Traipsing Memory

In second-year uni, in CLB7, I always sat by myself on left side of the lecture hall in a row that overlooked this group of quasi-nerds. And as Prof. Arman attempted to teach soil mechanics, my attention would wane and drift to this group, mesmerised by their interactions: the constant pen-chew and occasional lean–whisper–chuckle of the hippie-hoodie’d man in the middle; the straight-backed and friction-free studiousness of the attentive skinny chap; the hunch and sporadic writing flurries of the guy whose presence was variable; and the regular, over-confident hand-raise of the curly-haired one. In my daydreams, I saw myself amongst them, saw myself from a third perspective as the guy who wore hats, who skated to class, who interjected with dry-humoured quips to make people politely exhale. I knew these quasi-nerds matched my personality, but still I sat alone, repelling any new relationship with the dreadlocks I wore at the time, failing to absorb the conceptual information the professor was trying to transmit because the redhead of the group just put one cowgirl boot up on the armrest in front, and the shaved-head gent just stood, out of nowhere, and stretched. Each lecture, I’d leave the hall with a blank page and a few mental notes on the people I wanted to join. I was a suitable addition to their friend group—why couldn’t they turn around, forsake their incessant learning for a single moment and see that?

About a third of the way through the semester, my struggle with soil mechanics became clear: a failed quiz here, a low lab score there, I couldn’t grasp what this Mohr’s Circle thing represented, failed to realise the relevance of effective stress. And, I was lonely. I expected university to come packaged with gargantuan and fresh friendship circles, but after eighteen months of higher education, I still only hung with my high-school mates. I needed, I knew, an engineering friend. So, instinctively, I bought one.

Ben Miller—fourth-year and soil mechanics class tutor—advertised himself at the start of the semester for $45/h. Considering his constant High Distinctions in both social and academic settings, this was an escort rate impossible for me to pass up. He was bearded (I hoped to be bearded). He was intelligent (I hoped to be intelligent). He had this dense sphere of engineering friends who were all so cool, interesting, memorable. 

My time with Ben was always labelled as ‘tutoring’ because that’s what he thought he was doing; but really, he was employed for my social esteem. We’d sit in the underground level of the Tyree Building and run through theory and my misconceptions. I’d nod vacantly, say, “yeah, okay, oh, I see, ah, that’s right, mmhmm,” thinking only of what I’d say the moment our session ended, wondering if it were possible to wheedle my way into a fourth-year friend group. Through the conversations that sandwiched our sessions, I discovered we grew up in the same costal town, that we both liked scuba, that we both wanted to, at some stage, work in a remote part of the world. All these similarities suggested to me that we could be a functioning couple; but our relationship—no matter how hard I tried to ignore—continued to be tainted by monetary exchange. He would clock off for the hour and our interaction would narrow from two-way to one; and I’d scroll through his Facebook, searching for scraps of similarities that I could use to charm: pictures of him camping, because I liked camping, went to Station Creek and Point Plomer all the time; pictures of him fishing, because I had much experience fishing, a product of my fishing-mad father; pictures of him bushwalking, because I bushwalked regularly, had done a fair bit of it, progressively increasing my hiking adventurousness from short lookout strolls to multi-day trecks, a progression that would eventually peak in 2019 when I solo walked the Six Foot Track, a hike that, now that I think about it, I can’t recall very well. 

How could I forget it? It’s not as if it was a minor event. It took three days and I did it alone and I feel like lots happened but I can’t summon anything specific or significant from my head. My girlfriend dropped me in an empty parking lot at the Jenolan Caves and I remember being nervous, a little scared, frightful of the oncoming loneliness I’d opted to inflict on myself. I set out, up a steep fire trail through the burnt matchsticks of the Kanangra-Boyd Forest and the next thing I knew, I was lying in the dark, certain that a serial killer would come, and then it was lunchtime, and I got to say “Hello” to a girl who shared my picnic spot, and then, I was on a train, one packed with schoolkids, and then I was suddenly back home. In my head there’s a big empty vault for all the memories I’d hoped to make. The walk nests as a nothing in my mind because this is the nature of hikes: the plodding, the uneventful, the repetitious foot after foot interrupted only by eat and sleep can’t be a highlight of a person’s life; everyday motions (such as walking) are terribly forgettable things.

But then, what about my memory of the Green Gully Hike? a 65 km, four-day affair that has hikers descend down a pathless ridgeline and wade upstream through thigh-high river, a grade-five hike that offers quaint redback- and mice-infested huts to rest in at the end of each day, huts that all five of us had to squeeze into, sleep shoulder-to-shoulder or foot-to-face at least 14 inches away from the cob-webby walls. I remember hares caught in our headlights on the drive in, the way we tailed them at 18 km/h as they darted like pinballs from road edge to road edge, and how they were either too dumb or shocked to leap from our lighted-up path; and I remember the mosquito splatters on the walls above the beds and the orange hue of the dried blood of campers past; and the inexplicable extra kilos in one guy’s bag; the precision-flicking of a March fly up one lounging individual’s shorts; the plunging of bodies into a cold milky stream; the reading out of tacky visitor-logbook entries; the ridiculing of those who bought small dinner servings; the stretching in the sun; the campfire; the antechinus; the slow transition to gloaming; all this I remember, all this from only the first day, and all of this despite the meat of the hike being the same as the Six Foot Track, the same repetitious work interspersed with snacks and nightly sleep. 

In my head, the scenery of my solo hike is vague; the scenery of Green Gully is clear. I can see humanoid figures wending their way down steep slopes of scree, and see one figure photographing another with an endless mountain range in the background, and can see a boy swimming clothed beneath two precarious pyramids of rock, and him looking up at the towers in a contemplative way, how Ben Miller would’ve perhaps looked at them, with an eye for insight and desire to understand. I never understood what Ben tried to teach me; I wasn’t there to learn. He spent his energy teaching someone with a walled-off brain. I spent my money paying someone who had no craving for further friends. He grew frustrated. I stayed lonely. Then, as a last resort, Ben gifted me with his lecture notes, his past quizzes, assignments and summary sheets—a 1.4 gigabyte gold mine that is the currency of quasi-nerds, cocaine to the CLB7 group that sat before me.

I drip-fed these resources to them, and with each drop, moved one seat closer to their row. From a seat behind, I whispered dry-humoured quips, then from their direct left and right I did the same. And eventually I whispered to them from the middle seat of their row and they chuckled, looked at me, whispered back. I sat with them and learnt soil mechanics better than I had with Ben Miller. I sat with them and learnt geotechnics, wastewater, structural analysis etc. until we graduated in 2016. I sat with them and at the end of it all we stood, and we walked,  and we went on a hike. 

I flew with my engg. friends to South Chile, Patagonia, and we hiked the Torres del Paine loop track: up over a blizzardy mountain saddle where one guy almost got frostbite of the nut; down beside a glacier where the curly-haired one claimed he would swim, but didn’t; across a rope bridge where I peed and the wind threw droplets back up; and to the mountain peak for a sunrise viewing that was lost to fog and cloud. We walked together, me and my friends. It was repetitious, everyday. I see their faces, see their motions, hear their voices. I think of them and I remember this hike and I remember it all very well.