Lot's Wife Edition 5 2022

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Lot’s Wife • Edition Five What the River Taught Me: (mis)adventures and lessons in pack-rafting preparedness Words by Harrison Croft Art by Olivia Tait 20
The brilliant sun was only shyly making its way up past the horizon as I arrived at our launching spot: a simple little jetty astride Birrarung where it passes through Warburton. My travelling companion was a keen adventurer named James, and the task we had set ourselves was to paddle from this quaint riverside town to the mouth of the river at Hobsons Bay. Our loyal steeds were two inflatable rafts, and we began aerating these with great vivacity the moment we arrived at the jetty. While I relied upon two trains and a bus to deposit me there, James had been up all morning cycling to Warburton instead. With his bike being swapped for a boat as the primary mode of transport, he carefully secured this cumbersome landbased vehicle to the bow of his raft, and together we cast off. It was a crisp, dewy Saturday which had promised to warm, and dozens of joggers passed us by and asked where we were headed, totally disbelieving my chirpy reply, “back to Williamstown!” The first hours passed dreamily by. While the river transported me downstream, so too did it send me back in time, to an innocent and euphoric era in my childhood populated by Swallows and Amazons and The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow. Mysterious trees thrusted shade across the entire width of the river, birds sang their accompaniment, and a smile was chiseled upon my face. But this bliss did not last long. A little after midday, James was forced to abandon his bicycle under a tree. To deter thieves, he deflated both tyres and took the saddle and bike lights with him. This felt to me like Mawson eating his own sledge dogs in Antarctica; a short-term gain that forewarned severer long-term challenges. But the bike was Lot’s Wife • Edition Five 21 21 too cumbersome: it forced the bow into the water, snagged on rocks and branches, and limited his view enormously. It had to go. Geotagged photos are a wonderful thing. They show me the exact moment when my naïve calm was shifted to a feeling of immense peril. Looking back through my photographs, I ascertain this happened some time around 2:30pm, just downstream of Millgrove, because up until then, I kept my phone in my pocket, ready to snap a sun-soaked photograph in an instant. But after navigating a particularly violent set of rapids, I moved it into a waterproof bag, wrapped up inside a larger dry bag, itself contained within a third bag, and totally out of harm’s way. Rivers are occasionally blocked by felled trees. Birrarung’s upper reaches are blocked by many, many trees. We became like the bear hunters in that children’s book. Each log demanded a response: to go over, under, or around? Going around is known as portaging. You put your shoes on, climb out of the water, drag the leaden raft overland past the obstruction, then return to the water on the other side. This was impossibly slow (and agonising, on account of mountains of untamed and bloodthirsty prickles) and we almost always preferred to stay waterborne when possible. I tentatively approached one of these logs, hoping to disembark and clamber over like we had already done a dozen times before. But the water was moving too quickly - my raft was pressed against the log, and water began to fill the space occupied by my legs. The decision was instant. My boat was being forced under the ancient tree. I mustered every ounce of
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