We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 111
SUMMER 2007
ESSAY
Suzanne Rumney
Girl on the Ditch
It’s Day Five. A rest day. And just as well. My thigh muscles are coming off the bone. Steep, sustained descents from a 1000-metre ridge will do that. Also my left hand got between a raft and a hard place during a rapid. Yep, a rock. Three fingers have the girth and colour of gourmet sausages and enough skin has been ruched off to graft the hole where a two-centimetre splinter was cut out of my leg. Previously undocumented muscles are now squealing for recognition. Hauling rafts over boulders the size of caravans will do that. But I am not complaining. Actually I’m not allowed to complain. This is the Franklin River. The river guides refer to it as the Ditch. It’s one of the last wild rivers left in the world. Its name is uttered in tones of awe conjuring up images of heroic exploits performed by hard-muscled men. Its waters can rise five metres in six hours and become a raging torrent. Its nooks and crannies can wedge unwary feet. People drown on this river. The sherry topaz current swirling past is not water. It’s pure testosterone. For that’s what will get us down the rapids until we can relax on the calmer pools and reconnect with our feminine side. Our guides are superheroes. They leap sinkholes in a single bound. They spiderman up cliffs pulling their rafts behind them. If we punters don’t get over left or right quickly enough, we are tossed into position like a river bag. Guide 1 is whippet thin. He has no buttocks to speak of but his biceps bulge. Maybe it’s technique, a long learning curve over twenty years of getting to know every log, rapid and rock on this river in all its moods, but this guy can stick to slick rocks like a limpet, lean perilously over a sieve of logs and heave a stuck raft off a rock and back into the fray all by himself. A raft that has been tugged ineffectively for several minutes by four of us punters, I might add. There’s no fat on this guy. Like the polished quartzite corridors of Irenabyss, the narrow gorge we pass through to reach our first campsite, he has been scoured down by the river to smooth essential rock. Oh, and he doesn’t have much to say either.
Guide 2 is more chatty. He has no calf muscles to speak of but his quads bulge. He came up the mountain with us to the ridge just below Frenchmans Cap. When G1 says that G2 would give us an hour or so and then catch us up, I snigger a little and quietly mouth, ‘Yeah, right’. We know that we are soft-bellied punters but there must be some limits to our humiliation. I lead the way up the track as fast as I can. The first part is slippery steep and we use tree branches and trunks to haul ourselves up. Soon we are separated into three distinct groups of fitness level. Even before we reach the first official snack stop, G2 is alongside. The bastard is barely breathing. We wait for the others and wolf down scroggin and chocolate. G2 points out the highest mountain in Tasmania, Mount Ossa, and other peaks along the famous Overland Track that climbs over the top of Tasmania. He knows them well. I mention that I too have walked the Overland, and climbed Mt Ossa, but my words float out unacknowledged into the soft breeze.
We can smell smoke. I look down at the narrow cleft of the Franklin churning itself through steep mountains and wonder about wildfire. Would it leap across midway down the hill and leave us safe on the river? Or would we be boiled alive like crayfish in a pot? Uncharitably, I hope the smoke is coming across the strait from Victoria. It drifts above valleys, giving a watercolour edge in mountain blue to wave after wave of ridge. A 270-degree sweep takes in Mount Ossa to the north and swings around to Macquarie Harbour in the southwest. There is not one human structure to be seen. In front is a rocky dome. Like all soon-to-be conquered mountains, the majestic silhouette of a distant Frenchmans Cap is sadly reduced up close. With only 400 metres more to climb, it is now just a rounded hump covered in white rocks.
I guess doing it the hard way in a five-day return bushwalk would give it greater respect. It’s the other mountains, peak after peak, stretching in every direction that lure the lens of my camera. I now do a 360, spiralling out in ever widening circles until with the eye of an eagle I look back down on myself, a small black dot on a ridge with mountains rippling away to the horizon. The fragility of my own existence in the middle of this immense wilderness suddenly jolts me. I sit down in a bonsai garden and eat a chunk of Cole’s chocolate cake. The world at my feet takes on a new interest. Tiny alpine ground-cover with star-shaped flowers, waxy leaves and orange berries. Tough little daisies with petals that crunch. And just below, tea-coloured Lake Nancy nestling into the crook of the mountain’s arm.
