UNBOXED

For millennia, stints in the desert have been associated with thoughtful introspection. So after the confinements of the COVID lockdowns, Matthew Crompton set off to the Red Centre’s iconic Larapinta Trail, where he could, as much as anything, do this: free his mind.

Words & Photography MATTHEW CROMPTON

Looking out in the dawn from the ridgeline at Reveal Saddle. Below, a long dry creek bed leads back in the direction of Standley Chasm. Much of the Larapinta is spent gradually ascending or descending these dry watercourses, in long stints that become a form of walking meditation

In 2021, at the height of Australia’s COVID lockdowns, I took to stealth camping in a city park. This wasn’t ideal, but sleeping outside has long been a psychological pressure-relief valve for me, and I was going crazy without it. The grove that I hung my hammock in was tiny, and the park one of Sydney’s busiest. But it was within the permitted five-kilometre radius of my house, and provided I both got in and got out when it was still dark, I figured I’d be a-okay.

This resulted, predictably, in an embarrassing episode in which I was forced to flee from park security in the middle of the night, running through trees and across dewy fields at midnight with my hammock billowing behind me like a parachute. It was extremely undignified. But it got me through: After a few months of illegal park campouts, the vaccines arrived, and we were out of the lockdown box.

Nonetheless, confinement is as much a psychological state as it is a physical one. I was reminded of this as I stood, a year later, in the dawn at Simpsons Gap, twenty minutes outside of Alice Springs. The light was pewter in the sky, and warming. From orbit, this place—all of Central Australia, really—looked indistinguishable, the crust of an old planet, corrugations and red-black rust. But being here, as the clear shallow water that filled the sandy floor of the gap exhaled its cool sweet breath, the place was vividly alive.

I was here to walk, and so I walked. I took my photos and my fractured attention and shouldered my pack and set off west, into the rolling yellow grassy hills of the West MacDonnell Ranges. The Arrernte, the Traditional Custodians of this area, called it Tjoritja. It had variously, over deep geologic time, been both sea floor and towering mountain alp. Now, it consisted mainly of two low broken ranges—the rugged Chewings in the north and the Heavitree in the south—and the various valleys between and among them.

It was 26km that day west to Jay Creek: hours of rocks and acacia scrub, sweat and blisters, the sun a blinding desert orb radiating heat and light like a primal god. As I walked, I thought about the last two years spent living inside of rectangles inside of rooms—catch-ups with friends and family inside of online chat windows, collaborating with colleagues over Teams, and bingeing endless shows on Netflix to pass the time. Until, at length, a boxed-in world became the default.

At its worst it was doomscrolling, but even as I happily met up with friends for our regular Wednesday night trivia over Zoom, I could never escape the certainty that all of this—this world of virtual substitutes—wasn’t quite life. I was both endlessly bored and endlessly distracted, and I wasn’t the only one. A close friend, an avid reader, told me that she hadn’t been able to pick up a new book in two years; rereading old favourites being all that she could focus on.

Life loses a horizon, and in losing it, there’s no easy way to get it back. In camp at Jay Creek that night, I lay in my tent as the Milky Way rose in the deepening indigo of the southern sky. I’d fallen in love with the night sky over the last two years, taking trips from my home in Sydney three hours west across the Blue Mountains, to where the light of civilisation fell off into blackness. I’d learned the stars and constellations of the southern winter night—Spica and the Crow and the red supergiant star Antares, burning rubybright at the heart of the Scorpion. Lying there at Jay Creek in my tent, gauzy with tiredness, I thought that if there was an opposite to the boundedness of screens and rooms, it was this: the night sky, bottomless. And then I slept.

The following day was harder than the last, but more beautiful, and so perhaps easier in the end. The Chewings Range swallowed me as I climbed into a landscape of dry stony creekbeds, of rocky ridges and gullies where I scrambled up and down steeply for hours, surrounded by bone-white ghost gums and palm-like cycads—relics of Gondwanaland, growing out of the ochre cliffs.

In the waning light, I followed a dry creekbed upstream, then climbed at length to a high rocky saddle. There I laid out my mat on a sheet of Tyvek in the open air. Looking back in the dusk over the long red-green valley below, I lanced my blisters with the tip of a pocketknife, expressing the fluid in pressurised jets, then lay back on my mat in the spectral twilight, just breathing. Exhausted, my mind was quiet, and I found that I was more body than ever. My awareness beat vividly alive inside me like a small bird held in the palm of the hand.

