurgled, and finally I had to truss him up like a turkey to get at his foot, which sounds easy on paper but I swear I lost a gallon of sweat in that struggle. And remember how I was saying before (salient point 5 I think) about my poor old hip, the poor old hip that’s dislocated in about 7 places, well, isn’t it always the way, that was the hip Dookie got with his front leg. But, to cut a long grumble short, I got him down, I tied him up, and I gouged four sandhills and six boulders out of that hole in his foot, and I packed it with cotton wool and terramycin, and I covered it with a patch, and I kissed it all better and at last we got under way.
Sweet holy Jesus, mountain-man, there’s a herd of camels coming into my camp RIGHT NOW. As I write. There’s absolutely nothing I can do, so I’m writing to still my panic. Why oh why does this happen to me. Looks OK, no bulls with this lot thank heavens. But I have my rifle loaded just in case. You know, the rifle that doesn’t work. Well you never know, miracles can happen. Now, where was I. Got to write because I’m feeling desperate. OK, left camp about midday and then I came to the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen — Mungilli claypan.
Let me try to describe it to you. You come down an incline and suddenly you’re in another country. There is shade everywhere and the sand is soft salmon pink. Giant ghost gums glisten and sway and there are birds tweeting and warbling. On the right, like a tidal estuary that hasn’t seen the sea in aeons, is the claypan. It’s empty and flat and rimming it all round are low swells of dunes and trees and red-berried salt bushes. Some of the trees have smooth pink trunks, like shot silk, which glow crimson in the evening sun, and their leaves are deep deep shining green. Now, I know most people would drive through that three miles of heaven and not even gasp, let alone pull out the prayer mat, but it sent ripples to the pit of my stomach. I wish I could explain it to you. What a piece of country — so moving, so subtly powerful. Didn’t stop long though. Dookie’s foot-hole was growing in my consciousness like a triffid in the tropics.
So now I am here, one ear cocked for the burbling of bull camels (where there are mums there are usually dads, unfortunately).
Funny thing about this trip you know. One day it has me flying through the clouds in ecstasy (although, having been to the clouds, I can honestly say they’re a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there, the cost of living’s too high) and the next day …
Now, as I stare out at the glinting gibbers and dead trees, if you want me to be perfectly truthful, mountain-man, and this is just between you and me, and I wouldn’t want it getting around, I’m just a weensy bit tired of this adventure. In fact, to be quite honest, fantasies are beginning to worm their way between the spinifex clumps, skeletons and rocks — fantasies pertaining to where I’d like to be right now.
Somewhere where cool clover comes almost to your crutch, where there are no tidal waves, tai-funs, stray meteors, camels, nasty night noises, blaring, thrumming, cancer-producing sun, no heat shimmer and raw rocks, no spinifex, no flies, somewhere where there’s lots of avocados, water, friendly people who bring cups of tea in the morning, pineapples, swaying palms, sea breezes, puffy little clouds and mirrored streamlets. A silk farm perhaps, where you can just sit and listen to the worms spinning money for you as you lazily build wind-chimes for select friends and when you get tired of that you can stroll down to your own huge bath in a little shoji house in your garden and eat frosty pink water-melon cut into exquisite shapes while a six-foot, slim slave slides ice-cubes down your back and …
Sorry, sorry Stevie, I was getting carried away.
But you know what I mean.
Christ, right now I’d give anything for a friendly face. Even an unfriendly face. Even a human noise would be nice. Yes, even the resonating base blart of a human fart from behind that dead salt bush over there would do. I must be crazy, I’m sitting here wondering if I’ll ever get out of this alive, wondering if I’ll ever see Sydney neon and venom again, writing like crazy to people who only exist in the warped recesses of my memory, who could be all dead, and all I can do is laugh and crack pooh jokes. If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.
Finishing a letter’s harder than starting one. Full golden moon just bulged over the eastern tree-line. Worth it all for a moonrise? At this stage, yes. My skin’s as dry as dog-biscuits, my left leg may have seen its day, my lips are cracked and blistered, I’ve run out of toilet paper and have to use spinifex, there’s a skin-cancer trying to take over my nose (how do you keep your cool at Geographic cocktail parties when your nose drops off in a martini?), I’m slowly but efficiently going peculiar, I’m so scared of
dying that the knocking of my knees wakes me up in the morning and has it all been worth it? Yes, mountain-man, definitely.
