So this is me, exhausted, slumped against the base of a tree, my eyes closed. Completely miserable. In the middle of nowhere and in the middle of this story. Next to me sits Ryan. Ryan is also miserable. Perhaps even more miserable and scared than I am. We are both quite a pair.
Did you notice how I said we were in the middle of the story? Well, being lost in the woods is exactly like arriving in the middle of a story. Or wandering in halfway through a movie. You have no context. Suddenly you're just there. Dealing with it. You can't see the forest for the trees. Literally in our case. In our cases, one tree looks much like the next. You are just stuck in one long moment of anxiety and exhaustion which begins at dawn and keeps going well after sunset. No map. No compass.
So there we were, two people, miserable and bug-bitten and sunburnt, lost in the forest. Correction bush. The word 'forest' brings to mind something quite tranquil, doesn't it? Gentle woodland and soft grass, that kind of thing. Make no mistake we were lost in New South Wales bushland which is an altogether different environment. Harsher. More punishing.
As I said, at that moment, we were resting. We've stopped stumbling around to catch our breath. As this is as good a point as any for the picture to go all wavey, like in a film, (or maybe it's just because of the exhaustion and lack of water). Anyway, things go all blurry around the edges, indicating a shift in time, back to the beginning. You know the way they jumble things up in movies? You could almost imagine a voice over saying....
We got that lovely house out in the Hunter Valley. The one with the large deck jutting out the front, providing those amazing views of the vineyards. Out back there was a jacuzzi on the edge of a paddock, surrounded by bushland. In terms of money, it was quite reasonable once divided up between the seven of us. There was myself, Ryan, Amanda, Malcolm, Vic and another couple from Melbourne who I only just met. Nice enough people. Foodies. Wine dorks. Ryan and I had our own room. It was the usual air B and B set up: a clean mattress, extra bedding, empty draws. We settled for the room without an ensuite. That's was totally fine by me: I wasn't ready to share a bathroom with Ryan yet. Using the one down the hall keeps things private. Have I mentioned Ryan before? You know how difficult it is to get a decent man in Sydney these days? Especially anyone over thirty-five. Either they're unwilling to give up the endless sexual carousel that is Tinder or they have insurmountable personal problems and hangups. You start to get the depressing feeling it's all false advertising. Anyway, that had been my experience right up until I met Ryan. Ryan seemed like he might be an exception to the rule. We'd only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks at that point but things looked promising. In terms of relationship longevity, he'd been ticking all the boxes. I was impressed.
We arrived late, had a few glasses of wine and went to bed. The following morning Ryan and I were both up well before the others, making coffee in the kitchen, fussing about. As a brand new couple, I find you are always compensating for the lack of familiarity by being a little over industrious. It can a bit exhausting. I suppose it's about trying to impress the other person. Which is normal in the early stages of the relationship. After forty minutes, even with the smell of brewed coffee wafting through the house and us clanging around, emptying the dishwasher, the others still hadn't made an appearance. Ryan suggested we go for a bush walk and I thought fantastic! Once again: here was a man, not a boy, who was effortlessly ticking all the boxes for me. Not only was he sexy, financially responsible, socially confident and on good terms with his x-wife and his son....he was also the kind of guy who took the initiative, who actually wanted to do things. Unlike Joel. Remember Joel? Joel would have spent the entire weekend stuck in that house, looking at his phone, waiting for something to happen, complaining about the allocation of rooms.
I grabbed my phone, my sunglasses and that's about it. It was cool outside so we both were wearing hoodies. In my mind, we would be back to start making breakfast in about forty minutes. We'd come in and tell the other all about our amazing jaunt. There was no need for sunblock because it was still early. Off we went, quietly out the back door, past the jacuzzi, across the paddock and into the trees. With all the birds singing and those glorious gum trees overhead, it was quite majestic. An idyllic way to start a weekend of wine tasting, eating and board games.
There was no trail to speak of. Ryan was forging ahead, chatting away as we move deeper into the bush. It was uphill at first, the ground crumbling beneath our trainers so it wasn't exactly easy going. That was fine. I didn't mind getting my heart rate up. Ryan was telling me about his job, his childhood growing up in Sydney, his ex-wife. I can't remember in what order. It all just sort of jumbled out. I was focused on my footing and not getting swatted in the face by a springy branch. I had noticed, at certain times Ryan did like to talk a fair bit. Which was totally okay. This was, after all, the 'getting to know you' phase of our relationship. And there were going to little adjustments along the way as I got used to his personality and vice versa. He was obviously trying to impress me. And wasn't that what I'd initially liked about him? His ability to speak with confidence? His ability to express himself? Great but still....at that moment, as we trampled through the bush, I found his chattiness didn't quite gell with my state of mind. I wanted peace, not a long conversation. Besides which, his back was to me so I couldn't see his face. It off-putting. And it truly did feel like the right time to go into such personal detail. We should have just chilled out and enjoyed the walk. I'm not much of a morning person.
