Nest (22 page)

The sun was dropping low in the sky. She had been walking all day, a little above her usual pace. It had seemed important to keep moving. Her feet were sore but her body otherwise bearing up well. She judged she was in about the middle of the national park – though she wasn’t sure exactly where – deep in a gorge, surrounded by remnant forest. It was a good feeling.

She made for higher ground, looking for one good tree. Wisps of hair had worked themselves free of her hat, and her face needed a wash.

A golden whistler flew in front of her, darting from branch to branch just above her eye line. She let him lead her away from the path, taking his bright yellow chest as a sign. She stepped between a grass tree and a black wattle without taking her hands from her pockets, letting its tips brush her face. The bird alighted on the low branch of a tallowwood, then flew up into its higher branches to sing an encouraging song, his white face banded by black.

‘Really?’ she said, looking up. ‘This one?’ She could just reach the solid lower limb, but it was a stretch to the next and the trunk without footholds.

Before her time in the Sierra, before they had finished their DipEds, she and Craig had travelled together, climbing some of the world’s tallest trees – Californian redwoods. He had made contact with a team of post-grads who were documenting the heights of trees within remote groves and organised for them to go along and document the botanical finds. A friend of a uni friend, he said. Craig had done forestry as his first degree – about as practical as art. There weren’t many jobs, but there was research funding available. Somehow it ended up that they were among a handful of people in the world who knew the location of the Giant Grove and had seen the worlds within their crowns. Fanatics were kinder to fellow fanatics than artists were to fellow artists, as it turned out.

Jen had been unimpressed with the nerdy looking fellows at first, with their crapped-out car and college clothes. She had been less comfortable leaving the ground in those days, too, and didn’t like all the fuss and gear, let alone being trussed up like a rack of lamb. But once up in the mist, among salamanders and lichens and liverworts barely seen by another human being, she had found her tree legs. There were bonsai species growing in the clouds, redwoods within redwoods, and whole other genera sending their roots into rotting timber. The seeds had been dropped by animals and birds, though apart from the occasional osprey, there weren’t many birds up there – the only disappointment.

The ropes and gear – a ‘spider rig’ – allowed them to ‘skywalk’. The science fellows called themselves Skywalker One and so on, imagining themselves in outer space. Or a
movie. Stepping lightly along a branch, birdlike, and peering into a whole ecosystem within the tree’s crown was indeed an otherworldly experience. She had finally been able to imagine what it was to fly.

Jen had stopped to sketch what she saw while the boys mucked about with tapes and protractors and ropes. The search for the world’s tallest tree had them always gazing off around them, to the next tree, one perhaps a little higher, but for her there was more than enough right there in each crown: burned-out caves, fern forests, lost citadels of dead redwood spikes, hanging gardens of lichen, all dripping with mist. To think she had almost not gone along. She had worked with a fever she hadn’t known at home, nibbling on ripe huckleberries from a bush beside her, trying to capture on the page and in photographs what few had seen.

On the last night, they had slept suspended from the branches of the freshly ‘discovered’ world’s tallest tree, the base of its trunk larger than most houses. Their coloured sleeping bags were nestled within treeboats: nylon hammocks rigged from the tree’s upper branches, like brightly spun cocoons. An anchor rope connected each of them to the tree itself, in case a branch failed or they rolled out in their sleep. It was a feeling she had never forgotten, swinging free in the tree’s lemony scent, rocked to sleep by creaks and groans and the
shhhh
of the wind in its needles.

When they got home, and began to unpack, heavy with the lag of flying and sudden descent to reality, she found that Craig had bought them each an olive green treeboat. From then on, they sought out places where they could sleep swinging from the trees. Sometimes, when they could not get away for the weekend, they would settle for hanging them from the one tree in Craig’s courtyard for a night. The neighbours probably
had a giggle, but she and Craig had been oblivious. Making love in a treeboat – although something of a challenge – was perfection, every movement, sensation and emotion magnified by the weightlessness under the stars, as if defying gravity. Craig would climb down to her, and she would unzip her sleeping bag, and herself. But it was not safe for him to stay there overnight, unsecured, in case he toppled off, so he would climb back to his own rig, leaving her a little empty. It had been worth all the fuss, though, for the rush of their love meeting air and leaf and sap.

