by Inga Simpson
Once out the other side, there were more houses than there used to be, an estate where there had just been pasture, ficus groves and forest – all the tree-changers bringing suburbia to the country.
The road wound deeper inland, down and around, narrowing to enter forest groves. She passed cottages in the hills, smoke clouding out their chimneys and hanging over the valleys. The air had cooled, and her blood calmed a little.
She turned off the main road and crossed a creek, the Hilux’s cabin pitching and lurching, and accelerated up the pitted gravel slope. She pulled up in the car park with a screech. Ignored all the council signs, gathered up her pack and gear and loaded herself up like a snail. A penitent headed into exile. She took the less used path, heading out the back of the falls. She walked, one boot in front of the other, further into the forest, until she could breathe.
It was a weekday, and school was in, so she figured she was most likely alone. She climbed up onto a rock beside the path and roared until the gully was filled with her rage.
She woke by the river, pink light brightening behind the trees. The kookaburras began their telegraph chorus, passing their gossip and joy along the line until Jen could no longer hear it. This was the cue for the rest to start, the whipbirds and cuckoos, wrens and robins. The fire she should not have lit was almost out. She sat up in her swag, pushed sticks and leaves into the coals, leaned in and blew until there was a flame.
It had been too long since she had done this. She had made all sorts of excuses: her drawing, the exhibition, the boy, the birds, the house. Of course she had been afraid of going without Craig. Not afraid of being out here alone – but of feeling the terrible space he had left. She had reached the point where the pain was manageable, just so long as she didn’t disturb anything.
Jen unzipped the bag and extricated herself. A breeze tickled her bare skin. She padded naked over the sand to the river’s edge to fill her billy, then fanned the fire’s flames and rigged up the rack to boil the water.
She watched a kingfisher swoop from overhead, sharp-beaked and craning forward, to snap something up from the water’s surface.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s perfect.’ Mist hung over the slow-moving water. She ran down the beach and threw herself in, gasping as the water gripped her ribs. She splashed out to the middle like a child, in a rough dog paddle, then backstroked upstream, into the dawn sky, pinky-orange giving way to pale blue.
The kingfisher darted from tree to tree along the bank, as if following her progress. Her skin was yellow under the river water, muted. Far from pretty. She breaststroked back, watching her arms. An idea began to form for a picture. She had stayed at a bed and breakfast in Copenhagen once, where the host – something of a celebrity and a member of local government – had a life-size full-length nude portrait hanging in the foyer, in full view of the breakfast table. Jen had never understood Scandinavians, though she was fond of their part of the world.
Something shifted under her foot, a turtle perhaps. She felt like fresh fish for breakfast, cooked over coals. A decade-old hunger. The effect of fresh air, running water and sleeping outside. Without a proper line and hook, though, there wasn’t much chance of a catch, and she was too hungry to wait. Toast and tea would have to do.
She walked from the water, dripping. A full complement of birds were up and about now, singing in the day. The water gave their voices a resonance, the backing track for their vocals. She plucked a leaf from the low-hanging branch of a flooded gum and held it in her teeth while she squeezed out her hair and wiped herself down with her squidgy towel. She threw a handful of tea into the billy, and the gumleaf.
She sliced bread for toast and flicked it onto the grill, wiped out her mug. Kept her thoughts on what her hands were doing. Everything was better in the open air.
She prepared for her walk American style: water and food for forty-eight hours, fleece-jacket and a light bedroll. The first time she had hiked alone in the States, in the Sierras, she had set out on a nine-hour return trip above the snowline with a pocket water bottle and an apple, attracting a few looks along the way. Those she passed on the trail all carried full packs, bear spray, spare clothes, EPIRB, tent – the lot. She had thought them ridiculous. Stupid Americans. As she realised later, after she had passed the mangled haunch of a deer beside the trail, and plunged thigh-deep into snow, leaving her wet and cold, they had rightly thought her a naive tourist. She had assumed she could drink from the river, or suck on snow, but there had been signs about bacteria, so she didn’t take the risk. On the return trip, a snowstorm had come in – light flakes swirling around her and dusting the branches as if in a fairytale – giving her energy just when she had been beginning to flag, but if she had been higher up it could have ended differently.
There were no predators in these mountains, and there would be no snowstorm, or even rain, but she had come to enjoy being prepared for anything. Knowing she was self-sufficient for a few days allowed a freedom that was not a feature of everyday life.
The sun was dropping low in the sky. She had been walking all day, a little above her usual pace. It had seemed important to keep moving. Her feet were sore but her body otherwise bearing up well. She judged she was in about the middle of the national park – though she wasn’t sure exactly where – deep in a gorge, surrounded by remnant forest. It was a good feeling.
She made for higher ground, looking for one good tree. Wisps of hair had worked themselves free of her hat, and her face needed a wash.
A golden whistler flew in front of her, darting from branch to branch just above her eye line. She let him lead her away from the path, taking his bright yellow chest as a sign. She stepped between a grass tree and a black wattle without taking her hands from her pockets, letting its tips brush her face. The bird alighted on the low branch of a tallowwood, then flew up into its higher branches to sing an encouraging song, his white face banded by black.
