A few months ago I went on a motorbike trip around the very remote Shan State of Myanmar and presumed that while on that trip I would die. On our little Yamahas, we turned some corners where the road abruptly stopped and below us – a hundred feet or more – a sheer drop and a ravine.
Each time I looked down I saw my death as clearly as if it was a replay of a sporting event. High definition, the important bits in slow motion, parts of it captured overhead by a drone. There I was rolling down the escarpment, falling with the motorbike, tumbling through the sky until my broken body snagged on a tree, before falling again, then landing in a dense bit of forest. My corpse would be quickly devoured by feral pigs or wild birds.
As we took the curves of the road carefully, sometimes getting off the bike to walk it when the road narrowed – instead of enjoying the spectacular scenery – I came to terms with not leaving the country alive and the difficulty my family would have in recovering my remains.
On the first full day of riding, we saw an ambulance crawl up the steep mountain pass. It was a broken looking van, with a handpainted sign, heading up to one of the isolated hamlets, probably a day or more from the hospital. It crawled along carefully – the remoteness and lack of urgency indicating that in these parts it was all about recovery – not rescue.
Later in the trip – staying in the house of a villager who had ties with the local militia – we were told not to go down a certain road to the hot springs because there were landmines that had been washed on to the road in monsoon rains.
But what if we hadn’t been told, I thought, as I saw in my mind’s eye my limbs and head detaching (a surprised-not-surprised look on my face), the springs shimmering in the distance, my towel covered with blood and brain.
My anxiety (I have a lot of anxiety around motorbikes) was so heightened in the weeks before the trip to Shan State, I felt constantly sick. Why not pull out if intuition told me I would die on the road? The trip – and my death on the trip – felt like such an inevitability, that to alter the course of it, would be to mess with time’s arrow. It had been fired and it would find me.
Anyway, I didn’t die. I didn’t plunge down a mountain or get blown up by a landmine. I had a great time. And I returned to Australia feeling invincible.
Fast forward a few months to this Sunday at a friend’s house back in Sydney. I went to take out the recycling. He had a raised terrace and I thought there were steps going down to the bin. It was dark. I stepped into the void and fell several feet on to concrete and wooden slats, my neck – bent at a weird angle – taking the brunt of my fall.
As I lay there – in a weird position on my back in shock and pain – I also felt a sense of disappointment. What if this was how I was meant to die – taking out the recycling, in Newtown, on a Sunday night? Where was the dignity in being found under a pizza box?
It was similar to a headline I’d seen in Perth last month: “Police suspect woman found dead in her car ‘choked on chicken burger’.” (The woman’s family dispute this account, saying she died of a heart attack).
What if the visions I’d had of my death in Shan State had been mere vanity? Was the anxiety I had about dying somewhere remote and beautiful really just another version of a traveller’s boast? Or a well-crafted Instagram humble brag travel pic?
I was the boring backpacker in the hostel bragging: “Well, I went to this place that is so remote it hasn’t even been mapped”. But in my version: “I DIED in a place where it took an ambulance – not even a proper ambulance, a homemade ambulance! – days to reach my mutilated corpse. And my corpse wasn’t even destroyed by ordinary animals – it was destroyed by the local endangered Masked Finfoot!” What hubris to think my life was too interesting to die in a boring way. I would PLUNGE to my death in a cool location.
As I lay awkwardly by the bins, I realised it never ends in the way you imagine it ends.*
We all have to die sometime but I guess if we have anxiety about dying doing ordinary things – like taking out the bins or eating a burger – then we would be paralysed with fear all the time.
And it’s pretty bad if you stop taking the recycling out because you are too afraid.
*I am OK and still alive
