I look at her, and I’m filled from head to toe with a strange rush of warmth. I imagine it wouldn’t be an altogether stupid idea to share paths with her from now on — always.
I almost say it out loud.
But I don’t.
Not yet.
_______
Somebody called Louisa had clearly made a big impression on the guy who originally charted this region. After setting off from Louisa River, the most significant place in the Louisa Plains crossing is — wait for it — Louisa Creek.
The creek is wild. The climb down into the gorge is a challenge in itself. There are only a few tree roots and rocks protruding from the embankment to offer you a foothold. The embankment itself is nothing but sheets of almost vertical rusty-brown soil. The force of the current in the river has carved out the gorge, making it steep and deep. You can clearly see how much water has rushed through here during the rainy months.
A ten-metre length of rope has been stretched across the creek. It’s at just the right height so you can grab hold of it if you reach your hands up. Holding on to the rope, you can wade through the water even when the river is slightly fuller. It would probably serve as a decent support if the water level were below waist height. If the creek were completely full, the surface of the water would cover the head of even a tall man; if it came up to your chest, the current would inevitably knock you off your feet. Now there’s just enough water flowing across the shadowy riverbed that you can cross with relative ease, jumping across the rocks.
It’s no wonder that crossing these rivers during the flooding season is ‘forbidden’ — meaning that guidebooks tell you not to try your luck. Lots of people probably do.
I would.
I’d take her over with me; I’d snatch her away so that the bubbling water wouldn’t even realize it was being cheated.
This place is a designated campsite, too. There are worn patches on both sides of the river beneath the trees. It’s no surprise really; people are forced to wait here, often for days at a time.
We fetch water from the creek as it trickles tamely by.
Heidi
We clamber out of the bush and on to the beach only to discover the cove is adorned with a large rubbish dump: pieces of rope, plastic bottles, metal cans, chunks of polystyrene, plastic bags, floats.
I pick up a rusty spray can. It used to contain shaving-foam. I look over at Jyrki, whose cheeks are now covered with uneven stubble. His face reacts to the sight of all this trash, but he doesn’t say a thing.
‘Look, this must have belonged to someone who swears by the virtues of being clean-shaven in all circumstances.’
‘It wasn't a person that brought it here; it was the sea.’
I glance at the heaps of garbage. True, it will all float.
‘In the Pacific Ocean there’s a floe of rubbish twice the size of the USA, and it’s made up of exactly this kind of stuff,’ he says kicking a faded red plastic canister. ‘Ten metres thick, a hundred million tonnes of shit that smothers a million birds every year — and a few sea mammals for good measure.’
For a moment I’m utterly speechless. ‘Why does nobody do anything about it then?’
‘Because no matter who you ask about it, it’s always someone else’s problem.’
‘Oh. But why hasn’t this been cleared up? I mean, this would be easy to get rid of. You could take it by boat to Cockle Creek.’
Jyrki looks up at me from a bowed position; he’s taking off his hiking boots for the last few kilometres along the sandy beach.
‘Because if you clear up someone else’s rubbish then people really will start leaving their shit behind them. It would be proof that your refuse will always magically transmogrify into someone else’s problem.’
Jyrki
To my left the foaming, turquoise sea soothes the eyes. My toes dig into the sand. After days encased inside my hiking boots they are jumping for joy.
In the sand I can see a frayed piece of orange plastic rope. It makes me think of the dumping ground in the Pacific and the heaps of rubbish at Buoy Creek. Appropriately enough, there were plenty of garishly coloured buoys among the rubbish. Against the gentle colours of the Tasmanian landscape, they were like a slap in the face.
It’s mildly amusing to think of the innocent young first-time trekker girl we met in the first cabin at Overland who had packed a bag full of tinned food, bananas and apples, then came up to us old-timers, her head tilted to one side and both hands filled with rubbish, and asked where she should dispose of it.
It’s as if every piece of information about every national park, every document, hadn’t already made it perfectly clear time after time. Everything you bring with you when you arrive — that means everything — you take with you when you leave. Everything, every last sweet wrapper, every eggshell. The fact that some rubbish will eventually decompose is still no excuse for throwing it where it doesn’t belong. A strip of orange peel soaked in preservatives will catch your eye in the bushes for years to come. If you want to wipe when you go into the bushes for a piss, you pick up the paper and take it with you. The same goes for a used condom, a chewed piece of gum or a cigarette end. It’s a good job you’re not allowed to start an open fire in national parks, because then people would try to burn aluminium foil and even empty gas cylinders as well as any paper and plastic shit they might have. I’ve seen burnt remains like this before. How come people are strong enough to carry all manner of containers into the park when they’re full but suddenly haven’t got the strength to carry them away once they’re empty?
