Tracks (10 page)

And I recognized then the process by which I had always attempted difficult things. I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege. I was basically a dreadful coward, I knew that about myself. The only way I could overcome this was to trick myself with that other self, who lived in dream and fantasy and who was annoyingly lackadaisical and unpractical. All passion, no sense, no order, no instinct for self-preservation. That’s what I had done, and now that cowardly self had discovered an unburnt bridge by which to return to the past. As Renata Adler writes in
Speedboat:

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

Yes, exactly, only now, after all this time, I had discovered that the grenade was a dud, and I could hop right back to that same old spot which was safety. The excruciating thing was that those two selves were now warring with each other. I wanted desperately to find those camels, and I wanted desperately not to find them.

The pilot snapped me back to the present dilemma.

‘Well, what do you want to do? Shall we call it a day?’

I would have said yes, but Julie talked us into one more run.

And on that final turn, there they were. Julie spotted them, we took a position and flew back to the runway. And that was the point at which all my disparate selves agreed to do the trip.

W
HILE IT SEEMED RELATIVELY EASY
to fix the position of the camels from the air, once on the ground and surrounded by a confusion of little creeks, hills and washaways that I had not noticed from the plane, actually finding the beasts was quite difficult. Jenny and Toly came with me. We drove the long-suffering old Toyota as far as we could into the stony scrub, then set out on foot with the dogs who immediately took off after phantom leopards and moon-tigers. This desire of Diggity’s to hunt everything except camels was a bone of contention between us. I had been trying to train her to help me track them but she was not remotely interested. Her all-consuming passions were kangaroos and rabbits and these she would chase for hours on end, bounding over clumps of spinifex, head turning this way and that in mid-air like Nureyev. She was beautiful to watch but never actually caught anything.

I had decided to cut across as many sandy creeks and washaways as possible, hoping to find their tracks easily. We walked to the top of a hill to see if we could spy them but there was nothing but the still, olive-green witchetty bushes, and miles of broken red rock and dust. I wanted to go down a different side of the hill to meet up with another creek-bed, so down we traipsed, stumbling along the curves of the spurs where the going was easiest. The sun was almost directly overhead. And when we got to the bottom of the hill, and into this new creek which I thought would take us out into the flatter lands beyond, something very peculiar happened. There were fresh human footprints going up the creek in the opposite direction. Everyone stopped short. For a tiny flash of a second, I thought, ‘Now who on earth could be out here in the middle of nowhere walking down this very creek on a summer’s day at noon?’ Then, the knowledge that they were our own prints, that not only had we arrived back at the place which should, by all rights and reckonings, be 90 degrees to our right, but that we had somehow ended up going in the opposite direction, hit me like a smack on the back of the head. I sat down. I felt as if bits of computer tape and smoke and sparks would come out of my ears any minute. What happened to north, south, east and west? Where did they go? Only seconds before I had had such a firm and confident grip on them. There was some ill-concealed snickering and nudging going on behind me.

It was a good lesson perhaps, but it chilled me to the bone. I had visions of my ending up a baked carcass, all golden crisp, lying in some ditch in the middle of the desert, or arriving back in Alice Springs after months of wandering, thinking I was in Wiluna. Someone had just given me a medical pamphlet on the symptoms of dying of thirst (a sensitive, well-thought-out gift, I felt, and always handy) and it looked like just about the worst way you could go, physical torture in medieval dungeons included. I didn’t want to die of thirst ever. I realized how much I had relied on tracking or Diggity to get me home in the past, instead of training myself to take mental bearings. This, along with many other survival mechanisms, would definitely have to be worked on.

When we did at last find the camels, they were overcome with guilt, shame, and a profound desire to go home. They had lost most of their hobble straps, two of their bells, and had spent two or three days walking up and down a fenceline which they found stood between them and the general direction of Bassos. Camels are home bodies. When they fixate on a place or an area, you can be 99 per cent sure that they will always try to get back to it. Dookie and Bub had obviously overridden Zelly who wasn’t about to take off on her own. They hung around me like flies, shuffling their feet, looking embarrassedly at the ground, or coyly through their elegant lashes, acting apologetic and loving and remorseful, then I rode them back. Bub’s foot was almost completely healed.