Somehow, as my attention had fractured over the long course of the pandemic, it had become a labour simply existing without recourse to distraction. Then again, I’d been on that course for years. I recalled a day back when I had lived in Seoul in the late 2000s, on the bus between work and my home, a journey of no more than ten minutes. Some wondering had come upon me—the tallest mountain on the continent of Antarctica, or when the next series of Breaking Bad was due out—and my mind had instantly reached for that data, only to be stifled by the temporary lack of internet access that was the basic condition of existence in the pre-smartphone era. Yet I realised that somehow it was the first time in my life that that momentary lack of access, that momentary disconnection, had felt like an amputation. And that, from there, my hunger to exist always in something other than my own consciousness of the present moment would only grow.

When the sun rose the next morning, the stars having wheeled in their arc around the southern pole, the day was hot. I walked, and the sun blazed. The day reached 25 degrees. I trod ridges and crested saddles and trudged through the deep sand of a dry riverbed and came to Birthday Waterhole at two in the afternoon, hungry and footsore. I dropped my pack and minced in flip-flops to the waterhole and plunged myself in my stiff sweaty clothes into the shockingly cold water. I emerged, spluttering and baptised and shivering. Soon, it was night again.

I lay beneath the sky as Arcturus, the bright ruddy twin of Antares, rose in the constellation Boötes to the north. There was no mobile signal in this place, and that meant no screen to reach for, the boxed-in impulse to self-stimulate arrested before it could arise.

Living in the box these past two years, habitually removed from the natural world and from normal human company, I was like everyone else, having built up endless substitutes to compensate. These ersatz fulfilments came in the form of exercise and caffeine and alcohol, true. But mostly they were distractions— things built of loops and screens, exploited for dopamine again and again. They were endlessly absorbing, yes. But it was all bad product, and went sludgy in the veins like a sugar high, leaving the body overstimulated and the mind dissatisfied and wanting more.

The next day, I passed into the canyonlands of an ancient red eroded Himalaya. The gorges of the Chewings Range were time capsules, remnants from when this desert continent had been cool and wet—a time fifty million years gone, preserved in the hidden cracks of the Earth itself. I spent all morning leaping from boulder to boulder, scrambling up and down dry streambeds and waterfalls. I danced from step to step, letting my momentum carry me. Balanced on the point of one rock, I sighted the next a short hop away and let myself fall, carried by gravity towards it. It was a physical and psychological flow state, and the narrow gorges slurred into shadow and colour and motion as the time melted by.

I’d become increasingly obsessed with the concept of flow over the past several years, accosting strangers at bars and acquaintances at parties to ask them when, in the course of daily life, they found themselves to be truly happy. Content in activity itself, without thought to culmination or reward. Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi had studied the experience, and found it to be a period of absorption characterised by a sense of total immersion and involvement in the present moment, a state of pleasurable unbroken focus. And while the compulsive exploitation of digital dopamine loops superficially resembled a flow state in its capacity to wholly absorb and enrapture attention, it was not built on experiencing deeply, but on experiencing shallowly, again and again and again.

In the coming months, I would find myself drawn to water, taking surfing lessons and returning to my practice of freediving after a long absence. The natural association of these activities with flow, with depth, was thematically appropriate, but what I would find in them more than anything else was a sense of unbrokenness. The way that anticipating, catching, standing up on and riding a wave all formed a single long natural moment; or how a dive into cobalt depths—the water growing cold on my skin as I descended, the fish fleeing down the current into waving beds of sea grass and my diaphragm spasming as I turned to sight the surface once again far above me—created a unified elastic reality in which my attention would look nowhere else.

Walking on, I reached Windy Saddle and climbed onto the high broken spine of Razorback Ridge, traversing its shattered stegosaurus strata. I hiked down off the ridge into another dry creek bed that I followed west, gradually climbing to another saddle. It had been a wet year in Central Australia, one of the wettest ever, and the valleys were carpeted in lushness, in green spinifex and kangaroo grasses. In a year or two, our altered climate will flip its switch to extreme heat and drought, and all of this will burn. I descended from the saddle towards the mouth of Hugh Gorge, a huge Half Dome the colour of fired brick rising massively above it to the north in a towering bluff.

A few hundred metres into the gorge, its orange-vermilion cliffs exhausting all the words for redness, I ran into Vivian. A power hiker from Melbourne, she set a blistering pace to match my own, and we had been bumping into each other off and on all day. Now, I found her perched on a rock ledge, stalled as she attempted to navigate around a deep pool of cold water contained between the cliffs.

Human beings are animals defined by our capacity for cooperation, and Vivian and I took turns to scramble down off the high ledge onto a narrow sandbar, barely submerged on the right side of the waterhole, handing the packs down to each other to avoid a swim. A group of older hikers behind us, who came to the pool just as we were getting back into our boots, had no such luck. Many splashed off the low edge of the ledge directly into the deep pool, thrashing and spluttering.