I can’t sleep. There’s tea coming out of my ears, eyeballs and hip-pockets, and I’m feeling SO GOOD. I could howl at the moon up there (and Arcturus and Aldebaran and Spica and Antares etc.) and I really want to tell somebody. Steve, are you listening? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. What’s wrong with me that I feel this good? Have I gone bush-crazy? Am I moon-struck? Probably both and I don’t care. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.
This writing of letters out in the middle of nowhere may seem a little peculiar, especially since it would be months before I could post them, and I would probably see my friends before I ever got a reply. But it helped in recording events and emotions at the time. My diary was a mishmash of these letters, most of them never sent, and uninteresting sentences like, ‘Is it July or August, anyway, lost camels this morning.’ Then there would be a month with no entries whatsoever.
The jocularity of those letters reflected the pervading mood of that month along the Gunbarrel. It wasn’t that I was becoming reckless, it wasn’t that I had discarded fear, it was simply that I was learning to accept my fate, whatever it might turn out to be.
The incident with the lost camels was slightly more hair-raising than the letter lets on. They had been spooked by wild camels in the night and I had slept through the whole thing. The tracks told me what had happened in the morning. I had been letting them go at night either loosely hobbled, or not hobbled at all. Sallay would have shot me on the spot had he known this. But my reasoning went this way — we were in dry desert country and the camels were working hard — they had to range a fair distance from camp to find the feed they needed. Goliath was always tied up securely and I firmly believed Zeleika would never leave him. (She was to shock me out of my complacency a couple of months later.) And I believed I could now track them over anything.
This business of tracking is a combination of sixth sense, knowledge of the behaviour of camels, keen eyesight and practice. The place we camped that afternoon was gibber country and cement-hard claypan. You could drive a sledge-hammer into that stuff and it would hardly leave a dent. Finding the direction they had gone in therefore required circling away from camp until I found the tracks (which had become mixed up with a couple of other cameloid footprints) and trying to follow this general direction, by searching for the scuff marks, looking for freshly eaten fodder, and keeping an eye open for fresh dung. (I could tell my camels’ dung from any others’.) It required a lot of circular and frustrating walking. As it turned out I found them not too many miles away, stirred up and nervous, heading back to camp. They came straight up to me, like errant children, begging forgiveness. Their friends had left. Rather than putting the fear of god into me, this incident reinforced my confidence in them, and I continued to leave them unhobbled at night. Stupid perhaps, but the camels did gain a little weight that month.
As if walking twenty miles a day wasn’t enough, I often went out hunting or just exploring with Diggity after I had unsaddled the camels of an afternoon. On one such afternoon, I had got myself vaguely lost. Not completely lost, just a little bit, enough to make my stomach tilt, rather than turn. I could, of course, back-track, but this always took time and it was getting dark. In the past, whenever I wanted Diggity to guide me home, I simply said to her, ‘Go home, girl,’ which she thought was a kind of punishment. She would flatten those crazy ears to her head, roll her amber brown eyes at me, tuck her tail between her legs and glance over her shoulder, every part of her saying, ‘Why are you doing this to me? What did I do wrong?’ But that evening, she made a major breakthrough.
She immediately grasped the situation; you could see a light bulb flash above her head. She barked at me, ran forward a few yards, turned back, barked, ran up and licked my hand, and then scampered forward again and so on. I pretended I didn’t understand. She was beside herself with worry. She repeated these actions and I began to follow her. She was ecstatic, overjoyed. She had understood something and she was proud of it. When we made it back to camp, I hugged her and made a great fuss of her and I swear that animal laughed. And that look of pride, that unmistakable pleasure in having comprehended something, perceived the reason and necessity for it, made her wild, hysterical with delight. When she was pleased over something or someone, her tail did not go back and forward, it whipped round and round in a complete circle and her body contorted into S-bends like a snake.
