kiss my ass, I hope you die
Anna and I sat next to the busy road heading north out of Hobart, each with a big grin behind a sign saying Lake St. Clair. We held our sign out towards the passing cars and observed the smiles and honks of people passing by, yet not one person stopped for us. It was twelve thirty, and today we were hitch-hiking up north to start the Overland Track, a 6 day hike through the heart of Tasmania's highlands.
After thirty fruitless minutes, I went up the road to look for a better hitching spot while Anna proudly stuck her sign out. As I came back I saw a perfect hitching scene before me unfold before me: the typical old blue beater pulling off to the side of the road and a hippyish old man reaching over to lift up the front door lock. I tossed our packs in the back and took my seat in the back, wedged in between a pile of junk and a happy shedding dog named Ghandi. We took off and thanked him profusely. He had apparently already been once around the block and had circled back just to pick us up.
"You won't get a pickup there, I'll take you a spot out of town where you'll get an easier hitch."
I sat in the back petting Ghandi as the blue beater grumbled along and he told us about his young days.
"I did the Overland Track once. Well, parts of it. I remember because that was about ten days before I was arrested..."
Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. I hug Ghandi and listen on. Of course his story took place in the 80's at the height of the Franklin Dam debate where masses of people were arrested for blockading the dam, a move that helped destroy the project to dam the river. I am once again at ease and happy with my situation, because he is one of the people who has allowed me to spend my Christmas on the Franklin River.
He never told us where he was going really, just gave us a vague "to the end of town" explanation so as we passed the city limits of Hobart, I began to suspect something. Sure enough, as he dropped us 20 k's later and waved goodbye, my suspicions were confirmed. He did a U-turn and went right back to where he came from. 30 minutes for two strangers. He had places to go, people to see, but had instead given us something entirely unconditional. We waved back in an unbelieving stare. Something that would have never happened in Southern California. But oh Tassie, how much I love you.
We put down our packs and proceeded to hold the same cardboard "Lake St. Clair" sign. We had both agreed that although it was only fair to split the sign holding duty up, our chances would be significantly increased if Anna held the sign and I kind of sat away from the highway. I opened my 25 (60 lb) kilo pack and cursed my laziness. We couldn't be stuffed bringing a stove, and therefore my meals would consist of canned food. Of course, at 450 grams a can, 6 days of food proved to be quite heavy to carry while walking 6 hours a day. I hungrily knocked out 450 g's of pears and pear juice, drinking the cool juice and reveled in the wonderful sunshine of the day. Here we were. Young, on our own, and adventurous, running off into the wild with everything on our backs. As I gulped down the last pieces of pear, a shiny blue Toyota pulled up past us, and out hopped two thirty year old men. Troy and Anthony were total bogans, decked out in racing shirts and the owners of accents that made backcountry Alabama folk sound like English professors. They were warm and friendly, and talked of cherry picking and apple picking. Troy had lived in Sydney for ten years but came back to New Norfolk (pop 1000) because he liked it so much better. Typical Australian lifestyle: Sydney or the bush. You can't have one without the other. They mentioned a local pub in New Norfolk, saying that they didn't go to it because it was "too rough for them". I pursed my lips and wondered what could this bar could possibly be like? But then again, New Norfolk had one of the worst penal colonies in Australia.
The rides became more and more personal, and our timing became faster and faster. Each road was smaller than the last and so the cars coming along it couldn't shrug us off as easily. Troy and Anthony let us off in a dusty patch of Highway A6 and we waited there again, Anna holding our Lake St Clair sign up as I lounged on my backpack and ate another tin. Within five minutes, I got a bigger shock than ever as another blue car pulled up in front of us. The middle age hippy was back in the city. Troy and Anthony were probably at a race track. And here was Grandma, a seventy year old lady in a blue spotted dress behind the wheel. And she was picking us up. As I threw my bag into the back seat I wanted to ask her if she was sure she wanted us to come along. this was definitely a ride I would not have received if Anna hadn't been hard at work on the side of the highway while I lounged around. Once we got in she explained
"I never pick up people anymore because its so dangerous nowadays but I thought I'd give it a try."
She took us forty k's along the Derwent Valley, passing hops farms and sheep pastures as she unravelled her life story as old women are apt to do. It just so happened that she knew a sheep farming friend of ours in Bothwell, and actually went to school with his dad. She poured on and on about her life, which was actually quite fascinating. She commuted two hours to work each day and only slept 3-4 hours a night. She was a vibrant lady, full of life and a sort of nature-y new age-y-ness that I warmed up to immediately.
