Let me tell you a tale.  A tale of long ago.

There was once a young woman, barely 18, as memory has it, who longed to travel.  To see the world.  She had very little money, so she thought to begin seeing the world from home.

The young woman, of course, was young boot.  Supple of skin and trusting of heart.

Young Boot Takes to Her Heels

I can’t be sure, but I think it was close to 25 years ago, I decided I wanted travel somewhere.  On my own.  Unfortunately, I had very little money and couldn’t drive.  So, I looked at maps of the country and picked out interesting looking locations and then found out what buses would take me where.  It’s astonishing where the old Greyhounds would go.  And back then they were far cheaper than an airflight.  One of the places they took me was the Flinders Ranges.

I bought a tent, a backpack and some rudimentary cooking gear.  I bought a ticket and that’s about it.  No hiking boots.  No wetgear.  No maps for hikers.  Wonderful!  The roadtrip for the licenseless.

At one point, hiking around on my own, I stopped, literally breathless (it’s a long way up!) to admire the view.  It was then I realised that I had no proof I’d been there.  I’d been taking photos all around the ranges, but only of the scenery.  So, at Wilpena Pound, hanging precariously over a cliff, I took a photo of my foot.  Ever since then, my foot, with or without boot, has been in almost every holiday photo set I’ve taken.

On the same trip, I met a lovely guy from Switzerland.  He turned up in the ranges even less well prepared than me.  It was pouring with rain and he had a mat to sleep on.  And that was all.  So, I invited him to share my tent, the poor wet soul.  His name was Gunther and we shared tins of food and that’s all.  Sometimes trust leads you nowhere but good.

The next day I went walking around these mountainous ranges with Gunther.  Here’s a tip for you: first time up a high place, don’t go with a man who has grown up clambering up the Swiss Alps.

I still have a letter from Gunther and a photo of us together.  The trip was part of the making of me and I’m still a little surprised at my own audacity at the time.  He’ll always be a part of that.  ... As will the boot

Polishing the Boot

Of course, after this long, this photo was not in a good way, the negative was scratched and had been poorly taped by whoever had procesed them originally.  If you’re curious, you can see the untouched, or ‘unplugged’ version.

Returning to The Scene of The Crime

A couple of weeks ago, a few of us declared roadtrip and took off to the Flinders Ranges for a couple of days.  Happily, once we’d gotten up somewhere nice and high, my husband remembered that this was where (or thereabouts) I’d taken the first boot photo.  So, here we are again.  Fancier walking boots.  Fancier camera.  Same magnificent scenery.  Same young woman, at heart.

There aren’t enough words to say how much I enjoyed both of these trips.  The two trips span 25 years of growth, but the love of this place has not diminished.  Nor has the rugged love for the roadtrip itself.

Been a long time for you?  What are you waiting for?

go.

I’m looking for a theme to write about.  The world of full of wonder and lush, vibrant words. 

You wouldn’t think it would be that hard would you?

No doubt you have heard of the wombat.  If not, you certainly should have by now and I feel that this particular adventure may contain material too fascinating for your young years and you should look away now.

One of our nights on our great local adventure was spent cavorting about in a mini-bus with a dozen other tourists, shining lights at the local wildlife.  Also known officially as a spot-light tour. 

I should, at this juncture, point out that this is done without guns.  This is eco-tourism at its best and weaponry features nowhere.

Many wallabies and a possum or two were spotted by our over-excited crowd.  There was even a Mexican stand-off between two possums, half-way up a tree, with one possum upside down.  Apparently, it was a particularly fine tree.

The animals most likely to get our little crowd cheering, however, were the wombats.  I don’t know why, though I suspect, for myself, it has something to do with our much loved Fatso the Wombat.  Not as dexterous and multi-talented as Skippy, perhaps, but much loved nonetheless.  Why did the people from the other countries love the wombat so much?  Who can say.  Your guess would be as good as mine.

Our driver even took the time to tell us about the amazing tunnel blocking and foe-crushing abilities of the wombat’s bottom.  Amazing stuff.  Not a bum you’d want to mess with, I can tell you.  Even if it is the tallest tale I’ve heard spun in quite a while, it was done well and it was done by cover of night.  Let the tale live, I say.  Beware the wombat bottom!

In a particularly hair-raising moment, one wombat we spotted - Wombat on the right!  Wombat on the right!! - was particularly close to the side of the road.  Not a problem in itself.  Unless your wombat thinks the bus looks like a great place to go under for a midnight stroll.

At this point, all the passengers were crowding at windows trying to find the waddling rascal.  He’s here!  He’s safe.

The bus driver was most relieved.  He hadn’t been looking forward to explaining to his boss how half of his passengers had become injured by late night traffic while trying to protect/look for a foolish wombat. 