The steep slope back to the Ditch is hard on the knees. They start their trembling halfway down and thigh muscles work hard to control their spasticity. We slip and slide down the last 100 metres to the moss-covered rocks of the stream below our forest campsite. We punters agree that going down is harder than going up. Weary, muddy and scratched, we stumble in to lunch. G2 is already chopping up vegetables. Going up or down didn’t seem to make much difference to him. A few days later G1 tells me that G2 has done the Overland many times. Ah, that explains his fitness, I think. Keen bushwalker. But I’m not getting it. G2 doesn’t walk the Overland, G1 explains, he runs it. And what’s more, he has won the race a few times. That’s 83 km of running over the top of Tasmania, up and down mountains, along duckboards, through boggy bits and up rocky trails. What took me four days to walk, he has done in seven hours and forty minutes.
We mere mortals have just done a five-hour walk up and down to the ridge below Frenchmans. A leisurely lunch and a little siesta in the cool shade of the myrtle and sassafras trees would be very nice. But, no, this is boot camp for punters. We have to break camp and there are another three hours of rafting and one long portage before this day on the river is going to end. And, for me, a little matter of having a splinter dug out of my leg. It snapped off below the surface and G1 has to make a crosscut with a thick needle before tweezers can pull it out. This part of the river is reflectively serene and there’s no rumble from the rapids to muffle my vocal response. By the time the smooth piece of wood, almost two centimetres long, comes out of my calf, I’m feeling nauseous and G1 seems irritated. Later that night G2 makes a barbed comment about my lack of bravery. The next day when my fingers are jammed between the raft and a rock in the middle of a rapid, I barely squeak.
It’s midsummer and the water level on the upper section is low. Escapees from the corporate world, with the odd doctor, fireman and lecturer thrown in, many of us have survived hostile takeovers, psycho bosses and downsizing, but nothing, not even six months working out at the gym with a personal trainer, has prepared us for the physical hardship on this river. Portage. It doesn’t sound any better when pronounced with a French accent. Portage is just pure grunt work. The guides don’t mention it much before the trip. We know there will be some but nothing prepares us for the sheer effort required to push, shove, haul and lift rafts over boulders the size of caravans, small houses and the odd family sedan. Nothing prepares us for scaling cliffs while pushing, shoving, hauling and lifting rafts over boulders the size of caravans, small houses and the odd family sedan. And guess what? We like it. In today’s sanitised cottonwool world, there are few opportunities to test yourself against a wild natural force that can suck you down, bash you against rocks, mangle you through logs and spit you out for breakfast.
The women on the trip work hard. We are no Lady Jane Franklins being carried about in a wooden chair, though apparently the good lady did get down and dirty in the roughest parts. We know that this river is for men. Tough men. Apart from the scandalous Lady Jane, its history is chock full of cannibal convicts, sodden explorers, bearded piners and kamikaze kayakers. Compensating for our half-strength status, we modern Janes throw ourselves out of the raft and into the river, stumbling over rocks, trying not to get our feet caught as we help pull the raft over boulders and logs. We are right up front for the raft packing and unpacking, not to mention peeling vegetables and washing up. Our paddling is unstinting, with technique, not strength, the main requisite. Somehow we know that women aren’t really welcome on the river. Particularly menstruating women. There’s only access to the poo bag at either end of the day and precious little privacy or opportunity in between. Thank god for wetsuits. They can hide a lot of womanly foibles, not just smooth out cellulite and lend girdle shape to feminine curves.
But, hey, this river ain’t friendly to men who don’t quite make the grade either. Flabby-gut babyboomers or sophisticates who dip their paddles like gourmands testing the pâté. It’s definitely hostile to lumps of lard who can’t shift their bulk out of the raft and have to be portaged along with the luggage. As for punters with bad backs. Whatever were they thinking? On this bump and grind down the Ditch, you are either gonna end up with a chain of slipped discs or a gold medal in the next jerk and lift event at the Olympics. Oh, don’t worry, prospective punters. The G’s will help you down the Ditch whatever your age, size and fitness level, and a helicopter rescue is only a sat phone away. But their respect is hard to earn, grudging and reserved only for those who pitch in and shut up.