Back in New Zealand, when we registered at Kepler, in addition to various papers and receipts we were given a bright-yellow resealable plastic bag with instructions printed on the side about how to deal with your rubbish. So there wasn’t even the old excuse of not knowing where to put your junk when you wanted to wash your hands of it.
That’s it: it’s all about washing our hands. What would we do if nobody ever took care of our rubbish? How shocked we are when someone tells us to deal with it ourselves. Producing refuse is as natural as breathing. And it’s just as natural that this refuse is always Someone Else’s Problem. It's with this kind of logic that people dump washing-machines and fridge carcasses in the woods and by the side of the road, because eventually someone else will have to remove them to stop them being an eyesore.
Lay-bys are full of people’s construction waste, months’ worth of rubbish from the summer cottage and old redundant furniture. A skinned deer was even dumped in one.
Try collecting every strip of salami skin, the paper casing of every sticking plaster. Try flattening every empty tin of tuna, dripping in oil, so that it’s more convenient to carry. It’s a no-brainer that you take everything out of its double packaging, get rid of all cardboard boxes, clingfilm and plastic biscuit trays before you leave and make them someone else’s problem in the rubbish bins at the hostel or the local supermarket, wondering why on earth people ever needed these things in the first place.
And although we’d all been given the same resealable rubbish bags at Kepler we had only got as far as the picnic area on the first day’s leg before we noticed empty tins of sardines and chocolate wrappers left in the outdoor toilet. They had been neatly left in the corner of the hut, as if a diligent cleaner with rubber gloves comes past to collect them every day. Westerners’ brains are clearly programmed with the strong conviction that public toilets clean themselves.
Every person on this earth should be forced to collect all the rubbish they produce in a week and pile it in a heap on the living-room floor. You wouldn’t be allowed to take it away; it would have to be there all week. And for once it wouldn’t be Someone Else’s Problem.
And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in — your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
/> HOBART, TASMANIA
March 2007
Jyrki
She was holding a packet of chocolate biscuits in her hand, inching it closer to the shopping basket, looking at me all the while.
I shook my head.
She said they were rich in oats and fibre as well as chocolate. Then she said that it would be nice to reward, ourselves after a hard day or with our morning cup of tea. That you always need carbohydrates. And fibre.
Gently but firmly I took the packet from her hand and replaced it on the shelf. We already had enough to carry.
Our shopping trolley contained enough food for two people for ten days:
8 wholewheat flatbreads (diameter c. 20 centimetres)
1 packet of rice and maize cakes (12 cakes)
16 slices of pepperoni
10 slices of processed cheese
4 bags of instant mashed potato powder
2 packets of tuna (chunks)
500 ams orzo pasta
1 tube of tomato puree
1 large onion
1 small bulb of garlic
250 grams length of salami
4 packets of instant noodles
2 packets of powdered soup
20 muesli bars
1 bag of dried apricots
1 tub of smoked almonds
In addition, we were already carrying four meat stock cubes, twelve tea bags, six sachets of instant coffee, ten packets of sugar we had pinched from the aeroplane and various cafés, a couple of sachets of salt and a camera-film tub filled with mixed spices.
I had decided ages ago that there was no point investing in those obscenely expensive packets of freeze-dried trekking food. With these ingredients we would be able to cook varied nourishing meals. And they’d fit into a much smaller space.
The rewards on this trip were going to come from something else altogether.
Heidi
I’d never been really that hungry on any of our previous treks. Food had been more of a ritual than a necessity; it was a way of passing time. If you were especially tired, you almost had to force yourself to eat. But I wanted those cookies.
I was standing in the middle of the shopping aisle at Woolworths with my arms firmly crossed.
‘I’ll carry them.’
‘We share all the carrying. If you take them, I’ll have to take something else.’
‘They don’t weigh very much.’
‘But my rucksack is already heavier than yours.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s because you’re bigger. It’s not my fault your clothes are larger and heavier and your sleeping-mat weighs an extra four hundred grams because it’s full length and —’
‘It’s unfair to bring biology into this; that’s something we can’t do anything about.’
‘Is this about money? Those muesli bars you chose are cheap store-brand stuff. I’ll pay for the cookies.’
‘Because those so-called sports bars cost about three dollars each. We haven’t come all the way out here for fine dining. And, besides, if we get really hungry you women have extra stores of body fat.'
Jyrki
Eventually I had to ask her who had taken charge of the shopping for Overland. Was there ever a more skilful demonstration of effective food rationing?
On that matter she found it pretty hard to return service. She looked at me for a moment and thrust the cookies back on to the shelf. OK, she said and added that we still needed a couple of things from the toiletries department.
Plasters, I thought, and gave a nod.
