Wanderlust (24 page)

There's light sex and there's heavy sex. The first is weightless and meaningless, like a feather brushing your body, pleasurable but gone the next day. Heavy sex is more exciting, because it entails the risk of consequence. The risk might be of an immediate mishap (getting caught, falling off a chair); or of something more prolonged (ruining a marriage, falling in love). Risk is one of the things that gives meaning, and when we court meaning it heightens the sense of risk.

Jason was light. The Italian was light. Mark was light. They helped me escape all the heaviness back home. But all the lightness posed the same problem I imagine immortality would: If you could live forever, nothing would have meaning anymore.

One day Nathan came home from sailing with a long, heavy, silvery fish. But no one felt like cooking, and there was nowhere to keep it cold, so someone laid it across the threshold of the open front door. That night we gathered in the living room to watch a movie, and my housemates and their friends passed around a cloudy glass bong. Whenever someone new arrived, he or she asked why there was a fish in the doorway, then suggested we put the thing in the fridge, whereupon someone on the floor said that we had no fridge, whereupon everyone on the floor laughed harder than they had the time before, until we were in hysterics.

Several days later I moved in with Tracy, to a fold-out bed in her living room, where the breeze wafted in through the sliding screen door, and potpourri scented the air.

chapter eighteen

I
called my brother from one of
the booths between the beach and Shute Harbour Road. He mentioned in passing that he'd seen Kristin—in Vancouver.

“What?” I asked.

I was dumbfounded. In my mind Kristin was still in Australia, working in Cairns or Darwin or who-knew-where. We were supposed to meet up. We were in this together, our last hurrah, our bachelorette. Now she'd gone and left the party. I thought that even if we'd temporarily gone separate ways, it was out of respect for each other's independence—for my sailing and her sightseeing Swedes—with the understanding that we'd reunite. I'd thought of her as a companion still, even though she wasn't here. She hadn't even told me she was going home. Granted, we had no way to reach each other, but she could have sent a letter to Poste Restante Airlie Beach. We should have talked about it first.

Sometimes in relationships, what we imagine about the other person is almost as compelling as the reality of who they are. Now I felt like I'd made up an imaginary Kristin. I'd allowed myself to believe that she shared my desire to be on the road. That she didn't want to go back to her boyfriend. I'd envisioned a pact to keep traveling, together at least in spirit, with no end in sight. I was hurt. I
didn't see that there was something selfish in my hurt. I wanted her to be just like me, to do the thing I wanted her to do, regardless of what she wanted for herself.

I didn't even understand why she would want to go back so soon. Money was no excuse; there was plenty of work here among strangers. I was just getting started, just beginning to transform. I thought going home was weak. People who did were self-jailers, too scared to live without their bonds. They were geographical monogamists, in need of one place. They needed their habits and their things. They needed their people. I thought I didn't need any of that.

Kristin had gone home to her suburban condo, her two roommates. She'd gone home to her familiar place, the city with the mountains on the North Shore, which were unlike anything in this flat land. She'd gone back to the struggle to establish a postcollegiate life, with a career and all the rest. She'd gone home to friends, to parents, to Jeremy.

From time to time, out of a sense of responsibility, I called Stu. One day he told me that he'd packed up all of our things and was leaving Seattle. He'd found a renter for the house, someone who didn't mind its tatters. In the same way that I'd lost respect for Kristin when she went home, Stu's decision gave me new respect for him. In my mind he'd become part of our hateful house. But when he said he was going to separate himself, I liked him better. I remembered that he had wanderlust too. In our very first conversation he'd told me about Thailand and Bali, and then at the merest suggestion he came to me in Pakistan. He was turning back into the person I first knew.

At the same time, he shifted the burden. He was abandoning what I'd abandoned, and now there was no one looking out for
the problematic hearth and home. By staying there he'd enabled my freedom, giving me a gift that I'd overlooked. Now I'd have to think more seriously about the outcomes of what I'd done.

He flew to Fiji and hopped a sailboat to New Zealand. And with no warning, sometime when he was crossing the ocean, he did the most generous thing he could have done: He told me he understood. Two months after I made that full-moon call from the phone booth in Yeppoon, he mailed me a letter from Auckland, penned on a becalmed sea. Written on five small sheets of yellow notepaper, the letter read in part: “By leaving our safety net, we have thrown our souls upon the wind, exposing ourselves to all of the fears and dangers that we sought to protect each other from, and in doing so, we have made ourselves available to experience things that . . . border on the magical.” It was like he was saying he understood everything I had done. It recast my betrayal as a kind of love, and I wondered if his version of events might be the right one. And so by setting me free, he began to reel me in again.

