Sandy Bottom

I turn off the tarmac into the dirt road and push as hard as I can on my mountain bike. The wheels whizz and spin, slid and slide, skip and bounce, until, inevitably, they get stuck in an expanse of lush, thick red sand, with the consistency of talcum powder.

Bulldust.

I swear at length and with feeling, get off and push. I battle through the patch, get on the bike again on the other side, and carry on through the trees, into the bushland. I hide my bike behind a big old fat boab, and start running. It is early morning, the land lies steaming under a tropical sun, and wallabies scatter before me as I run, barefoot through the sand. Black hawks circle overhead, following me from a distance and keeping a moody eye on me, in case I should show the great good grace of rolling over and carking it on the track, and providing them with a nice, juicey, fresh breakfast.

It feels a bit like I might, today. I've left it later than I would have wanted to, and the sun is beating down hard on my head. I've got neither hat nor water with me, because, dontcha know, I don't need those things.

Five km through the bush, along the edge of a salt marsh and past a water hole full of wading birds taking off at a screech when they feel me coming, I am given cause for reconsideration of that notion. I run from shade patch to tree shade patch as best as I can, and my head is slowly starting to cook. The end of the run is a well-deserved achievement, and going home for a drink and a rest-up appears like an attractive notion right now. But there's work to be done.

I retrieve my bike from the custodianship of the mighty boab, and ride till I get to the start of the drift of bulldust where I got stuck on the way in. Same as I have just about every other time, except on those rare occasions where it had rained the night before, and the water had packed down the fine sand enough to be able to ride over.

I stop, stand and glare at it. We have unfinished business, it and me.

Getting stuck up to my handlebars, or just about, every time I ride through here is shitting me to tears, and today is the day I have come to do something about it. So I get my hatchet out of my bag, and get to work.

There's a funny little kids' song I like to sing, that involves "going on a bear hunt", meeting obstacles such as "thick, squelchy mud", not being able to "go over it or under it", and, consequently, being forced to "go through it". I have often sung it with groups I have led through all manner of environments, mountains, forests, rivers and swamps, with little kids and big adults, and it stands as a moral guideline for life: if you can't avoid something, go through it. By extension it would be great to be able to apply that to some people I have known, the acquaintance with whom would have been greatly improved if, instead of diplomatically going around them and avoiding the pain in the arse that they were, it would have been possible to go straight through them, in the process preferably flattening them and comprehensively grinding them into the ground.

The difficulty of negotiating the section of bulldust on the track is compounded by the fact that it appears immediately behind a bend in the track, and that the inside corner of that bend is completely overgrown with runners, shoots, saplings and branches of sundry extraction. If it wasn't for them it might, possibly just might, be feasible to stick to the hard shoulder of the track, skirt along the edge of the loose sand, and get through it in one piece. Therefore, I have come equipped to clear the edge.

I go to work with the hatchet, hacking away at the base of small trees, chopping into thick, overhanging branches, and slicing through shoots and runners. Within seconds the sweat is pouring off me like rivulets of rain in the wet season, which it should by rights be right now, but which is so far giving no sign of any inclination to start: the sky continues to be a hard, glaring blue day after day, and there are no clouds anywhere within cooee. As I work I become aware that I am, potentially, engaging in a type of exertion that could lead to trouble. The temperature is very nearly 40 degrees in the shade. In the sun it would boil and explode any thermometer you'd deign to try to use. The sun is sitting overhead like a mobile smelting furnace, and the air is wobbling with still, standing heat waves. It vaguely occurs to me that this might not, in actual fact, be such a brilliant idea, and that if I croaked here on the track, in the middle of nowhere, it would take a long time before anyone found my desiccated and dehydrated dead body.