"Someday I'm just going to walk along a river until I can't walk anymore, and then that will be my time. My nephew always said that, and that's what he did."
Grandma's vivacity left me inspired, and we smiled through the dust that her car kicked up as it scooted away, leaving us once again beside the highway. Two minutes later a land cruiser picked us up, explaining that this was not a good hitching spot and that he'd take us to a better one. He drove us 5 k's into town and like our first ride, turned right around and headed back in the direction from which he had come.
We got stuck in Hamilton for quite some time. Hamilton was one of these one-horse towns in which you good go into the grocery store and meet into the Mayor, the post office manager, the chief police officer and foremost citizen all in one person. We sat in the dust and heat and waited, thinking that if the fifth car picked us up, we might get picked up next Tuesday. Anna abandoned permanently holding the sign up since nobody was actually coming, reserving her energy for short, excited spurts when a car would come around the bend and we'd leap to our feet only to admit defeat as we craned our necks from right to left and watched it speed by.
After a good thirty minutes we were picked up by two young girls going all the way past Lake St. Clair. The older One had just taken a year off from uni (midwifery school) and she drove us all the way into the national park.
The sky opened up and poured forth a quite a deluge, and Anna and I huddled under the shelter with our first thoughts of preparation. Were our packs too heavy? Would we have enough food? We really had no clue what we were getting into, and so we marched off onto the track and proudly took photos, not smiling too obviously so we could look like worn, jaded, weatherbeaten hikers amongst all the day-tripper tourists gathering at the visitor centre. Oh, and were we tough. We were going to live it alone for 6 days. There was a definite air about "doing the Overland", and we revelled in the romance and beauty of it.
Then we put our packs on.
my 25 kilos (half my weight almost) dug into my back and reminded me that this was indeed no simple undertaking, and I resolved to eat more tins now and save my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for later. We hiked through the mud and and tree roots and dark myrtle forests until dark and wound up at a tiny hut on the shores of Lake St Clair. Anna was the first in and saw the rat warning sign. Immediately I was enlisted to put our packs out of danger, and was given the side of the bunks that the rats "would most likely crawl up", if they had an appetite for human fingers, hair, or toes.
In the morning the rat traps yielded 3 rats and a brushtail possum, who hid curled up in a frightened ball in the back of its cage and wouldn't come until we held it upside down.
We walk consisted of approxiamtely 7 hours of walking and was at times quite painful, the knees and shoulders screaming out in protest as we plodded along through mud and tree roots.
A funny thing occurred however. I walked ahead and began to sing to make the walk more enjoyable. Having exhausted my repetoire of fresh songs in New Zealand, I reached back into my past and called up The Bouncing Souls for some service, and began singing "Wish me Well". I sang out loud and unashamedly, bellowing the words to an audience of currawongs and pademelons who scattered as I came near.
However, this suddenly took a violent turn for the worse. I was three words into the chorus of "Kiss my ass, I hope you die" when I looked up from my feet and the trail to an old man not ten feet from me. I pursed my lips and shook my head so the hair covered my eyes, muttering some sort of hello as I past. I immediately decided to be take caution to the wind and choose less profane songs to perform lest someone else hear them again.
The trail wound up this mountain and down the next, and our breaks seemed longer and longer apart. But oh, the view from our climbs was spectacular. Our eyes reached out over unending views of buttongrass plains and dolerite mountaintops. This was Tasmania. With its yellow bellied parrots and wombats and me. Oh, so much to say and now that I look on it, this does nothing really to explain it. So I suppose I will relate the funnier bits and not the ones that were so emotionally striking.
But right now we have a house inspection tomorrow and I must go home and cook my darling Kieren and his girlfriend dinner because he's had a tough day at work and I do nothing but lounge around Hobart all day now.
The Austrians left today, and I must admit I was quite sad. We cried as we exchanged our last hugs and of course are making plans for this may when, things going well, I might head to Hungary and make a gneral trip around the continent to catch up with them.
I made them crepes and noted that I have, cooking-wise, improved quite dramatically over the semester. I've changed so much since I left, and I really wonder if my friends will be able to discern these things. I'm stronger, more humorous I suppose, quieter at times, and all sorts of things that bears the tattoo of Tasmania. But right now I'm happy listening to a beautiful Swedish song while typing here and will revel in all this lostness and inevitability of it. We've had a great time and we've grown and accepted the terms of engagement by which we came here. The buildup of relationships and that so many times come to a halt. I suppose like everything, that until we are all old and married that 99% of all the people we meet will turn into nothing more than memories. Quite horrid to believe that. The meories are great. But I'm excited to come home and to raft and to live. I am reminded of Reed and his scrawlings in high school, that one page of scraps that he gave to me full of Kerouac quotes and badly drawn penguins in his typical undiscernible handwriting: "dig the lostness".
