We arrived in Arrowtown last Sunday with a plan to hire a couple of bikes, ride up to Macetown to the goldrush ruins.
This did not happen.
The new gold rush around here is hiring bikes, e-bikes in particular. But not in the off you go mate careful ya don't fall off a cliff haha way things used to happen.
Maybe customers today expect a lot more, maybe the product offering has been much enhanced.
The crucial point is that if someone hires you an e-bike, they will also be undertaking to come and rescue you if anything goes awry. And what that means is that they may not hire you a bike if they don't like the sound of where you're going.
We told the friendly young woman,
We heard it’s a good ride to Macetown, is that still something you can do here?
She flashed us a perturbed look. It contained volumes, chiefly:
You boomers will surely be out of your depth.
She said,
Oh we don’t hire bikes for that.
And then,
I don't think you’ll find anyone who does.
And she enumerated reasons:
You have to cross the river, like, 25 times and it can get quite high.
It’s a long way out there, and there’s no signal.
It’s back country, and there’s no signal.
We wouldn’t be able to come and help you if anything went wrong, because there’s no signal.
We were a bit bemused. But not to worry, we had our tramping gear with us too.
You can walk it, though, right? we said.
Well yes, she said but then we got the perturbed look again and back country and no signal and all on your own out there.
We politely thanked her, went back to the car, pulled our boots on, found a route map, and then set off in pursuit of broken dreams reduced to dust.
Macetown grew out of the gold rush on the Arrow river: tents, then huts, then hotels and a school that was also a hall and a post office and a bustling community of some hundreds, just like in the Dire Straits song. But it is no spoiler to say that what we would find up there would be none of that bustle. We would be walking in the footprints of ghosts.
It lies 12k or so up the Arrow River by a choice of routes. We picked the 4WD road and the 25 river crossings.
It’s lovely once you're in.
A lovely day for a lovely walk, and as usual the delicious sandwiches on my back.
That promise of being all alone out there didn't pay out though. A steady stream of 4WD folk were on the way up as well, a family or two, dudes showing their girlfriends their prowess, a worried-looking young guy with his dog, wondering what he'd taken on, paying customers on Safari.
Beautiful though. That river there was once full of gold, this place is still golden.
In due course, ruins. They planted trees, made walls, made somewhere to live while they retrieved the gold from the rock and the water. But once the gold is all gone, so is the reason for being there.
Sitting eating sandwiches, and what I have on my mind is finality: the way things come to an end, some with ceremony and occasion, others with no realisation at all that this will be the last time you meet in this room, talk to this person, do this job, play this game, visit this town, pan in this river. For whatever reason it turns out that you were doing it for the last time and you had no idea at that moment. If you had, maybe you might have stood, looked around, contemplated.
Or maybe it’s less of a wrench if you don’t know. I still have the most vivid memory of pulling the door shut for the last time on the house we’d rebuilt and Mary Margaret had grown up in. We were looking forward to our new home, sure, but leaving that last time was hard.
All the doors in Macetown eventually closed for a last time, and then everything crumbled.
At various spots in the ruins there are plaintive signs imploring people to not stay overnight in the remaining buildings, to not do damage, to not carve up the ground with their motorbikes and utes.
I’m looking at it all and wondering about the careless indifference of people. It would be so easy to not be an asshole, to show some care, and yet the not my problem / can’t be fucked / don’t tell me what to do spirit remains undimmed.
A thing I like very much about walking into the backcountry is the escape from aspects of everyday life that disappoint. But sometimes they will follow you in.
Lovely walk, though.
