Killing Time

May 12, 2025 Webmaster

by Jane Bone

This particular tramping track was merciless. We had climbed all day with short breaks for water and snacks, occasionally overtaken by fitter and more experienced walkers. Late afternoon I had virtually crawled into the hut on my hands and knees. I prayed that there would be a space on the sleeping platform at ground level and there was, so silently singing alleluias I set out my sleeping bag and went to relax. Dust swirled in the air but there were a couple of seats and efficient souls had made tea. I chatted with Sal as we drank tea and discussed the day. Sal said she had been stuck with a friend who had just acquired a special watch, well, not so much a watch as a bracelet with a flat rectangular screen that records everything and reports back: kilometres, number of steps, heartbeats, blood pressure, and calories consumed. Sal said she had been driven crazy listening to the litany of stats. Every now and then her friend moaned when the internet dropped out. Apparently this meant that the device would give her a wrong number at the end of the day. Sal rolled her eyes and said that she had bloody suffered from the conversation more than from the walk.

Later we crawled into our sleeping bags. Not being able to sleep as everyone snores, and worse, is unbearable in a confined space. Inevitably I needed to go to the loo, a stinky long drop, not for the faint hearted. There is a special way to get out of a sleeping bag on a crowded platform shared with strangers. I wriggled like a snake sloughing its skin and looked back at the crumpled empty bag as I stretched my arms above my head and suddenly felt alive instead of squashed and claustrophobic. Creeping out of the room I saw Sal’s friend, she was asleep and the bracelet was by her rucksack. She had explained that in the morning it would tell her how she had slept, how many hours deep sleep, how many hours nearer the surface. She must have taken it off after washing. I walked over silently, picked it up and went outside. I stood on the deck in the moonlight, and flung it as hard as I could down into the bush. Alone in the shadows I could have been the first creature to crawl out of the swamp, I was solitary, powerful, surrounded by black fern fronds and the sounds of the night.

Later, as my eyes closed, I imagined it recording the moreporks calling across the valley; counting the fluttering moths that alighted on its dead face; calculating its distance from the stars looking down at it from the dark velvety sky, as the satellite that gave it life wheeled endlessly around the earth.