Most fun I’ve had in ages.

No photos, sad to say.  It was pitch black, lined with ghostly gum trees and a soft spotlight gently highlighted each animal.

The next day, however, is where I got my bum.

Driving around Australia, you will occasionally, if you’re lucky, spot a wombat or two.  Only for a moment, mind you, before they waddle remarkably quickly back into the bush. 

This time, however, we spotted a wombat right by the edge of the road.  We pulled up and he sat about nibbling on various tid-bits of fauna.  He was in the distance at first, really only a speck, but it’s amazing what your eyes can bring close.  Not wanting to upset him, I walked slowly closer and closer.  Then suddenly he dashed, in a waddling way, across the road.  Not into the bush!

So, there I was playing traffic warden for the wombat.  As you can see above, he did make it safely to the other side of the road.

Wombat bottom and all.

There’s the preparation.  The thinking about it, the doing of it, the lying in bed worrying at it.  Then, eventually, there’s the adventure itself.

This adventure takes place in my country.  Not my home, exactly, but a little bit further south of where it lies.

Where shall I start?  Shall we dive right in to the middle?  Will we delve into the microscopic detail?  Or shall we stroll along and just see what we find?

Let’s kick up our feet and start from the top.  Which is not the same as the beginning.

I’ve always loved to walk.  Not quite so much as a swim, but it’s that same feeling that if I didn’t have a reason to stop maybe I never would.  I can see that the older I get, the easier it will be to stop.  But that’s for then and this is for now.  Of course, there’s walking and there’s walking. 

Walking around hills and mountains is an unbelievable high.  (Pun fully intended.)  I wouldn’t describe it as a feeling of conquering.  What an odd notion that would be.  A human conquering a mountain?  With what?  A shovel and an awful lot of time? 

It’s a mixture of feelings.  It’s a feeling of fatigue and aching muscles.  It’s astonishment at the raw beauty of the landscape.  A dizzy sense of flying, on sight of the view from the top.  It’s a sense of quiet and of stillness.  It is, for me, a gentle sense of achievement and of overcoming the physical body.  It is unbearably, bodily beautiful.

I’m no mountain-climber, but even little strolls, like those around Crater Lake, may give you an insight into what that would be like.

One thing is for certain, whatever it takes of you to make the walk, it gives it back to you a hundred-fold.

When I came home from the trip, I had a small list of ideas for the virtual bonfire that is Scrine.  We were only away a week or so, so the list is not long.

I can’t help but wonder why I haven’t done the same for our big trip last year.  After a month away, there was so much food for thought it was a feast.  I certainly intended to share some of that time away, but each time I came to write my head was too full of strong images and intense emotions.  In the end, the wintery and intense feeling of belonging and then the feeling of no longer being there was all I wrote about.

I know, in part, this is because some of the places we visited are far too devastating a tale for me to do the story justice.  I think it is also because they are not my story to tell.

It might also be that my home, unbearably hot as I often find it to be, is inherently my home.  It’s where I find it easiest to think.

Still, if I attempt to be honest with myself, it’s probably just about the mechanics.  When I travel through places like France, Poland and Russia much of my available brain activity is spent panicking over whether I can correctly order a coffee, read a street sign or ask for help. 

Yet, I haven’t given up.  I’m hoping that the next few tales of traverses in Tasmania will help untangle the tales from Europe.

It will be fun trying.  A road paved with tales.  Are you packed and ready to go?

Let’s see if I am.

It’s a close run thing to being so busy that you can no longer think straight, but right up to that moment it’s a wonderful feeling.

You might feel almost raggedly tired - because you have no time to even think two steps ahead - but that’s okay, because you also have no time to feel tired.

It is not, thank heavens, the same as the slow, woeful, sands stuck in the hour-glass fatigue as not having enough to do.  It’s a weary, healthy useful tiredness.

It’s accompanied by a quiet sense of relief that someone finds you useful.

Drug me up, baby.  Feed me with things to do.  See me smile.

Action packed enough for me to momentarily forget my little corner of Scrine. So, time for a quick stop, to blow the dust off the table and stir up the spiders with the broom.

It’s funny, but I’ve never been afraid of spiders.  Cautious, to be sure, but not irrational or fearful.  I save my screaming heebie-jeebies for the loathsome cockroaches and others that I daren’t mention here for fear of crushing them with the force of my breath over my lips.

Even after a rather awful incident earlier this year with a spider that has left me with a small physical scar, I still don’t have that gibbering, breathless fear of spiders.  I’ll not nestle in with them, of course.  Who knows which will be poisonous or necrotising? 

How do the throat-constricting fears form to such dizzy heights?  It isn’t just an event or two.  After this year, I really should be feeling completely irrational about it.  It would only be sensible.  No, it’s something else.

