by David Yeadon
The gale had dropped to a gentle breeze. Shafts of gold light through the clouds swept across the mountains, transforming patches of dun-colored rock and scrub into rich palettes of bronze, ocher, and Irish-green. For a moment I had a flash of déjà vu: I’d been here before, or somewhere very like it. Then I remembered. The Outer Hebrides Islands of western Scotland. The same treeless barrens, the same sedgeland and buttongrass plains of bog and marsh, the same bold and brittle-ridged mountains—and the same colors. The colors found in the tweeds made by the lonely crofters of Harris. The only difference was in the people. Here—with the exception of the two Willsons and occasional hikers—there were none. The land existed in its own right, untouched unmolested, unchanged for millennia. In the Hebrides, even in the wildest spots, you’d find the welcoming curlicues of blue-gray peat smoke rising up from the chimneys of crofters’ homes set in rocky hollows or nestled in sheltered coves. They were hard to spot. Built of local bedrock gneiss and thatched in marsh grass they blended perfectly with the colors and textures of the surrounding land. But they were there—and on the days when the sea squalls hullaballooed across the moors or the westerlies smashed the surf on those scimitar sweeps of white sand they were a welcome reminder that comfort, warmth, and maybe even a spirit-raising glass of malt would greet any wayward walker of the wilds who happened to hammer on their thick oak doors.
Here there were no such compensatory comforts. The land was as it looked—lonely, aloof, indifferent. You carried your own nurturing with you—or you did without. There were no half measures.
Well—almost none.
A surprise awaited me as I set off on a path that rose from behind the hikers’ hut and eased over a low ridge to another huddle of wind-shaped pines beside a slow-moving, peat-bronzed stream.
A house!
Something I hadn’t expected.
Set by the side of the stream and sheltered from the elements by a thick grove of trees and bushes was another Quonset hut, originally painted in turquoise and red, and now faded over time to a pale eggshell blue and rusty sienna. A perfect hermit’s hideaway. I edged closer and then noticed the name painted in small letters on the wall by the door. DENY KING. PLEASE KNOCK FIRST.
I’d found Deny’s home.
The outbuildings were full of implements—axes, shovels, spades, forks, rakes—all neatly lined against wood and tin walls as if Deny might come along at any moment to select his favorite piece and set to work clearing his now-overgrown patches of garden on the slope between the house and the stream.
But of course no one would come. Deny was gone. He’d died only a short time ago, according to my pilot friend, and no one was living here.
Yet it didn’t feel that way. Peering through the cobwebby windows of his home I saw a simple kitchen with a wood-burning stove littered with pans and old coffee cans and cooking utensils. On the side of the house overlooking the stream and the boat-house (Deny’s boat still neatly roped to the dock) was a sunlit room with a large window facing the mountains.
Books lay scattered on a low table and on top of an old upright piano, the fireplace was full of half-burned squares of dried peat; an old couch occupied the niche by the window. I could imagine Deny lying there looking out over the vast sprawl of marsh plains and mountains, reading his books (they filled every shelf and nook and cranny in the living room), getting up every now and then to heat some coffee, and then taking a stroll along the narrow paths that divided his garden into neat oblong patches.
Whoever, whatever this man had been, I sensed him. I sensed his spirit in this little home—the kind of place that many of us fantasize about when we dream of a simple life. A life unmolested by irrelevant details and distractions, untouched by the traumas of city life, unplagued by pension-bound perspectives and the petty politics of existence. I sensed peace, simplicity, and wholeness here. A tangible lesson in the less-is-more ethic.
Accompanied by the shrieks of shrike-thrushes feeding in his gardens, I wandered around Deny’s little compound. There were more wooden sheds filled with lifejackets, oilskins, and piles of driftwood, jars of nails and screws, hammers, saws, and screwdrivers. There were compost heaps, a boat yard where he’d been repairing an old wooden dinghy, an ancient wind-up telephone hung on a wall. (Presumably for decoration. There were no telephones out here.)
