I decide I wanted to climb her, the next weekend. It rains, and I change my mind. On the Tuesday after Helen talks about going up. I say I would go up with her, if she would like. By Saturday it is raining again. We go anyway.
I choose to go back to Sphinx Rock Comminity(SRC) because I assume that we can climb up the Rock from there. We walk the 5 or so kilometres from "Kaivalya Meru" to SRC. Someone gives us a lift for about a kilometre. They are looking for Blue Knob Hall. It is still raining when we get to SRC. We spend some time in a bus shelter, and watch the cows across the road. Helen says that cows are very old. I think as I do about cows, about their wisdom, and that of other domesticated animals. What is it about an animal's character that they allow is to domesticate them? The answer that came back is that they don't care. They would like to be respected and appreciated, but they do not hold grudges. This is different to a wallaby who's message to me is, I am a wild animal, and I will keep away from you and be silent, and I don't worry about what I'm going to eat because I know what I can eat. And I don't care about clothes and shelter. (But the bastards have a coat of fur.)
I suppose the question is that if we could grow fur how many humans would do it? I would.
There are also ducks grazing in the same field as the cows, and magpies digging for grub things.
Except no one at Taurus House knows the way. Jimmy says the only way to Sphinx Rock is over Blue Knob. We go to Sonja's, and Sonja's friend Ruth says we have to start from somewhere over on the Nimbin Road, but she doesn't know where. Then Sonja says that Richard has been up there and we should ask him how to get there. Richard lives at SRC. On our way to see him, it stops raining.
Helen is still in high spirits for climbing even though it is lunchtime, and someone has said it will take four hours.
We meet Richard. He said to go to this other community, and how to find the place to start the climb up Blue Knob. If we saw the man who owned the land, we should introduce ourselves and tell him what we were doing. He told us it would take four hours. It starts to rain again slightly. Richard thought it would be a good day for a climb because we wouldn't drink as much water. He tells us about his trip up there, where they camped and that there is a triangulation tower up there, overgrown with weeds. Once there was a view and now there isn't.
We thank Richard and continue on our way. Walking along the road till we get to the turnoff, and pass it. Going up the hill owards Nimbin, we stop and lunch on apples and organges, and while we are still sitting there, Helen leaps up and flags down a car for us. A man drives us to the next community. He is from Brisbane, and I tell him we are going to climb up Blue Knob.
We get to the community and pile out, thanking him. We see the bus shelter, and start to climb up the road. It is very steep. Our climb up Blue Knob has begun.
The trees are beautiful, we can hear running water, the air has a feel, the mountain is feeling us. We pass the old quarry.
We walk past three farms in various stages of Permaculture, and Helen and I discuss the virtues of the moveable chicken ark. It is first time I've seen chickens roosting at midday instead of scratching on the ground. I guess they don't like mud and wet feet. Just like Josephine the goat. We climb some more, and at some intangible point on the mountain, I feel it. I feel the mountain, and I am afraid. I feel afraid of the mountain, and what could happen.
We come to a four wheel drive graveyard, and finally the owner's place and his bright yellow bus. There is no one home.
Helen and I mill about, and look up. The mountain goes on. We pick our way upwards along another track, which looks like it could have had a car drive on it once. It is red clay, and choked with weeds, and it has a plastic pipe embedded in it. We come to a dam, and stop and look at it. It looks very inviting, but we go on. We come to a kind of field, and the car track starts to slope back down. We follow it anyway, like cows, and I am starting to feel like a cow. We come to another dam, and an orchard of bananas, citrus, and exotic looking ginger being overgrown by long grass.
We take in a view of straight up. On the other side of the dam is like a wall circling the dam of mountain and rainforest. The top is covered in cloud, and I think that that part might be Sphinx Rock. I haven't seen Sphinx all day, because it has been covered by cloud. We wonder about what is the right way to go up. The car track goes on and lower down. We feel what is the right way. And we go back to the field. Cross the field and stop again.
I say, I reckon we have to go up there, pointing straight up. Helen doesn't look keen. "Straight Up" is very steep, like Mt Somerset. Nothing quite like an igneous rock for steep. Instead we skirt the base of the slope, and it is relatively easy walking, not counting no path, fallen logs, waist high grass, and thick slippery mulch. We walk about ten minutes, and come to more steepness, and a gully, and I don't want to cross it and neither does Helen. It has a nice view of the Knob looking straight up. We turn back, and sit on a log and discuss tactics.
