The Backpacking Housewife

by Janice Horton

  Then, when she finally settles herself down to begin digging her pit, the sandy soil and the scent of damp forest begins to fly in all directions from her thrashing thwacking front flippers.

  ‘Okay, she’s gonna be a while. Let’s check the rest of the beach,’ George whispers.

  We creep away. My heart is racing with excitement. I feel so lucky to be witnessing what looks to me like a miracle happening. A turtle, who is perhaps even older than I am, has come ashore on this moon-drenched beach to the very place that she herself was born to give life to her own babies. I’m so moved by it all that I’m almost in tears.

  Further along, towards the end of the beach, near to the big, round, weather-hewn rocks, I switch on my torch to illuminate the place with red light and I see another set of furrows in the sand coming from the water line. ‘Look! More turtle tracks!’

  We follow the deep tracks to where another green turtle is heaving herself towards the top of the beach and again we watch and wait until she has settled herself down to nest.

  ‘You know, Lori, we’re gonna have to move this one,’ George whispers to me. ‘It’s way too close to where the poachers come in.’ He turns his red flashlight to where the dark water ebbs and flows against the rocks that might disguise a thieving poacher’s boat.

  And then, I remember, aside from all the excitement, that we are primarily here to defend these turtles. We are their first, their last, and their only line of defence against their predators.

  Going back to the first turtle, we find her deeply entrenched in her pit and starting to lay her eggs. George explains to me how, once they start to lay, they can’t stop and they seem to enter a trancelike state. He tells me that if we are really quiet and respectful around her, then she probably won’t even notice that we are here, while we go about our work identifying her.

  David passes me a notebook and a camera and tells me it will be my job to record and identify this turtle and her nest. I make a note of which palm trees she had chosen to lay her eggs between, and then I creep about taking some close-up photos of her, making sure to get clear images of all her markings, both on her head and on her enormous shell, which I also measure. It’s 1.2 metres across. Enormous!

  Then, leaving David to monitor proceedings, I follow George up the beach back to the second nesting turtle, where I repeat the identification process. This time though, as George needs to mark the exact location of this nest so he can return to move it later, he attaches a long green piece of string to the trunk of the nearest tree and feeds the length of string into the pit with the eggs. ‘This string,’ he explains in a whisper while the turtle is in her trance, ‘will help us find the nest later. Because, when she’s done, she’ll do such a great job of camouflaging that it will be very difficult to know where it is.’

  Several hours and many more nesting turtles later, George and David and I are sat on the beach watching a mother turtle leaving her perfectly camouflaged nest site to drag her heavy and exhausted bulk back into the sea. I feel incredibly emotional.

  My eyes are filled with tears as I watch the turtle making her way slowly past me.

  She’s so close to me but she is totally focussed on returning to the sea and trusting that in sixty days – or in two full moons’ time – her babies will be born and able to follow her down this beach that they in turn might one day, in decades to come, return to, to start the whole process over again. Then David says something to make me stop and think about this passage of time.

  ‘I’ve decided, I’m going to do my very best to come back here in thirty years, in the hope that the turtles I see coming ashore will be the ones I helped to the sea as hatchlings.’

  ‘Oh, that’s such a lovely idea, David,’ I say to him, wishing I could do the same thing.

  George agrees. ‘Yeah, that would be so cool. Let’s do it!’

  The two lads shake hands to seal their pact.

  George laughs. ‘To think, we’ll be really old by then. We’ll both be fifty-two!’

  And both seem completely oblivious to my own dilemma.

  If I could possibly return here in three decades’ time, I’d be seventy-seven!

  Chapter 9

  Koh Phi Tao (ii)

  Early the next morning, after a night without very much sleep thanks to the world’s loudest bullfrog living in our bathroom, I roll exhausted out of my hammock. But, the moment I put my foot on the floor, I’m racked with intense pain. It’s so immediate and so painful that it feels like someone’s just driven a hot metal stake right through my foot.

