Ways to Come Home

by Kate Mathieson

  Would it be a good sense to have, to know when something in our lives has died?

  ‘Kate?’ Gift calls out.

  Last chance.

  Just weeks ago I would have said yes. I would have grabbed my camera too. Got on the truck. There would have been a sensation in my stomach, Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. But I would have swallowed it down. Shrugged it away. I would have thought, That is so dangerous, but everyone else is doing it and they look so happy.

  But something had seeped out of me in that delta, something has loosened its hold, let go.

  No. I don’t want to see a decapitated zebra.

  ‘No, you go,’ is all I say.

  The truck door bangs shut and they rev the engine all the way down the dirt track, shifting in and out of gears as though making a getaway.

  Then it is just me and the park and a few empty tents.

  What a strange feeling it is, this lightness. I sit down with a book and open the front cover and read it without interruption.

  The others come back full of stories of blood and gore. Talk around the dinner camp circles around the zebra head.

  ‘I could see bone.’

  ‘There were veins still pumping out blood.’

  ‘The smell! It was horrid. Decaying.’

  It is amazing they can eat the lump of beef broiled in brackish water for dinner.

  AFTER DARK we walk through the camp to a lookout that we’ve been told is a must-see. Walking along the darkened track, the only light spilling from head torches reveals an array of trees, rocky outcrops where snakes coil in the day.

  The viewpoint overlooks the Etosha pan, a vast, bare, open expanse of salt. The largest salt pan on the continent. Originally a lake, it dried up centuries ago when the Kunene River in Angola changed course, heading to the Atlantic Ocean. Over the years, the lake dried up, leaving behind an enormous salt pan over 130 kilometres long and 50 kilometres wide. In the language of the Ovambo tribe, Etosha means ‘great white place’.

  At night this particular place is said to be a busy location where animals gather to drink from a small watering hole. We’ve been told to expect giraffes, elephants, lions, warthogs, ostriches, rhinos and perhaps a leopard.

  The lookout is basic. A large outcrop of rocks. Someone has built a small shelter of wood above some of them and the front is gauzed with a sheet of wire, separating us from the water pan below.

  No chatter. A sign tells us. It scares the animals away. We scarcely breathe. The water lays still below. A small night light reflects off it, bright enough for us to see silhouettes, but all we can see are the trees. An hour passes. Then two. It grows desert cold and we start shivering. The rocks have left our backsides numb and I can feel pins and needles down my legs. Soon I won’t be able to feel a thing.

  Ant shuffles back about midnight to get her sleeping bag and a small pillow. She lies down on the rocks and tries to find a comfortable place. Candy is leaning against Bazz and he, with droopy eyes, is leaning against a rock. Both are almost asleep. My teeth chatter as the wind picks up.

  Legend has it that the formation of the Etosha Pan resulted from a small village being raided; everyone was slaughtered except the women. One of the women was so upset by the death of her entire family that she cried until her tears formed a massive lake that eventually dried up and left behind a huge white pan.

  At ten past one I feel like crying too. My pins and needles have become those nasty ones that really hurt. I start moving one leg, trying to get the blood flow going, but it feels rubbery and strange and when I stand up, it almost collapses right from underneath me.

  No. I don’t want to sit here all night freezing. No. I don’t care if I miss out on elephants and lions. Besides, who wants to see them through the veil of wire? This, us and them, delineation never feels right. I might as well be at a zoo.

  On the way back it’s almost pitch black. Alone, I hear the crack and sigh of the trees and branches. This would have scared me once, but now it comforts. I hold my hand out in front of me and can barely make out the edge of my fingers and the start of the night. As if by some transcendence, we’ve intermingled after all these months out here.

  I walk back over the rocky track, feeling the grasp of trees hit my shoulder. In some places the path is wide and sandy and in others I must navigate small crevices and turn sideways to slip through trees.

  I’ve left my head torch back in my tent; I relied on Ant’s as we moved up here. But I’ve learnt something out here – we don’t always need light to guide our way. Sometimes we can rely purely on instinct, to know where to put our feet, which pathway to tread. Carefully, slowly, step by step I make my way back without tripping.