Farther along a mossy path that bounced gently as I walked on it and across which the sunshine cast strips of soft, moist light, I came to a studio, open to the elements. Everything was in place for a day’s painting—the brushes were neatly arranged on a small table alongside squeezed tubes of oil. An easel stood with a canvas already on it, half completed—an evening scene of golds and crimsons over blue-hazed mountains. In the corner beyond the table were a dozen other empty canvases, awaiting Deny’s inspiration.
Eerie. And yet somehow strangely sublime. I had entered into his little private world and, although he was no longer around to sit and talk, artist to artist, about his life and his dreams, I felt welcome. Nothing had been touched. It was as though he’d merely left off one day in the middle of things and just never come back. His body had moved on elsewhere. But his spirit remained. Intact, inviolate, unmolested. Like the land here.
Farther down the path, past more patches of cultivated garden, was another shed, larger than the others, with windows that were less laced in webs and dust. The door was unlocked and I went in.
The sensation that hit me is hard to analyze—even, to quote Wordsworth, with the benefit of “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
Only twice—maybe three times—in my life have I entered a space that has truly spoken to me. The most memorable occasion was a decade or so ago on Cliff Island in Maine’s Casco Bay when I was exploring some of the less-known islands of America’s Atlantic Coast for my Secluded Islands book. It was a misty early morning and I had arrived earlier than expected on the ferry from Portland. No one seemed to be around at the dock, so I decided to wander for a while through the forest that fringed the little coves of the western shore.
After a couple of miles I came across one of those places that hopeful hermits dream about—a tiny hand-built A-frame house sheltered in pines with windows overlooking the bay, and a natural boat ramp up a slab of exposed Maine granite bedrock. It was still misty and the waves slopped lazily up a small sand beach enclosed by huge boulders. There was no boat, so I presumed the owner was off for a spell of early morning fishing. The yard was neatly organized: three piles of cleanly split wood, each of a different size, covered with tarpaulin; stacks of lobster traps surrounded by coiled ropes, buoys, and large blue plastic pickle barrels for the catch; an outside refrigerator stocked with beer and basics; and a small outbuilding used as a toilet and storeroom. Everywhere a sense of harmony and order.
Inside had a similar well-organized feel. A single room, maybe twenty by twenty feet, rising to a pyramidal apex and equipped with all the necessities of the simple life—propane gas range, wood-burning stove, stereo, CB radio, an old sofa covered with a worn quilt, scattered rugs, a well-stacked library (with a bias toward books on ecology and small-scale farming) on shelves supported by gray cinder blocks. On a low table was a manual for constructing a solar greenhouse.
Above the compact kitchen was a raised platform reached by a rough-cut ladder which housed a foam-mattress bed and more piles of books. Sunlight tickled through segments of stained glass.
And that, basically, was it. A totally self-sufficient home—economical, cozy, and full of its owner’s personality. And it spoke to me, clear and clean as larks’ song: “This could be your home. What else would you ever need?”
Now, I’ve lived the gypsy life for years, sharing a modest motor home with my wife and two cats as we’ve ventured off on the backroads of America or down into the hidden corners of Britain and Southern Europe and farther beyond. I admit to a penchant for small, compact, well-organized spaces. But this little home on this quiet Maine island seemed to envelop me in its pure—and simple—
totality. It wanted me to stay, to sprawl by a blazing fire in the cast-iron stove, cook up a few mussels and fish caught fresh from the bay outside the door, listen to fine music on the stereo, or read for days from books that I’ve long promised myself I’d read but never have.
It was with almost unbearable reluctance I closed the door of that house behind me and walked back through the misty forest to the dock on that early morning on Cliff Island. But although I left the place, it has remained with me, clear and crisp in every detail, for all the subsequent years.
And that’s precisely what happened in Deny’s little one-room shack up the path from his home. The moment I stepped in the door and looked around at his hand-made furniture (sofa, two chairs, a table by the window overlooking the mountains), the wood stove, a sleeping nook on a platform reached by a ladder made of barely trimmed branches, an old gas stove and tiny kitchen area—that same sense that somehow this was mine swept over me in a wave of certainty and serendipity. The room welcomed me as if I’d been away for a while on a hard journey and had returned, tired and torn, to recuperate and find my “centering” once again in its simple security.
