I turn my boots in my hands. They are crusted in a thick layer of mud, and the idea of trying to scrape them clean seems absolutely hopeless. Why did I have to choose the ones with the nubuck surface, just because they looked cool?
‘Is it really that important?’
Jyrki jumps to his feet, muddy water splashing around him, and looks at me as though I’d just suggested barbecuing a baby.
‘Yes, it is!’
The layer of dried mud seems like it’ll never come off the boots, although the brushes have stiff bristles. We crouch there in silence; the swishing of the scrubbers reminds me of washing rugs by the lake, and for a moment I am in Finland again where summer is so familiar: the birch trees and the rowan, the lapping of the lake, the song thrush and the chaffinch. The silent dusk of a summer’s night, the dull applause of the aspen leaves, and . . .
Then I can hear those old lyrics so clearly that I can feel my throat tightening: How lonely is your shore; and how I yearn for there . . .
When I finally open my eyes and see the untamed swells of the Southern Ocean I feel such a wave of angst that I have to catch my breath. People would give their left arm to get to experience a place like this, and still I yearn to be somewhere else.
And yet there was probably never a shore quite as lonely as this one.
I look up at Jyrki. He has already finished cleaning his boots and has started scouring the tent hooks.
Jyrki
There are active crimes, and then there are passive crimes.
A passive crime is the act of not doing something.
A fledgeling first-timer hiker, your bog-standard Aussie, stepping on this unknown virgin soil as a conqueror just like his ancestors, would look at that sign, those brushes, and scoff. In the self-appointed sacred name of individual freedom his shoes would remain firmly on his feet. People can decide for themselves how to spend their time; it’s Everyman’s Right — particularly when nobody is there to check on you.
Nobody was watching back when the Europeans arrived in Australia and the axes started flying. Indigenous tribes were ravaged first by disease, then deportation and, finally, through a systematic child-removal policy. The rich soil was robbed, leaving nothing but a barren salt desert. The government even paid blood money for the destruction of natural vegetation: a hefty tax cut for every cleared hectare. And so farmers tied a heavy iron chain between two tractors and drove them side by side. Regardless of whether the area was ever to be cultivated or not, the chains ripped all indigenous plants up from the ground by the roots. The land was effectively shaved bald. Nature itself became the victim of genocide.
It made me think of Finland in the 1960s, when the state financed the clearing of land while simultaneously paying farmers to leave their fields fallow.
The Europeans who first arrived in Australia seemed to think that, because the island’s latitudinal location and its climate somewhat resembled those at home, the land must automatically have all the necessary preconditions for extensive crop-growing and cattle-rearing. And because the island was partially covered with giant forests, tall enough to rival the sequoias of California, people assumed that beneath them must be a layer of fertile humus. But what they didn’t know was that the majority of the nutrients in this ancient terrain were in the plants themselves and not in the soil.
Settlers arrived in the spirit of freedom and happiness with the flag of enterprise flying high. And, almost in passing, they ransacked an entire continent and brought it to within an inch of its life.
At first this island was a penal colony.
A man arrived in Australia, and the immigration official asked him if he had a criminal record. The man replied that he didn’t know it was still an entry requirement.
Out here a farmer — who if he’s lucky might have a farm the size of Wales — deliberately burns down the forest so that a few weeks later his sheep can eat spear grass, the juicy green shoots of the first plants to push their way through the ashes.
When people fell a palm tree — which otherwise might feed an entire village — so they can have palm shoots in their salad, when we kill a shark for its fins or shoot an elephant for its tusks, it’s small beer compared with this. But there’s no point getting on a high horse about it: in just the same way, protected forests along the Mediterranean coast are secretly set alight so that eventually there will be nothing left to protect. Then someone can snap up the land for next to nothing, build a couple of fifteen-star hotels and fill their restaurants with imported Sri Lankan tuna while a couple of metres away on the beach Giorgios’s fishing business is suffocating in a sea full of plastic bags and tourists’ diarrhoea.
We see two wallabies as we climb up the ridge from Prion into the forest. They take fright and dash into the thick bushes with a frantic rustling. I can imagine them desperately scrambling with the sheep for fresh grass on the black terrain, the kind that Bill described back at the Grampians.
We wipe our feet before stepping into someone’s home, but we don’t care what kind of dirt and destruction we spread across other creatures’ territories.
In a few years the Tasmanian devil will probably become extinct. The species is plagued by a disease causing nasty growths around the head. The disease has spread to Tasmania only in the last ten years. Unlike phytophthora, it might not have been brought here by humans. But if the population continues to fall at this rate — and even if some individuals turn out to be immune and can continue the species — the foxes and cats that humans have introduced to the island will quickly find their way into the little devils’ ecological niche. This is exactly what happened in New Zealand: the possums brought over from Australia destroyed, and continue to destroy, indigenous fauna so fast and effectively that you can almost hear the daily slaughter in the bushes.
Our forefathers committed active crimes in the name of their own happiness. The generations that followed have opted for passive crimes, for precisely the same reasons, and seem happy to stand by watching a chain of ethnic cleansing, both other people’s and their own. There’s nothing you can do about it; that’s the way the world goes around; we have our rights. The way your average Yank talks about climate change: are we going to let a few polar bears threaten the American Way of Life?
