The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (22 page)

Back on the ground, a series of bodily sensations that were suspended in the sky return: blood pumps in my ears, my arms tingle from the harness, my jaw aches a little from screaming bloody murder.

Rod smiles calmly, just another day at the office for him. “How was that?”

“Whoa,” I breathe.

“Bloody oath,” he agrees.

Some molecular shift occurs in Cairns. I'm certain of it. Otherwise, why would I decide that the best way to top off this particular day is to bungee jump? Bungee jumping is even more terrifying and satisfying than skydiving because I have to jump myself. No one is attached to me, making the decision. It's just me on a fifty-meter platform in the dense rain forest I saw from a surreal distance while skydiving. A glorified piece of rubber binds my ankles like cuffs. I need to give my weight in order to calibrate the rope, and I wonder if the five pounds I instinctively fudged off mine is going to make a fatal difference. The rubber
device feels flimsy, as if I'm being lowered down the edge of a cliff with floss around my waist, not anything that will prevent me from smashing into the lake and rocks below.

Two slinky New Zealanders are running the show. One of them keeps rattling on about losing my “bunginity.” The other creeps right up behind me and whispers, “Just let go. It's going to be so good.”

In order to jump, I do have to let go. I know that—of my fears, my anxieties, my ego. To fling yourself out into the abyss requires shutting off the analytic part of your brain, which wants to discuss the few pros and many cons in paralyzing detail—otherwise, you can't jump. If you're doing any talking to yourself up there, it's talking yourself out of it. Besides, I'm tired of playing it safe.

So I let go. I curl my toes around the edge of the platform and fall forward. My stomach lurches. The water reaches out for me, and I brush it with my fingertips. Then I'm back up, down, up, down, slower and slower until I'm suspended inert upside down. A question appears before me as the adrenaline drains from my body: Have I ever been truly present at any moment in my life before now?

Back at the hostel, I meet two friendly Japanese girls who are here studying English. They're headed down to the restaurant next door for dinner, and I join them. They introduce me to our fourth roommate, half-German and half-Thai Jasmin. She's aloof and keeps her eyes on her food. The next night I run into her again, and after a few quiet drinks, she explains her current depressed state. She came to Australia with a good friend who for some reason ended up renting a car with a mutual friend. Jasmin and her buddy originally had plans to tour the Outback, but her friends changed their minds without consulting Jasmin. She
spent a miserable, blistering week in the unair-conditioned car with the two of them, pulling over on the side of the road every night to sleep in order to save money on accommodations. Eventually, the lack of showering and annoyance at her friend's completely changing a month's worth of plans was too much, and she had them drop her in Cairns.

“I wasn't supposed to be here alone,” she says. “I can't get used to it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I'm going home ten days early. I already changed my flight. But first I am seeing that big red rock. That's why I am here.”

“Good for you!” I say enthusiastically, reminding myself of jubilant Pedro back in Dublin. Usually, I have the tendency to absorb the energy of whomever I'm around, but I am determinedly keeping her depressing vacuum at a distance. “You know what you should do? You should go bungee jumping.”

She frowns. “Definitely no.”

I shrug understandingly, happy anyway to have a temporary friend after a long day alone. We order another beer. Tomorrow Jasmin is off to Uluru, and I fly to Darwin, a city that looms large in my imagination because of Muriel's stories.

It rains hard my entire first day in Darwin, so I take the owner up on his offer to let me stay a free night in exchange for helping him paint the common room blue. He offers me thirty dollars to put some stickers on promotional pamphlets, so I do that, too. A number of backpackers are performing odd jobs around the place, including cleaning, which probably explains why the bed-sheets are always slightly askew and why a girl claimed she saw a cockroach in the kitchen this morning. But I don't care because the place has infinite free pancakes for breakfast and a large pool I plan to swim in as soon as the lightning stops.

Try as I might, I cannot get a good feel for Darwin. The Darwin of Muriel's youth was flattened by Cyclone Tracy, and now it's mostly modern buildings with trendy restaurants unaffordable on my backpacker's budget. I walk the stone remnants of the Old Town Hall many times, trying to imagine the force of winds capable of uprooting the sturdy Victorian structure. I visit the art museum, where you can hear an eerie recording from the cyclone and see pictures of the devastation. But the city itself seems to have moved on, and I feel like I'm looking for something that has been lost.

I've made a mistake by choosing to stay in Darwin for eight days. Muriel warned me—“you'll see it all and then some in four or five hours”—but I wanted to plant myself in this distant city at the top end of a distant country, as Muriel did two decades before. I wanted to inhabit her life somehow, from when she was my age, as though this would offer some great insight. But all I get is long hours wandering back and forth along the esplanade. From the vantage point of Survivors' Lookout, at the southeast end of the city, I read about the 1942 bombings on Darwin by the Japanese. These were the worst wartime attacks in Australia, and large portions of the city, as after the cyclone, needed to be rebuilt. It's a strange thing, cities like this that recover over and over after tragedies, phoenixes rising from the ashes, some choosing to replicate what was lost while others using the opportunity to reinvent.

I am reinventing myself, too.

I book a three-day Kakadu National Park four-wheel-drive excursion to break up the endless afternoons in Darwin. Our guide, James, is twenty-five. In sunglasses, he's an attractive, tanned guy, but when he removes his shades, I notice that his eyebrows are situated below the brow bone in a way that throws off the whole symmetry of his face. James brags about never acquiescing
to the pretty girls who try to pick him up on the tours, then makes sure I understand that heaps of pretty girls do try.