‘Really?’ she said, looking up. ‘This one?’ She could just reach the solid lower limb, but it was a stretch to the next and the trunk without footholds.
Before her time in the Sierra, before they had finished their DipEds, she and Craig had travelled together, climbing some of the world’s tallest trees – Californian redwoods. He had made contact with a team of post-grads who were documenting the heights of trees within remote groves and organised for them to go along and document the botanical finds. A friend of a uni friend, he said. Craig had done forestry as his first degree – about as practical as art. There weren’t many jobs, but there was research funding available. Somehow it ended up that they were among a handful of people in the world who knew the location of the Giant Grove and had seen the worlds within their crowns. Fanatics were kinder to fellow fanatics than artists were to fellow artists, as it turned out.
Jen had been unimpressed with the nerdy looking fellows at first, with their crapped-out car and college clothes. She had been less comfortable leaving the ground in those days, too, and didn’t like all the fuss and gear, let alone being trussed up like a rack of lamb. But once up in the mist, among salamanders and lichens and liverworts barely seen by another human being, she had found her tree legs. There were bonsai species growing in the clouds, redwoods within redwoods, and whole other genera sending their roots into rotting timber. The seeds had been dropped by animals and birds, though apart from the occasional osprey, there weren’t many birds up there – the only disappointment.
The ropes and gear – a ‘spider rig’ – allowed them to ‘skywalk’. The science fellows called themselves Skywalker One and so on, imagining themselves in outer space. Or a movie. Stepping lightly along a branch, birdlike, and peering into a whole ecosystem within the tree’s crown was indeed an otherworldly experience. She had finally been able to imagine what it was to fly.
Jen had stopped to sketch what she saw while the boys mucked about with tapes and protractors and ropes. The search for the world’s tallest tree had them always gazing off around them, to
the next tree, one perhaps a little higher, but for her there was more than enough right there in each crown: burned-out caves, fern forests, lost citadels of dead redwood spikes, hanging gardens of lichen, all dripping with mist. To think she had almost not gone along. She had worked with a fever she hadn’t known at home, nibbling on ripe huckleberries from a bush beside her, trying to capture on the page and in photographs what few had seen.
On the last night, they had slept suspended from the branches of the freshly ‘discovered’ world’s tallest tree, the base of its trunk larger than most houses. Their coloured sleeping bags were nestled within treeboats: nylon hammocks rigged from the tree’s upper branches, like brightly spun cocoons. An anchor rope connected each of them to the tree itself, in case a branch failed or they rolled out in their sleep. It was a feeling she had never forgotten, swinging free in the tree’s lemony scent, rocked to sleep by creaks and groans and the shhhh of the wind in its needles.
When they got home, and began to unpack, heavy with the lag of flying and sudden descent to reality, she found that Craig had bought them each an olive green treeboat. From then on, they sought out places where they could sleep swinging from the trees. Sometimes, when they could not get away for the weekend, they would settle for hanging them from the one tree in Craig’s courtyard for a night. The neighbours probably had a giggle, but she and Craig had been oblivious. Making love in a treeboat – although something of a challenge – was perfection, every movement, sensation and emotion magnified by the weightlessness under the stars, as if defying gravity. Craig would climb down to her, and she would unzip her sleeping bag, and herself. But it was not safe for him to stay there overnight, unsecured, in case he toppled off, so he would climb back to his own rig, leaving her a little empty. It had been worth all the fuss, though, for the rush of their love meeting air and leaf and sap.
Now she was just a husk of a woman. Orphaned. Childless. Little more than bone and sinew and skin. Without feathers to hide beneath or a song to sing.
The light was hurrying away. She took a running step, heaved herself up, and shifted from a crouch to standing full height. Gripped the branch above backhand and attempted a chin-up. She managed to lift herself and the pack easily enough, but could no longer force her chest above her arms and onto the branch. She hung there for a moment, then dropped back onto the broad branch below. Even from there, she could see out over the whole valley, the river glinting below, and the roar of the three-basin falls echoing up to her.
She slipped her pack off her shoulders and unclipped the front flap to remove the treeboat. She swung the ropes over the branch above, ran them back through the little pulleys. It wasn’t spider rope, like they had used in Giant Grove, but it would do. Craig said they were trialling rope for the special forces, to use on black ops. Perhaps he was teasing, perhaps not, but she had always wondered how geeks with the backside hanging out of their pants could have got their hands on such high-end gear.
Jen spread her sleeping bag out into the hammock, ready to climb into. The tree was hardly a giant, and her position a little lame – only eight or nine feet off the ground – so she needn’t anchor herself, but it was a nice spot and she was too tired to search for another.
She climbed into her nest while it rested on her porch branch, then raised herself, hand over hand, with the little pulleys. She secured them so that she was close enough to touch the rail branch but free to swing. Evening air bit at her lungs, just enough to let her know she was outside, and alive after all.
The first stars twinkled through the branches above, and birds settled into their roosts around her. She smiled into the dark, snuggled further into the bag and folded her arms over her chest, stuck her knees out, like a frog.