And what about those polar bears and tigers? Yeah, well, at least one day they might bring in hordes of gawping tourists.
Once all the other fauna have been destroyed Australia could well see a surge in the popularity of fox-hunting, after the wise decision to ship in foxes to take care of the even more wisely shipped-in rabbits. Once devastated by phytophthora, the indigenous flora can be replaced by some nice imported plant species that the wallabies can’t digest. Then we won’t have to shoo them off the hotel gardens all the time.
To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
NEW ZEALAND
Nelson Lakes
February 2007
Jyrki
At the lakes in Nelson the tracks were real tracks, not small minor roads. Across the rivers there were rope bridges, proper rickety ones that can only take one person at a time.
The silence was perfect.
If I’d been able to choose now, I would have come from Queen Charlotte straight out here to Nelson. It would have been a much shorter trip, too, but instead we’d gone and booked those bloody berths in Kepler.
At least here you had the freedom to decide for yourself how long each leg was going to take. We’d left St Arnaud in good time that morning, and our aim was to complete a 27-kilometre stretch of even terrain on a gentle incline before ending up at Upper Travers Hut. According to the guidebook, the leg should take somewhere between ten and eleven hours.
We hadn’t encountered anyone else for the last few hours. Occasionally, when we came out of the forest cover, we were able to see Mount Travers. It
s peak was covered in snow. At last, a fleeting glimpse of something real.
Having said that, Upper Travers Hut itself was big and new. Two separate dormitories; berths in bunk beds for about thirty people, each one equipped with a thick foam mattress covered in wax cloth. An enormous lounge with a kitchen area and dining tables and chairs. A veranda. A composting outdoor toilet a decent walk from the hut and a large tank to collect rainwater.
At least we were the only people in the hut.
Even out here they charged for the use of the cabins, all except for the most basic shacks. The price was in a different league to those along the Great Walks. The series of tickets cost only a couple of New Zealand dollars, and you were supposed to leave individual tickets in the cabins according to their standard. This cabin cost two tickets. Each ticket had a perforated tear-off section with the same serial number on the remaining stub. The idea was to keep one half of the ticket and leave it somewhere visible while you were staying at the hut — attaching it to the straps of your rucksack, for instance. The other half was to be dropped into a locked postbox 011 the wall of the cabin. If the ranger taking care of the track happened to come in and inspect the cabin, you could easily check to see who had paid. Freeloaders could expect a substantial fine.
I’d bought a book of eight tickets back in St Arnaud, but I should have bought sixteen. It was an oversight. Two times four nights, times two. I’d only counted enough for myself.
At least it was quiet now, and it would soon be dusk. Nobody would turn up after dark.
She’d thrown her rucksack on to the floor in one of the dormitories and was busy digging out her civvies. She’d just pulled her sports bra over her head and was groping for her sweat-free clothes when I moved my hand swiftly and stopped her in her tracks.
She looked at me, and the sports bra fell to the floor. Her beautiful breasts, the size of a fist, heaved slowly. The chilly air in the cabin and her damp clothes had left her nipples wrinkled like raisins.
I kissed her and said that now was the time.
Heidi
Sex?
There I stood in nothing but my panties, my skin covered in goosebumps, ready to collapse into anything that was clean and dry; the sun was setting and the air getting colder, and here was Jyrki coming at me in this primitive shack halfway up a wooded mountainside when I was absolutely exhausted and wanted nothing but food and sleep.
‘Time for a wash.’
‘I don’t know if I’m really in the mood for ... A wash?’
‘Naked. Bring your mug. And a towel.’
Jyrki was already rummaging through his own rucksack and soon produced the said items. I must have been looking at him like a madman as he started taking off his own clothes.
‘Out by the back door there’s a barrel of rainwater. There’s no stream round here, so we’ll have to use the water in the tank — but sparingly, mind.’
‘But that’ll be cold.’
‘What were you expecting?’
Jyrki walked across the dormitory in all his naked glory and strode towards the emergency exit, a mug in one hand and a towel the size of a handkerchief that he’d bought in Wellington in the other: a super-absorbent travel towel packed in a small netted bag, the kind that, apparently, you couldn’t get anywhere in Finland.
‘We shouldn’t bother with soap. You won’t be able to rinse it off properly, and it’ll just lie in the soil.’
The door was draughty. Although it was already cold inside the cabin, the sudden gust of chill air was a reminder of the not-so-distant Antarctic.
‘Well?’
I followed Jyrki to the door. He had placed his opened towel on the railing and was now crouching down filling his mug with water from the tank. I almost shrieked as he poured the water over his head, scrubbed himself using his hands and repeated this with another mugful of water.
‘Pouring it slowly like this, you can make a little bit of water go a long way. Gets the sweat off the skin. This is basic stuff. If you don’t wash the film of sweat off your skin, you can bet you’ll catch a chill at night.’