James first takes us on a jumping-crocodile cruise. Our group boards a catamaran on which a lanky, bush-hardened guide dangles bloody meat tied to a pole over the water, then yanks it up while the deadly saltwater crocodiles jump for it in vain. The “salties” personify stealth, coasting partially beneath the water for long, slow stretches before seizing their prey with a burst of energy. Often they drag the doomed animal (or human) back underneath the water, where it drowns, if the croc's powerful jaws haven't killed it already. This particular breed of crocodiles is the largest in the world; they are thick, lumbering things, with square scaly ridges all along their back. Compared to the massive torso, the crocodile's feet look shrunken and mismatched. When the jaw opens, two rows of uneven teeth reveal themselves like an ancient torture device. Their dark, scheming eyes terrify me.

The guide knows all the crocodiles along this stretch of water. Some of them have been gliding out to greet him for over a decade, yet even the most familiar, seemingly agreeable croc is not to be trusted—ever. “Give her a chance,” he says about a female circling the boat, “and she'll rip you limb from limb.” With that, he rewards the croc with a piece of raw steak. She sinks like a submarine with her prize, beady eyes the last to disappear.

I recently read about a group of three guys racing around on motorcycles in a flooded area somewhere nearby when one was picked off by a scheming crocodile. The croc quickly buried the body, then came back for the other two guys, who were by then hiding up in a tree. The croc stalked them for three days, menacingly circling the trunk, though they eventually escaped. The fear of being ambushed by a crocodile haunts me our entire three days in Kakadu. I think about it as we walk through the cathedrals of Aboriginal rock art, where we witness the pelicans and storks bowlegged on the rocks and point out to one another the silver barramundis whirling the water around like it's being
flushed. Water holes that are baked land in the dry season abound now that it's the wet season, though many of them are off limits because of lurking crocs. The only stream James offers to let us swim in is surprisingly fast-moving. On one side is a flat bank where we strip off our sticky hiking gear, on the other is a rock cave big enough for five or six bodies to climb up into.

“Are there crocodiles here?” I ask nervously.

“Shouldn't be,” James says. “But you can never be one hundred percent positive.” The real worry, he tells us, is the current. In order to reach the rock cave, we'll have to swim upstream against the water at a pretty quick clip. Otherwise, we risk being washed away to some unknown destination. James makes it clear it is not in his job description to go after us. “So who's keen?” he wants to know.

The two Irish girls who choose to pair miniskirts with chunky boots to hike each day are. So is Eva, the German girl who, while we're washing dishes one night after dinner, can't think of the English word for “pruney” so points to her hand and announces poetically, “I get old.” One of the boys will cross, but the other two won't. James jumps in first, then the others heave themselves in one at a time to his outstretched hand. When it appears no one else is crossing, James makes a move to follow the others up into the rock cave.

“Wait!” I yell.

I dive into the cold water, immediately feeling the current drag me. My arms beat the water like a windmill. My legs flutter wildly. I beg all my years of middle-school swim lessons not to desert me. I forget my fears of crocodiles. I forget everything except my body in motion, its strength and determination and the feel of James's callused hand just as I am starting to slow.

He grins, then hoists me up onto the rock. “Welcome to the other side.”

I like backpacker me. She is easygoing. She talks less, listens more. She doesn't wear a watch. She doesn't have anyone to answer to because she is far, far away. She is freer than ever.

In Ireland, I was pleasantly depressed, surrounded by friends and Guinness. In Australia, I am relaxed, a new experience altogether. Being so close to the ocean has somehow slowed me down, and Australians' constant “no worries” philosophy has rubbed off on me like a fake tan. I have shelved my worries, large and small, like preserved jams. Who will I be in South America? Will I shed these former selves like snakeskin? Or perhaps it's more about perspective, the right angle. It's like trying to see your entire body at once. Even with wall-to-wall mirrors, it's impossible. You have to turn your head to view each part, so you constantly exchange one view for another.

Carly takes off for Sweden, Denmark, and Thailand a week before I arrive in Sydney for my final night in Australia. We're set to meet in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after I return to San Diego for a quick visit with my half-brother, Marc. My dad is flying out to meet us. Muriel drives me to the airport, and we shift uncomfortably in the hard plastic seats and try not to cry. I'm not ready to leave Sydney. Or the Dawsons. But my visa has expired, like Ireland's before it, and it is time to move on, a fact I'm slowly starting to accept about Australia—and about life.

In San Diego, my father tells me flat-out that I should not go to South America. Ireland and Australia, okay. Developed countries where they speak English. But two young women traveling by themselves all over South America? “Not a great idea,” he says.

“Two young women!” I throw my hands into the air. “Oh, how
the mighty feminist has fallen! I doubt that if Marc ran off to Mexico with a buddy, it would be any cause for concern.” I recount how I have already successfully negotiated two new continents. “I'll have no part of your convenient double standards!” Then I storm out.

Two minutes later, I slither back to his side. “Umm … so it looks like I need a yellow-fever shot.”

Bam! Just like that, I'm fourteen again (though the dramatic storming out was already pretty teen-tastic), dreamy and careless, book-smart but absentminded. All my time away, the maturation I felt occurring, does not exist. I appear to my family ill-prepared for the chores of adulthood, such as getting a lifesaving vaccine before traveling to a foreign country. I slip back into familial never-land. My father spends the rest of the afternoon helping me track down a doctor who will take me on such short notice. In the waiting room, I slouch between him and my brother. “Why does this always happen?” I mutter to myself.