We got completely lost. After about thirty minutes every tree and every rock started to look exactly the same. And of course, by then my phone was completely dead. Not that I had any phone reception to begin with. After an hour or two, we were still stumbling around without any real sense of direction. And it was at this point that I started to get really annoyed with Ryan. If he hadn't been talking when we first set out on this little adventure then maybe we'd have paid more attention to our route and we might not have lost our way. Another thing: he wouldn't admit that we were lost for the longest time. So we just kept moving deeper and deeper into the bush, making decisions based on his unreliable sense of direction. He took it as an insult to his masculinity. It was all ego. In retrospect, I felt certain that if we had faced up to the fact earlier, we might have been about to backtrack or at least start marking our progress.
By the afternoon of the first day, six hours after leaving the comfort of the rented house, we were exhausted, hungry and seriously dehydrated. And of course, we were both completely stressed out. We had to face the reality that we were going to spend the night out in the elements. For most of that first day, I'd been looking to Ryan to lead because he was the man and supposedly he’d been in the army reserves. But the more time we spend out there, the more I started to suspect that all he really knew about wilderness survival was what he’d learnt from watching Bear Grills on TV. As the afternoon began to drag on and our shadows stretched out, Ryan started to freak-out. He actually got angry at me because apparently, I had dragged him off on this little hike. This was a brand new aspect of his character I instantly found to be off-putting. Being unable to deal with stress and frustration of our situation, he found it necessary to vent on someone. On me. I was shocked. At first, I made concessions. Adjustments. He's stressed out, I told myself. He's edgy. It could happen to anybody. But then it kept happening. And when he wasn't being irritable with me, he was whining about the situation. He never once thought about how I was feeling. He just never even asked. Not once.
That night the side of that mountain we were on was covered in a heavy cloud. It made everything sticky with precipitation. It just rolled over us shortly after the sun went down. The first couple of hours were fine but then the temperature plummeted. We had to spoon together for warmth. It was a long, uncomfortable night huddled together at the base of that tree. The only good thing was we both slept soundly because we were exhausted. We woke up early the next morning and I was still freezing. At first, I was confused. This was supposed to be a relaxing long weekend away from the city. It didn't compute. Where was the wine? The fun? Why was I sleeping in a pile of leaves and dirt? Why did my back ache?
We got up and started moving. And for the first part of the morning, Ryan seemed a little bit more in control, self-possessed. We were both completely filthy and physically exhausted but it was good to feel the warmth of the sun and get on the move again. Having an entire day ahead filled me with a new optimism. We can get out of this, I thought. We can find our way back. By noon Ryan was starting to panic again, talking about his kid and how he would never see him again. We were in a bad situation but his panic wasn't helped matters. A certain point I just exploded. I’d had enough. And then we were both standing in a clearing, both covered in scratches and dirt, shouting at each other. Our first real fight. Basically, I was saying that he needed to man up and stop whining. He didn't take that well. In the end, I just walked off which probably wasn't the smartest move. At that moment, I thought to myself, you have to get out of this. With or without Ryan. You have to stay calm and think what needs to be done. I didn't know anything about survival in the bush but I needed to think without Ryan chattering away in my ear. Maybe then I'd remember a few of the things my dad was always banging on about. After a few minutes, Ryan resentfully appeared at my shoulder. He was still quite stroppy. Even though we weren't talking I could tell he was sulking. Do you know it felt like? What it reminded me off? It was like when you see a mother in a supermarket and she’s got some howling toddler beside her who is having a tantrum because he is not allowed to have an ice cream. That's exactly what it felt like: me trying to make Ryan feel better about our situation. At that moment, something else dawned on me. During our first couple of dates, I might have completely misread his arrogance as confidence. Yes. Blinded by the possibility of love, I might have fooled myself into thinking he was more sensible and well-adjusted that he actually was.
We kept on moving. What else could you do? You had to move or at least try. When the afternoon of the second day rolled around we were both really, really hungry. You know those diets? The ones which you fool yourself about your calory intake. The treacherous diets compromised by micro-rewards? Where you end up nibbling away at whatever is in the fridge while you pat yourself on the back, imagining the kilograms falling away. Well, this hunger wasn’t anything like that. This was real, hollowed out hunger. Just your stomach eating away at itself. And to think: back at the house, we had been within arms reach of all those groceries in the fridge. I wanted to cry when I thought about the array of stinky cheeses and the fresh bread and the soppressata. I could almost taste the peppers and herds in that cured meat.