The shock had me speechless. Wasn’t it part of the life of a macho hiker-man to be unashamedly dirty and smelly? I’d much rather be dirty and smelly and blokier than thou than pour cold water over myself at a time when my teeth were already chattering from the cold.
‘Sometimes it's easier if someone else does it,’ said Jyrki, and before I’d had time to say anything he had poured a mugful of water down the back of my neck.
I screamed so loudly that the sound echoed around the woods and the mountainside. It was as if a vat of molten metal had suddenly been tipped over me, but Jyrki continued unhurriedly pouring water over my back, sides and buttocks, scrubbing me with his big hands, and, as if by a miracle, I suddenly found myself in a Zen-like state of tranquillity. I stood there silently as he returned with another mugful, and together his hands and the water removed the sweat from my breasts, my stomach and thighs.
‘Face,’ said Jyrki and poured water into my cupped hands. I rinsed my face and felt beneath my fingers the coat of dried sweat across my forehead and around the sides of my jaws; it came away in my hands like a layer of fine sand.
‘Now dry off,’ he told me.
I didn’t have a special travel towel, but I did have a thin cotton sarong. It was much larger and heavier, of course, but it had already been put to plenty of different uses, everything from a picnic tablecloth to an improvised dressing-gown in hostels with the shower in the corridor.
I wrapped the sarong around myself and towelled myself off, and suddenly everything seemed to make perfect sense. My toes and the area between my shoulder blades ached, but I wasn’t cold any more, not one bit.
Just then something hit my arm so hard that it smarted. The impact was almost electric — sharp and painful. Another blow to my shoulders; a third on my forehead. And only then did I notice that a cloud of black dots had gathered around us.
‘Damn it. Sand flies,’ said Jyrki and swiped at the cloud of insects to make it disperse, opened the door as little as possible and pulled me inside. A few black dots followed us inside but thankfully not very many.
‘We’ll be able to swat them. From now on we need to be careful opening the door. Maybe we should go to the toilet via the lounge, so we don’t need to open any doors directly outside.’
I nodded, sat down on the edge of a bunk and started pulling on dry, warm clothes. I felt so wonderful that I could have burst into tears.
Jyrki
There was a rattle from the veranda. I was setting up our cooker on the metal- plated work surface in the kitchen. I decided that if the newcomer was a ranger I’d say I’d forgotten to put the tickets in the box.
She heard the sound, too, as she brought in the bag of food, looked first at the door then at me and commented that the timing of our little naked escapade had been exceptionally good. Even I tried to smile.
The new arrival was a tall, thin, bearded bloke. A short exchange with him made it clear we didn’t need to worry about the hut tickets. The guy introduced himself as Fabian from Austria, your typical hippie hiker. He said he’d come from Lake Angelus and had first thought he’d stop at John Tait Hut, three hours back down the road, but reckoned he’d still have enough daylight to get out this far. Pretty good estimate; outside the sky was already a dark shade of blue.
I poured water into the pot and left it to boil. I took out some rice cakes, the cheese and a packet of soup, then handed her the empty water bottle and instructed her to fill it up from the tank.
Fabian brought his hiking boots and poles inside, leaving them next to the door, and suggested we do the same. We’d thought it might be a good idea to air our boots, but then Fabian mentioned the keas.
As I lifted our boots and poles into the cabin, Fabian explained that once we were about a thousand metres up we were already in kea territory.
I told him I’d heard people talking about them back in Kepler.
Fab
ian said that in that case we probably knew what he was getting at.
The door opened, and she came back in with the bottle of water, batting sand flies out of the way and cursing like a trooper. In English she said that she couldn’t understand why such an amazing country had to be full of creatures that were such arseholes. Fabian nodded, and they continued talking about the local fauna. I didn’t really listen any more, but I was amused and slighdy disappointed at her naïveté. Animals just follow the behavioural patterns typical of their species; they don’t have morals. Only Disney films depict animals with a concept of good and evil.
Pizza boxes filed inside deep freezers. Packets of frozen chips stacked beside them.
My skin starts to tingle at once. Hollow, familiar. So sweet you want to scratch it.
I have a quick look around and kneel down. The cable winds its way behind the refrigerated drinks cabinet, supposedly out of sight. A sharp tug. Snap. It’s out of the plug point.
An almost imperceptible hum in the soundscape of the store changes. Other than that; nothing happens. Somebody turns up. Lifts bags of frozen vegetables into their shopping trolley. They jangle icily. For now.
It’ll take all day or even until the next morning for anyone to notice. The bags of fries will be mush. Toffee will ooze out of the ice-cream cones. Maybe a clock or an alarm will ring once the temperature inside starts to rise. But by then, with any luck, it’ll be too late.
I pick up a large packet of crisps and a litre-and-a-half bottle of fizzy and take them to the check-out. The girl doesn’t give me a second look. This isn’t the shop where I’ve got an account.
Even if the stuff in the freezers don’t thaw out entirely, there’ll be no way of knowing how long the bags have been warm, whether they’ve gone off or not. just imagine the fuss, the hookah, the palaver. The staff will give each other the evil eye, then end up blaming the cleaners.