I sat on a chair made of branches and planks and rested my head on the table by the window. Outside, shafts of sunlight were playing across the plain, silvering strips and patches of marsh and bog. The mountains around the plain were purple and deep blue. On the table was a small box of writing implements—old ballpoint pens, pencils with the ends slightly gnawed, an eraser broken into two ragged-edged pieces, and some sheets of yellowing lined paper.
“Write here,” the room said to me. “Stay—and write here. What more do you need?”
Was Deny a writer as well as an artist? His little room reminded me of the small gardening shed used by Dylan Thomas at Laugharne in southern Wales. The same broad sweeping vistas, the same sense of being away from it all, the same sense of a place without distractions and superfluous ornamentation where one could focus—both inwardly and outwardly—and send the creative juices spilling and splashing over canvases, lined paper, or whatever medium you chose.
The silence in the room was total.
Whoever Deny was, I liked him. His spirit was alive and well in this cluster of ramshackle buildings by this stream in this magical place—one of the wildest and least-visited places on earth.
The silence continued and I sat quietly, not writing, not really thinking. Just being in the place. Letting my own silence rise up to greet the silence that surrounded me.
Until the silence ceased.
“G’day.”
I jolted in my seat as if bumped in the rump by a billy goat. The silence collapsed in shards of silver. My stillness was whisked away like gale-blown clouds.
Nothing for a few seconds, and then “Hello…g’day.”
For a fleeting moment I thought—Deny! Maybe all this reverie and introspection into the life of Deny King had, in the intensity of the silence, metamorphosed his tangible spirit into an even more tangible incarnation.
A face peered at mine through the cobwebby window. A large man, red cheeks, big nose bulging in odd places (a drinker’s nose?), richly tanned face etched deeply with lines (or scars), and firm chin set on a thick-muscled neck.
No, it wasn’t Deny. From Phil’s descriptions, Deny was a small, wiry kind of man who walked with a bit of a stoop.
The newcomer was altogether larger; his face folds moved like thick lava from a scowl to a pleasant, open smile.
“Thought I might find you here,” he mouthed through the glass. “Okay if I come in?”
“Fine.” I tried to smile back but felt embarrassed to be discovered trespassing in Deny’s hideaway.
As soon as he entered the door, bending his huge head to avoid the low beam, the room shrank. He was a giant, or at least appeared so against the modest scale of the space and its meager furnishings.
“Hey—sorry to disturb you, but I thought I might find you here. Just came back in the boat from the beach. Saw your fire at the hut. You’re a good fire man. S’going beaut now. Toasty as all blazes back there.”
I must have still looked a little confused by his sudden appearance.
“Sorry mate—forgot me manners—Bob Geeves. Wilderness Tours. Out of Hobart. I do the honors at the camp down the beach there.”
Obviously my confusion confused him.
“Er…the camp, y’know—on Melaleuca inlet by Bathurst. I take the camping trips….”
My voice finally returned. “Oh—Bob Geeves. I’ve heard of you from Phil. Hi. Good to meet you.” I introduced myself.
“Well—and g’day to you, Dave. Heard you might be stayin’ over awhile. Thought I’d come up and see you’re all right and stuff like that. Y’okay for food?”
“Food? Oh, yes, fine. I was just going back to cook some dinner. You want to join me?”
“Sure thing. Brought a couple of fish. Caught them on me way back. You like fish, right?”
“I’d prefer anything to that dehydrated rubbish I’m carrying with me.”
He exploded with a sudden gale of laughter. The small room seemed to shake. “Good on yer, mate! Yeah—that’s crap in’t but s’bout all you can carry on the trail. And it keeps you goin’. But I’ll tell you, five days on and you’d give your left testicle for a plate of fish ’n’ chips in a sweaty snack bar.”
Together we strolled slowly back to the hiker’s hut, past Deny’s studio, past his neat rows of gardening implements, past the blue and red house, and up over the moor ridge.
The fire was indeed “beaut” and the bunk room toasty. I prepared the bread and a salad I’d carried in with me while Bob grilled the fish by the fire and started to tell me about my newfound friend-of-the-spirit, Deny King.