Heidi
Jyrki must surely know that women have periods — in the past he must surely have had had direct contact with the phenomenon — but his brow furrowed when he saw me throwing the packet of Always Ultra into the shopping trolley.
‘You do understand where it is we’re going?’
I looked at him the way you look at someone who opens their mouth in completely the wrong situation only to state the blindingly obvious.
‘South Coast Track.’
‘And Old Port Davey Track.’ Jyrki picked up the packet; its cosy softness almost disappeared inside his enormous fist. ‘And how exactly are you planning on disposing of these once they’ve been used?’
Well... you know, the way you ... the normal way ...’ The mere mention of the subject made me blush. People just don’t talk about these things.
‘The normal way?’
I thought of all the instructions there had been at Overland Track, and it started to dawn on me.
‘There are some pit toilets, but only as far as Melaleuca. And anyway, you don’t put anything in a pit toilet that isn’t biodegradable. These have got God knows how many layers of protective plastic.’
I stared at him and realized that the furrow between my eyebrows must have vaguely resembled a double Grand Canyon.
‘Sooo?’
‘After use — that is, when you want to get rid of them, assuming you don’t want to carry them around with you — you’ll have to open up the towel, take a stick or something and scrape out the absorbent padding, the cotton wool or cellulose or whatever it is, into the pit toilet. Then you’ll have to roll up the non- biodegradable parts into a tight package. Aren’t these supposed to have some kind of wrapper with a strip of sticky tape? You could use that. The package will be about the size of a cigarette. Then you keep them in a resealable bag. And as for all that plastic packaging that’s another matter altogether . . .’
A look of nothing but utter seriousness radiated from Jyrki’s face. I grabbed the pack of towels and threw it back on the shelf then snatched a much smaller box of tampons and brandished it in front of his face.
‘What about these?’
‘Hmm, I suppose they’re OK. They don’t have any of those applicators. But all that cellophane . .. And once they’ve been used you can’t leave those anywhere either, no matter how much cotton is in them. OK, the box is made of cardboard, but you can dispose of that here.’
‘And what about the used ones?’
‘You carry your own refuse.’
I dropped the box of o.b. tampons into the trolley.
Jyrki didn’t know that I also had a couple of panty liners in my rucksack, but this wasn’t the moment to get into a discussion about them, too.
I remember one of my classmates who had decided to start having children in her twenties. On one of her rare nights off, she and I went out for a couple of ciders together. Suvi told me how guilty she felt about the volume of nappies she got through with her children. She had been told that disposable nappies were the work of the devil. Under no circumstances should people use them because they create plastic, shitty Mount Everests at dumpsites up and down the country. But when she’d thought of switching to terry nappies, she had serious doubts after learning about the effect on the environment of 90-degree white washes and the quantities of phosphates in all that washing powder. On top of that, there was the question of whether it was better to let a child become traumatized by walking around in soggy cotton nappies versus letting them get so used to being in ultra-absorbent Pampers that they would never see the point of learning to use a toilet. And imagine what fun it must be for the kid starting school with a bag of spare nappies. She rounded off her outburst by concluding that the most ecological solution was to feed the offspring to the neighbours’ huskies at the first convenient opportunity.
It made me shudder to think that I had once fantasized about starting a family with Jyrki.
The best place to dump stolen bundles is in the toilets at restaurants or department stores. A bus has got to be pretty empty, so nobody notices you just walking off. Sometimes a park bench or the top of a bin will do nicely.
When you take the target out of its pram you’ve got to do it quickly but not in a rush. So it looks like you’re the kid’s parent or some family member. Then walk away. Stay cool.
It’s a pretty big deal. The brat might start screaming, and that always attracts unwanted attention.
Ante says the fuss that breaks out over these things is in a league of its own. We’re not just talking about a runaway dog here.
Dogs are easier. Still, they can find their own way home. Sometimes. Depends what we’ve got in mind for them.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Cox Bight
Friday, March 2007
Heidi
Cox Bight is a miniature paradise.
From the sands at the shore it’s only a half-metre step up to the embankment, covered with short velvety grass.
The campsite is situated right next to the beach, sheltered by the trees and bushes. This is clearly more worn away and in more regular use than any of the other campsites after South Cape Rivulet. This place is evidently visited by far more people, but that doesn’t mean that the spot isn’t lovely and idyllic. Apparently the leg from Melaleuca out here is a day’s walk and seems every bit as popular as the stretch from Cockle Creek to Rivulet. That means tomorrow’s leg will be an easy stretch with a decent path. To one side, a small distance from the shore, where the path leads off towards the pit toilet, there is even a small, roofed information hut, not quite big enough for someone to fit inside. More of a small stand with a registration book.