  I hop over to a bench seat by the window, and sit down and peel off the dressing to find my foot is now horribly infected. This is the one thing I’ve been warned about – so many times – and the one thing I’ve been trying to avoid. I now need something more than an antiseptic cream to treat this injury now or I could be risking blood poisoning.

  As it’s still quite early, and Marielle, who it seems can actually sleep through the bullfrog noise, is still stirring in her hammock, I hop down to the communal area to go through the first aid box for something I can use. It’s here that I see Ethan having his breakfast alone.

  Today he’s wearing another pair of baggy shorts and a bright loose-fitting shirt with a yellow banana pattern on it. He gives me a wave and a smile and gets up from his seat in concern when he sees I can’t put my foot down. I explain my problem and ask if there are any antibiotics available. I feel terrible using so many of their medical supplies and promise to somehow replace them.

  ‘No problem. We have plenty. We’ll run out of beer before we run out of antibiotics,’ he tells me, reassuringly.

  I sit down with a box of sterile dressings and alcohol washes and grit my teeth.

  Ethan pulls up a chair to sit opposite me. ‘You need any help? I’m a trained paramedic.’

  Is there anything this man isn’t qualified to do?

  ‘Sure, thanks very much.’

  He takes my foot and rests it on his lap. ‘On a scale of one to ten how bad is the pain?’

  ‘Nine…’ I say, without any hesitation.

  ‘Oh, that’s bad…’ he says, snapping on a pair of latex gloves and starting to gently work a swab against the layer of creamy pus that’s now covering my open graze.

  ‘Ouch! And I’ve been so careful about cleaning it and trying to keep it dry,’ I wail.

  ‘Sorry, Lori. But this is a very nasty infection. It must be eviscerated properly or we’ll never get it to heal. That’s the problem with all this tropical heat and humidity, it’s so easy for any cut to get infected and if you’re not careful, it can lead to sepsis.’

  I try to be brave but every dab feels like my foot is being hit with a hammer and every wipe is like being slashed with a shard of glass. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

  It seems to take Ethan forever to completely clean my wound and to apply an antibiotic powder. He gives me a course of antibiotics pills too and some painkillers.

  Soaked in sweat and shaking with stress from all the pain, I thank him for his care but then I doubt I can stand up. Seeing my paling face, he helps me to my feet. I lean into him for support. He feels so strong and steady, like a rock, against my weakness.

  ‘There. All done. Dr Ethan prescribes a hammock for you today, young lady.’

  ‘But I can’t. I must help. That’s why I’m here after all. The very least I can do this morning is sit on those rocks at the end of the beach and put any poachers off coming ashore.’

  Ethan shakes his head, laughing. ‘My dear mermaid, with that pretty face and that lovely long blonde hair of yours, you are far more likely to lure them in!’

  I blush furiously, seeing that the others are now having breakfast not too far away from us and suspecting they will have overheard our conversation and Ethan’s flattering compliment.

  ‘Besides, it’s my turn to cook both lunch and dinner today,’ I retaliate.

  Ethan shakes his head again. ‘Sorry Lori, but you’ve got to keep your f
oot elevated. I don’t think you realise quite how serious it is to get an infection out here. It can be life-threatening. I’m not joking. If I don’t see any improvement in your foot over the next two days, you will have to be taken off the island to the nearest hospital for treatment. Two days. Now go and put your foot up. I’ll bring you breakfast in your hammock. It’ll be the island version of breakfast in bed.’

  I do as I’m told. I hop over to a hammock feeling a little intimidated by his warning.

  I also feel totally useless and something of a burden. So much for helping to save turtles.

  Ethan soon brings me over some fruit and cereal and coffee on a tray.

  I smile at him sheepishly. ‘Thank you. You are being very kind.’

  ‘Yeah, I know and it’s fine. Don’t worry. Dr Ethan is going to make you all better.’