Particularly about the toilet arrangements. I knew I would have to shit into a plastic bag. But nothing prepared me for this plunge back into the crib. The freezer bag I shit into is transparent – I hear, feel and smell my turds drop into the bag. I see the skid marks down the side. No dog owner, no mother, I cringe at the blood warmth of my offering.
It has the consistency of mashed banana and smells slightly of the curry I ate the night before. Holding the bag against my thigh, shielding it from the gaze of others, I sneak the bag back into camp and shove it quickly into the garbage bag that holds today’s collection. I’m worried that I’m beginning to develop an unhealthy interest in the activity around this bag. One morning I see someone step from rock to rock across the creek holding out a half-filled bag. I wonder at the volume. I can’t help commenting ‘Ooh, that’s gonna be a bag-filler’ when served Mexican bean salad. The last ritual after breaking camp and before packing the rafts is the stomping down of the shit bag. G1 tells me that one punter actually volunteered for this job.
I feel more comfortable about my interest. I would never offer to stomp shit. As it is, this bag sits on the other side of the bolster in my raft, practically at my feet. The occasional shifting of this bag as we negotiate a rapid, bumping into rocks, bouncing and levering ourselves off logs and submerged boulders, brings a brief sewer whiff, one off-note in the lemony tang of the tea-tree, the blossom scent of the flowering leatherwood, the damp earthy smell of moss-covered bark and, ever present, the metal-sweet fragrance of water so fresh, so pure that you can open your mouth as you swim and take in gulp after gulp.
I no longer begrudge the plastic bag.
I wear no watch. I don’t know what day it is. The amber river flows on relentless. I can’t remember what we did on each day anymore. I think that might be a good thing. We stay in a succession of camps. Some are beach camps with fine pebbly shores, tea-tree shade and often the roar of a rapid just upstream. On rest days, their shingle shores are perfect for hot rock therapy. A cool dip in the swirling depths is followed by a languorous bake on hot flat rocks with river-smooth stones strategically placed along the spine. My skin tingles where the gentle breeze chills lingering drops on skin now as warm as the stones themselves. I could stay here all day but the Tasmanian sun bites and hunger beckons. Stretching like a cat, stone clinking onto stone, I join the others for another hearty lunch.
Other camps are set in forests with split-level sleeping quarters connected by stone steps. They offer shade, terracing and the odd leech. The trees have evocative names like sassafras, celery-top pine and leatherwood. At night, snug in my minus-five sleeping bag, comfortable on a softly plumped lilo, I stare up through dense tree tops at the Southern Cross and a low-slung moon. I think of the ravine around me. The trees desperately rooted into cracks and balanced precariously on top of craggy rocks. Others that couldn’t hang on jammed headfirst into the river, roots pointing to the sky. Rocks that lost their grip too. Logs tossed and wedged into crevices halfway up the hill. The jumbled mess of temperate rainforest trees, scraggy Huon pine, lunging pandani and umbrellas of man fern. A glimpse into a primeval world that is all green with moss, hushed and dripping. Awe-inspiring but alien. We humans can visit but we don’t belong. My thoughts go over the top of the ravine to the next, and the next and the next. More mountains, more rivers, stretching for mile after mile. The enormity, the remoteness, the relentless effort to survive chills me in the oven-warmth of my thermal protection. I zoom back into this camp, these terraces, the camp kitchen, the rafts bobbing below, the food barrels, the eskies, nine other people breathing softly around me, my own river bag next to me, my comfy bed, my little pillow, my camera, my fleecy top, my thermal socks and my toothbrush. Feeling safe in my little world, I sleep at last.