A 60-something woman from the group came trudging up the sandbar behind us in her wet bathers. Stripping off her bikini top, she slipped on a dry t-shirt. “Guess we’re free-balling it to camp, hey?!” she cackled to her sexagenarian friend, who was also gleefully getting her kit off in the cool air of the gorge. God, I love Australians so much sometimes.

That night I camped at a wide spot in the canyon, a river of wind pouring down the gorge from the north. Overhead, the Pointer and the Cross rose and wheeled as the bright giant star Canopus set behind the rocky ridgeline to the southwest. Twice as I lay tired in the dusk, my inflatable pillow was blown away by a sudden strong gust to float on the surface of a nearby waterhole. Chastened, I built a small wall of stones to shelter me on the windward side. The wall of stones built, the wind grew faint, and soon ceased to blow entirely. Typical.

I was deep into the hike now, into the timeless physical aspect of it. There was no schedule to follow, and no immediate avenue available into any place or experience but the one that I was now absorbed in. I was both totally locked in and simultaneously totally free, as if the imposition of this hard geographic limitation had liberated me from the stultifying effect of endless choice.

Laying there, the spectra draining toward the horizon from an indigo wellspring at the top of the sky, I thought about the dopamine loops, about the structure of empty reward. The finest example of it, I thought, had to be the ‘unboxing’ video: that strangely ritualistic reveal where a purchased product, fresh from a factory floor somewhere in the so-called ‘developing’ world, was undressed on-camera before your very eyes. It was the hunter-gathered thrill of the get, of a serendipitous find, stripped of both effort and process and thereby left hollow. A painted cake, as the Buddhists say, that did not satisfy hunger.

And yet the truly insidious twist lay not in how the unboxed thing did not satisfy our hunger, but in how the act of seeking that momentary thrill sharpened and intensified the hungering itself. For the dopamine system was one fundamentally concerned with wanting, not getting. With the itching anticipation of reward rather than the reward itself. And the more we fed it, the hungrier it became, until pursuit of the hunger rose to obscure our full awareness of the world.

In the morning, I packed up and hiked out of Hugh Gorge and into the Alice Valley, the straw-coloured sun blazing high above a landscape of low ridges and dry grass. Mica and quartz glittered in the ancient soil as I trudged a long undulating ridgeline. The Chewings Range rose up rugged and red and purple and green to the northwest, looking soft and ethereal in the distance.

The day was a meditation, and thoughts circulated in my head like visitants, coming and going all day long while my boots crunched the dry dust. Are my problems only problems because I keep trying to solve them? I wondered. And: The things that I become anxious or angry about; aren’t they like worries or misfortunes in a dream that vanish the moment I stop giving reality to them? Again and again, families of red-faced zebra finches roosting in the scrubby acacias raised an alarm and took wing as I approached, rocketing off down the wind like bullets.

By mid-afternoon I reached Rocky Creek, shadeless and sunblasted but for a small patch in the lee of some rocks in the dry sandy creekbed, where I pitched my tent. I washed the dirt and sweat from my face and lay shirtless in the tent, reading until the purple dusk had come and gone and the sky was once again black and astral and luminous.

I thought about my last trip to the Northern Territory, up in the Top End around Darwin. It was a great melting pot and crossroads of Aboriginal languages and cultures. There, at night beneath the open sky, with a clear mind and a quiet heart, the subtle space swarmed with presence, with an endless Dreamtime layering. Here, in the remote desert centre of the continent, the subtle vibration was different: quiet and deep and old. I looked up at the night sky, at the worlds unfathomably far away across the unbridgeable gulf of space, and all at once a knowing inside me understood. Grasping and inhabiting the endless chain of lives stretching away into the dark, pre-human past, into the obscure post-human future, it saw the truth of space and time and said a single word: “Wait.”

So much of our present predicament, I thought, a world accelerating itself as fast as it would go towards ecological and social collapse, emerged from a derangement of perspective. When I was a teenager, I lived in Ohio, and I would sit alone in the woods and try to feel the reality of the place before it had been colonised by my ancestors. Those woods were part of the great hardwood forest covering the eastern United States and Canada, and had been the home of the Erie people, a powerful and influential tribe known for their skilled diplomacy and ability to forge alliances.

