Australians like the way Richard talks

The muesli was gone, as was almost all our food, which meant light packs; our water was low too, but we had enough to get to the next stop. Rachael resuscitated the fire, and we lingered in camp as the sun gained height, sipping hot chocolate and each eating a granola bar for breakfast. We would need only a few hours of walking to get to the next campsite.

Three kilometers brought us to the foot of the Heavitree Range, and we climbed to a saddle, dropped down onto the southern side, then turned west, walking through low open hills dotted with small blue mallee trees. By lunchtime we had reached Ellery Creek.

A dirt road comes into Ellery Creek, admitting visitors drawn by a large, permanent pool, Big Hole, that stops up a gap in the range. A small campground offers low wooden platforms, fire pits, and gas grills, as well as a bathroom with toilets but no sinks. The spigots of two large adjacent water tanks do little more than drip water, I suppose to discourage waste. Nonetheless, later in the afternoon Rachael and I managed to wash a few clothes; she filled a plastic shopping bag and did a proper job, while I settled on simply soaking and wringing out two shirts and two pairs of socks and a pair of underwear.

First, though, we retrieved our food box from a small locked closet in the bathroom building; Rachael had dropped off the box the week before. She used one of the grills to heat up mushroom soup for our lunch, and we spread peanut butter on thin, dense slabs of brown rye bread. A bevy of flies played around the rim of my bowl, landed on the bread and on my face--but I wasn't bothered, not too much. We had covered about 130 desert mountain kilometers in a week, settled in to carrying our belongings, to sleeping and eating out, and on this day we had reached a new food supply and a place with a few amenities, including the opportunity to clean up a bit. I was feeling good.

After lunch and laundry we repaired to Big Hole. A pair of ducks paddled about on one side, but soon disappeared into a tall stand of reeds. On the other side, big gum trees grew close to the edge, giving way where a cliff fell into the water. On the far side the pool narrowed into the gap. A sandy beach sloped down to our side of the pool, and Rachael was soon in the water, though not for more than five minutes. The pool was frigid, and while swimmers are common in summer they are apparently the exception in winter. Several groups of people came down while we sat beside the pool--a couple contingents of French, two men from Sydney on a tour of the Northern territory--but all were fully dressed in the sixtyish afternoon. They only laughed and shook their heads when asked if they planned to go in. I too had decided against the cold water, content instead to sit on the side in the sun and read a little Trollope. But I soon realized I would regret such timidity, and quickly, before I could change my mind, disrobed and ran and dove into the water. Just as quickly, and maybe more so, I turned around and clambered out of the shockingly cold water. Rachael chided me, "that hardly counts, you should have a swim." Oh, but it counted, and I'd had as much swim as I wanted. Drying in the sun felt wonderful.

At camp, Rachael chatted up a man from Alice, who was leading a small tour group at the end of its tour. He offered her some of the leftover food, including a loaf of white bread, a bag of tomatoes, a package of individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and a large pile of sliced ham wrapped in foil. Soon I was stuffing a large sandwich in my mouth, a treat that later effectively ruined my dinner (but it was corn soup, which I didn't like anyway). We had met another hiker, a man who had come in from the west soon after we arrived, and Rachael offered him some of our food bounty. He too had a big sandwich.

Later, this man, Richard, would share our fire. He was the only other American I met on the trail (not including the ex-pat Jo); most people were Australian, with a few British and western Europeans sprinkled in. As we went along, we would meet others who had met Richard, and everyone remembered him for his accent, which the Australians in particular found fascinating. Richard was from Tennessee and he spoke with a slow and distinctive southern drawl. I heard more than one person liken him to Forrest Gump, but Richard was a bit sharper.

Back in the States, he was a math professor at Tennessee Tech. He'd been teaching for twenty-six years and in three years would be eligible for retirement, which he planned to take. He said he wanted to see what it was like to travel in fall and winter and not just summer. In speaking of himself, he was reserved and circumspect, and we learned little more of his life in Tennessee. He did reveal that he had been to Australia four times, the first time to see a woman in Adelaide. Rachael asked about this woman, but only learned that Richard had met her at a conference in the States, and that on subsequent visits to Australia he had seen her but hadn't spent so much time in Adelaide as on the first visit. Twice he had taken seven weeks to hike the 1200-kilometer Heysen trail. "I just really liked it," he said, "so I did it again." That sounded a bit Gumpish to me, but I didn't say so out loud.

Just at dark, Krystal and Chris from Standley Chasm appeared. They had camped atop Brinkley Bluff three nights before, when we had been at Birthday Waterhole, and had been slowly gaining on us since. They shared our fire, as did Richard, and we all sat together long into the dark night. Chris gave an account of running the bulls in Pamplona, which he'd done a couple years past, but he downplayed the danger; he had worked at cattle stations in the Outback, and he said it was scarier getting in a truck and loading steers than it had been dashing from bulls in Spain. Krystal told us how Chris had recently won second place at the Camel Cup, an annual race in Alice Springs—though it had been his first time astride a camel. He had wanted her to do the "Honeymoon Race" with him, a relay in which the man rides the first half of the race, the woman the second. But she declined, saying she was not going to stand in the middle of the track with a herd of camels bearing down on her.

She and Chris had both been to the U.S., separately, Chris working on an itinerant agriculture crew of some sort in the Southwest, Krystal for International Student Volunteers, recruiting students at college campuses. University of Texas at Austin had been her favorite. They had left Sydney a couple months earlier, planning to move to Darwin, up on the north coast. But Alice had caught them for a time, and Chris had been working for a tour company, while Krystal did clerical work in town. The year before they had traveled for some time in India (where they had got married) and Nepal, and they and Rachael fell into conversation about the different places they both had visited, while Richard and I were content to sit off to the side and listen. Krystal, though, would occasionally draw us back in by asking questions about our own particular travels.

Late, before bed, Richard and Chris took turns pointing out constellations. In the cold night we all stood away from the dying fire and looked and pointed up and tried to make sense of the star-filled sky.