Beyond daydreaming about gourmet nibbles, I had to concentrate on keeping Ryan motivated and thinking positively. Funnily enough, that ended up proving to be a welcome distraction from my empty stomach. I insisted we maintain a schedule: we would have a rest under a tree for 10 minutes and then we'd walk for forty minutes. It wasn't exact timing because no one had a watch. Anyway, after what felt like forty minutes on the move, we'd stop and rest again. And then walk again. And rest. And walk. Like that, all afternoon. Ryan seemed to like having the responsibility taken out of his hands. He'd withdrawn quietly a bit by the time it started getting dark.
As we went into the second night and the clouds came down again, we were both a bit catatonic with fatigue and dehydration. We finally had to stop because there was insufficient light. You couldn’t see your feet or the ground in the dark. The danger was a branch would poke you in the eye or one of us would twist an ankle. I kept remembering this woman I’d read about in a magazine article. A French woman who'd become lost with her family in the Sahara Desert. Things got so dire that she had to bash her son and then husband’s head in with a rock because they were dying or as good as dead, from sun exposure and dehydration. I had to work hard to crowd that grim image out of my mind. This was one of those times when you think what on earth possessed me to read that terrible article? The price you pay for morbid curiosity. Somethings you just don't need to know about. And look, we weren't at that point yet but I wasn't discounting the idea of taking a rock to Ryan's head that night for being such a dick. He just kept on surprising me. And not in a good way.
The next morning we both woke up and started walking. It was weird how you could just keep getting more and more hungry. And despite this, you had to keep moving forwards, stumbling along, depleted of energy and motivation. Getting more and more lightheaded so that most of the day starts to seem completely surreal. Like a dream, you can't escape from. You get on this emotional roller coaster. Up and down you go. Only you don't let on because at least one of you has to project the outward appearance of having a clear head. Physically speaking, it sort of disgusted me that Ryan has this fantastically gym chiselled body but no stamina what-so-ever. He was definitely coming off worse than I was. By the middle of the third day, he was dragging, insisting on taking longer and longer rests, basically slowing us down. Regardless we just kept on marching, with Ryan moaning and complaining. When I thought about Ryan from my father's perspective, how he would assess Ryan's behaviour over the past couple of days, what had I been thinking?
At that point, all I knew was that Sydney was basically due east. Civilisation. That meant we needed to move in that direction. Simple enough. Amazing what comes to you when you're moving through various states of delirium. Just walking along, my brain churning away, I remembered something out of the blue, something I probably won't have remembered under any other circumstance. I remembered what my father had taught me one hot afternoon at a family picnic. We came to an open area and using a stick and two markers, I found what I thought was the East-West line. That meant we knew roughly what direction to travel in. That little nugget of survival information had been there all along, lodged in the back of my brain, along with the lesson on how to fend off unwanted advances from boys (knee in the nuts and knuckles in the throat. Go for the eyes. Or if situation demanded it, the upward thrust of the hand, heel flat, right into the nose) and how to change a flat tyre. I also remembered that to avoid walking in circles, we needed to move in a straight line by sporting prominent trees or rocks in the distance and moving towards them. Then find another to do the same thing. Again. So this is what we did for the entire day, moving through the bush, tree to tree, hopefully heading in an Easterly direction. It might not have been the best plan, but at least it was a plan.
And then, just like that, totally unexpected, we came over a little hill and down onto the a…dirt road. Practically fell onto it. The relief I felt was substantial. Just seeing that little road cutting through the bush was like spotting an oasis in the desert. It wasn't paved but it was a road! A connection back to civilisation! We were both feeling lot better walking along on level ground and being out of those trees. Ryan was attempting to compensate for his shitty prior behaviour, trying to take charge of the situation, to re-establish his masculinity. It didn't help. Now, everything this guy tried made me dislike him just a little bit more. And it wasn't exactly a challenge taking control of things now, seeing as how I’d gotten us out of the trees. Whatever...we picked a direction and followed the road for a short time, swatting flies off our faces, until we came around a bend and the road just sort of ended at this scrubby turnaround area with a few muddy pallets and what looked like abandoned construction equipment dumped in the weeds. A single gumboot. A crushed beer can. And Ryan? He freaked out again. Another ragged temper tantrum. He kicked the ground and started swearing, clutched and punching at the air. Once again, the swagger and confidence were gone. He was just another angry, ineffectual guy putting on a show. I turned around and started walking back in the other direction. The road may have dead-ended here but that only meant it lead to somewhere else. I thought we were pretty lucky actually. We might have walked for hours in the wrong direction. That would have been far worse.