A powerful owl whoo whooed nearby but received no answer.
‘Whoo,’ she said. ‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’
She lay snug in her nest, watching the sun come up. Light flowed into the valley, revealing layer upon layer of colour and texture. Finches and wrens chattered around her, and a breeze ran up, tickling her face and rattling the leaves. It was Thoreau who said that in wildness lay the preservation of the world: one of his more optimistic remarks. She knew that she could not save the world by drawing it. There was nothing, it seemed, that could shift or slow the human compulsion to consume the planet – but she could still save herself.
The shrink said she should relish her freedom, the possibility of the unknown, and out here it didn’t seem as difficult. She unzipped her bag and wriggled out, lowering herself to the branch below. She released the harness, dropped it on the ground, and climbed down to pack it all away.
She hopped from rock to rock, relying on her boots to grip, her balance and judgement to hold. Water roared all around. Craig had loved rock-hopping, though he often left her far behind with his goat legs. Sometimes he was impatient to see what was around the next corner, and sometimes it was to prepare a surprise upstream, like the day he proposed. By the time she had caught up, the sparkling wine was chilled, a picnic laid – and Craig washed clean and lying on a rock in his shorts as if he had never hurried.
She had been happy that day in the gorge, shouting out ‘YES’ for all the world to hear – and thought her life secured. They had made love on the rocks, with the water rushing and falling about them, drunk on bubbles and love.
Jen lay full stretch on the sand watching a stony creek frog – Litoria wilcoxii. Only the black spots down her lower sides had given the female away, her back the same smooth brown as the coppery stones over which clear water flowed. She swam with her nostrils just above the water, leaving a trail behind her. A male called from the water’s edge, his soft purring intended to elicit a particular type of attention.
They had been at a barbecue when Craig said it. At one of the other teachers’ new townhouse. It had been hot and they had all drunk too much while the host was preparing the meal. Someone was about to go off on maternity leave, and there must have been a conversation about children. Jen had been focused on the food, worried about what she would eat from the mountain of meat burning on the hotplate.
She soon tuned in, though, at the home ec teacher’s question about their choice not to have children. Jen was thirty-eight by then, though she looked younger, especially when with Craig. People no doubt wondered, though the more obvious question might have been why they were still engaged. They kept spending their savings on trips away, and then Craig broke his leg rock climbing. He was stuck inside, for months, and it took some time after his physical recovery for him to return to anything like himself. She had figured they would talk about children once they were married and told herself they still had time – but things had drifted.
She hadn’t quite caught Craig’s answer, at the barbecue – there was something about ‘our lifestyle’ and perhaps he had shaken his head.
Miss Hanaford, her name had been. ‘Was that something you and Jen decided early on?’
Craig shrugged. ‘I guess if it had been important, it would have come up.’
Bushed
By the time she emerged from the trees, the sun was dropping from the sky and there was a council officer reclining in her chair at the campsite. ‘Hey, there,’ he said, from behind dark aviator glasses. For a moment she thought she was back in the States and he might add ‘little lady’.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes, you can, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘Do you have a permit?’
‘A permit for …?’
‘To camp here, Ms Anderson.’
She slipped out of her pack and dropped it on the ground between them, a strap flicking his boot. He knew perfectly well she didn’t have a permit; he had already run her rego number and checked back with council. Officious little prick.
‘I thought this was a public camping area?’
‘The public camping area is by the car park, as the signs indicate. Or further along, at Tallowwood. And to camp there, you still need a permit.’
; ‘I didn’t realise. Sorry,’ she said. ‘It was a last-minute thing, not very well planned.’
He made a point of looking over her gear and rather immaculate camp. ‘It’s a hundred and fifty dollar on-the-spot fine for camping without a permit,’ he said.
‘Ah.’
‘Out of interest, where did you sleep the last few nights?’
Jen crossed her arms.
‘I was here until dark yesterday afternoon,’ he said.
How dedicated, for him to come all the way back out here today to check on her. ‘I slept rough,’ she said. ‘Up in the gorge. I got a bit lost and left it too late to make it back to camp.’
He looked over her pack again, but his face remained blank. ‘When were you planning on heading out?’
‘Now,’ she said. The serenity had been spoiled by this snoop in uniform.
‘In that case, I’ll leave you to pack up,’ he said, extracting himself from her chair. ‘You can apply for a permit online,’ he said. ‘Takes five minutes.’
‘Thanks.’
Bio
She unpacked the Hilux, hanging the tent, sleeping bag and treeboat over the line to air. Another cloudless sky – warm day and cool night, just the way she liked it.
She undressed, put on a load of washing and ran a shower. As much as she had enjoyed bathing in the river, hot water and soap were delightful. She shampooed and conditioned her hair, washing the last of the camping smells down the drain. The windows of the bathroom fogged with steam. Though not before she caught sight of a koala’s bottom in the grey gum overhead.
There was a message from the gallery owner, chasing her bio for some promotional material. The machine said it was Tuesday when she had called. But when was Tuesday?