Don’t Forget to Look Up

 

I sit at a picnic table, drink beer from a can and watch the show: sunset at Ayers Rock. Most of the road-frazzled tourists at this viewing site chatter, eat, drink and snap pictures. My travel-mates distinguish themselves in their attempt to perfect the mid-air jump shot. One after the other they arc themselves from our picnic table. They tease, dare, call out suggestions, compare pictures. And they laugh. They laugh a lot.

 

There are sixteen in our group – from Poland, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Korea, Israel and Australia. I’m the only representative of North America and the only person over the age of fifty. In fact, I am the only person over the age of thirty-five.

 

The light dissipates. The Rock loses its gold, becomes rust-red and eggplant. And then, oh my heart, then I see it: I see the Southern Cross for the first time. The Crosby Stills and Nash song bubbles up: “When you see the Southern Cross for the first time you understand now why you came this way.” Lyric fragments return. “Think about how many times I have fallen. Spirits are using me, larger voices calling.” “And you know it will. You know it will.” “I have been around the world…”

 

No one else in our group knows the song. The people who do, people my age, are with tours leaders who serve wine in glasses and appetizers on proper plates. White table cloths are involved. Tonight these people will sleep in hotel rooms. There isn’t a fibre, a nerve, a twitch that says I belong with them.

 

Ellie, our tour leader, serves up stir-fry on paper plates. She is the most people smart twenty-three year old I’ve ever met. On our drive through Australia’s Red Centre she handed each of us her microphone and fired off a list of questions that instantly bonded our group.

 

 

What brought you to Australia?
What’s the story of your first kiss?
Your most recent?

 

 

We fall silent as we eat and watch the night sky reveal itself. Later, we’ll build a campfire. Under the kinetic direction of Ido from Israel we’ll play a convoluted and hilarious game of Whodunnit. We will slide into smoky sleeping bags and pretend the swags protect us from field mice. Each hour I’ll wake up to spot the position of the Southern Cross until morning when it’s upside down and fading into the horizon. We’ll spend our second day hiking around Ayers Rock – Uluru – and The Olgas – Kata Tjuta – and after another night under the stars we’ll hike King’s Canyon whose Aboriginal name I never did learn.

 

Our bus will rock with great music and plenty of laughter. We’ll pass around erasable markers to write graffiti on the bus windows. In a fit of giggles and for no particular reason we shall name our group Team Beanie. We’ll play games on the long drive back to Alice Springs. We’ll tell more stories. We’ll sing a bawdy song at the top of our lungs. And afterward, we’ll celebrate over dinner and drinks. Stella from Korea will leap onto a table and dance. A biker across the bar will give me the eye.

 

I don’t know these things when I meet the Southern Cross for the first time. I do know I’m ninety days into a 102-day trip around the world. I crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2. I volunteered in one of the townships outside Cape Town and joined a small group tour of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. And now I’m half-way into a free-style journey through Australia. I’ve met kindred spirits along the way: Dave and Pam on the ship. Marg in the volunteer house. Marilyn in South East Asia. And there’s a man who writes to me and makes my heart sing.

 

Past, present and future collapse into this one moment. I am here now. With these beautiful souls and before Ayers Rock I breathe in the stars of the Southern Cross. I am alive. I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.