It is said that the Romani, when they are close to death, too old, too tired, to continue their long round of ‘travelling’ are taken by those closest to them back for a final visit to the places that they loved the best in their younger days.
Over the past weekend my eldest son organised for myself and my wife to join him to help him celebrate his 50th birthday in a place where I had taken him many times in his younger days, and one last visited by us together 7 years ago. I was somewhat reluctant to go for the journey involved a 1000kms road trip, but – not wishing to disappoint him – we went along on the journey.
However, once on the way, in spite of some niggly moments where I had to dispute with my increasingly irritated daughter (back seat driver) for not following her Googled Map instructions on which road to take (I had taken the same road dozens of times before), as we got closer to journey’s end, the Flinders Ranges National Park (Ikara) I began to feel the old excitement of yore mount once more.
Many things happened over the weekend, some good, some very good, and some astonishing, not least of which involved me recovering from a serious bout of lower back pain (one of the reasons behind my reluctance to make the journey). The fact that this occurred after I had drunk a little too much and fallen flat on some rocky section of a path I was attempting to negotiate late at night makes it all the more amazing! Perhaps too the serious anti-inflammatory drug I was taken (on doctors orders – drink a little less if possible under the circumstances, he had also said!), then completing a 9kms walk into and up a section of Wilpena Pound itself (a circle of mountains that enclose a beautiful flat and somewhat verdant scrub and pastured valley). The hike involved climbing up a 500metre section of one of those mountains and getting down again! I felt a surge of energy in spite of the old body and its various aches and pains, even starting to dance and sing again as I walked. Only on the last few hundred metres of the track back to our cabin did I start to feel the fire and numbness in the legs hit. We revisited many of our old camping spots over the course of the weekend, driving through the interlacing rocky gorges that had been gouged out and uplifted, over aeons of time, exposing rock strata 500 – 1000 million years old, and opening to the naked eye of the world all those intervening years, layer upon layer of earths vast history. Only towards the end of our journey did I realise that I had – however briefly it may have been – rediscovered my vitality – a zest for one more glimpse of what once had caused me to fall in love with this beautiful, arid, landscape, so far removed from my own place of birth. Sing-alongs, shared food and wine aplenty, and silly games of ‘Chinese Whispers’ around the campfire under the stars with extended family, including grandchildren (and perhaps just a little too much wine, Kareem?), other highlights of this trip. There were many, many, more moments of course, far too many to be recounted here, but the return journey was like a gradual saying goodbye to an old friend, one perhaps I will not see again this time around.
There is one last moment that must be a part of this retelling however, another connection to a disappearing past.
*
*
On the last morning we went to the dining hall after packing up, loading the car once more, and readying everything to leave. We went particularly to say final goodbyes to those family members still lingering over their breakfast, and, as we did so, I looked across the room to see a group of people gathering for what I took to be a ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony about to be conducted by an old grey beard Aboriginal elder. It was time to leave. I didn’t wish them to think us rude so I looked directly at the elder and caught his eye; we smiled at each other and I made a gesture, a slight inclination of the head, whilst I placed my right hand over my heart – a universal acknowledgement of kinship, as we left; his smile broadened.
What is it, this ‘travelling’, that calls us back, again, and again, to those places that were once so special to us, to our survival even?
That was the lesson that came the day after we arrived ‘home’ once more. An insight given as a gift to make sense of it all.
*
We are those ‘travellers’ sojourning briefly here on this tiny blue speck of a planet, lost somewhere in the vastness of space and time, yet somehow claiming it as our ‘place;’ in some ways our grip may grow even tighter the closer one gets to needing to loosen it, but that is the nature of journeying, the excitement of new places to see, new things to explore, until – perhaps sooner than we realise – it is taken from us. For the Nomad this comes about naturally when one can no longer keep up with those others, the next generation and the one after that. In Australia, particularly in the more ‘Outback’ country where life was always harsh and only the fit could survive the long ‘Walkabouts’ that were involved in staying alive following the brief seasonal rounds that sustained them in small family groups, and competition for the scant resources was fiercest, when the old ones could no longer keep going, or keep up, help in the daily rounds of hunting and gathering their food each day, they would be left with a few precious resources at a place where the basics of survival and shelter could be had.
Today we have ‘nursing homes’ and old peoples complexes, ‘villages’ which are meant to carry out a similar – if less ‘connected’ – function for those elders too old, too sick, or too frail more generally, to keep up with the younger generations eager to press on with their lives! We avoid the ‘parting’ bit that is the reality that such situations have always called forth in us as Nomads all, preferring to salve our consciences with, “they will be properly looked after there,” to the more realistic, “you are a burden, a brake on our ‘lifestyle,’ so go – out of sight, out of mind – whilst we move on without you. Of course, our new idea of ‘caring’ extends a false hope that we – the ‘left-behind’ – can keep going by ourselves, even where the evidence to the contrary has been obvious to all for a long time, no longer a life of choice, as each passing day brings the inevitable inching closer and closer.
For those fortunate enough to still be in their own homes, they too can become, can mean the same thing, only experienced a little differently, their belongings crowded around them, speaking of times past, of loved books, and belongings, destined for the ‘skip’! Places of abandonment where no-one visits, no knocks on the door herald the return of those others, the travellers, with the next generation in tow. So we create ‘Mothers Days’ and ‘Fathers Days’ to create the semblance of care, or to encourage visits of those otherwise too busy with their own rounds of ‘hunter-gathering’ to do more than nod in the direction of those ‘left-behinders’ who still cling on to life and a little independence.
How ironic, that we must return to a life that sprang out of necessity and a recognition of the inevitability of the round of things to reach an understanding of that which we all once knew and shared – our common humanity, our common ends.
*
Only love changes that.
Those earlier generations didn’t abandon the old ones to their fate out of lack of love, but out of necessity, and that makes all the difference.
Is this not the message of that last ‘shared smile’ with the Aboriginal elder spoken of earlier?
Tracks in a Pathless Land 