Tracks

Davidson, Robyn. Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback. New York: Vintage. 1980. Print.

First Sentences:

 

I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes....A freezing wind whipped grit down the platform and I stood shivering, holding warm dog flesh, and wondering what foolishness had brought me to this eerie, empty training station in the centre of nowhere. 

Description:

With personal challenge and survival memoirs, I always try to imagine whether I could achieve what the author accomplished. Almost always the answer is a resounding "No, not in my wildest dreams." That is even more obvious while reading Robyn Davidson's magnificent journey, Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback.

 

Davidson is just an ordinary Australian-born young woman with no special skills or ambitions...except for a persistent desire to walk across the Australian outback desert, alone, with only camels and her dog as her companions. Yes, that's right. She will walk on foot, not ride the camels, for 1,700 miles, making her "lunatic idea" (her words) even more impossible-sounding.

 

So she takes a train from her home in Queensland to the bleak outback town of Alice Springs, where men are men and women stay home. There she hoped for the first time to actually even see a camel and then learn how to manage them by herself. 

 

She began to work for a domineering man who captured and tamed wild, feral camels that roam the outback. Taking on the lowest position on his ranch, she agreed to work for free in exchange for camel-training experiences and, at the end of eight months, be given three of his camels for her expedition. Not all goes according to this plan, however.

 

Eventually, off she goes, with her two camels, following old desert roads, trails, and open terrain from one feeding spot to another, hoping local information about watering holes is correct and the rumored tiny settlements are still active and places where she can get rest and advice along the way.

I knew [people] all had that sinking feeling that they would never see me alive again, and I had the sinking certainty that I would have to send messages from Redbank Gorge the same day, saying, "Sorry, muffed it on the first seventeen miles, please collect." 

Along with her faithful dog, Diggity, and occasionally a photographer from National Geographic magazine, the source of her funding and eventual article, she slowly walks, gaining rhythm, confidence, and power in her aloneness. Wild, unpredictable camels, numerous hardships, and the vast desert all around her. What could possibly go wrong?

We were breaking camp at four in the morning, walking until ten, resting in the shade until four, then continuing until eight at night....Living on one's nerves and expecting every moment to produce a horrendous catastrophe is one thing -- doing it in 130-degree heat is quite another. Hell must be something like that. 

Along the trek, she encounters wild camels ("If you see one, shoot it first -- immediately" is the advice given her), snakes, dried up water holes, abandoned villages, as well as friendly, generous people and moonlit skies that kept her dream alive.

 

I really enjoyed reading her clear, honest prose as she recounts adventure after challenge, or just the boredom of putting one foot in front of the other mile after mile. It is a powerful, yet simple read, one that should be enjoyable to anyone seeking an insight into the beauties and threats of the Australian Outback desert, and the perseverance of one woman who tries to live in it.

It struck me then that the most difficult thing had been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity....One really could do anything one had decided to do whether it were changing a job, moving to a new place, divorcing a husband or whatever, one really could act to change and control one's life; and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders.   

One woman's quest to trace the route of Marco Polo through China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries...by bicycle. Wonderful descriptions of her journey, the land, and the few people she encounters in the vast, mostly unsettled mountains of Asia. (Previously reviewed here.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

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