Free Walking to the Moon by Kate Cole-Adams Page A

tufts, like pineapple tops . Once you get over the black, the green is everywhere, sprouting in foolish, furious clumps from the branches and even the trunks of the charcoaled trees. Occasionally among them the trunk of an angophora bursts bright orange or salmon pink from its blackened casing. Once your eye is in, all you see is colour.
    Now that I have made my decision I enter for a while a dreamy hollow of walking, a passage of time in which I am protected from the flickering doubts that have been with me since leaving the nursing home. The path is pink and sandy and has its own momentum, the black and green of the trees alternating beside me.
    A landscape abbreviated, comforting even, in its starkness: the sense that the worst has already happened, and I am still here.
    It is not, I am aware, real bushwalking. I have a map but no compass. And although the map shows that I must now be a considerable distance from any houses, some kilometres into the national park, I am on a fire trail. There is no chance of getting lost. Nor is there any chance of stumbling across an unexpected waterfall or swimming hole—as I might have, if I had plotted my own course. Once, in the distance, I see what might be a small snake uncurl itself from the side of the road and slip into the bushes as I approach, but it disappears before I reach it, and might have been a lizard.
    The road is surprisingly uneven. Despite the evidence of the map, I had imagined a straight, steady incline. Instead, it curves this way and that, though more, it seems, to the left. To the west, or what I imagine to be west; I can no longer tell. Either way, for the most part the land is higher to my left. The road is steep in parts and rippled, with potholes and fissures where the earth, yellower as I get higher, has cracked open or been washed away. After heavy rain it is almost impassable, the guy in the mountain shop said. A slippery torrent, clutching as it passes at sand and clay and small stones.
    Now and again I stumble, the impact travelling up my leg to the small of my back. Careful. It is smoother on the other side of the road, but I follow the inside of the curve, clinging mainly to the left. I tell myself that it will even out, and that this way I have to cover less distance. But in truth, I cling to the left because I am afraid of being hit by a bike. Any moment, I keep thinking, a group of riders, three, maybe more, could come sliding around one of these corners. They wouldn’t be expecting me, or looking. It is not logical, I know; as my husband would point out, I am better off on the outside of the curve, where I can be seen, and see. But I stick to the inside, where I feel safer. And my husband is not here.
    As I walk, placing my feet carefully so as not to twist my ankle on a loose rock or another tree root, I think about the riders. In the end I can no longer tell whether I want them to come or not. In one version they are a cheerful force, raising their hands as they pass, perhaps even stopping briefly to tell me about conditions further up the path and wish me well. In another, they are simply careless—skidding around a corner too fast and striking me or at least showering me with dust. In the third—Stop.
    The land to my left is raised, a shallow clay embankment, too familiar already, embedded with repetitive truncated concerns— bikers and snakes and other possibilities. I look to my right. A cluster of angophoras, five of them together. Through the trees, the land falls away a little and I can make out a ridge, or fragments of ridge, that seems to run parallel to the path. It does not look far, though it is hard to get a sense of perspective from here. Beyond the containing green of the angophoras the landscape appears in patches mainly as a khaki monotone with little in the way of gradient or features, the eye lulled or deadened by the sameness. I look at my watch. Eleven. Two hours’ walking behind me. Lunch in an hour.