Astral Traveling
Just to the south of Eden is heaven. The old whaling town gives way to a spotted eucalypt forest that protects a long stretch of wild beach. The trees march tall and straight down to the sand or bonsai versions grow from the rocky headlands. Turn left off the Bruce Highway (even Australian roads are called Bruce!) and a fire trail will take you to your own piece of paradise.
My intention late on a crisp day was to find somewhere to sleep in that forest. In the warm light of the next morning, I hoped to watch for whales migrating along the coast. I barrelled along a fire trail cut deep by past floods. Ahead of me a lyrebird appeared and, reluctant to fly, fled on foot. The sides of the track kept it from escaping so I followed its lyre-wagging waddle for a hundred metres until it took to the air for a short distance and crash-landed into the understorey of cycads. I stood where it had touched down and searched for another glimpse of its diaphanous tail. Nothing was visible except the trunks of hundreds of spotted gums towering like leprous candlesticks over a carpet of cycad fronds. You don’t have to be gullible to take directions from a lyre-bird so I set up camp right there. I had dinner, rolled out my swag among the budawangs and prepared to sleep under a starry sky.
Wanting to be up before sunrise on these whale-spotting trips, I aim for an early bedtime but find that sleep can be elusive. Rather than counting sheep, my solution for insomnia is to try picturing the solar system. I start with the sun and planets in an unlikely syzygy and set them racing. Mercury, for example, completes four laps in one Earth year and 700 circuits to a single one of Neptune’s. Then I give seven of the planets a day and night by spinning them like tops, while Uranus and its gossamer ring, I must remember, have a horizontal axis. Mars and Earth have similar length days and so turn in unison, while Jupiter’s ten-hour day spins it so quickly that the planet is squashed.
Then I add all the moons – circles within circles – ensuring that of Saturn’s fifty-four, Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, and that Jupiter’s Io is crusted with volcanic acne. Since Pluto was plutoed in 2006, I have filled the void beyond Neptune with comets, their diaphanous tails pushed leeward by the solar wind.
I am usually asleep well before teetering to this level of mental gymnastics, especially in the later years of life when just the effort of following our own planet’s daily orbit seems to be increasingly beyond me. But not yet, on that crisp night with the eucalypt leaves shimmering above. So, I looked up and out from Terra Firma through the Milky Way and tried to see to the far edge of the universe. Photons emitted millions of years ago finally splashed down on my retinas. And so I slept.
I woke the next morning, walked to the nearby cliff and scanned the ocean in the hope of seeing the surfboard fluke of a humpback fluke. The water was calm – not even a hush of surf below – and the join between sky and sea indistinct. Half-asleep in that seamless hemisphere, I relived my model of the solar system from the night before so vividly that I actually felt the Earth spinning and circling beneath me. The sun reposed unmoving at the centre of the Earth’s circumambulations so that I didn’t witness a “sun rise” but instead perceived the opposite; the Earth’s edge bowing down before the golden orb.
Then a gannet appeared and flew at my level until suddenly tying its knot in the air and falling like a bone crucifix. Xeno’s paradox proposes that a crawling turtle chased by a running man is never caught- each time the man reaches the spot where the tortoise was, it has moved on again. Similarly, it seemed that the gannet would never reach the water as the planet’s revolution made it recede from the stooping bird. Then time overran the paradox, the gannet smacked into the sea, and I snapped back onto solid, immobile Earth.
For one crystalline moment on that cliff top I had escaped the surly bonds of a world that revolves around the self and instead understood how we all plunge towards a conclusion that is in retreat from us. Our final breath crawls away even as we sprint after it. Then, one starry day, we win the booby prize by catching up with time and are brought to an enduring rest.
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