Or, rather, there should be. Now all that’s left of it is a pile of charred remains. The ring-binding has survived along with the soot-edged stubs of pages a couple of centimetres in from the spine. Someone clearly got a kick out of torching this. Perhaps it was the same person who had scraped away at one of the booth’s legs with a knife and singed it with something like a cigarette lighter. The idea was presumably to bring some excitement to a leisurely Sunday-afternoon walk.
‘They’re determined, I’ll give them that. First the flight from Melaleuca, then a thirteen-kilometre walk just to vandalize something that’s vitally important to other people,’ says Jyrki.
So yet again we can’t register ourselves.
A little way further into the campsite there are a few clusters of tents, all people trekking in the opposite direction. The fact that we’re from Finland always causes surprise; all the others are Aussies from the mainland. They find it amusing that we’ve come here to enjoy the heat: for them Tasmania is a cool spot where they can escape the 40-degree heat back home. They ask us about Ironbound, and we tell them that it certainly lives up to its reputation.
Jyrki shows them his crippled hiking pole like an old war wound. I don’t bother pointing out my thighs, my shins and my arms. Anyone with a pair of eyes can see the blotchy leopard-skinned pattern covering them. The variegated bruises of different shapes and sizes are interspersed with nasty-looking scabs and scratches that I picked up yesterday before pulling on my hiking trousers. The magnum opus is in the middle of my right thigh, a bruise the size of my palm, blue in the middle and edged with a pretty yellow coloration, making some of it look a distinct shade of green.
As we chat with the trekkers heading east, I can see Jyrki’s back straightening — without his even noticing it — and with that same expression of fake indifference, the same nonchalant shrug of the shoulders that was all over the body language of the guys we’d seen at Cockle Creek who had already crossed Southy.
Jyrki
I splash myself with water straight from the small brook. Further downstream there’s only the beach and the sea, so it’s fine to wash myself here. No point lugging water up to the campsite, and for once there’s no need to be frugal with it.
Once I’ve towelled myself off and started pulling on my civvies I hear a rumble. I look up.
This weather front can’t be coming in across the sea, from the Antarctic, the way they normally come. If it were coming in from the sea, we’d be able to see it a long way off. This one is coming from behind the forested horizon, from the west-north-west. This is a freak air current, a weather phenomenon that’s becoming all the more common across the globe.
I grab my hiking clothes and the wombat bottle, which I’ve been using to scoop up washing water. I stick my feet into my Crocs and make my way straight towards the campsite. The tent is a few hundred metres to the west of the brook.
Just then I feel the first raindrops.
Heidi
I’m convinced I left it on that tree trunk. Absolutely convinced.
There were still about half the slices of pepperoni left in their opened vacuum pack. I was supposed to cut them into strips with the Swiss Army knife and mix them with the mashed potatoes. I had been keeping a beady eye on the water we’re heating up — because we mustn’t, mustn’t, mustn’t waste any of the gas in the cylinder — and I’d gone back into the tent, for a minute at most, to change my panty liner for a tampon then come straight back out to sit on the tree trunk and use my body to shelter the cooker from the strengthening wind coming in from the sea.
And now the pepperoni has vanished.
Could it have been the wind?
My eyes scan the surrounding scrub.
I sigh with relief: the wind. It’s been gaining in strength all the while; by now it’s pretty blustery, and the sea is white with the crests of waves. The plastic pepperoni packet is flapping in the wind a few metres away at the foot of a bush. It’s flown a good distance.
I take a few steps and pick up the packet.
It’s empty.
I crouch down in a panic, run my hands through the grass and undergrowth, my eyes darting across the ground looking for something round and a browny-red colour.
I can understand the packet being blown away, but I can’t see how the slices of pepperoni — tightly packed together and sealed with fat almost into a single chunk of meat — could have been picked up by a gust of wind if it had rolled out of the packing.
Possums are timid and only move around at night.
Rats?
I stop for a moment, frozen. It’s as though I can see myself, I can almost smell the pepperoni — cumin, peppers, magnificent animal fat. I can remember — and the more I think about it the more real it seems — how my hand could have reached up towards my mouth, as if by magic, how my teeth could have sunk into the slices of sausage; the thought of my molars squeezing the dizzyingly salty, spicy meat juices on to my tongue . . .
‘No,’ I hear myself saying, but my tongue is still twisting around inside my mouth, searching for the taste of pepperoni and strips of meat, and I fall to my knees once again.
‘Please be here, please be here, please be here,’ I chant out loud, crawling in increasingly large circles between the bush and the tent.
Right then I hear a boom of thunder.
The raindrops are so large and heavy that they soak you right through, leaving spots the size of coins on your clothes.
Our rucksacks are lying open beside the tent, open bags of clothes and supplies carelessly hanging out of the loosened drawstrings. The food bag is open, too, propped up beside the tree trunk we’ve been using as a kitchen.
I jump to my feet, forgetting all about the pepperoni, and take wide running steps.