  While everyone’s busy, I lie in my hammock and try to read, but I’m constantly distracted by all the goings on at the camp and on the beach and in the hatchery. From my hammock, I have a good view over all the procedures. Ethan has spent most of his morning patrolling the beach with Marielle, after which he fixed part of the roof on Turtle HQ. Now he’s busy servicing diving equipment on a bench outside the dive hut. He’s sitting in the shade, wearing just his baggy surfing shorts. His lively looking banana-pattern shirt has been discarded, leaving him bare-chested. He’s concentrating hard on the task in hand.

  He is impressively toned. I’m sure he must work out to have a body like that at his age.

  I can see George and David are transferring the second nesting turtle’s eggs from last night into the hatchery. I watch, fascinated by how patiently, methodically and carefully they handle the soft, white, papery, ping-pong sized eggs, making sure they put them into the new nest at precisely the same depth (about an arm’s length) and in exactly the same order that the mother had originally laid them. Then, once they are done, having loosely replaced all the sand and placed the cone over the top over the site, they disappear inside Turtle HQ to record the details of the new nest.

  When they come out again sometime later they come straight over to me.

  ‘Hey, Lori. Of all the nesting turtles that came ashore last night, we have positively identified all but one of them from the database. That means, the first one we all saw was a first-timer and Ethan says you get to name her.’

  ‘Me? Really? What an honour!’

  I look gratefully at Ethan and he glances up from his work to smile at me.

  I’m so thrilled, I’m jabbering with excitement in my hammock, trying to come up with a suitable name for her. ‘Erm … let me think?’

  ‘If it helps to narrow it down for you, we already have most girls’ names beginning with T and all those associated with the teenage mutant ninja turtles,’ George tells me.

  ‘Well, I did notice, on the top of her head she has a curved mark that looks like a smile. And, as meeting her has given me so much happiness, I’d like to name her Happy!’

  ‘Happy it is!’ George announces, heading back into Turtle HQ to record my decision.

  The next hour or two is quiet. Lunchtime comes and goes but I’m not feeling hungry.

  The afternoon is baking hot with hardly a breeze coming across the beach. There’s not a cloud in the bluest of skies and the sun is intense. Even the jungle seems to have been silenced by the cruel pulsating afternoon heat and I’m alternating between reading and napping while everyone keeps asking me in passing if I’m okay and offering me water.

  With most of the chores now done and in respite between the shifts, Laura and Jodie have gone snorkelling in the lagoon with George and David. Marielle, having cooked lunch for us again, is now doing something in the dive equipment room. Ethan is sitting in the shade on the wooden steps of Turtle HQ alternatively strumming his guitar and jotting in a notebook.

  He’s concentrating hard and he looks like he might be composing a song.

  I enjoy hearing him sing. His voice is soft and smooth and he sounds a bit like Jack Johnson.

  Back in my shady hammock, I’m sweaty and sticky and sweltering and feeling seriously miffed that I can’t go and cool down in the sea. I curse under my breath. I reason that if I hadn’t cut my foot, I could be out snorkelling or diving right now and enjoying myself. Ethan had even said that I could have done my advance diver certification here.

  It’s easy to feel sorry for myself right now.

  But then I remember where I am – on a sun-drenched tropical island in a hammock – and I think about life and the weather back home in the UK, where it is no doubt freezing cold and dark and much more miserable than here. I remind myself of my blessings, and how if I hadn’t cut my foot that I probably wouldn’t be here at all because I’d have just carried on with my plans to go to the other islands instead of coming here with Laura and Jodie.

  I would have missed out on all of this and seeing with my own eyes the miracle of nesting turtles coming ashore in the moonlight to lay their eggs. An experience I will undoubtably treasure for the rest of my life. I really should trust in fate and remember that things always happen for a reason.

  Suddenly Ethan appears like a handsome mirage in the steamy air and hands me a cold beer.

  ‘Here, I brought you something for the pain,’ he tells me and gives me a sexy wink.

  I’m confident he’s not at all aware it was a sexy wink. It’s just my interpretation.