A rich, complex, and highly organised society, they had lived for thousands of years among the bounty of the great hardwood forest, building a culture that would indefinitely enjoy but not exhaust its riches. By the 1650s they were gone, having run afoul of the neighbouring Iroquois Confederacy, who wished to monopolise the fur trade with newly arrived Europeans, and who triumphed in this aim with the aid of guns that those Europeans provided. In little more than 200 years, much of the forest that they could have occupied for millennia more had been settled and stripped bare for farmland.

I hiked one more day across the Alice Valley, drawing nearer and nearer to the shattered ochre wall of the Heavitree Range to the south. I hadn’t looked at or even thought about a screen in days, and the richness of the world, its limitless and bottomless facets, were so full in me that I felt I could not humanly hold any more. My mind barely served any longer to separate me from the world that I walked through, only to mediate its reality into consciousness. I walked into the deserted campsite at Ellery Creek north and stripped down and waded into the large permanent waterhole in the gap that locals call the ‘Big Hole’. Even in the blazing midday desert sun, the first cold bite of the water shocked my breath away.

I lay floating on my back in the gap’s oasis waters. From here, you could look 500m across the waterhole to the south and see the daytrippers gathered there. Many sat near the water’s edge, looking of course at their phones. It was no wonder, I thought, that our absorption in virtualities, in manufactured environments increasingly positioned to substitute for the richness of a living world, and with our concomitant estrangement from other beings, all coincide with the ever-direr diminishment of the natural environment.

A shopping mall explodes with stimuli, for example. It holds an endless array of bright and colourful things whose very purpose is to attract and hold attention, compelling the

IMAGES - CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT

Hikers wade up a narrow sandbar beside a deep pool in Hugh Gorge

Larapinta constants: grasses and broken rock

Dingo tracks in wet sand near a transient creekbed waterhole

A ghost gum tgrows out of the ochre cliffs

Even in the era of smartphones, a good paper map still delights

Trail markers in the sunrise beyond Simpson Gap

The large, permanent Birthday Waterhole is bracingly cold, even in the heat of late afternoon hunter-gatherer thrill of the get to arise in us. And yet, like the screen-based loops, its offered rewards are vanishingly shallow and short-lived, its fulfilments hollow. We cannot find lasting satisfaction in consumerism any more than we can in bingeing TikToks. Yet we continue to bulldoze bushland for another Bunnings, enacting the economic ideology of a cancer cell and calling it prosperity.

Here is the fact that I was finding walking on the Country of Tjoritja, and sleeping beneath its skies: that to be stimulated was not the same thing as to be fulfilled. After this trip was over, I would return to Sydney and buy myself a Nokia 6300 dumbphone. It was a small block of cheap grey plastic with no touchscreen. The battery lasted for days and it came with Snake preloaded, and to compose a single text message on the keypad would routinely take minutes. Yet it was possible, too, to stand in the supermarket checkout line without reaching for it, and to kill that impulse felt like an unfettering, like a kind of waking up.

There on the evening of that day on the Larapinta, I did something dangerous. In the day’s last light, I donned my boots and scrambled up onto the red rock ledges above where I had pitched my tent on a bench of sand north of the gap. It was cool as I set off in the winter sunset, but by the time I had mounted the first pitch of the stepped and broken rock face, I was sweating, and had stripped out of my fleece.

The pitches were full of hard spiky spinifex that pricked me through my trousers and left a sticky resinous perfume on my hands as I climbed. I scrambled higher, traversing a ledge to a small gully wedged with great rounds of broken stone. The ledge was exposed, and I sought out and tested holds before I placed my weight on them, knowing that I must not slip or fall. I looked down at my tiny tent far below, knowing that I was doing the thing our outdoor culture so often moralises you never to do: to knowingly put yourself at risk.

Yet risk is at the heart of life. Knowingly, and unknowingly. And failing to be present or awake to life, though immaterial, is a risk of great consequence as well. I stripped off my sweaty t-shirt and in the dying plum-red light took in the whole wide valley before me, its expanses of sand and mallees and acacias. The Chewings Range in the purple distance to the north. Already the stars were glittering into existence, the tail of the Scorpion an inverted question mark shaping itself out of the twilight. It asked: How do we live with intention and attention? How, in the ways that we are boxed in—the ways that we box ourselves in—do we not also lose the world?

I began to downclimb to my camp in the empty valley. A hawk passed in silhouette against the sky, and in the shadows of the gap, I heard the trill of night birds waking. W

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R e l a x . D e - s t r e s s . A l l ov e r t h e w o rl d , w e v e n t u r e o u t i n t o n a t u r e to r e co n n e c t w i t h o u r s e l ve s . S o g e t o u t t h e r e w i t h th e M a m m u t Hik i n g c o ll e c ti o n. Sl ow d own a n d ex p e r i e n c e