We decide we will have to go straight up. After a rest on the log, some fruit and water, and a discussion about how long the water will last, we begin the real climbing on our hands and knees. Most of the slope we walk on our feet though. We find a fence, and the fence is what we follow up the ridge. In places, the ground is less steep, and where it is less steep, there is more grass, and less mulch. The trees have moss growing all over them, and they look very cool. I think there were about three steep rises and two slightly flatter bits. There is a stand of casurina, which we camped in, and lots of tiny like staghorns as big and smaller than the palm of my hand. And every now and then, there would be a gap in the trees, and would take in a view of the valley below, and the slopes on the other side of the valley.
It starts to rain again. At one point, Helen slips over, and says she doesn't want to climb anymore. I say, we aren't in a hurry, have a rest, see how you feel. She rests, and we go on, oh, yeah, it was one of those steep slopes where the safest way to climb is by zig zagging. There are no plants that look like native undergrowth. I still don't know what is native rainforest undergrowth, what it's shape is, what it's look and feel is, how it is meant to cover the ground.
At about 3:30 pm, we come to an impasse. Helen looks up and through the trees, and sees the almighty first cliff. Then she sees the ridge that connects us to the top of the cliff, the sheer drop on the left and she wasn't going to go any further. She wants to pitch the tent and stop for the night. I can't seem to explain to her that we can't pitch a tent on this 50 degree slope. I don't know if it is even possible. I climb up a bit higher and look over the valley, and the cloud is drifting up against the cliff face. I want to go higher. As I wait around for something to happen, I notice the ferocity of the wind whipping up the rainforest side of the spine. What happens is I get cold.
I look around for a flat spot. Impossible. I give up after 15 minutes. Consult with Helen. We go back down because she is pretty sure that she doesn't want to climb the spine. We go down the first steep patch, and stop just becfore the next clearing because there is a flat patch. We pitch the tent. I find out it is not the tent that I thought it was and I have never seen this tent before in my life. But I have pitched their kind before.
When the tent is up, I sit in it, and immediately feel better to be out of the wind. There is no other shelter from the wind, not even the trees, anywhere up or down the ridge. I welcome the tent because my shoes, socks and jeans are wet. Helen and I talk about mountain climbing and Mt Isa and eat dinner of fruit and nuts and watch the trees, the clouds, the valley. The wind stops. It is amazing. The first time all day that I had noticed. What I could then hear were cars. I told Helen that I hadn't noticed the cars on Kyogle Road from Kaivalya Meru, as much as I could noticed the traffic on Nimbin Road.
It starts to get dark, and we check our shoes and socks for leeches. I found five leeches on my left foot, when I had taken my shoes off. We crawl into our sleeping bags , which amazingly are dry and wait for sleep to come.
I did not have an extra pair of socks. My feet are cold and wet, and I do not sleep for a long time, and it is not for long when I do. I also want a blanket. All night I keep waking up shivering, wishing: it was dry, or that I had brought more dry clothes, or that I just wasn't there. The sleeping bags are dry because I had put them into plastic bags, and stressed to myself and Helen, that there was no point taking them if we couldn't keep them dry.
I know that I have slept. I keep waking up from vivid dremas. It is an unpleasant experience.
When the sun comes up, I still don't want to get up. The thought of wet shoes and socks and jeans is enough to put me off. I cower in bed until Helen asks me if I am thinking of getting up yet. I tell her what I am thinking. She says she wants to start off down the mountain by 10 am.
I sit up. Big move. She has already eaten. I look outside. One of the bags that had been out all night is perfectly dry. So is my felt hat. I wish I had realised that the wind, which blew all night, would have dried my jeaans and my socks too. My shoes are still wet. I hang my jeans and socks on trees anyway. I touch them periodicly to feel how they are drying.
Then we sit and look out again, and wait for the clothes to dry. Helen hangs out her jumper and some socks. And we think about the trees.
Last night in the cold and the dark, I thought about the Aboriginal women climbing the Knob to Sphinx to be initiated. Was it winter or summer when they left? What did they eat? What did they wear? Did they take stuff up?