  I thank him for the beer and feel myself blush while safe in the knowledge that my face is already so red and sweaty that he can’t possibly tell that he has embarrassed me again.

  I watch him walk away and I can’t help but admire what I see.

  My eyes are fixed for a moment on his muscular mahogany-tanned body, the broad width of his shoulders, the way his back tapers down to the attractive round firmness of his bum in those surf shorts. Not only is he a turtle-saving hero, a dive instructor, a Mr Fix-It, a marine biologist and a trained paramedic, he’s also a talented songwriter and musician and a fun, friendly, helpful, incredibly good-looking man. Plus, he’s shown such care and concern over attending to my infected foot that, even during the agony of the ‘evisceration’ (as he called the cleaning of my stinking pus-filled appendage), I couldn’t help but close my eyes and enjoy his warm hand firmly gripping my lower leg.

  Ever since my crush on pretty-boy Jack on Koh Lanta, I’ve had a heightened awareness of my reawakened libido, which I must confess is still troubling me. I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have an active imagination and a rampant sex drive at my age.

  And I can’t help but wonder where the heck it’s been hiding all this time?

  Perhaps Charles is to blame? He was always just a quick fumble and a few thrusts under the bedcovers kind of guy. I think, to be honest, that’s why I was so shocked at seeing him with Sally. Not that any wife wouldn’t have been traumatised at catching her husband in bed with her best friend, but what had really stunned and angered me was not what they were doing but how they were doing it. They were both going at it like they were at a bloody rodeo. Maybe it’s me, perhaps I’m to blame? I haven’t been interested in sex for years.

  But surely, in those early years of our relationship and marriage, there must have been something about Charles to make me fancy him and want to be with him physically?

  But now that something, whatever it was, completely escapes me.

  Now, I can only wonder how I never realised a lot sooner that I was married to someone with so little in the way of charm, intelligence, personality, or attractive physical attributes?

  I can’t help but to compare him (rather badly) to Ethan. Ethan is interesting and intelligent and he looks in really good shape. His lifestyle as a scientist and a diver and a world traveller obviously keeps him in peak physical condition. Whereas Charles spends most of his working day at his desk or driving around in his car and his evenings asleep in front of the TV. Charles looks every single one and more of his years, with his long and lanky untoned body an
d his cracked teeth and thinning hair. So, all I see in him is a cheating and soon to be ex-husband, who now seems very boring and ordinary.

  I’m starting to believe that I’ve had a lucky escape from him.

  I while away another woozy hour in the hammock thinking about Ethan.

  The beer and the painkillers are definitely working. I close my eyes pretending to nap. I say pretending, because I’m now in a full-blown romantic fantasy. In my imaginary world, Ethan comes to my room with my dinner on a tray, after he has insisted on my bed rest. Unlike in real life, where I’m cohabiting with Marielle and my room is dark and sparse, in this particular daydream, I’m in a large, light-filled room and I’m lying on a big soft king-size bed, surrounded by pillows and cushions and fine white sheets and a billowing voluminous silk mosquito net. As Ethan enters my imaginary boudoir with a quiet knock, the early evening sun is streaming in from the large open window making the room look steamy, and I’m wearing a La Perla negligée. He sets down the tray and asks me sympathetically how I’m doing. I wave a hand dismissively, saying something about how I’m trying to be brave, and he tells me with a sexy wink, ‘I brought you something for the pain…’ and then he opens a bottle of wine and…

  I suddenly hear Marielle yelling my name.

  ‘Hey Lori! Venez ici … we have baby turtles in the hatchery!’

  My eyes snap wide open and I literally fall out of the hammock in my scramble to be there.

  I hop over to the hatchery to see dozens of tiny almost-black, fully-formed baby turtles, emerging from the sand and flapping their four little flippers like they’re wind-up toys.

  Marielle is sitting in the sand right next to the nest, the cone removed, and she is picking up each of these flapping adorable creatures and putting them into a large clean bucket. She’s ignoring my squeals of delight and coos of joy because she is counting in the newly-born babes.