The fear in the story-teller’s eyes as she retells the frightful night that the spider was found under the bedcovers is a very personal thing.  That look goes straight into the hindbrain and has nothing to do with logical thinking. 

For some it’s the obvious, such as spiders, snakes and things with claws.  For others that fear is exposed with the silliest of things, like the clown, the bunny rabbit or the… no, it’s true name I shall not speak.  Fragile is it’s byword.

It isn’t the big fears, the life rending, grief-filled fears.  Not the real and crippling fears of living life.  Not the hunted running, not the starving, not the murderous and torturous. 

It’s that squirmy fear.  The one that drips away in your mind as you try to sleep.

I think that whatever ‘spooky thing’ it is that we fear, it is a thing of fancy. 
These ‘little’ fears are the reflections of our very human imaginations.

Although, I could be imagining it all.

Wait.  Can you hear that fluttering sound?

I had thought it would have just been shut and immediately emptied of its books.  Converted into a laughably well stocked bottle shop.

Of course, I did not think it through.  The fate could have been far worse.

The library may just have been closed, its shelves still full of books. 

No money for staff?  Cut backs! they cry as they fly overseas to courses on costs rationalisation. 

No demand for the printed word?  No one reads anymore! they tell us from out between the lines of the newspaper. 

No one goes outside anymore?  No one visits libraries anymore! they tell us as they jaunt from one newly opened football stadium to another.

Of course, this whimsical view I have of libraries is no doubt coloured by the effect that my library had on me as a youngster.  Yet, isn’t that the point? 

Decades later can it not be one of the building bricks of my character, the feeling that I had, standing in that room full of books with nothing more clever to say than “gosh”.  I was young and I’m sure my vocabulary wasn’t big, but it was even smaller that day for the sight of all those books.

The memory is vague, but I at least know it to be mine.  It is not one rubbed shinily from a printed photo. 

That games room (ah, Battleship!).  Those grey metal shelves.  The skirt-wrapped legs of the friendly librarian.  These are all my memories and it was my place.

I can’t tell you the first book I read there, nor the last. I can’t tell you the best one ever read.  I can tell you the love that I felt.  That it felt like my place.  My place of books.

I’m sure it had Toad of Toad Hall.  Right next to Piglet and Pooh.  George!  And his Dragon.  Who knows what else?  Books of eggplants and aubergines.  Books of bridges and buildings.  Books of eclipses and novas.  Whatever there was, it was my adventure.  It was my sanctuary.  Mine and all the other kids.

The thought of it shutting, leaving the books behind, leaves me sadder than I can say.  Without reason, I am sure.

Whole shelves of ghostly characters.  Gardens covered in dust.  Night skies collapsing in.  Lost adventurers.

The empty room, once full of books - so sad.  But not so sad as the room full of books, bereft of readers.

I hope that their adventure lives on.  No, I know it does. 

It’s still here with me, inside this frighteningly overpacked head.

Take up your walking stick, come adventuring with me.

Turn the page.

Begin.

The book is Moondust by Andrew Smith.

If you intend to read this book, you may consider what follows a spoiler.  I would say no, not technically, but, if you’re worried, please do go away and read it and come back some other day.

I stopped reading at that point for good reason and not because I wasn’t enamoured with the story telling.  It’s beautifully written and enchanted me the whole way. 

The author had set out to interview all the remaining astronauts that have ever walked on the surface of the moon.  I will let him tell you why when you read the book, as he does a much better job of it.  Far more eloquent than I.

Regardless, I was cheering for him all the way through.  I wanted so much to hear from all of these men.  For as long as I can remember knowing that men once walked on the moon, I have wanted to know more.  Anything about them at all.  I will never understand what is like, but they went there.  It has always made me smile to think about it, just as it does now. 

At the last 20 pages, there was still one to go.  I couldn’t bear to read any more.  I didn’t want to know that he might have failed.  I put the book down for a time when I was more ready to hear the news.

Recently it was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.  Time to pick it up again, lady.  Deep breath and in you go.

How often books do this to me.  Leave me staggered and permanently altered.  Change my life.  Touch me in an almost or actual physical way.

Here’s to those men that walked on the moon.  The men and women who have been to space, to travel among the stars.  And, this time, to those that take me there with their words, whether for real, for history or for make believe.

Take me away.  Turn the page, and set me free.

I have been a part of other online communities, but they have come and gone.  Or I have. 

Scrine isn’t only that and never will be.  It fills a place in my heart that has little to do with the internet and much to do with a home.

I shan’t wax lyrical, I don’t have the right words.  The only two I have are the ones that always come to mind.  Thank you.

Thank you, Keith.  Thank you, rusty bird.  And, this very special once, thank you, e.