I unzip the vestibule and the mosquito net and hurl first one open rucksack in on top of the beds then the other. Then the bag of food, my sarong — still damp — all the socks, shorts, T-shirts hanging on a nearby branch, then a quick glance towards the cooker, which is now hissing angrily with each raindrop that strikes it. I turn off the gas supply and plonk the pot into the vestibule along with the cooker. Finally I dive inside behind everything else.
By now the rain is now drumming on the roof of the tent.
I can hear the sound of heavy footsteps and panting, then Jyrki comes crashing into the tent, almost uprooting the guy ropes in the process. It’s chaos inside the tent: our damp rucksacks, the two of us half soaked, the bundle of trekking clothes in Jyrki’s hand dotted with droplets of rain. I hurriedly zip up the doors at the entrance.
The rain is coming down like a roaring wall.
It’s coming down so hard that grit and loose sand is being splashed halfway up the tent’s outer walls; from the inside of the tent it looks black and grainy. Jyrki tries to find a comfortable position. He can’t: rucksacks and bags and clothes fill the space. I could never have imagined that, compared with this, normal life in the tent feels quite spacious. We’re literally drowning in stuff.
‘Those have to be packed up and put in the vestibule.’
Jyrki starts shoving things into his rucksack. Not in his typical systematic fashion; the main thing is that everything is inside. He is ready long before me and opens up the inner zips.
Water is running through the vestibule. The ground simply can’t absorb a flash flood like this, and now water is flowing in under the vestibule walls which aren’t attached to the ground. The gas cylinder with the cooker on top and the kettle are like small crags in a flooded river. For once Jyrki is speechless. His hand falls limply against his rucksack.
‘What about the rucksack covers?' I suggest.
‘They might keep the rain out, but the water will get through if they have to swim in this. Then, in no time, it’ll have soaked through to the stuff at the bottom of the rucksack.’
‘But isn’t everything in plastic bags or those waterproof things?’
Jyrki shakes his head. ‘Imagine what those
rucksacks will weigh tomorrow if they suck up water all night. Then they’ll be wet on the inside, the DrySacks will be wet on the outside, and the plastic bags won’t keep anything dry. At least the tent’s waterproof’ He zips up the vestibule and we look at each other for a moment, both leaning against a rucksack the size of our upper bodies. ‘Let’s try and stack them over there, on their sides against the walls at the foot of the tent. We can sleep with our legs together.’
I nod.
We try to hang the dampest of our clothes from the guy rope running along the inside of the tent’s roof, forming a curtain between us.
And with that we are in separate rooms, in a space no bigger than three square metres.
The air is so thick I feel like I could suffocate.
Jyrki
Once it’s almost dark and the adrenalin in my blood has dropped off a bit it occurs to me that we haven’t eaten anything.
From the other side of the makeshift sarong-and-T-shirt curtain she says that the cooking water didn’t have a chance to heat up properly.
I clamber to my knees and peer into the vestibule. The ground is nothing but mud. All the food we’d put aside for dinner needs boiling water. I suggest we cook dinner inside the vestibule. The mashed potato will be ready in no time, and we can mix in some strips of sliced pepperoni.
She panics at the thought. Surely you can’t light a fire beneath a roof of nylon fabric. Candles can set fire to things very high up, she says. Isn’t nylon fabric highly flammable?
I tell her I’ve cooked inside the vestibule before, and that some people even use the cooker inside the tent itself, although I wouldn’t go that far.
She’s clearly worried — and with good reason. People die in tent fires, and losing or damaging the tent in these conditions would hardly be the ideal scenario.
Still, it’s annoying that she doesn’t trust me. But, on the other hand, it’s a fair point that we need to conserve our gas.
We’ve still got flatbread and rice cakes, she says. And cheese.
I point out that we’ve been saving them for breakfast and suggest pepperoni and dried apricots instead.
She is quiet for a moment then says she’s not really hungry, adding that the last thing she’d want to eat is those sour, sugary apricots because she can’t imagine how she could go outside to brush her teeth in these conditions.
I listen to the incessant rush of the rain, like a waterfall drumming on the tent. The storm front seems to have been caught right above Ironbound. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be over any time soon.
I think about the sweet, sticky layer the apricots leave in your mouth. Perhaps we should have picked up some xylitol chewing gum after all. Then I remember that nuts neutralize the pH levels in your mouth.
She gives an indifferent response of sorts. We eat smoked almonds. I count out fourteen and a half per person.
We had a stroke of luck, I tell her. Judging by the volume of the rain, anyone looking for the ultimate extreme experience will be sure to find it trying to cross Louisa Creek tomorrow.
Heidi
We’re lying inside the tent, in the deep darkness.
I can’t move my legs; they’re wedged between Jyrki’s legs and one of the rucksacks. The air is so moist that it sticks to my fingers.
The storm is still rumbling with no sign of letting up. Although I’ve closed my eyes I can still sense the bolts of lightning forcing their way beneath my eyelids like flat needles.
Then I hear it.
