Trifter

In Tully, Northern Queensland Australia during the month of February the air is humid and as you move your body it is as if you are swimming through a slick of oil. I struggled through a feted boggy mulch of forest flesh and breathing with difficulty lurching from tree to tree moving through the rainforest unplugging my heavy and kludged caked boots with each ridiculous step. All around me I heard the discordant sounds of creatures I couldn’t see. The forest’s drifting greens, browns and yellows filled the space around me in a slimy psychedelic haze. My body was filthy and my enthusiasm gaunt from the exhaustive hours of walking through a suffocating shroud of dank fructiferous air. The forest was a backed up toilet.

There were no recognisable shapes to give me a civilised perspective. The birds screeched and squawked warning their forest chums of our approach. It was like Graham’s Wind in the Willows: Vol. 2 – “The Horror, the horror.” The canopy above me filtered sharp painful shards of light through the mangled gaps of the leaves and when some manic creature fluttered in the trees my face caught bits and blobs of blue sky. The forest garbage funk wafted like burning shit from the bog blackness at my feet and the stress and heaving of my lungs strained to almost bursting point. An inner voice resonated in my mind because my speckled thoughts filtered fancifully between the real and the unreal of the forest’s perfume. The dankness, screeches, squawks, whispers, odours and slithering colours left me drained and breathless yet, its allure reaches deep into the untapped senses of the mind.