Letters from Lisa

(note: this entry, and all others like it, will be jointly posted on the Australia Travel Blog page)

I’m leafing through volumes in the travel section at my favorite bookstore. France on $30 a day. Wine growing in Sweden. Culture Shock: Antractica. My hand reaches for a guide to the Himalayas, but my gaze falls upon a shelf labeled Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

The full force of my homesickness hits me. My hand drops to my side.

I shouldn’t feel homesick. I am home. In the United States. New Jersey. The same little highrise apartment where I took my first steps, had my first imaginary friend, broke up with my first ex. This is where I have lived my entire 27 years. Even during four years of college in New England, “home” was always here.

I came home from Australia four days ago. Now all I can think about is going back.

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It took a full day, plus a few hours, to advance from my familiar front door to the Esplanade in Cairns (where you can Dive The Great Barrier Reef! or Snorkel For A Day or Half Day! Equipment Provided! Boats Leaving Daily! and in Japanese as well!) and another full day bouncing and swaying on a cramped but homey little ex-trawler to reach my Australian destination, an island almost no one had heard of. Most maps didn’t show it. Weather reports didn’t mention it. Tour boats didn’t frequent it. This was simply because, 11 months of the year, nobody lived there.

Nobody human, that is.

My new Australian address was Ingram Island, a tiny coral cay of about 25 minutes in diameter, laid out between several reef flats, the Far North Queensland coastline, and a busy shipping channel that spanned the horizon. Ingram Island had no grocery stores, no main streets, no rest stops or campgrounds or structures of any kind. Anything we anticipated needing — sleeping tents, fuel, drinking water — had to be loaded onto the Gwendoline May, which would take us into viewing distance and then anchor in deep water to avoid a skirmish with the coral. The cargo would then be reloaded into one of the two small metal “catch boats” that we would be using for turtle research (creatively named Turtle Research 2 and Turtle Research 4 — I decided not to ask what had happened to 1 and 3) and finally unloaded onto Ingram’s sandy shore.

As it happened, I was one of the first two volunteers to come ashore. We offered to go first not because we were the strongest or most useful unloaders — just the most seasick. The Gwendoline May had encountered large swells and high winds soon after departure, and although I had traveled extensively on boats before without a single bodily complaint, I sensed this time would be different. Indeed, my first conversation on board the boat began with, “Have you taken seasickness medication yet?” asked by Sara, the biologist who would be cooking the ship’s meals, after she watched me gracefully jam my hip into the rim of the dining table.

Despite Sara’s friendliness and skill with cooking, the kitchen was definitely not the place to be. Too many items of furniture to bump into, too little ventilation, and too few windows with a horizon view. I spent every opportune moment outside on the back deck, watching the colorful plastic “nelly bins” filled with our food and supplies shift around under the blue tarp protecting them from the waves. Water flowed in thick lines across the deck, tickling my feet in their flimsy plastic sandals.

The other safe place to be, digestion-wise, was horizontal on the bottom bunk in the “girls’ bedroom”, a triangular alcove downstairs from the kitchen. I threw my purse (which I wouldn’t be needing for the next 14 days) at one end of the bed, threw my dizzy self down on the other, and tried to imagine I was being gently rocked to sleep instead of tossed about by ocean waves. The seasickness pill packaging had warned of possible drowsiness, and I fervently hoped it was right. Thankfully, it was.

I slept so soundly, in fact, that I missed the drama in Cooktown, when the boat stopped off to pick up three final passengers that would be joining the project. The waves had only gotten rockier, and the sky had faded to an unhelpful black, when Turtle 2 (or possibly Turtle 4) was dispatched to retrieve the new additions. When the boat returned, all those awake struggled to reel (or steer) it back in, but were thwarted by crashing waves that sprayed them with water and raised the boats to different heights, making it difficult to get across. At some point during docking, head researcher Ian — who, in a foreshadowingly creepy way, had recently warned us about the dangers of pinching extremities when climbing in and out — had his foot slammed between the boats, rather in disregard of the relatively fragile nature of the human toe. He tumbled into the water, while the others nervously watched, but then popped up, rolled his eyes, and climbed aboard. The three new passengers took possession of their luxurious accomodations on the dining benches and kitchen floor, and Ian retreated inside to examine his bit of mangled anatomy. But there was an encore of excitement, as the supplies had shifted loose due to the rough waves and had to be reorganized. Then, finally, all was quiet on the Gwendoline May once more.

I awoke early the next morning blissfully ignorant of the Battle of Cooktown Harbor. The last thing I remembered was Ian’s video of an episode of Crocodile Hunter focusing on sea turtles, in which he’d made a brief appearance. (The topic of the ubiquitous Steve Irwin and his exaggerated camera-mugging became a frequent diversion throughout my time in Australia — it seemed that anyone who worked with wildlife had encountered him at some point.) The inside scoop was that Steve broke some fingers while shooting a turtle jump, and had simply taped them up for the remainder of the shoot, without complaint. Now it seemed Ian was about to do the same with his toes.

I had been on the boat for about 18 hours — many of these cocooned in my bed — and had met almost everyone with whom I would be living on Ingram Island. There was Ian, whom I’d met the night before we left. There was Travis, a young athletic Australian from outside Melbourne, whose wife Katie kindly kept me company while the guys attached the catch boats to the Gwendoline May.