Now that the trip was real, now that I knew it was actually going to happen, I was horrified by the amount of work I had to do to prepare. And I was at a complete loss as to how I could lay my hands on the money to buy equipment and so on. The camels took up so much of my time that it was impossible to get more work in town. I could borrow money from family or friends but I decided against that. I had always been poor, always lived on a shoe-string, and if I did borrow the money it could take me years to pay it back. Besides, I hated being in debt, and it seemed unfair to ask my family to donate money to a project which, I knew, already had them worried half into the grave. And most of all, I wanted to do the thing on my own without outside interference or help. An attempt at a pure gesture of independence.

While I was sitting at Bassos, fretting, worrying and chewing my nails up to the elbow, a young man, a photographer, arrived with a friend of mine. He took a few photos of us and the camels but, for an event which had such far-reaching effects, the meeting was inauspicious to the point where I had forgotten about it the next day.

But Rick came again, this time for dinner with a group of people from town. And once more, I was so preoccupied that only a few things stand out in my memory. He was a nice enough boy — rather Jimmy Olsenish I thought — one of those amoral immature photo-journalists who hop from trouble spot to trouble spot on the globe without ever having time to see where they are or be affected by it. He had the most beautiful hands I had ever seen on anybody — long tapering fingers that wrapped around his cameras like frogs’ feet — and I remember vaguely some tepid arguments concerning the morality of and justification for taking clichéd photographs of Aborigines in the creek-bed for
Time
magazine when you knew precisely nothing about them, and didn’t much want to. And, oh yes, I remember he stared at me a lot, as if I were a little bit touched. Just those few things, nothing more remains.

He also talked me into writing to
National Geographic
for sponsorship. When they left that night, I wrote what I drunkenly considered a brilliant letter, and thought no more about it.

Before I went to Alice Springs, I had never held a hammer, had never changed a light-bulb, sewn a dress, mended a sock, changed a tyre, or used a screwdriver. I had never, in all my life, done anything which required manual dexterity, patience, or a sense of functional design. And here I was, confronted with the problem of designing and building a complete pack, not to mention saddles. Kurt, Sallay and Dennis had taught me a lot but not enough. I was soon to discover that the method known as trial and error was a vastly overrated way of learning to do something. I could not afford either the wastage of materials or the loss of time and my sanity. I was still broke, still scrimping and saving to buy necessities, so that even one ruined rivet got me where it hurt most — in my pocket. I had to weld a saddle frame for Zeleika which would fit, then make three leather pads stuffed with barley straw and lash them to the frame. I needed girths, breastplates, cruppers and various extra bars and hooks to attach the gear to. The other two saddles had to be redesigned and on top of all that there were six canvas bags, four leather bags, water canteens, bedrolls, specially designed pack covers that could be lashed to the whole thing, map holder and more to think about. It drove me to distraction and despair. Luckily, Toly came to my rescue. He had a natural gift for making things work. How I envied his brain. For hour after hour I would sit outside, fiddling and whimpering over bits of canvas and webbing and leather and copper rivets and plastic and so on, often screaming with frustration and throwing bits of stuff around in a blind fury of incompetence and impatience. Toly said to me one day, after one of these outbursts had ended in temper-tantrum tears which soaked into his shoulder, ‘Rob, the secret of this business is that you must learn to love the rivet.’

Of all the things I had to cope with before and after the trip, this learning to make and fix things was the most excruciating. It was a slow and agonizing process but gradually the fogs of ignorance and clumsiness cleared. I began to look at machines without experiencing instant brain-fade, and to work out how they functioned. This no-woman’s-land of tools, machinery and so on began to make sense to me. It was all still fiddly, time-consuming and boring, and it still gave me ulcers, but it was no longer completely unintelligible. I have Toly to thank for that. If I never actually learnt to love the rivet, I at least learnt how to tolerate it.