My favourite camp is all rock. A kind of cave where a wide shelf of gently sloping rock is sheltered by the overhang of a tall cliff whose guts have been eaten away by the floods. To the north is the last rapid of the day, roaring away in a now familiar backdrop of noise. To the south the river swirls away between rock shelves and around a corner. A Petra-style sacrificial altar complete with drainage channels greets us as we move out from the raft. Layered rock shelves are quickly claimed as sleeping quarters. Stones line the edge of some, no doubt planted by those who worry about rolling in their sleep. A native rat joins us for dinner. It makes several attempts to lug away the Nutrigrain but is scared each time by the beam of a torch. It obviously does well on camp scraps. Its coat gleams in glossy brown health. Breaking camp the next day, I am asked to wash down the kitchen area. Nothing left for Ratty unless she found something last night.
We learn quickly that the G’s want some peace at the end of the day. You can’t blame them. They’ve held our lives in the palm of their calloused hands and listened to our incessant chatter all day. They’ve tolerated our dyslexic confusion over right and left and our discordant paddling for kilometres. In a punter-free zone based around the kitchen, they suck down a can of beer and discuss the events of the day before starting the evening meal. We punters have our own demarcation lines. Our sleeping territory is marked out by dumping river bags and unfolding our lilos. We peel off damp wetsuits and itchy thermals and hang them over convenient branches and logs. Water babies swim in the unseasonably warm river washing off the sweat, grime and, for those who have pissed in their wetsuits, urine of the day. Others pat themselves dry and slip on their night-time thermals and fleecy jackets. Lounging against trees and rocks in the dying sun, we sip cask wine out of tin mugs and wolf down big handfuls of guacamole and corn chips. We scratch our bellies, belch loudly and piss where we goddamn like. Stubble is growing on the men’s faces and our hair is greasy, either slicked back against the scalp or sculpted into feral tufts. And we like it. I haven’t looked in a mirror for days. No toner, cleanser, scrub, day cream, night cream or under-eye oil has passed over my face for eight days now and my skin feels better for it. As each day passes, civilised niceties are being sloughed off like a snake-skin. We appreciate the freedom of not caring how we look, smell or sound and wonder how we will adjust once off the river.
We don’t care about table manners either. Hunched over our food, we shovel and talk with our mouths full. This food isn’t just for taste. It’s fuel. We need it and need it regularly. Just like on a skiing holiday, we can eat as much as we like and not worry about fitting into our suits. There’s no holding back on chocolate and, yes, I will have a third brandy cream and maple syrup pancake. Master river guide by day, G1 morphs into a canny chef by night. In some culinary sleight of hand, G1 can whip up crusty pizzas with just a fuel stove and wrap-around foil. Leftover sponge cake is doused in the last of the brandy cream, sloshed with other mysterious ingredients, and re-emerges as tiramisu twenty-four hours later.
The poo bag now just a passing interest, I’m fully engaged in finding out the names for every rapid and rock feature. This is one hell of a schizo river. Take the Great Ravine. We tumble over the portage of the Churn into the calm waters of Serenity Sound. We squeeze out of the Faucet into Transcendence Reach. We are twisted out of Side Winder and dumped from Thunder-rush into the Sanctum. We emerge from the toil and trouble of the Cauldron into Deliverance Reach. The first rapid we traverse is called Sticks and Stones. I guess a lot of bones have been broken on this river. There were twenty-two airlifts out of the Franklin in just one summer season back in the eighties. And the names might not hurt but they will certainly confuse you. Each point of interest has been variously named. Originally called Devil’s Hole by the piners, Big Fall looks innocuous but has claimed two lives. Its frothy depths hide a recircling action that crunches up kayaks and holds even big rafts under its torrent. Bob Brown only just managed to escape its clutch to go on to save the life of the river which almost took his. Pig Trough is still Pig Trough. Named by convicts, compulsory portage at all levels, its violent passage of slabbed rock and spume leads the way towards the calmly iconic Rock Island Bend, the instantly recognisable face of the Franklin, adorning the ubiquitous Dombrovskis cards to be found in every postcard stand in every grocery store in Tasmania. The more recently named Nasty Notch precedes the rapids of Descension Gorge before narrowing into the still black waters of Irenabyss. Jane River, Andrew River, Eleanors Ferry, Calders Ferry, Sir Johns Falls, Dianas Basin. I’ve decided that far from being just a masculine energy, the Ditch is actually the yin and yang of rivers. There is a place for women on this river.