Now she was just a husk of a woman. Orphaned. Childless. Little more than bone and sinew and skin. Without feathers to hide beneath or a song to sing.

The light was hurrying away. She took a running step, heaved herself up, and shifted from a crouch to standing full height. Gripped the branch above backhand and attempted a chin-up. She managed to lift herself and the pack easily enough, but could no longer force her chest above her arms and onto the branch. She hung there for a moment, then dropped back onto the broad branch below. Even from there, she could see out over the whole valley, the river glinting below, and the roar of the three-basin falls echoing up to her.

She slipped her pack off her shoulders and unclipped the front flap to remove the treeboat. She swung the ropes over the branch above, ran them back through the little pulleys. It wasn’t spider rope, like they had used in Giant Grove, but it would do. Craig said they were trialling rope for the special forces, to use on black ops. Perhaps he was teasing, perhaps not, but she had always wondered how geeks with the backside hanging out of their pants could have got their hands on such high-end gear.

Jen spread her sleeping bag out into the hammock, ready to climb into. The tree was hardly a giant, and her position a little
lame – only eight or nine feet off the ground – so she needn’t anchor herself, but it was a nice spot and she was too tired to search for another.

She climbed into her nest while it rested on her porch branch, then raised herself, hand over hand, with the little pulleys. She secured them so that she was close enough to touch the rail branch but free to swing. Evening air bit at her lungs, just enough to let her know she was outside, and alive after all.

The first stars twinkled through the branches above, and birds settled into their roosts around her. She smiled into the dark, snuggled further into the bag and folded her arms over her chest, stuck her knees out, like a frog.

A powerful owl
whoo whooed
nearby but received no answer.

‘Whoo,’ she said. ‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’

She lay snug in her nest, watching the sun come up. Light flowed into the valley, revealing layer upon layer of colour and texture. Finches and wrens chattered around her, and a breeze ran up, tickling her face and rattling the leaves. It was Thoreau who said that in wildness lay the preservation of the world: one of his more optimistic remarks. She knew that she could not save the world by drawing it. There was nothing, it seemed, that could shift or slow the human compulsion to consume the planet – but she could still save herself.

The shrink said she should relish her freedom, the possibility of the unknown, and out here it didn’t seem as difficult. She unzipped her bag and wriggled out, lowering herself to the branch below. She released the harness, dropped it on the ground, and climbed down to pack it all away.

She hopped from rock to rock, relying on her boots to grip, her balance and judgement to hold. Water roared all around. Craig had loved rock-hopping, though he often left her far behind with his goat legs. Sometimes he was impatient to see what was around the next corner, and sometimes it was to prepare a surprise upstream, like the day he proposed. By the time she had caught up, the sparkling wine was chilled, a picnic laid – and Craig washed clean and lying on a rock in his shorts as if he had never hurried.

She had been happy that day in the gorge, shouting out ‘YES’ for all the world to hear – and thought her life secured. They had made love on the rocks, with the water rushing and falling about them, drunk on bubbles and love.

Jen lay full stretch on the sand watching a stony creek frog –
Litoria wilcoxii.
Only the black spots down her lower sides had given the female away, her back the same smooth brown as the coppery stones over which clear water flowed. She swam with her nostrils just above the water, leaving a trail behind her. A male called from the water’s edge, his soft purring intended to elicit a particular type of attention.

They had been at a barbecue when Craig said it. At one of the other teachers’ new townhouse. It had been hot and they had all drunk too much while the host was preparing the meal. Someone was about to go off on maternity leave, and there must have been a conversation about children. Jen had been focused on the food, worried about what she would eat from the mountain of meat burning on the hotplate.

She soon tuned in, though, at the home ec teacher’s question about their choice not to have children. Jen was thirty-eight by then, though she looked younger, especially when with Craig. People no doubt wondered, though the more obvious question might have been why they were still engaged. They kept spending their savings on trips away, and then Craig broke his leg rock climbing. He was stuck inside, for months, and it took some time after his physical recovery for him to return to anything like himself. She had figured they would talk about children once they were married and told herself they still had time – but things had drifted.

She hadn’t quite caught Craig’s answer, at the barbecue – there was something about ‘our lifestyle’ and perhaps he had shaken his head.