Gregory hiked with burlap hessian sacks as his packing cells, an old tarnished silver billy and a series of mottled vegetables. Things like potatoes, carrots, a turnip and a cabbage. The cabbage in particular looked worse for wear – limp and spotted from days, maybe weeks, in the central Australian heat. A little like Gregory himself.
Sporting a nasty burn on his ankle courtesy of the aforementioned billy, Gregory had holed up at Ormiston Gorge to recover before continuing east to Alice Springs. He seemed unfazed about this unplanned halt in his itinerary. He wasn’t in a hurry. At 70 something years old, why rush hiking more than 250km across the West Macdonnell Ranges I guess.
Gregory’s reputation preceded him; we’d heard about this delightfully eccentric man from other hikers well before we set eyes on him at Ormiston Gorge. The famed kiosk there closed at 4pm, so we’d left our camp at Waterfall Valley early that morning, quickly tackling the uphill slog to Mt Giles lookout. We cooked breakfast against the expansive backdrop of the Heavitree Range before winding our way back down the rocky trail and rolling dustily into the kiosk with the hours remaining to purchase toasted focaccias, chocolates, lemonade and ice-cream stretching blissfully before us.
Larapinta was another world – one far removed from the chaotic, stressful, pandemic-dominated one I’d managed, improbably, to escape. Here instead of counting covid cases I counted the millimetres of water I need until the next source, and shooting stars falling silently above my head as I slept in the open desert air atop mountains I’d sweated up earlier that day. I passed hundreds of fluffy mulla mulla blanketing the otherwise sparse hillsides we trekked along and stared with amazement as thousands of bright green budgies regularly took to the air around us.
The hike was hard, but it felt good to be doing something hard by choice. Aching feet, tweaked knees, blistering hot sun on exposed escarpments – these were all things I could make sense of. Slowly with each kilometre, each breathtakingly beautiful view and each quiet desert night, I felt myself returning. Nature has an extraordinary capacity to put things into perspective, but nowhere did that feel more true than on the Larapinta. Surrounded by millions of years of geological history and tens of thousands of years of Arrernte culture and custodianship, my mind slowed. Our legs got stronger, the dirt collected under our fingernails, our socks flapped in the wind as they dried on the outside of our packs. I felt happy.
Being on the trail brought both a sense of stillness and great movement that collided in a kaleidoscope of moments forever etched in my memory. A lone ghost gum standing silently in a wide plain of yellowed grass and scraggly mulga. Pools of dark water surrounded by burnished walls of ancient red rock and the soaring presence of an eagle high above. Afternoons spent laying in the warm sand of the dry riverbeds we camped in and a blazing sun setting behind Mt Sonder as we neared our final destination.
The trail was uncharacteristically empty as a result of new covid outbreaks that sent many already battered urban populations around Australia back into various states of lockdown, but the people we did meet burst into life like characters from a novel I could scarcely believe I was a part of. Ian obsessed over the weather, giving us hourly updates on any changes for the coming day’s forecast, which in reality never deviated from blue skies and sun. We met a 19 year old with no planned itinerary who was subsisting primarily on peanut butter and wraps, and had plans to hike the Australian Alpine Walking Trail next. I always wondered if he took more than peanut butter for that one. These shared moments of human connection ran like a thread long that 250km route, invisible to the naked eye but as reliable as the directional blue arrows indicating the way and the kilometres remaining. Sometimes the numbers were off, but ultimately it was the presence of the sign that really mattered.
I never expected to see Gregory again, but years later I almost tripped over him in the iconic ‘SUP’ of Meredith Music Festival. There he sat under a towering pine eating what looked like a homemade cracker topped with chickpeas. We chatted about Larapinta; I reminded him of that handful of soba noodles he’d kindly donated to me because I’d eaten my dinner at lunch thinking it was my emergency meal I no longer needed. I’m not sure he really did remember me but it didn’t matter. I remembered Larapinta and the lessons I’d learned, the people I’d met, and the commitment I’d made to myself out in the desert – to prioritise happiness.
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