After thirty fruitless minutes, I went up the road to look for a better hitching spot while Anna proudly stuck her sign out. As I came back I saw a perfect hitching scene before me unfold before me: the typical old blue beater pulling off to the side of the road and a hippyish old man reaching over to lift up the front door lock. I tossed our packs in the back and took my seat in the back, wedged in between a pile of junk and a happy shedding dog named Ghandi. We took off and thanked him profusely. He had apparently already been once around the block and had circled back just to pick us up.
"You won't get a pickup there, I'll take you a spot out of town where you'll get an easier hitch."
I sat in the back petting Ghandi as the blue beater grumbled along and he told us about his young days.
"I did the Overland Track once. Well, parts of it. I remember because that was about ten days before I was arrested..."
Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. I hug Ghandi and listen on. Of course his story took place in the 80's at the height of the Franklin Dam debate where masses of people were arrested for blockading the dam, a move that helped destroy the project to dam the river. I am once again at ease and happy with my situation, because he is one of the people who has allowed me to spend my Christmas on the Franklin River.
He never told us where he was going really, just gave us a vague "to the end of town" explanation so as we passed the city limits of Hobart, I began to suspect something. Sure enough, as he dropped us 20 k's later and waved goodbye, my suspicions were confirmed. He did a U-turn and went right back to where he came from. 30 minutes for two strangers. He had places to go, people to see, but had instead given us something entirely unconditional. We waved back in an unbelieving stare. Something that would have never happened in Southern California. But oh Tassie, how much I love you.
We put down our packs and proceeded to hold the same cardboard "Lake St. Clair" sign. We had both agreed that although it was only fair to split the sign holding duty up, our chances would be significantly increased if Anna held the sign and I kind of sat away from the highway. I opened my 25 (60 lb) kilo pack and cursed my laziness. We couldn't be stuffed bringing a stove, and therefore my meals would consist of canned food. Of course, at 450 grams a can, 6 days of food proved to be quite heavy to carry while walking 6 hours a day. I hungrily knocked out 450 g's of pears and pear juice, drinking the cool juice and reveled in the wonderful sunshine of the day. Here we were. Young, on our own, and adventurous, running off into the wild with everything on our backs. As I gulped down the last pieces of pear, a shiny blue Toyota pulled up past us, and out hopped two thirty year old men. Troy and Anthony were total bogans, decked out in racing shirts and the owners of accents that made backcountry Alabama folk sound like English professors. They were warm and friendly, and talked of cherry picking and apple picking. Troy had lived in Sydney for ten years but came back to New Norfolk (pop 1000) because he liked it so much better. Typical Australian lifestyle: Sydney or the bush. You can't have one without the other. They mentioned a local pub in New Norfolk, saying that they didn't go to it because it was "too rough for them". I pursed my lips and wondered what could this bar could possibly be like? But then again, New Norfolk had one of the worst penal colonies in Australia.
The rides became more and more personal, and our timing became faster and faster. Each road was smaller than the last and so the cars coming along it couldn't shrug us off as easily. Troy and Anthony let us off in a dusty patch of Highway A6 and we waited there again, Anna holding our Lake St Clair sign up as I lounged on my backpack and ate another tin. Within five minutes, I got a bigger shock than ever as another blue car pulled up in front of us. The middle age hippy was back in the city. Troy and Anthony were probably at a race track. And here was Grandma, a seventy year old lady in a blue spotted dress behind the wheel. And she was picking us up. As I threw my bag into the back seat I wanted to ask her if she was sure she wanted us to come along. this was definitely a ride I would not have received if Anna hadn't been hard at work on the side of the highway while I lounged around. Once we got in she explained
"I never pick up people anymore because its so dangerous nowadays but I thought I'd give it a try."
She took us forty k's along the Derwent Valley, passing hops farms and sheep pastures as she unravelled her life story as old women are apt to do. It just so happened that she knew a sheep farming friend of ours in Bothwell, and actually went to school with his dad. She poured on and on about her life, which was actually quite fascinating. She commuted two hours to work each day and only slept 3-4 hours a night. She was a vibrant lady, full of life and a sort of nature-y new age-y-ness that I warmed up to immediately.
"Someday I'm just going to walk along a river until I can't walk anymore, and then that will be my time. My nephew always said that, and that's what he did."