  Back in the clearing it’s dark and full of tents. I can only just make them out from the twinkling of stars unobstructed by a canopy of trees. From memory, I make my way through the camp. I feel my way along a stone wall, and when I hit the wooden posts of a small alcove, near a towering tree, I find my tent.

  I tumble inside. It feels so soft and comfortable lying there on top of my sleeping bag. I leave the front of the tent slightly unzipped. I wrap my shivering body in the bag and nestle down for what remains of the night.

  But sleep is impossible when you’re this cold. I lay there thinking of the headless zebra and the full lion. I can’t choose sides. It’s impossible. I want the lion to eat, and the zebra to escape. But it doesn’t work like that.

  Years before I came to Africa I saw a documentary about predator and prey – gazelles and lions. Rabbits and cougars. Deer and leopards. It showed animals will always try their best to escape. To run for miles. Or jump in diagonal leaps to escape the snapping of hungry jaws. Prey will swim across a lake, or attempt to cross an ocean to avoid death. But once caught, the prey will freeze. It won’t struggle. It stops. Gives up immediately. It just knows. Death is inevitable.

  I look at the dark purple sky of Africa through the small tent window, scattered with stars. I’ve learned so much from being out here. To trust my instincts. To go where the water is. To avoid, if possible, losing my head. How to smell the sulphur in my life. And know when it’s time to walk away.

  THE SKELETON Coast heaves with seals and waves. Every space is taken. Penguins are on high alert, cruising the water’s edge, diving through the water only when they feel safe. The sky is full of white-flecked gulls.

  Seals lumber to the waves. When they find the frothy edges of the tide, they shimmy like silken dancers, graceful and sleek, riding through the rumbling waves. We get a flash of their gunmetal grey tails. A quick salute of a flipper, like they’re waving.

  The smell, all kinds of it, is rancid. Old fish carcass guts and small penguin poo, runny plops from passing pelicans and the fishy breath of seals. The midsummer sun comes and bakes it all like bread in the oven, the tops become crusty and hard. Gift suggests we have lunch here. Lunch. The smell hits me in the face no matter which way I turn. I am amazed that other people gulp down sausage sandwiches.

  I take the time to walk to the other end of the dusty road, along the cliff side where the earth drops away suddenly, a long twenty metres to the sand below. I leave the path and push through to the very edge where a lone line of metal chain was meant to prevent people from falling over. It would do little if that is what I am planning.

  Luckily, I’m not.

  The sky is full of squawks. Birds swoop and dart and soar, seagulls and pigeons. A pelican watches from the heights of a curved light, overhead, waiting for the moment to dart down and grab a fish for lunch. I’m sure to be covered in poo soon, but I don’t care. It all stinks and I might as well stink along with it.

  The entire shore, from the south of Angola down through Namibia, about 16,000 kilometres in total, is called the Skeleton Coast. Shipwrecks, old and rotting. Rusted hulls. Overturned in storms. More than a thousand boats found a sudden end here, and now lie creaking and fading under the heat. Years before the sailors and their shipwrecks, this place was an animal graveyard. A bay
of bleached white whale and seal bones and the men who cut and killed them for fat and fur. The future must have seemed dismal then. A cove of blood. A beach of bones.

  Have we not all felt like this at some time?

  Where it feels like nothing is moving, nothing is turning out how we wanted, how we expected. How stagnant that can be – viscous like honey, everything sticky and solid.

  All I wanted was to grow light and lift into the air. But I was trapped close to the earth. I slept, and ate, and moved through my life, a ghost in the corridor; on the couch; riding the train to the city. I was a chrysalis formed tight. It was a time of lying still, being bound; not breathing. Of letting others carry me. Moving then would have been dangerous, for greater things were occurring beneath the surface.

  I am transforming. Of course, now I see it. How could I not?

  I lie down on the grass and watch the sky, gulls dropping and circling, coming out of the waves with tiny silver fish flapping in their beaks.

  Sometimes it is necessary to lie there, like the bones and shipwrecks on the Skeleton Coast. And wait. Patiently.

  And sometimes it is necessary to open your wings, take to the wind, and move.

