Day 4

A third night spent listening to the nocturnal sounds of the local fauna in lieu of sleeping, swatting away the extremely-irritating and ubiquitous culicidae and counting the multiples of each five minutes which were ticking over ever s-o-o s-l-o-w-l-y. Although my clothes were wet through from the previous afternoon I was not as cold on the sand as the preceding nights. Dare I suggest that I was becoming accustomed to the deprivations of sleeping rough al fresco…if so, it was not a contemplation that I was getting any comfort or reassurance from.

The cold and discomfort of the night and the fear of dehydration were the two motivators that spurred me on to keep striving to find a way out of this bush nightmare. With all that time to kill my thoughts returned again and again to the gaseous elixir that I was craving, that ultimate beacon of hope, the icy bottle of Coca Cola. The enduring solitude of my predicament certainly gave me the space for mind-wandering and my brain was certainly meandering in spectacularly tangential fashion! I speculated on the respective merits of Coke versus Pepsi. At one point, I decided that I would prefer Pepsi to Coke, not sure why really. Possibly it is due to Pepsi being seemingly less of a universal icon than Coke, making it somehow more appealing and desirable than its better known rival. After further musing, I recalled who the celebrities associated with Pepsi were – Michael Jackson and Elvis. My startling conclusion: Pepsi was the preferred drink of dead people, so it couldn’t be good for you! I quickly distanced myself from the notion of ‘Pepsi-hegemony’ and defaulted once again to Coca Cola. Such was the state of my tired and wildly imaginative mind by now, I was wondering if my ordeal had put me on the verge of becoming borderline delirious? (did I say ‘becoming’?)

I made my (now) usual start at 6am (first light), determined to make this my last day in this off-track hinterland, do or die sort of resolve – although resolve clearly hadn’t worked so far! The brutal fact was that resolve hadn’t been enough, apparently. Each of the previous two mornings I had expressed equal, optimistic determination on starting out – and the results in terms of getting somewhere (ie, ‘out’) were “sweet FA”!

Hampered by the twin burdens of self-doubt and the accumulative effects of exhaustion from lack of sleep, I moved at a laborious pace…initially across the sloping terrain, and then when that got too arduous I reverted to my previous alternating strategy of swapping over to the creek and wading through the water. Travelling through the creek seemed even more hazardous than it had been on the three preceding days. I stepped through the water with great caution, aware that my fatigue level made me more prone to lose my footing. In deeper water I crawled at snail’s pace along the creek floor, my eyes constantly searching through the murky water in front of me for the presence of submerged logs and rocks. Despite my diligence, every few minutes or so I would inevitably crash painfully into one of these hidden obstacles and add to my already impressive tally of minor scratches and cuts (scars of battle with nature? If so, I definitely seemed to be losing the war!)

On narrow rock platforms I would edge my way along them, but again because I could see not far beneath the surface, I regularly came a-cropper when the platform suddenly ended, resulting in my plunging into 10 foot deep water. My non-waterproof backpack was inundated with creek water every time this happened, it’s contents, primarily my mobile phone and bushwalking guidebook (which got me into this fix in the first place! Duh!) had long since been rendered inoperative. The quality of the water in Glenbrook Creek was of a very uneven nature, in the free-flowing parts it looked quite OK. However not pristine like the springs down the road in the Magdala Creek Falls near Springwood (where, somewhere, I barely knew what was where by this point!). Much of Glenbrook Creek exhibited a reddish or rust-coloured tinge. At the parts of the creek where the current was slowed by clumps of large rocks, the water had a whitish sludge which coalesced into patches on the surface.

There was no sign of the rescue copter until late in the morning, and even then, it was in a quite distant part of the national park from where I was. I was even more convinced now that I was “Robinson Crusoe,” in all senses of the term – stranded and utterly alone, and more gravely, solely responsible for my own survival. The intense heat of the day was having its effect on me faster than on earlier mornings. Treading my way carefully up the creek, I could feel the back of my neck reddening after only an hour or so. Because of the intense heat I had to stop more than on the other days and take the occasional dip in the creek to refresh myself before struggling on. It was now well over three days since I last heard a human voice. Occasionally, I would mistake the gurgling sound of the tumbling waters for incoherent voices. This momentarily would pep my spirits up, only to register immediate disappointment when I realised my error. Aside from the falls and the incessant cicadas, I was consigned to endure yet further silence. Even the whirring noise of the copter circling the sky had deserted me, it appeared. I probably didn’t feel more alone during my ordeal than at this point.

One o’clock passed, the journey back to the old (mythical perhaps?) ladder was taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated. Everything had been going in slow motion since I first stumbled into this overgrown underworld. What concerned me most was that I had not yet sighted any of the landmarks that would indicate that I was approaching my objective. I suppose at this point I had reached my lowest ebb, I had not found the promised exit route at the swimming holes, I had not rediscovered the old ladder…the doubts in my mind about surviving were growing stronger as I was growing weaker.