Grandma's vivacity left me inspired, and we smiled through the dust that her car kicked up as it scooted away, leaving us once again beside the highway. Two minutes later a land cruiser picked us up, explaining that this was not a good hitching spot and that he'd take us to a better one. He drove us 5 k's into town and like our first ride, turned right around and headed back in the direction from which he had come.
We got stuck in Hamilton for quite some time. Hamilton was one of these one-horse towns in which you good go into the grocery store and meet into the Mayor, the post office manager, the chief police officer and foremost citizen all in one person. We sat in the dust and heat and waited, thinking that if the fifth car picked us up, we might get picked up next Tuesday. Anna abandoned permanently holding the sign up since nobody was actually coming, reserving her energy for short, excited spurts when a car would come around the bend and we'd leap to our feet only to admit defeat as we craned our necks from right to left and watched it speed by.
After a good thirty minutes we were picked up by two young girls going all the way past Lake St. Clair. The older One had just taken a year off from uni (midwifery school) and she drove us all the way into the national park.
The sky opened up and poured forth a quite a deluge, and Anna and I huddled under the shelter with our first thoughts of preparation. Were our packs too heavy? Would we have enough food? We really had no clue what we were getting into, and so we marched off onto the track and proudly took photos, not smiling too obviously so we could look like worn, jaded, weatherbeaten hikers amongst all the day-tripper tourists gathering at the visitor centre. Oh, and were we tough. We were going to live it alone for 6 days. There was a definite air about "doing the Overland", and we revelled in the romance and beauty of it.
Then we put our packs on.
my 25 kilos (half my weight almost) dug into my back and reminded me that this was indeed no simple undertaking, and I resolved to eat more tins now and save my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for later. We hiked through the mud and and tree roots and dark myrtle forests until dark and wound up at a tiny hut on the shores of Lake St Clair. Anna was the first in and saw the rat warning sign. Immediately I was enlisted to put our packs out of danger, and was given the side of the bunks that the rats "would most likely crawl up", if they had an appetite for human fingers, hair, or toes.
In the morning the rat traps yielded 3 rats and a brushtail possum, who hid curled up in a frightened ball in the back of its cage and wouldn't come until we held it upside down.
We walk consisted of approxiamtely 7 hours of walking and was at times quite painful, the knees and shoulders screaming out in protest as we plodded along through mud and tree roots.
A funny thing occurred however. I walked ahead and began to sing to make the walk more enjoyable. Having exhausted my repetoire of fresh songs in New Zealand, I reached back into my past and called up The Bouncing Souls for some service, and began singing "Wish me Well". I sang out loud and unashamedly, bellowing the words to an audience of currawongs and pademelons who scattered as I came near.
However, this suddenly took a violent turn for the worse. I was three words into the chorus of "Kiss my ass, I hope you die" when I looked up from my feet and the trail to an old man not ten feet from me. I pursed my lips and shook my head so the hair covered my eyes, muttering some sort of hello as I past. I immediately decided to be take caution to the wind and choose less profane songs to perform lest someone else hear them again.
The trail wound up this mountain and down the next, and our breaks seemed longer and longer apart. But oh, the view from our climbs was spectacular. Our eyes reached out over unending views of buttongrass plains and dolerite mountaintops. This was Tasmania. With its yellow bellied parrots and wombats and me. Oh, so much to say and now that I look on it, this does nothing really to explain it. So I suppose I will relate the funnier bits and not the ones that were so emotionally striking.
But right now we have a house inspection tomorrow and I must go home and cook my darling Kieren and his girlfriend dinner because he's had a tough day at work and I do nothing but lounge around Hobart all day now.
The Austrians left today, and I must admit I was quite sad. We cried as we exchanged our last hugs and of course are making plans for this may when, things going well, I might head to Hungary and make a gneral trip around the continent to catch up with them.
I made them crepes and noted that I have, cooking-wise, improved quite dramatically over the semester. I've changed so much since I left, and I really wonder if my friends will be able to discern these things. I'm stronger, more humorous I suppose, quieter at times, and all sorts of things that bears the tattoo of Tasmania. But right now I'm happy listening to a beautiful Swedish song while typing here and will revel in all this lostness and inevitability of it. We've had a great time and we've grown and accepted the terms of engagement by which we came here. The buildup of relationships and that so many times come to a halt. I suppose like everything, that until we are all old and married that 99% of all the people we meet will turn into nothing more than memories. Quite horrid to believe that. The meories are great. But I'm excited to come home and to raft and to live. I am reminded of Reed and his scrawlings in high school, that one page of scraps that he gave to me full of Kerouac quotes and badly drawn penguins in his typical undiscernible handwriting: "dig the lostness".