The many and various pressures on me were beginning to manifest themselves in bouts of moodiness, despair, whingeing, and the wringing of hands. Jen and Toly thought I might crack if I didn’t get away for a while, and eventually talked me into taking a week’s holiday. It took them a few days to convince me that it was possible, and that the camels would not necessarily die just because I wasn’t there to fuss over them. We put Zeleika in the yard; Jen and Toly would go out each day while I was away to collect feed for her, and I was placated into believing that I had nothing to worry about. But wouldn’t it be my luck, after spending all that time with them without even a day’s break, that that was the week Zeleika decided to give birth. I received the telegram and sped back to Alice as if I was being chased by wasps, to find the most endearing, beautiful, glossy, black, spindly, lovable little calf, tottering around after his mum, who stubbornly refused to let anyone near him. It took me a day or two to convince Zelly that I wasn’t going to harm her first-born; it took a little longer with Goliath. He had his mother’s brains and his father’s easy good looks and he was born a fighting handful — cheeky, pushy, self-centred, demanding, petulant, arrogant, spoilt, and delightful. He eventually settled down enough for me to be able to put the halter Jen had made for him on his head permanently. And from that day I began picking up his legs, tickling him all over, placing bits of cloth on his back and tying him up, for just ten minutes at a time, to a tree in the yard. I let Zelly go and kept the calf inside — a perfect arrangement for all concerned except Goliath who would bellow his lungs out until his mother came back to feed him.

Everything seemed to be coming together at a breakneck, if erratic pace. The two bulls had to be castrated as I would be travelling in winter and didn’t fancy another bout with either Dookie or Bub. I had decided to leave in March, the beginning of autumn. As it looked as if the Lands Council was at last getting Basso’s, and as Jenny and Toly had to get back to Utopia, we planned a trial run there with the camels and gear, for January, merely a month ahead. Sallay cut the bulls for me. It was done without anaesthetic and had me quivering and wringing my hands with sympathetic pain. The bulls were trussed up with ropes like plucked chickens, rolled over and then slash slash, scream scream, the gruesome job was done. Two weeks later it became apparent that Dookie was at the gates of death with an infection. I called on my friend the vet, and he came out to remove the huge lumps of stuff with emasculators. We drugged the camel, like Kate, until he was unconscious, then the vet showed me what to do. He pulled out the tubes, now swollen to the size of yams, and cut them off as high as he could. Dookie came immediately to consciousness with the pain. Then came the interminable terramycin shots. The vet agreed with me that a walk to Utopia would help the wounds to drain so preparations were now in earnest.

Both the camels and I were totally inexperienced at packing up and going on long journeys. My panic and irritability reached absurd heights. The weather didn’t help — 130 degrees in the sun. The gear on which I had lavished so much fetishistic care looked, in the cruel light of practicality, ridiculous. I was gibbering by the time we decided to leave. We had planned it for six in the morning while the air was still breathable and didn’t scorch the lungs like butt ends. At eleven I was still running around like the proverbial headless chicken, and Toly and Jenny were alternately trying to placate and keeping well out of my way. Eventually it all looked correct. The saddles were on, all nicely padded with sheepskins and blankets. The pack was distributed evenly and it looked relatively workable.

I tied the animals, who were by now extremely toey, together, and went inside for a final cup of tea and a last loving glance at Basso’s. Ada was with us and in tears, which did nothing for my confidence. ‘Oh my daughter, please don’t go, stay here with us. You’re going to perish out there for sure.’ A camel commotion started up outside and I bounded out of Ada’s arms to see, to my horror, that the three were in a complete tangle and terrified out of their wits. Ropes and camels’ heads and bits of ripped pack were jumbled together in a turk’s-head knot. It took half an hour to sort it out. At last we were on our way, and we hugged Ada and waved confidently as we moved out into the blazing sun.