  ‘YOUR LIFE must be good,’ a Namibian man tells me at the markets, sitting behind his table of ripe pineapples.

  ‘Must it?’

  ‘To be able to leave for so long, to take a holiday here.’

  I nod.

  ‘And why Namibia?’

  ‘Because it’s so far away.’

  He laughs.

  ‘Why do you live here?’ I ask.

  He looks at me and pauses before he says, ‘Because that’s how life was designed for me.’

  Even though I didn’t need it, hadn’t a knife sharp enough, I buy a pineapple from him.

  ‘Two?’ he asks, smiling cheekily.

  ‘Yes, go on,’ and he gives me a bag for each.

  Already the scent of tropical juice wafts when I move.

  I’m about to thank him and move away, but then I turn and ask, ‘Do you like selling pineapples?’

  Aloud, it seems an absurd and almost obstinate question, but something in me needs to know. Was this better than sitting at a desk, in front of a screen, to earn all the money we could for the beautiful houses and cars we hurriedly bought?

  He laughs.

  ‘Of course, I enjoy it. I sit outside, I meet new people. I have enough to eat, for me, for my family. I am filled.’

  That night the sun sets magnificently. Blood red fills the sky. When is the last time I watched the entire act without moving? I can’t recall; I am always too busy making dinner, rushing home from work. In Africa, I have been too busy putting up the tent, or stoking the fire.

  Now I pause and watch as the membrane of night pushes the sun below the surface. The beauty of it almost brings me to my knees. My eyes sting with tears.

  Am I laughing? Crying? Is this what it feels like to be smashed open with love and awe?

  Under the glance of stars I wash the pots, the kettle still warm from the fire. I unfold my sleeping bag in seconds – an easy routine. Tent up and standing in minutes. Could do it in my sleep.

  We sip hot chocolate from a powder boiled in water over coals until our eyes droop and our happy, weary bodies call for bed.

  I don’t want to be inside tonight, not even under the thin cover of a tent. I want to be outside, under the stars. I want to feel the soft drift of night upon my cheeks. To watch the moon sail across the sky.

  The darkness of night’s embrace enfolds me. Everyone else is asleep. As I lie under the stars, I smile at the sky. My heart has never been so full. I’m beaming, too. It’s more than I’ve ever wished for.

  When I started this journey, nothing would open for me – chestnuts, doors, answers. But now, everything is opening. It feels like a spring breeze. I am filled.

  THE ROADS have changed. They are sealed, all of them, with multiple lanes. There are billboards for radio stations and churches. There are tunnels with electric lights. Petrol stations have flashing signs and a queue backing out the driveway. Inside their fridges are switched on and they work. Lemonades are cold. Pies are hot. Children have shoes.

  I slide open the truck window at the traffic lights. (I haven’t seen one in months.) Next to the road two young boys are playing soccer in the dust – with a real soccer ball. One scores and takes off his shirt and hollers and whoops like he’s just won the World Cup. The other one laughs loudly. I smile at them.

  One waves. I wave back.

  How could I ever leave?

  The heat drives an intensity between us. We sit silently, on the edge of something, as the truck rumbles through cities and suburbs, unbroken slopes, terraced vineyards, houses with balconies.

  We pass vineyards and fruit orchards, grass that shifts in the breeze, manicured hedges. Rivers run, irrigating the banks, lush and fresh. It smells of meadow.

  After two more hours, we are deep in South Africa rolling towards Stellenbosch. And today we are doing something remarkably suburban. We are going wine tasting.

  Girls in pretty frocks and boys in their best shorts line up to be guided through the underground cellar filled with deep vats of wine. The day is bright. Blue sky stretches like reams of silk above us.

  Inside, everything smells of earthiness and fermentation. The cellar walls, deep and wet. We take many winding staircases past barrels and bottles and more barrels until it feels like we’ve found middle earth. Shelves and racks and lines of wine bottles. Full and stoppered, ripening.

  Back into daylight, we sit by a fountain at wrought-iron tables and heavy chairs and listen as the sommelier explains the fine art of matching grapes with food. We sample cheeses – crumbly cheddars and sharp blues, feta with raspberries, creamy cheese with apricot, a sharp pecorino. The blue is a standout, the sharpness smudged perfectly with a mouthful of shiraz. With full bellies, we sit in the sun with our last tipple as the moon appears above the glow of sunset.

