…There was a woman on my mind.  Of course there was.  She’d given me an ultimatum; give me what I want, or leave me alone.  I loved her.  I wanted to make her love me too, but I seemed to be unable to reach her.
I sat on the muddy ground under the lush forest canopy and cursed life.  Where was it written that a man has to choose between the woman he loves, and what he loves to do?..

April 2058

I step out of the car, and push my thick spectacles up my sweat beaded nose.  My legs ache.  My back aches.  At eighty five, even sitting down for hours knocks you around.
The heat is uncomfortably intense.  In the past ten years the depleted ozone layer has let more and more energy into the atmosphere. The results are all too evident, here in the centre of Australia.

The rock sways gently in the rising heat haze.  I stand, staring.  It is massive.   Red.  Utterly beautiful.  Iconic.  Serene.  Indestructible.  Even from this distance, over a kilometre from it’s base, Uluru has an impact, in reality, that I did not predict.

I’m bringing a lot to this moment.  I’ve been traveling, non-stop for more than forty years.  My journeys have taken me to every part of the planet.  Thousands upon thousands of roads.   A million kilometres.  More meetings, travel companions, family and friends than I can even remember now.  My memory is full.   I’m tired.
I decided, more than forty years ago, that this place, this sacred rock, would be my journey’s end; my last destination.
This is the last place to go.  After Uluru, I plan to travel only in my mind.

My aching legs insist.  I ease myself to the ground, and sit in the soft red dust.  Sarah, whose car we came here in, comes and sits next to me.
So.  Is it like you imagined, Dad? she asks me softly, smiling and putting her hand around my shoulder.
I feel like I will cry suddenly.   It’s been a long road.  I’ll miss it.

We sit in the shade of a tarpaulin and eat sandwiches.
Don’t you want to go closer? Sarah asks me.
I shake my head.   Around the foot of the rock, tour buses, helicopters, hundreds of parked cars are scattered across a quiveringly hot concrete apron.
This is close enough, I tell her.  It’s not about the rock.  It’s about being here.  It’s about knowing I did what I set out to do.  Well, some of it at least.  It’s just a sense of completion, I guess.
A hot wind gusts at the salt bush.  My lips feel dry and cracked.  My hips are aching from sitting cross legged on the ground.
I think back forty something years to the day I sat down, and with youthful presumption, wrote the story of this day.  My lips felt a lot more supple then, and my muscles never strained or failed me.  I suppose.  Honestly I can’t remember.  The way aging erodes your body, it works mercifully on your memory too.  By the time you get to where I am now, you don’t mourn for your lost health, because you can’t really remember what living in a youthful body was like.

Maybe I don’t remember what being young felt like, but I remember everything I’ve done.  Playing the blues with pirates in Thailand.  Hunting with dolphins.  Diving in the sparkling waters of remote Western Australia.  Dancing, naked under the stars.  Staggering, wide eyed, through the ruins of Angkor Wat.  Exploring the Alhambra.  Picnicking under the stars in Spain.  Hitchhiking through the Italian alps.  Wandering, spellbound, in the desert.  Heartbreak.  Elation.  Confusion.
So much confusion.  Every journey I ever went on seems to have begun with confusion.

There’s a clearing in a forest, in a remote corner of Brazil.    I went to Brazil in 2017.  I was forty-three years old.  I found the clearing in the forest, and I camped there for a week.  I was angry.  I was lost.  I knew exactly where I was geographically, my GPS told me that, but I was lost in self doubt.
I made friends with Alberto, the farmer who worked the land on the edge of the jungle.  Alberto gave me a lift into town to get food, and I helped him to change a flat tire.
He invited me to eat with his family that night.  I spent a lot of time during the next few days helping him mend fences and roll joints.  In the evenings we ate in his kitchen.  At night I went back to my clearing to brood.

There was a woman on my mind.  Of course there was.  She’d given me an ultimatum; give me what I want, or leave me alone.  I loved her.  I wanted to make her love me too, but I seemed to be unable to reach her.
I sat on the muddy ground under the lush forest canopy and cursed life.  Where was it written that a man has to choose between the woman he loves, and what he loves to do?
There were a million insects in that forest.  I slapped at mosquitoes, and smeared foul smelling ointment on myself, and smoked dope, and played the blues, and swore and wrote angry sentences in my notebook.
I made a crude slingshot out of frayed rope, and a strip of tough, leathery bark, and I hurled stones across the clearing, and missed my targets and swore at myself.  At night I slept badly in the humidity.
I got the answer in the end.
After a week of building fences, and slapping at bugs, and tossing and turning alone in that muddy, mozzie infested forest, I could see what I had been missing.
She didn’t want me.
It was that simple.  The things she wanted weren’t mine to give.  I was in love with someone who could never love me back, because the man she saw in front of her wore my face, and spoke with my voice, but he just wasn’t me.
That was the turning point in my journey.  After that I was really free.  I would be loved for who I was or not at all.  And I would keep my self respect, and I would follow the road less traveled.
The horizon opened around me like a tropical flower.

I walked down to Alberto’s cottage and asked him to drive me into town.
While we bumped down the road, Alberto told me a story.

My father was a very poor man, Alberto told me.  There were seven children in his household, and we were always hungry.  This land here is good.  The soil is rich, but most of what my father grew, the landlord took in rent.  To make a little extra money, my father trapped monkeys in the forest.  The way to trap a monkey is unusual.  Have you ever seen this done?
I shook my head.
The trapper places a small bottle, or a hollowed out gourd at the foot of a tree where there are many young monkeys.  The bottle is tied to the tree trunk with a strand of wire, and inside the bottle is placed a nut.  The trapper has not long to wait, before one monkey climbs down the tree to the ground.  He is curious.  He sees the nut inside the bottle, and he reaches in to grab it.  But once he has grabbed the nut, he cannot get his paw out of the bottle.  With his fist around the nut, it will not fit through the bottle’s neck, and as he sits there perplexed, the trapper grabs him by the scruff of the neck.
My father captured many, many monkeys in this way.  It is ingenious, you see?   The monkey has a greedy nature.  He wants to get free, but he does not want to let go of the nut, and so he is easily trapped.

Alberto dropped me off at the main road.  I thanked him for his hospitality, and said goodbye, and hitchhiked to Colombia and went to a brothel, and got a new tattoo and headed north.

After I finish my sandwich, I get my camera out and shoot a few pictures of Uluru.  They all look like cliches.  This is the most photographed landmark in Australia, and there is nothing in it’s immutable, ancient, inscrutable visage left to discover, except inevitability.
Perfect.  The perfect place for an old man to soliloquise, and squint into the past.

I help Sarah pack up the tarpaulin.  We climb back in the car and crank the air conditioning.  I ease back in the comfortable car seat, and take a deep breath.  I look across at Sarah and smile at her.
Thank you for coming here with me, I say.
She shakes her head.
Where do you want to go now? she asks me.
I think about that.
Home? I ask her.
Where’s that, she asks, and laughs.
I turn and look in the rear vision mirror, at the empty dirt track behind us.
Lets just drive for a while and think about that, I say.
Sarah nods, grinning.  She starts the car, and sends it into a tight, skidding U turn, raising a cloud of red dust that mushrooms up into the hot, desert air.
I grin too, my sunburned lips cracking as the smile spreads, unstoppable, across my face.
 

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