Then there were four fellow Earthwatch volunteers, all from America like me, and all involved in education in some way (also like me). It had taken me quite a while to meet them. Ian and Travis had left me at the dock to help load the boat while they went back to pick up the other volunteers, as well as everyone’s luggage. In the ensuing rush of bags and bodies, my luggage got left behind, so Ian had to drive me back to get it. “Oh, you wanted that stuff?” he joked, but I had confused Cairns with New York City and was worried that someone might have swiped my bags from the hotel lobby, and I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I wasn’t even sure that what was in my luggage would be useful — I had never slept in a tent or gone more than a few hours without access to running water — but I had compensated by bringing most of my closet, packed smartly in plastic bags in case the luggage fell into the ocean during unloading, which had been specifically mentioned as a possibility in Earthwatch’s official Expedition Briefing.

As we completed the loading — now with me personally supervising as my luggage descended to the deck — I surveyed the mountain of bins and poles and oddly shaped packages and had a flash from Spaceballs: “Take ONLY what you NEED to SURVIVE!”

I climbed back down onto the ship, now assured that we weren’t leaving my underwear in Cairns, and felt sufficiently recovered to meet the other volunteers. I met Rik first, thus dispelling the rumor that we were an all-female volunteer team. (One crew member, upon hearing said rumor, had made a silly remark about us constantly shaving our legs, which to my knowledge none of us ever did on the island.) Rik was an elementary school principal from the Midwest, and remarked that the rest of us seemed to be teachers — thus him spending time “with the enemy”. He had a small gash on his face from having bumped himself somewhere on the boat, and mentioned he had numerous other cuts and bruises from his week of scuba diving on the reef — particularly one injury sustained from a collision with a turtle. (Which was destined to be the first of many.)

The “other teachers” turned out to be Meg, Heather and Emily. Meg, a rather fit lady from Virginia, quickly pointed out that she was not, in fact, a teacher, but worked in the development office of a private school. Like Rik, she seemed comfortable in the water, since she was a competitive swimmer. In contrast, Heather was actually a teacher. She was from my neck of the woods, New York City, but taught in a different universe. Her students were tough, world-weary, self-identified “ghetto” high schoolers in Spanish Harlem. She had this in common with Emily, who taught a similar bunch at a charter school in Boston. Emily seemed more than ready to take on a rustic residence on Ingram Island, since she’d hiked and camped extensively on various road trips in the U.S.

Before piling into the dining area to get oriented, we assembled for a “before” picture, knowing full well that we would come out feeling, looking and (yes) smelling quite differently after the project ended.

Now, stumbling past the sleeping bodies in the kitchen area, I was certain that I already looked like an “after” picture. I therefore quickly formulated my very first Ingram Island rule — No Looking in the Mirror. I smoothed my hair back one final time in the ship’s bathroom, then sighed and stepped back into the kitchen, where life was beginning to stir.

Sam, a Parks and Wildlife Ranger from Cooktown, introduced both himself and his two companions — Aboriginal boys whose names I first misunderstood and then figured out to be Bevan and Gresham. Still wrapped in blankets, they struck me as shy and quiet, though they were simply subdued due to sleepiness. Sam, though, was talkative and friendly, and his typically sharp Australian wit flowed particularly long when he encountered Rik, who was to become his sparring partner over everything from light switches to sports to fruitcake.

For some reason that still eludes me, the Bone Collector was on over breakfast, which probably would have given me a queasy feeling even if we hadn’t been on a seasickness-inducing boat. Fortunately, I was soon spared by Ian’s announcement that we were about to start unloading. We assembled on the deck, and I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind leaving the boat immediately, or sooner. After Bevan and Gresham were dropped off with the first round of supplies, Meg and I went next.

As we hauled the bins up the beachfront, I thought nervously about the fate of my luggage, but swiftly dismissed the wayward idea that my bags might be left behind. As we threw our shoulders and elbows into propelling huge barrels of water up the slope (almost nothing is heavier than water) I was positive the other volunteers would check for me. As we panted on the beach, sprawled out and sweaty in salt-watered clothes, I knew for a fact that the boat crew wouldn’t raise anchor before inspecting for left items one last time.

But when the last boatload had been unraveled, piece by piece, onto a tarp hastily laid out in a vain effort to keep sand out (Ingram Island Rule #2: Sand gets in, no matter what, so don’t bother) I didn’t see one of my bags.

Back to the boat!

It turned out that it had indeed got to the island and was merely hidden under some larger bags. So after Ian checked with the boat crew about having one last lunch (and one last fling with plumbing) before they cast off, we disembarked on the island to start setting up.

Ingram didn’t feel like home to me yet. Not as Meg and I clung to the sides of her balloon of a tent as it caught the wind and achieved brief moments of flight. Not as we shuffled and peeked in the storage bins that housed our sustenance — including one that seemed devoted to cheese spread and Vegemite. Not as we were sitting down for a brief meeting and Ian plucked a green ant off his shirt and bit into its belly. I couldn’t help but feel quite far away from everyone and everything familiar. Ingram seemed a pretty island, an island that promised new experiences and a touch of adventure. It just didn’t feel like home.

But it would.