Lunch and flies at Trephina Gorge

In the morning early I sat alone on the back patio and used The Field Guide to Central Australia to armchair botanize. Gai and Rachael stood in the kitchen in their pajamas talking about work. Porcupine and weeping spinifex are dominant grasses in the region. Termites are the "miniature grazing animals of the spinifex grassland," doing work akin to that accomplished by wildebeest on the African veldt or caribou on the Canadian tundra. On high ridges and slopes in the West MacDonnell Range I walked by endless mounds of spinifex, and by many small termite towers, raggedly pointy and deep red monoliths two and three feet tall, rising up among the jumbled rocks.

Beyond the backyard fence, a quarter mile distant, the first sun lit a long and low red ridge--its form one that thousands of years since had inspired the local aborigines to make the caterpillar their most venerated dreamtime creature. In the yard, black and white magpie larks picked in the hard grass and squawked like blue jays. A flock of noisy galahs, pink and gray cockatoos, passed overhead. The neighbor dogs whined and barked.

I walked into town to Outback E-Mail, and later met Rachael at the Woolworth's grocery store, which was packed with Saturday shoppers. At a newsstand I leafed through a copy of The New Yorker ($12!), and realized that I'd neither read nor heard anything about the U.S. presidential election for a whole month. I've had no news, really, not of the States especially, and not much of Australia. Though before going on the Larapinta walk I did watch some Pope coverage; he'd come to Sydney for World Youth Day. After recuperating from jet lag for three days at a palatial mansion, and taking contemplative strolls over the extensive grounds, he had met his public, first reviewing a endless number of military and civic groups. An overhead camera, perched in a helicopter, showed him being walked over a great parade ground, dressed all in white of course, a little hunched man weaving obediently among the reviewee contingents, led by an upright man in uniform. When he finally reached the stage Cardinals kissed his ring, as did lesser Catholic lights, while the non-Catholic clergy assembled for the occasion contented themselves with slight obeisances.

In the afternoon Rachael and I drove out to the East MacDonnell Range, east of town, eighty kilometers to Trephina Gorge. She lay out lunch on a sticky picnic table, while I waved at the squadrons of flies. We (Rachael and I, not the flies--well, yes, the flies too) shared leftover pizza, crackers and white cheddar cheese and hummus, cashews, stuffed grape leaves, sprouts, apple and pear juice, elderflower cordial--I ate and ate. On the trail over the last weeks I ate little and was contented. I seem to have lost weight, maybe as much as ten pounds. In the couple days back in town I've been much hungrier and have eaten two or three times as much at each meal, though I've not been nearly as active. Strange, though I suppose there's some explanation. Or maybe just habit kicking back in.

We walked up along the rim of the rocky gorge for a couple kilometers, and eventually descended to the sandy bottom. Upstream, just beyond a wire fence, a large red cow stood in the shade of a gum tree. We headed downstream, adding our tracks to the myriad that had already churned up the white sand. We came to a small waterhole, green and dank and smelly, with bees playing around the sandy edge. The water had been much higher on Rachael's last visit, a few month's previous. It's the same story all over the MacDonnells--rain has not come, and waterholes have evaporated and receded considerably.

Back at the picnic ground, Rachael lay down on a table for a rest, while I set off on another short loop walk, up to top of a hill overlooking the gorge. With no wind, the flies had their way with me. Walking fast up the steep track didn't help at all. They were worse than they've been on any day of the trip, large in number and persistent in their demands for human moisture. I thought I'd gotten somewhat used to the flies, which are motivated, bold, and fast. This means that they will not only land but walk briskly the length of one's lip or cheek, delve patiently into eyeballs and nostrils, ride a sunglass lens quite a distance (the last is more distracting than annoying). And yet they are well able to avoid a swat. One can acclimate to a bit of this, but today was excessive.

I walked to the top, then descended on the far side into a ravine, where numerous shrubs were flowering--silver cassia with small yellow flowers, rock fuchsia bush with violet. I collected samples of those, and of a spiky plant poetically named dead finish. Apparently this is the plant one would turn to absolutely last in a food or water emergency (some mallee, on the other hand, a family of small gum trees, are quite handy in that a bucket of water can be had from a fifteen foot section of roots; similarly, in the roots of the witchetty bush, long and fat white grubs can be found--the aborigines ate these delicacies raw or cooked).

Back down in the river bed, I spotted a dingo, walking unconcernedly up the trail on the other side. At first I thought it might be some one's dog, but no. I followed fifty yards behind for a few minutes until it heard me and looked over its shoulder. It appeared surprised and alarmed by my sudden presence, and dashed off into the brush.

At home in the evening, we watched a film, Rabbit-Proof Fence. Based on a true story, the film is set in 1931 in Western Australia, and dramatizes the experience of three young girls who were part of the "Stolen Generations." From the 1920s right up to 1970, "half-caste" children were forcibly removed from their aboriginal families and sent to boarding schools to be de- and acculturated, and to be trained to serve as domestics. The idea was to "save" the white side of these kids from an aboriginal fate, and, over the next generations of marriage with whites, to reassert a white color. The film shows how the three young girls, two sisters and a cousin, ran off from the Moore River School, and made their own way a thousand kilometers (or miles?) back north to their home and mothers. For much of the way they followed the rabbit-proof fence that had been strung across the country to protect agriculture.

One night beside a campfire on the Larapinta Trail, Rachael and the young couple we camped with several times, Chris and Krystal, had named Australian movies that I must see. Rachael has rented several of them in the afternoon, but we'll see how far we get. I head for Melbourne and my flight home in three days.