  Africa smells of smoke. The deep wood smoke of a campfire, rubbish and tyres burning in a heap. Candles at night when the electricity won’t work. Bonfires on a beach. Flames shooting to the sky. Matches struck against a box. The thin plumes of smoke from cheap hand-rolled cigarettes. The smell of smoke is gathered in every crease of my clothes.

  Meanwhile, Stellenbosch smells of crisp white chardonnays (pineapple and passionfruit) and spicy gewurztraminers (sweet gardenia blooms); cheddar cheese crumbled on a white china plate. It smells of deodorant and perfume and hair-sprayed ponytails. Of cleanliness and grass cuttings. Just like Australia.

  It doesn’t smell like smoke.

  We are in houses and buildings. Civilisation is so close we can reach out and touch it. I feel strange finding a clean toilet with a door. A room cool with air conditioning. A waiter wearing a black vest and a pressed white shirt.

  I count the days we have left until my re-entry into life. Four. Am I ready to go back?

  Returning must be calculated with precision. Like an astronaut’s re-entry to Earth, I must know the right time to resurface.

  A breeze ruffles the canopy of trees. They shiver and the sun drops slightly. Ant brings an especially lovely sauvignon blanc to the table, and in the afternoon light we toast it to the mountains. Ailie carries over more plates of cheese – nutty rinds, mushroom bries, silky camembert, vintage cheddar – and we take too many photos. The cheese goes down quickly, as does the wine.

  ‘Did we make it all this way?’ Ant says as the sun begins to set.

  It casts a mellow light across the mountains opposite. Mountains that could take years to explore, to dig up, to discover. Around us, perfectly terraced hills grow grapes that will one day fill someone else’s wine glass.

  ‘Yes, we did,’ I nod.

  Ant holds her glass to the sky, as though expecting God to lean down with his wine and clink glasses.

  ‘Let’s drink one more glass,’ says Ant.

  We do. And stars begin to appear like someone
is painting them perfectly, one by one, on the dome of the sky.

  AT THE long table under South African skies, I’m sitting between Tiff and Ant, facing Bazz and Candy. Further down, Scott and Steve are passing out drinks. Tonight we’re camping in our tents. I’m relieved to be away from the old, rusty springs and stained mattresses of Stellenbosch and her air-conditioned vineyards. I’m back laying my head on the mattress of the earth.

  I’m eager to light a fire and boil the kettle. To shave skins off a carrot. To dice an onion for dinner. We do and eat a light vegetable soup with some old brown rolls, wrapped in foil and plunged deep into the coals until they toast. It tastes heavenly. For dessert, delectable cooked bananas in brown sugar – all the things that remind us of living in Africa these past few months.

  The chatter rises. More beer and water arrives. Scott is wondering where he’ll go next – Pakistan, Afghanistan, India? Candy is saying it’s probably time to start a family. Ant is smiling at everyone and saying, ‘I love you, possums.’

  Tiff has tears in her eyes. ‘I’ll miss you all,’ she sniffles.

  There are hugs all around. And kisses. And we’re all saying, ‘Can you believe it’s over?’

  After dinner we silently glide towards the edge of the camp where a squat, stone fence separates the grass, and us, from a wide river below. We sit there, all fifteen of us, dangling our legs over the stone fence into the darkness below. The moon, large and round and full, casts a luminescent spectral light across the grassy mountain opposite. Someone points out Orion. Someone else says, ‘Listen to the water.’

  If I get really quiet and listen past the river, past the cows mooing somewhere in the distance, I can hear breathing. I can hear us all breathing. I can hear the noise we all sit there making. Together. No-one moving.

  I glance down at the telling brown scars on my wrist and perhaps it is the moonlight, but somehow they seem to have disappeared. When everyone else scuttles into their tents for the night, I lie on my back in the soft grass and watch the sky. The Milky Way is luminescent and in between her stars, a smattering of asteroid dust as though Van Gogh has been up there for hours painting the whirling night.