chapter nineteen

I
got a job as a deck hand/cook
on a refitted former racing yacht that took tourists on five-day trips. I saw Mark for the last time on my first day of work, just after we had left the marina and were getting ready to raise the sails. I was sitting on the bow, attaching the hanks to the forestay, when I saw a small lime green sail coming our way. It came closer and I saw that it was Mark, windsurfing at high speed. He came within five meters of the boat and waved to me and called, “Bon voyage!” then made a graceful jibe. I yelled good-bye, he looped toward the boat one more time, and headed away. He'd finally made plans to move back to Sydney, and I knew he'd be gone by the time I got back to shore, and that I'd probably never see him again. Light as air as he'd been, he'd given me my all-time best first date, to the teardrop shoal, and now the perfect unburdened good-bye.

The problem was, I wasn't much of a deckhand and could barely cook, and definitely couldn't manage tacos for eight at a forty-five-degree angle without getting seasick. I was too stressed to enjoy the blissful settings: Whitehaven Beach, so empty that it made our visitors feel like they'd discovered their own paradise; isolated
snorkeling inlets; drinks by tiki torch on Adventure Island, nee South Molle. After finally getting the galley clean at 10:00 PM, instead of collapsing into my bunk, I had to socialize with the skipper and the guests. At 6:00 AM, before cooking breakfast, I tried to take a few minutes on deck by myself.

I was terrible at the job, which made me hate it. Permanent residence in paradise was looking unviable. It's typically believed that people in the service sector don't move into anything more cerebral because they can't, but the reverse is true too. I could be forced back to offices and keyboards by sheer incompetence at everything else. When the manager of the sailboat took me off after several weeks, I was at loose ends. I was no less of a tourist than any of the backpackers who passed through; I was just a different kind. I started to think about leaving town.

The day after I was kicked off the boat I went to a party at the Hog's Breath Café, the same place I'd met Stewie on the day that Kristin left, and he'd pointed up at the house. I began talking to an acquaintance—by now every face was familiar—at the bar. Shaun was one of a pair of American yachtie brothers who'd washed up in town years before. Everyone called them the Sepo Twins: Sepo was short for septic tank, which rhymed with yank. Shaun told me that his brother was getting married to a local girl, and that he himself had finally decided to leave. The next day. He was going south, all the way to Sydney. I asked if he needed another hand, to drive and cover the gas. He said yes, absolutely, he could make better time that way. I said I would come with him as far as Noosa, and we raised our cans.

I'd acquired a few things in Airlie Beach, and now I couldn't get my backpack closed. It's amazing how quickly the dust settles when you don't move. I decided to leave behind a mask and snorkel, some clothes, and a couple of books. I asked Tracy to mail them
to me, and she said she would, and we both knew I'd probably never see them again. I inscribed a few numbers in the tiny black book I kept for the purpose, but the hastiness of my departure meant that I couldn't spend a lot of time saying good-bye, which was how I liked it. I'd be there one moment, and then,
poof,
I'd be gone. I romanticized the quick disappearance, but really I just hated the awkwardness of leaving. I hated the heartfelt statements that were required, and the declarations of intent that I already knew wouldn't come to fruition.

Why south instead of north? Now that Stu had released me along with himself, I didn't need to run from him anymore, and if I went south I'd be closer to New Zealand than if I went the other way. Then there was the fact that going north would have taken me into the wrong kind of new territory. I could have continued on the tourist itinerary, to Cairns, the Daintree, the Northern Territories, where the books all promised real live crocs. That's what Kristin had done before flying home. Then I could have gone down to Alice Springs and Uluru, nee Ayers Rock, nee Uluru. But taking that route would have suggested a kind of finality. Once everything was ticked off, the next obvious thing would have been to go home, and I didn't want to do that.

chapter twenty

I
first heard about the Kokoda Trail
from other backpackers. It had a fearsome reputation: sixty miles of track, most of it no wider than a single person, passing through jungle and malarial swamp, and rising to a height of 7,185 feet as it traversed Papua New Guinea's Owen Stanley Range. From July to November of 1942, Japanese and Australian troops had done battle along the trail. More than seven thousand soldiers died, mostly from tropical diseases.

Though I'd heard the country spoken of up and down the Queensland coast as a dream or goal, I hadn't met anyone who'd actually been there. It loomed above Queensland on the map, across the Coral Sea, as much an idea as a place, all rumors of impassable jungle, tribal warfare, cargo cults, and cannibalism. In the remotest valleys of the island, which was shared between the nation of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, there were supposedly even tribes that had never made contact with the outside world. The Sunshine Coast, on the other hand, the stretch of small towns north of Brisbane where I washed up after Airlie Beach, was in thrall to the march of suburbia. I even became a part of it.