We walked for another forty minutes then finally we came to a sealed road. A real road with lines painted on it. We were completely out of the bushland five minutes later, walking across an open valley. In the far distance, I could see some houses and vineyards. I felt elated. I just kept walking, one foot in front of the next. Eventually, we heard an engine and then a truck approached and we flagged it down. I’ll always remember that guy’s face because it wasn't Ryan’s. The driver had the beard and he looked quite shocked at the state we were in. We climbed into his truck and took off. In the side mirror, my dirty hair flying in the wind, I could see we both looked like shite. It felt so good to be travelling back to the comfort and safety of my life in a car and not plodding along on foot. Having said that, I was ready to walk the rest of way back Sydney if necessary.
It was dark by the time we got back to the house. All the others were there waiting for us. They had been sitting around for three days doing nothing, just waiting for the news, good or bad. The girls came down the driveway in tears. The boys were stood around with their hands in their pockets. One of them offered Ryan a beer. Men. The rescue was called off, the police came out and spoke to us. Aside from our friends, the local police and the rescue unit seemed a bit pissed off with us. The police insisted that we go to the local hospital and get checked out. They seemed most concerned about dehydration. They gave us electro-lights, asked questions to ascertain our mental state and that was about it. But the time we were discharged, it was too late to drive back to Sydney and besides all our stuff was back at the house. I took a long shower. I just stood under the stream, feet together, eyes closed. I avoided talking to Ryan for the rest of the evening. It was awkward being in the same room as him, let alone the same house. It was obvious to me that Ryan was subtly testing the waters with me, trying to gauge my feelings about the last couple of days while talking himself up with the others at the same time. Damage control. He tried to make out we had both acted as a calm, collected team. It made me cringed to hear his voice in the other room but I didn't say anything. I just didn't see the point.
Once I was a flight from Sydney to Hawaii. The plane was half empty. Passengers had whole rows to themselves. One of those lucky flights on which you might actually get a decent nights sleep. Shortly after takeoff, I notice this American guy had started chatting up a woman in the next row over. Flipping through my magazine, I had one ear tuned into there conversation. I couldn't help it. This guy was making moves on this girl and it became apparent that she was receptive to it. There was nothing wrong with that. He was a good-looking guy. Well built and handsome. A bit later he got up and moved over to sit down next to her. A short time after the last drink service, after the lights had been turned down, there seemed to be a lot of fumbling and stifled moaning going in that row. They were under a few of those thin plane blankets. I was considering moving, for the sake of their privacy, but then I thought why should I? I was catching flashes of this hot, mid-air action between the seats. Nothing graphic mind you. Two bodies straining together. The other passengers were watching superhero movies and rom-coms while these two were getting it on. Anyway, after they'd finished, they started talking quietly and giggling in the dark but, as we got closer to Hawaii the conversation started to become noticeably strained. I couldn’t hear the specifics but you could tell there was tension. Trouble in paradise. Then they start to argue. Not loudly but it was definitely an argument. As we descended into Hawaii they both returned to their assigned seats and were ignoring each other. They both left the plane separately, moving towards customs and beyond. To look at them you would not suspect any kind of connection. They were just two people a line with their luggage and their passports. And I’m assuming that was the end it. A relationship compressed into an eight-hour flight across the Pacific. Attraction, conversation, foreplay, sex, post-coital companionship, deeper exploration of personality, disappointment and separation. All taking place on a red eye. The point is, some relationships have a limited lifespan because some people are not meant for each other.
That was the situation with me and Ryan. In some ways, I'm grateful we got lost. It meant I got to see the worst of Ryan and as a result, I avoided what I now know would have been a bad relationship. He just wasn’t the person I thought he was. He certainly wasn’t the same person I went off into the bush with that first morning. I don't need a he-man but I do need someone who has enough nounce and confidence to last more five minutes in a stressful situation without coming apart at the seams.
I got a ride back with Amanda. Ryan was like, are you sure? We should talk. By then, I think he'd reassessed the entire thing so that he was, if not heroic, then at least a positive participant in what happened. People do that. They tell themselves different versions of the same story. It's natural. They compensate for their own shortcomings. In the past, I've done things I haven't been especially proud of. I've altered the story to make myself feel better. Sometimes you have to. After all, you have to live with yourself, don't you?
That's okay, I told him. We'll catch up later. In the city. I need some time to myself. He gave me a peck on the cheek. The expression his face was complicit and sympathetic. A look that said, we made it. We got through the ordeal together. We have a bond.
Yeah, right.
Over the next couple of weeks, Ryan made a few more attempts to connect and reconcile but the damage had been done. At least in my mind. Eventually, I did get to hear his modified version of our ordeal from Amanda. As I suspected, it was different to mine. If there had been any doubt before, that Ryan was not for me, after hearing about his patient dealing with my hysterics, well, there was none remaining.
