#2: Marooned in the Desert: the Story of the Birdwatchers
A few years back, Lucy (my partner) and I were on a camping trip exploring a desert in Australia, when we became locked in due to sudden heavy rain. The dirt track was closed for days, and we found ourselves marooned in a remote, unforgiving landscape with a handful of other travellers in the same situation as ourselves.
The following is an excerpt from a larger writing project I am working on: I hope you like it. I’ll begin at the point where we have just pulled into the campground.
The campsite we found ourselves in doubled as a pub, and after removing as much mud as we could from our camping gear and getting into some fresh clothes, we learned that being stuck at a campsite with its own pub was quite a fair trade for being leg-roped on the trail for an unknown length of time. As it turned out, the initially frustrating development of having our plans interrupted was to be the enduring highlight of our trip, our year, and perhaps even of the decade. We learnt a lot over the days we spent marooned amongst the small group of stranded strangers we found ourselves with: a handful of people, the only souls within a hundred miles in any direction. As it transpired, this was also the place where we met the three birders, and the myth they’d managed to bring along with them.
One evening after the track had closed and we had started getting used to our new home, a small sedan came limping into the outpost. Three wet, swampy looking humans poured out, booked a room, and disappeared. An hour later they reappeared at the bar neatly dressed, laptops in hand, tripping over themselves with excitement. They were harmless enough people, and very soon they had consumed enough alcohol for all of us. The three newcomers huddled close to each other but talked loudly, as if they desperately wanted everyone else in the pub to overhear a secret. Eventually, something in the air snapped: they could take the self-imposed anonymity no more. They waded over, introduced themselves cheerily and, with sea legs, commanded the bar, flipped open a laptop, and bid us all to gather around.
‘All’ was everyone in the bar: a German couple in their 60’s who’d nearly rolled their caravan in the mud and rain at high speed and barely made it into the campground; a younger couple from Melbourne; the two owners of the pub; and lastly a starless, nameless itinerant who turned slippery as Teflon whenever you tried to learn the remotest detail about him.
The birders story was drawn out and dramatized: at least, as much as three drunk, ecstatic birders taking the lid off some good news can make a story stretch.
Apparently they’d been a week in the desert, on the trail of the fabled Grey Falcon. The bird was notoriously difficult to find, they explained, and it often took dedicated birdwatchers many visits to the desert to get a sighting that was good enough to confirm. Many never got to see one at all. The three men had come from interstate to find and photograph the falcon, and were obviously madly and blindly determined. They’d spent days combing the desert, following the hunches and advice of locals, and had consulted all the written information they could devour: but still, no falcon.
Unfortunately for them, their car had suffered some kind of mechanical failure, and the trio had to make a camp by the roadside. They had taken exactly not enough water with them: one small bottle each, a hangable offence when you are about to head down a desert track that, save for a single pub roughly half way along, is a 300 mile-plus, tyre-gnashing drive with no phone reception, no water tanks, waterholes that boil people alive, locals who don’t suffer idiots, and life-searing daytime temperatures. A satellite phone would have made sense: but this group had put their heads together and decided that, no, the trip could be safely negotiated without one.
Stranded, they divided the small amount of food they had for the trip- consisting solely of dried crackers- and they ate these whilst making camp in the desert by the road, awaiting someone with car-fixing skills to chance by. They had a long wait (the track was closed), no help came, overnight it rained again, and in the morning they had to fill their water bottles from filthy roadside puddles. Eventually a car did come along- somebody who worked on a station and needed to get to town- and got their car going. If the station worker had decided to head in the other direction, the birders would have had to walk out, or (more likely) would have perished. They joked about all this, but did not seem to appreciate just how close they had come to being in serious trouble.
The morning after their car broke down, they had been laying in their sleeping bags by the roadside- bedraggled, wet, broken and miserable- when a cockatoo alighted a few metres away. There were so many cockies around, and they had seen so many up close, that they paid it no special attention. They continued laying around talking until one of them realised it was no cockatoo: Grey Falcon! A Grey Falcon, sitting on the gibber not ten feet away. Luckily, one of them had slept with a camera in their sleeping bag (nobody wanted to ask why) and snapped a long series of photographs, which is what we were now treated to on the laptop at the bar. Tears of excitement filled the eyes of one of them as he explained what good luck they had been granted to see this bird, this close. We could only agree with them, and felt genuinely happy for them, and for the next hour we were treated to their other photos, quite splendid shots of desert birdlife. But the few images that buoyed them, the falcon photos, were displayed again and again.
The barman had the aridity and omnipotence of the desert he lived in, and was not surprised at the sudden appearance of the bird, or the enthusiasm of the three men. In fact, he told us, in two weeks time there was meant to be a “whole planeload of poms” flying in from the UK specifically to observe the Grey Falcon. Due to the flooding they had needed to postpone: they’d already re-booked their flights and all. He found it interesting that people would circumnavigate the planet and spend considerable sums of money to catch perhaps just one glimpse of a single species, but explained he’d seen this phenomena so often it was to be expected as a regular occurrence.
The night wore on, the chance collision of strangers in the desert producing conversation that poured out the open doors and into the waiting night, the incandescent bulb outside the pub the only artificial light for hundreds of square miles. This was not lost on any of us: we all agreed that the further you get from civilisation, the easier it is for meaningful community to form, and the stronger the communities are. In places like this, we knew, there is no other option than to unquestioningly help others, and to openly rely upon them in return.
Eventually- when the roads dried out- we would leave, sad to part ways with the remote outpost and the handful of people within it. What was interesting is that no two groups of people had anything much in common with each other: it was the desert that glued us into a cohesive, tolerant social unit. Both the landscape and the remoteness made it very clear that this was the only option. We had become- for a few untethered days- a small, ephemeral community.
Wonderful story!