We are now on the Lower Section of the Ditch. Only two of us are still here from the Upper Section. The others didn’t get chewed up by the river. They climbed up a steep hill and 4WD’ed back to Queenstown via the Mount McCall Track. Six new punters have joined us for the last five days. After bonding closely with the first lot, I can’t be bothered with this new group and find myself sniggering at their rooky clumsiness in the rafts. Bloody punters.
‘I don’t like this new lot,’ I whisper to G1.
‘Everyone says that,’ he replies. ‘You’ll get over it.’
G1 has taken to his kayak. Considered competent after seven days on the Upper Section, an American woman and I become the guides for our raft. We call out orders and steer the raft using our paddles as a rudder. Leaning forward and down into the stroke, splashless like spoons into jelly, we paddle in unison and soon have our raft forging ahead. At the first rapid, a young Belgian guy falls into the froth. I leap over the luggage and haul him back in by the straps of his lifejacket. At the second rapid, he tumbles over again. We shout at him to keep his feet up. The other raft rescues him. At the third rapid, he’s over the side again but this time we can’t help him. The recircling action keeps us trapped under the fall. The raft fills up and my corner starts to sink. We push and shove against the rocks with our paddles until our joints creak. Like an abalone suctioned down, the raft is refusing to leave its rock. With a grunt-wrenching shove, we win our battle against several tonnes of water and the raft lurches away. The water drains out and we pick up our flotsam. At the next rapid, G1 points out a sinkhole. Like a gigantic plughole for the mother of all baths, the water swirls evilly into a whirlpool and drops under a huge boulder. We look at it with horror.
‘Don’t fall in here,’ says G1. ‘You won’t come out in one piece.’
No one falls out at this rapid. We guides plot a perfect path through the rapid and back-paddle powerfully to avoid a sharp outcrop of limestone. In the calm of a brandy and soda pool, we take a quick drink from our bottles. I look up and see G1 smiling at us. A proud smile. I get the feeling we’ve just graduated from punters’ boot camp.
It’s funny what you can find out afterwards. Ditch. I always thought the guides called the Franklin River a ditch because they were scared of it. Just as men give boats women’s names, I thought the term ditch had been chosen as some kind of antidote to the untameable torrents. Ditch – flat water, often muddy, maybe a few tadpoles. Nothing dangerous, easily traversed, possibly even in gumboots if you tread carefully. But no, I was wrong. Don’t know where I was in 1983 but obviously not in Tasmania. I missed it all. I missed the Tasmanian government’s determination to dam the Franklin. I missed the rubber ducky protests, the arrests of over a thousand people and the bulldozers crushing their way through previously unconquered horizontal scrub. What I find out is that the Franklin River is called a ditch because the dam-crazy premier of Tasmania at the time referred to it as a ‘leech-ridden brown ditch ... of little interest to the vast majority of people’.
In David Malouf’s Johnno, the protagonist wonders how long it would take to shit every last bit of Australia out of his body. Every time he sat on the toilet in London he rejoiced. Back in Hobart, somewhat relieved at being back on a china bowl, I watch my poo flush away and wonder how long I will keep the Franklin River in my system. How long will pure Ditch water continue to nourish the cells in my nails, hair, skin and now buffed biceps? How long will it add a spring to my step and a glint to my eye? Do I have to worry at all? Maybe we sealed a blood oath. I shed my blood in the Ditch and now the Ditch is in my blood. What I do know is that I’ve been irrevocably changed. Make-up consigned to the bin, corporate clothes in plastic bags, I’ve just signed up for a job that will have me camping in wilderness for three days a week. I also know that if the Ditch or any other wild river comes up for grabs, I’ll be there fighting Franklin-buffed tooth and nail to save it. Yeah, the girl has been Ditched.
SUZANNE RUMNEY is currently working in indigenous education in East Arnhem Land. She has previously worked as a volunteer in East Timor.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au