The Briar Patch

Edward Cranswick
12 Mar 2004

A few hundred meters short of the crest of the hill, the highest point on this 80-km-wide, east-west route across the Eyre Peninsula, he encountered a luxuriant growth of blackberry brambles, prolific with blackberries, as if he were in some well-watered place in North America. The blackberries were ripe, black and plump -- quite at home in this dry South Australia bush. He spent a quarter of an hour pricking himself on the thorns while gorging on this bush tucker and then rode his bicycle up and over the hill and 15 km down to the sea, the Spencer Gulf.

That night the fox woke him by tugging on the elbow of the sleeve of his sweatsuit pyjamas while he was sleeping outside in his sleeping bag on the walkway under the eaves of the dormitory, out of the rain. He came out of his sleep almost instantly, his whole being perhaps more aware of this interaction on a deeper level than merely his dreaming frontal lobes, and he lifted his head and was confronted by the fox a few meters away eyeing him with prudent but bold interest. To his now conscious mind, the view seemed implausible -- an anomaly of the possible realities -- so after a somewhat token gesture and expression that he assumed would frighten away any wild thing, he lay his head down and tried to get back to sleep. A few minutes later, the fox tugged at his plastic foam sleeping pad and he sat up again to see the fox looking at him expectantly, checking his reaction to this stimuli. This time he was a bit nervously wishing and looking for a stick or some object to throw -- some tool/weapon with which to re-establish the boundary between man and nature -- but the fox was then gone and he dozed off for a while into the grey morning light.

Later in the day he told the others attending the Alcoholics Anonymous weekend camp of the fox's visitation -- some must have thought he described old flashback visions from the bottle. By the evening, the rain of the previous day had blown away and the sky was clearing, waiting for the rise of the full moon. He made his bed on a flat patch of granite halfway between the kitchen/dining hall and the sea and lay down to sleep facing the Southern Cross through patchy clouds.

That night the fox woke him by nipping the little finger of his left hand that cushioned his head. Again the fox was looking at him expectantly as he surveyed the grey light, and he was surprised again but not so much as the night before, resigned to the presence of, if not expecting, the fox. And again he lay down to sleep once more only to be reawakened by the fox's attempt to bite his head which yielded the fox only a momentary mouth full of his several-month-long hair. The fox displayed this trick of loping off and disappearing into the bushes lost in gloom and circling about in them to come at him from another direction -- this performance was repeated several times. He was no longer frightened: when he confronted the fox this time, it was to solve a definite problem. He stared at the fox and slowly put his hand out towards it -- the fox advanced a meter, carefully sniffed the outstretched fingers and then tentatively nibbled at them. "What the fuck are you doing!", he ejaculated as he jerked his hand back -- and the fox disappeared into the brush.

By that time, there was no question that it was morning and not just moonlight, and he decided to confront the day. He walked into the dining hall where a man and two women were eating breakfast and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

"The fox attacked me again", he announced.

"I know", one of the women said. "I was making coffee and heard a noise from the kitchen and saw the rubbish bin was knocked over and the fox going through the rubbish. The fox paid no attention to me when I walked into the kitchen, and it was hard to chase him out."

"I had a vision of bridging the gap between humanity and nature, of man meets fox, and I stuck my hand out but the fox started chewing on it."

"He probably thought you were some rubbish that we'd tipped out", the other woman said, "and tried to see if you were worth eating".

The camp is owned by a Lutheran Church group who rent it out to other groups as well. For most who stay there, the fox is probably a novelty: a cute natural manifestation that some undoubtedly feed on occasion. For the fox, the people come and go, the subtleties they cultivate to distinguish themselves from one another lost in the great commonality of all having too much of everything and not knowing what to do with it or themselves -- like some vast & choking algal bloom on the Face of the Deep.

He had originally intended to stay late on Sunday afternoon and help clean up the camp, but two days of hanging out with forty people had been brought to a boil by the end of lunch by a woman whose words to him about the paradoxes of her own soul voiced to him the contradictions of his own heart ... and he bolted. He suddenly said goodbye to her and a few others and almost ran to his bike -- only to surreptitiously circle back to retrieve his plastic travel cup he had forgotten on the table -- and then he rode off.

A couple of hours later as he rode back over the crest looking for the blackberry patch, he noticed for the first time a small quarry, a borrow pit excavated in the dark metamorphic rock on the other side of the road, half-full of water. He stopped to plunge into it -- it was green, but fresh water is rare in South Australia -- and then stopped again a hundred meters down the road to eat some blackberries. The next morning in the town 25 km further west, he told a woman about the quarry and asked her whether it had filled with rain over the weekend because he had not noticed it the first time he had ridden passed.

She said, "It's always got water in it".