Did they leave stuff up to be used again? were they frightened too of the wind and dark and what was out there. I got the impression that they didn't do it very often, and maybe only once in their lifetimes.
Without thinking, but knowing it is ok, I drop all my ice cream bean seeds on the ground around the tent.
I thought/felt the trees around us. I feel lots of things, like how lonely they are for people up there, but all I can remember is trees are trying to evolve to be more tree, and I don't know what that means. What is more tree? And I won't know until more people go out to the trees with the intent to help them evolve to be more tree.
Carol told me once that if I made LSD, everyone that had it would have something to do with trees. Instead, I've decided that I will play my flute at Market Day, and I will play music for the trees. Then everyone that listens will have something to do with trees.
The Spirituality of geomorphology. The Landscape has specific purpose and intent. To hide things, or attract things, make people feel a particular way, to guard things, to select people and things. I don't know much about this, but I feel a lot.
We start to pack up, pull down the tent, put on wet shoes and socks. We leave at 10 am.
The way down is a bit easier because it is a bit drier. It takes us an hour to get down to the yellow bus. Helen cuts her hand on the barbed wire fence, and I go through all the things in my mind that we could put on the cut. A leaf, which would not stay on long. I have discovered that leaves are good for the stopping the flow of blood from a leech bite.
Instead I said to Helen, "you won't be able to fall over anymore or you'll get dirt in it." (the cut) and she only fell over once after that. She did slow down and pace herslf after me, which is why she didn't fall over.
I told her about the Bloody Mary Run at Mt. Guthega where I sprained my knee, and the slope was a bit like this one. This was not the place for either of us to break a leg, which would be quite easy.
We survive, however, to the bottom of Blue Knob, and when we cross the field at the bottom, we keep following the car track, to a new place. It goes around to where there is a sand pile, some water taps, a bare patch of dirt, and a couple of rusty skeletons of chairs, facing each other like someone had left then there after an intimate dinner, looking out over a magnificent view of the valley and Wollumbin.
Back at the yellow bus, the owner is home, combing his beard, and doesn't really look surprised to see two total strangers, coming down from the mountain. We introduce ourselves and tell him where we have been. He tells us about his trips up the Knob, where the track does a right agngle turn, and runs on a ledge where he sits and meditates. He went up there with a bunch of people once, and they went down the other side of the Knob to get to Sphinx Rock. They kept looking up at Sphinx, and it wasn't getting any bigger. They got to the bottom of the Knob, and Sphinx still wasn't getting bigger. They got to the knife edge, with sheer cliff on either side, they ran out of water, and the Sphinx was any closer. I get the chills just hearing about it.
Helen's eyes get really round, and she is glad that we had stopped where we did. The man says that is only the first scary part, and he said that of all the mountains he has climbed in the area, Blue Knob is the most spectacular. He says that the top of the Knob is over 1000 metres above sea level, and this place where we are standing is 350 metres. Mt somerset is 320 metres, so I figure Helen and I have probably climbed about 200 metres up the Knob. There are hardly any birds up there either, and we saw no wallabys. We thank him and leave.
When we get to the old quarry, I call a pit stop. I get my rock brother out of my pocket and go to see if his family is in the quarry. It isn't. There are some other kind of red basalt, and a fine grained shiny mafic rock, lots of hornblende or pyroxene, or both. The quarry and the rocks are sad and incomplete, that no one loves them anymore, or appreciates their scrifice. I let them know that I care and that I feel their pain, and I ask them what I can do. I tell Helen about the rocks. And the rocks say I have done enough, and I can come and visit them again anytime. Children probably used to play in that qauarry.
I carry the rocks' sadness with me when we leave. We walk and walk maybe 1 and 1/2 kilomtres. All along the road I study Blue Knob through the trees and try to see where we had been. I get an invitation to go back. We get a lift where we stop for lunch, because it is a good place for a car to stop. A woman and a 4 year old girl going to Brisbane. She is a student and is going back to Brisbane for the next week of study.
She drops us off at the turnoff to Lismore. We walk about 100 metres, I notice that my feet are warm, and we flag a 4 wheel drive, with two women who are going to Inverell. One of the women knows someone called Rosalind who used to do work at Breathconnection, and she asks us if we are involved with Breathconnection. We are, still, quite intimately. :) We get back to KM at 2pm.
Thus endeth the trip.