Someone, one of the many interested interrogators who found my tale incredulous, later on asked me if at any time during the ordeal I had thoughts that this was it, that maybe I was going to die here. Of course I did! I could picture myself in a sort of “deadman walking” scenario. More so as each day passed, but I would always dismiss the thought each time just as quickly because I had to keep as positive a frame of mind as I could to find that one, hidden way out. I just knew I wasn’t going to give up, I’d rather die trying!

Later on, after I had rejoined the man-made world, a doctor (my GP actually) bizarrely asked, whilst he poked and prodded me, if my desperation ever got to the point where I contemplated lighting a bush fire to attract the attention of the State Rescue Service! I had spoken before of an element of delirium invading my senses, but mercifully my desperate thoughts never went to this ‘solution'(sic). Even if I had arrived at such a loopy notion, I could never bring myself to do something so extreme and irresponsible, no matter how desperate I was! For one thing a raging bush fire could just as easy engulf me in the out-of-control inferno I had created! So, no fires or similar “hare-brained doctor” notions, but I did many times curse the fact that I had not put something useful in my empty backpack – like say signal flares.

The very real and growing concerns I had about becoming dehydrated forced me to debate with myself the pros and cons of drinking from the creek. No, it wouldn’t taste great, more seriously it would probably make me sick if I swallowed any sizeable amount of the highly questionable water. Conversely, I couldn’t survive indefinitely without water. Dilemma! I resolved to collect some water in my remaining empty plastic bottle, not to drink any time soon, but to store as an emergency last resort measure. To counteract the immediate parched feeling of my mouth, I allowed myself the luxury of applying the water to my dry mouth, giving me some modicum of temporary comfort whilst avoiding swallowing any measurable quantity.

I thought I heard a noise, but this time it wasn’t the noise of the cicadas, nor the sound of the rushing water running away from the falls. I heard it again, it was a human voice – at quite some distance, but discernible none the less. I stopped dead in the creek waters so as to listen more intently. Over the preceding three days of my entrapment I had been fooled several times by the babbling sound of the falling waters bisecting a mass of rocks, mistaking this for the sound of incoherent voices. The voice I heard now though was more audibly human, with a linguistic structure to it. I could almost make out distinct words being uttered, the timbre of a strong male voice talking to someone else (I assumed), a monologue of sorts. I gathered myself together and with great effort hurried my progress as best as I could. The voice, a miracle sound to my ears now, was on my left but a fair way ahead of where I was. I needed to catch up, shorten the distance between myself and the trailing sound which represented rekindled hope. Suddenly, there was silence, and then I heard the same voice again, it sounded like someone enunciating authoritatively on a subject – how strange!

I composed myself, mustering up what energy I could, and shouted in the direction of the voice. My attempts at shouting were a bit muted owing to my state of dehydration. I wet my lips from the turgid water I was standing in, and tried again. Louder, but still far from authoritative or even emphatic. No response from the bushes. Then, I stopped hearing the voice. The voice had disappeared, and with it, my momentary and tenuous reconnection with the human world. A false hope? My hopes had been momentarily raised and then instantly thwarted, crushed, eviscerated. Nonetheless I felt buoyed by the revelation that there were people in the vicinity of the creek…somewhere, I just needed to find them.

I pushed on imbued with the sense that, maybe, there was light at the end of the tunnel. If there was a group of people out there, tangibly close, then perhaps, there were others as well, and my chances of coming upon someone during the day had received a boost. Was there someone out there with a metaphorical life-jacket with my name on it, hovering frustratingly just out of my reach? Everything was weighing on my finding the answer to that question.

My newfound optimism would have been even greater had I had the presence of mind to think through the implications of it now being Saturday, ie, that more people would be likely to be wandering around different parts of the national park. I trudged on for over half-an-hour, probably for another good forty-five minutes at least, no more voices or even the fragments of human sound. Quite suddenly (I sensed), the silence was telling me that once again I was all alone. The roller-coaster that was my emotions was about to swing round again.

Some time close to 3:00pm I guess, with the heat of the day at its most potent, I was feeling more thirsty than I had been up to that point all day. I allowed myself a few, very tiny, micro-minuscule sips from the bottle of unsavoury creek water. I rationalised that the minute quantity I had consumed so far amounted to a low risk of suffering any ill effects. To go on I knew I needed some kind of liquid in me. I kept going, down the creek, but as each quarter-hour passed, in the back of my mind were the doubts, the nagging thought gnawing away at my confidence…had I had missed my one solitary chance at rescue? There was no guarantee in this deadly dice with nature that there would be a second one.