It starts quietly, but it’s getting louder all the time. It’s like an approaching squadron of fighter jets moving in behind the drone of the rain and the howl of the wind. At times it fades a little, but each time it grows the roar is even more penetrating than before. The trees are rustling and wailing in the forest around us. Every now and then I can hear something large, heavy and rotten falling or dropping to the ground with a crash.
I let out a quiet cry. The bottom of my stomach is aching with fear, my heart’s racing at a million kilometres an hour. The raging sea is far too close; I imagine it would only take a second for it to breach the half-metre embankment separating us from the beach. The creaking trees, crying out in agony, are right next to us, above us, ready to topple.
Tears squeeze their way out from the corners of my eyes. I can’t control my loud gulps of breath.
A hand reaches out from under the curtain hanging between us. Jyrki’s arm comes to rest on my chest, wraps itself around me, pulls me and my sleeping- bag tight against him.
‘Hey. It’s only the tide.’
By now I’m sobbing — long, heaving, spasmodic sobs — because I know at some point I’m going to have to tell him I’ve lost the pepperoni.
Jyrki
Heidi’s cousin and her fiancé, both our age, not even thirty, were swept away by the tsunami at Khao Lak.
I can understand her overreaction.
I’ve got to do something. She clings on to me in the darkness.
I whisper comforting nonsense into her ears. With my body I protect her from the roaring, rushing wall that she thinks is rising up from behind the horizon.
There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water; and silence.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Cox Bight to Melaleuca
Saturday, March 2007
Jyrki
It’s incredible how much a thin piece of nylon fabric that doesn’t even absorb water can weigh once it’s wet. As we roll up the tent, no matter how much we try to shake it, it seems to have doubled in mass.
The morning is chilly and bright and beautiful. The droplets of water blown off the eucalyptus trees by occasional gusts of wind and the muddy earth under foot are the only reminders of the storm.
My night of insomnia stings my eyes and lingers as a stuffy taste in my mouth. I’m shivering a bit from lack of sleep and the moisture hanging in the air. She pulls on her hiking trousers; I’ll make do with shorts.
As I’m boiling up some water to make a cup of tea, she suggests we might as well have some soup for breakfast.
I’m startled. Packet soups aren’t meant for breakfast.
Well. I suppose it is a fact that we barely had any dinner yesterday.
She hands me a packet of soup so quickly that she must have been holding it out ready.
Heidi
I’m spooning chicken soup into my mouth when I notice something black on my arm.
After a storm like that all kinds of crap falls out of the trees. I flick at it with my free hand, but it won’t come off my skin. Then I see it swelling at one end and stretching itself out into a funnel.
I give a shriek and start flapping and shaking and swiping at my arm, but the black blob won’t come off.
Jyrki reacts, then sees something moving on his thigh, too, albeit on top of his shorts.
‘Leeches. Well, well.’
‘Get it off! Get it off!’ I shout.
I don’t even know why I’m so supremely revolted by the thought of having a parasite on me, sucking my blood, my vitality, eating away at me, and I can’t even bring myself to look at my arm as Jyrki, after flicking his own leech to the ground, starts prising the thing off my skin, a thing that’s slimy and shapeless.
‘I should have remembered this,’ says Jyrki. ‘These little buggers drop down from the trees after its been raining. We should check each other’s necks every now and then before we reach open ground.’
Jyrki
One of our colleagues packing up his stuff has heard the scream and comes over to see what all the fuss is about. I explain that the little lady wasn’t exactly enamoured with our invertebrate friends. The bloke chuckles and hangs around for a chat. He’d set out from Melaleuca the
day before, and he’s clearly more than a bit impressed when he hears we’re continuing along Old Port Davey Track. He asks about our food packages waiting at Melaleuca.
My surprise is tangible. He notices this and continues, explaining that the few people that take our route or that trek back and forth along Southy usually have extra supplies flown out to Melaleuca beforehand. You call the flight operator. You put together a packet of food and take it to the airport. All this costs a nominal freight charge because the plane takes travellers out this way almost every day, so it’s a handy way of shipping out extra provisions for your group. Then halfway along the track you can stock up your rucksack with fresh supplies that you haven’t had to break your back carrying all the way.
I glance to one side. She seems to be concentrating on pressing a piece of paper on to the spot where the leech bit her.
I quickly change the subject and wish the guy good luck for Ironbound. He says his goodbyes and walks off.
Hopefully the food-package conversation didn’t fall on the wrong set of ears. If she’s overheard him I’ll never hear the end of it.
Heidi
After a two-hour hike the sun is so high in the sky that I’ve absolutely got to take off some of my clothes. I don’t bother listening to Jyrki muttering, as if to himself, that it would save time if certain people could make their minds up about this sort of thing back at the camp.
I sit down on my rucksack and take off my boots, then my hiking trousers with their duct-tape seam. I stand up and start pulling up my shorts when Jyrki clears his throat. Meaningfully.
‘Erm, hang on,’ he says, pointing vaguely towards the back of my knee. ‘Hang on a minute.’
I look down and this time the scream gets stuck in my throat, comes out as nothing more than a shrill little squeak, and I feel almost faint.