“He was a real outback man—tin miner, naturalist, meteorologist, artist, and—when you got him going—a great storyteller. God, he’d tell tales that’d scare the beejeez outa you. He was ’bout eighty when he died just a while back and—I tell you—he’d done jus’ ’bout anything a man has to do down here to stay alive. The only thing he didn’t do was go hunting whales like some of the crazy boyos did here ’bout a hundred years ago. Did a bit of lumbering—big trade in Huon pine from Bathurst early on. But what he and his dad, Charlie, were really after was gold. They first came on down in 1930, but nothing panned out and they went back to their farm—Sunset Ranch—not far from Hobart. Then they hit bad luck—loads of it. Bush fire wiped out the ranch in ’34, Charlie’s wife, Olive, died ’35, so he and Deny came back here to get in on the tin-mining bonanza in 1935. Deny was twenty-four, m’be twenty-five, then. He wanted to be an engineer but gave it up to help his dad until the war. Came back again in ’45 and built that house you saw—called it Melaleuca, after all those trees down by the creek.”
“It must have been a tough life.”
“Well, early on they had plenty of company. Twenty men or more working the peat beds for tin. But the price got bad and after a while it was just the two of them. They got mail and supplies every month or two from fishing boats that came into Bathurst. Made a bit of extra cash from the Bureau of Meteorology—he built that wooden tower with a wind gauge—didn’t you see that? Y’must have come in the back way. He clocked a real roarin’ forties gale there in ’48—more’n a hundred and twenty miles per hour! Told me when he climbed up to take the readin’ he lost all his clobber down to his vest an’ boots!”
“You get winds like that?”
“Dead right we do—and rain—a hundred and ten inches average—some years double that. This is crazy territory down here. Remember that Snowdon fella from Buck Palace, photographer, married Princess Margaret—he came here doing a book on Tasmania in 1980. Got stuck down in Melaleuca with Deny for three days. Planes wouldn’t fly in from Hobart. Said it was suicidal. Fella only came for a day to photograph Deny. Ended up becoming a mate for life! Hillary came down too—y’remember Sir Edmund Hillary—fella who got up Everest? Called Deny “a real pioneer.” Deny liked that. Y’know, they ev
en named a plant after him—Euphrasia Kingii—some new specimen he discovered on one of his botany expeditions. I tell you, Dave—he was a rare man.”
“Did he ever marry?”
“Deny—sure he did. Margaret. Lovely girl. Gave her a wedding ring made out of gold he’d panned ’round here. He always said he’d find the lode—somewhere in there with the tin an’ all. Never did. Just flakes and a few nuggets. Nothing much. They got two daughters—Mary and Janet. They still come down—painting like their dad. He did a lot of that when the price of tin went down.”
“I saw one of his paintings. Looked pretty good.”
“Oh, Deny was an okay painter, all right. Sold all his stuff. When he died he had twenty on order.”
Crash!
Our chat by the fire over Bob’s grilled fish was suddenly interrupted by a great bang on the hut door.
I jumped. Bob looked up and smiled.
“Cheeky bugger,” he mumbled.
“Who—what?” I spluttered and fish bits flew from my mouth.
“Bloody possum,” said Bob, and stood up. “Cheeky as hell. She always knows when I’m eatin’…bangs on that door like a bloody landlord!”
He extracted a particularly succulent piece of fish from the pan.
“You do without this?”
I was hungry but decided to be polite. “Sure.”
He strolled to the door, his huge frame making the floorboards groan, and opened it slowly to reveal the cutest, cuddliest kangaroo-type creature I’d yet seen in Australia.
“There y’are, you cheeky bugger. Get that down yer.”
The possum extended delicate raccoonlike fingers and took the offering gracefully. It was not much larger than a big cat, with a thick woolly gray coat, long bushy tail, pink ears and nose, and what looked like a permanent grin set in a cherubic round face. Its eyes glowed deep red in the reflected light of the hut lamp.
“She’s weaning, Dave. Y’see that—a little Joey!”
Bob pointed to the possum’s pouch set way down her stomach, out of which peered a miniature version of the mother, grinning too.