Appalled and in love [road trip misanthropy]

Three days into our three month tour and I’m feeling three times more bitterness towards humans than usual.

Every time we go fishing I witness casual acts of cruelty, people leaving fish to die on the jetty, or in a bucket, or in a bag.

My eyes sting and my insides boil with rage. I don’t have a problem with eating animals, I do have a problem with torturing them.

On a previous trip to Lorne, I walked over, thunder and lightning, to where two men stood fishing with a tiny leather jacket flipping and gasping on the ground behind them.

Excuse me, I said, what’s the plan with this fish? They eyed each other.

If you’re going to keep it, can you please put it out of its misery?

Pause.

Ok ok, I’ll throw it back, one said, just for you.

*tosses it into the sea*

Fish feel pain you know, just because they can’t scream… I trailed off as the drawbridge was raised, the gates were locked and their backs formed a stone wall.

Perhaps I should have been more curious, built rapport, quizzed them about their gear and rigs and tips… before mentioning the fish? Did they feel threatened, shamed, scolded or judged? Had I fallen into the classic activist trap of fighting fire with fire, rather than gently enquiring?

Their chiller bag jumped and jived with dying marine life, and I resigned myself to achieving approximately nothing (though one little leatherjacket might disagree).

Yesterday, fishing off the jetty in Port Campbell, someone reeled in an Australian salmon and threw it into an enamel pot half filled with water where it spent the next twenty minutes thrashing, the lid clattering a tuneless eulogy.

Next to him, a guy with calves the size of whales and a bloom of tattoos caught a rock fish; I forced myself to watch, willing him to prove me wrong, wishing for a swift resolution, but he took out the hook, flicked the creature aside and promptly started angling for another.

Its tail was still flapping as we walked away in disgust. (I was so close to going over and doing something! anything! to assist the fish. But my internal risk calculator added the calves to the tattoos to the antisocial haircut and said, Catie, pick your battles.)

Earlier today we pulled into our next campsite, an old favourite. A deep black river cuts through golden reeds towards a wild roaring sea. Last time we found a seahorse, caught bream, spotted koala. This time we arrived to a parks officer in an orange jumpsuit spraying the understory with poison. The wind whipped the herbicide in every direction, including ours. My mouth got that furry feeling it does when something unsavoury hits its membranes. We left.

A little way back along the road we found a nice spot to have lunch, and though the Jenny wrens and golden whistlers offered good medicine, it was offset by the beer cans, wine bottles and toilet paper strewn across the grass.

I hate us, I said to Jord. Why are humans so horrendous? What’s that called… misanthropy?

As the sun slunk west and the sky lost a few lumens, my mood dimmed too. Texting a friend, I told her I needed a grief circle, stat. And I thought of Meg Ulman, the keeper of our local women’s circle, where we learn to cry with our heads held high and kindly refrain from passing the Kleenex.

In Jord and Happen Films’ new doco about Meg, and Patrick, and Woody, and Zephyr, and the life they make on Djaara Country — called The New Peasants — Meg shares her hope that Woody will find a balance between being appalled, and in love. That he will be able to witness the brokenness of this world, without it breaking him. That there are indeed many nitwits and jerks and fish torturers out there, but there’s a lot of greatness too (that last one’s from me).

I mulled over Meg’s words as I sat by the creek in the semi darkness smelling the briny smells and hearing the lapwings yell KEK KEK KEK KEK KEK. Appalled and in love, appalled and in love. Some dickhead in a black jeep tried to drive along the opposite bank and got bogged. The moon’s reflection dipped and danced in the ripples.

Some days, like today, the balance is going to be off. But the balance between humans and non-humans has been off for a very long time, so I can probably have my misanthropy, and my biophilia too.

Notes: I would have loved to get tangential about NVC, righteousness blind spots, my incandescent vegan days of searing, short-sighted judgement, about traditional cultures’ treatment of animals and how our habit of outsourcing everything makes us uniquely precious about death. Maybe next time.