I am quite sure Diggity was more than a dog, or rather other than dog. In fact, I have often thought her father was a vet perhaps. She combined all the best qualities of dog and human and was a great listener. She was by now a black glossy ball of health and muscle. She must have done a hundred miles a day with her constant scampering and bounding after lizards in the spinifex. The trip, of necessity, had brought me much closer to all the animals, but my relationship with Diggity was something special. There are very few humans with whom I could associate the word love as easily as I did with that wonderful little dog. It is very hard to describe this interdependence without sounding neurotic. But I loved her, doted on her, could have eaten her with my overwhelming affection. And she never, not ever, not once, retracted her devotion no matter how churlish, mean or angry I became. Why dogs chose humans in the first place I will never understand.
OK, you fusty old Freudians, you laudable Laingians, my psyche is up for grabs. I have admitted a weak point. Dogs.
Animal lovers, especially female ones, are often accused of being neurotic and unable to relate successfully to other human beings. How many times had friends noted my relationship to Diggity, and, with that baleful look usually associated with psychiatrists, said, ‘You’ve never thought of having a child, have you?’ It’s an accusation that brings an explosive response every time because it seems to me that the good Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three tilings to make life bearable — hope, jokes and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.
I was by now quite happy about camping by or on the track. The thought of anyone driving down it had long since faded into the impossible. But I had not taken madmen into account. I was awakened from my slumber one night by the roar of an engine. I struggled out of deep sleep with Diggity barking in fury, and a voice calling from the dark, ‘Hey, is that the camel lady, it’s the overlander here. Do I have permission to enter camp?’
‘What the …?’
An apparition appeared before me, with Dig biting at his trouser legs. The ‘overlander’, as it turned out, was some nut testing a Suzuki vehicle by driving it across the widest part of Australia, over spinifex, sand and gibbers, just as fast as he possibly could. He was breaking some kind of record. He was also manic and, presumably, out of his mind on speed. His eyeballs hung out on his cheeks and he kept slapping his upper arms, commenting on the cold, and hinting that he wouldn’t mind camping here. I most certainly didn’t want him camping anywhere near here, and neither did Dig. I made this quite plain without being out and out rude. He sat and raved at me for half an hour, with Dig quietly growling at the foot of my bed, and me pointedly yawning and saying very little except, ‘Hmmm, oh really, that’s nice, yawn, hmm, you don’t say,’ and so on. He then informed me that he had been following my tracks for miles, which, considering he was coming from the opposite direction, was no mean feat. He eventually left. I scratched my head for a while, and shook it just to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating, and went back to sleep. I forgot about it. Had I known what he was going to do when he got back to civilization, I would have wrung his neck then and there.
We were getting close to Carnegie. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be anywhere but in this desert and on my own; on the other, I was running very low on food, my last meal before I got there being dog-biscuits liberally laced with custard powder, sugar, milk and water. And I was nervous about seeing people again. By now I was utterly deprogramm
ed. I walked along naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat, because my nose had peeled so often I thought it might disappear altogether. I might be left with just a bare lump of sizzling cartilage sticking out there. And I honestly could not remember, or put into context, etiquette. Did it matter, I would think to myself, if all the buttons had gone from my shirt and trousers? Would anybody notice or care? And what about menstrual blood? From my position, it didn’t matter a damn whether it followed the natural laws of gravity and ran down my leg, the way it was meant to do, but would others feel the same way? Would it make them confused and unhappy? But why on earth would it? I wouldn’t cover a cut in embarrassment would I? I was in an agony of confusion, because I just DIDN’T KNOW. I’m amazed at how quickly and absolutely this sense of the importance of social custom fell away from me. And the awareness of its absurdity has never really left me. I have slowly regained a sense of the niceties, but I think, I hope, that I will always see the obsession with social graces and female modesty for the perverted crippling insanity it really is.
It is extraordinary that the two most commonly asked questions about the trip (after ‘Why did you do it?’) are … one, ‘What did you do when you ran out of toilet paper?’ and two (and this is always whispered over in the corner by women who giggle a lot), ‘What did you do when you ran out of Meds?’ What on earth do they think I did? Ran to the nearest chemist shop to barter? Well, for all those who remain morbidly curious over body functions, when I ran out of toilet paper, I used smooth rocks, grass and, when lucky, a kindly desert plant known as pussy-cat tails. When I ran out of Meds, I didn’t care.
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