by David Yeadon
I liked Steve. Here was a young man—a student of engineering—who’d decided to give a few months of his life to the preservation of one relatively obscure bird. He expected little, and received little, in the way of material recompense. But you could tell by the way he spoke and the way his eyes gleamed when he described his activities in this lovely place that he was finding other, far more satisfying rewards.
It was a rather wet and cold walker that dragged himself across the last half mile of open plain to the sweeping arc of Cox Bight. The light had been dwindling for an hour or so into a golden dusk that flecked the tops of the enormous fifteen-hundred-foot-high quartzite cliffs of the New Habour Range. They tumbled in brittle, sparkling majesty down to the surf.
A narrow granite promontory split the bay into two separate parts and I wondered about camping on its tip, close to the surging waves.
But then, to my right, I noticed the lagoon, a deep-purple circle of water separated from the bight by a long finger of dunes edged by what looked like a miniature rain forest. The tide was out, so I crossed the narrow inlet dividing the lagoon from the ocean and sank down into the soft white sand of a sweeping beach. In the lee of the dunes the constant battering of the winds from the west ceased. For the first time in hours I felt warm and protected. Maybe I wouldn’t bother with the tent after all. My waterproof sleeping bag had seen me through many a cold night and a sleep on an open beach would be an appropriately romantic beginning for this back-to-nature odyssey.
But before the light vanished altogether I had to explore the miniature rain forest or whatever it was on the backside of the dunes.
By the time I’d clambered over the dunes and through huge bushes of native fuchsia I began to wish I’d left exploration until the following morning. I entered another one of those eerie worlds of ferns and tangled, stunted trees which reduced the dusk light to a green-gray gloom. Vines that dropped from higher branches or serpentined around moss-coated trunks snagged at my ankles. They seemed alive. My face and hands were soon coated in sticky spider webs and shards of cloying lichens. The ground was spongy with a rotted mass of dead and putrefying vegetation.
The silence was perhaps the most unsettling feature of the place. Only a few yards in, the hiss and skitter of the surf ceased and I felt cocooned in a soundless tomb. Even the wind had gone. Nothing moved in the tentacled darkness. There were no friendly bird calls, no frogs, no crickets. Nothing except the crunch of my boots on dead twigs and the slithering of wet ferns against my body.
I’m sure, had I been more of a botanist, I would have enjoyed days of delight exploring this quirky little forestscape in an otherwise treeless wilderness. But, while I find occasional fascination in recording plants and flowers and berries and buds, all I felt here was a kind of intuitive dread, tinged with that inevitable intrigue of the unknown that Wordsworth once described as the “ideal” condition of the wanderer:
Whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through trackless wood,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing,
Upon a river point me out my course?
This wood was certainly trackless, and as I moved farther in it seemed that nothing tangible would “point me out my course.” The place absorbed me into itself as if it had no intention of letting me go.
Michael Crichton once explained the driving force behind his own wanderings. “I felt a need for rejuvenation, for experiences that would take me away from things I usually did, the life I usually led…. I felt the urge to do something for no reason at all.”
And so, for no reason at all other than maybe maudlin curiosity and a fascination with “feared things,” I moved even deeper into the dark, groping tangle. I was determined not to lose my way as I had done at Bob’s camp, so my route was as straight as I could make it, keeping my back to the ocean.
It was almost dark when I finally extricated myself from the dwarf forest and rejoined my lonely backpack on the beach. I was relieved to hear the surf and wind again. Familiar elements, familiar rhythms. Occasionally in my travels I feel, to paraphrase Dennison Nash, an outsider in a world of ambiguity, inconsistency, and flux. The forest had reminded me of that state—confusion tinged with frissons of fear—in an unfamiliar environment. But back on the beach, with my hands dug into the soft sand and a pack of sandwiches ready for dinner, I was home again….
Sleep came easily this night.
But not for long.
Maybe my sleeping bag was not as waterproof as usual, or maybe the rain was harder than any rain had a right to be. Whatever the cause, I awoke just before dawn in the middle of a horrendous downpour to find myself soaked.
Rolling up the errant bag and cramming scattered belongings into my backpack, I scurried over the dunes and into the forest. Ignoring the snagging vines and moss-coated trunks, I plunged in until I found a dell edged by ferns where the rain merely dripped and splattered, rather than pounded with the ferocity of a sledgehammer.
Fortunately, my butane stove worked and I treated myself to steaming bouillon and a mushy mix of dehydrated rice and something that resembled chicken pieces in appearance but tasted of stewed cardboard. Whatever. It was food and I was hungry.
John Locke once wrote, “So far as a man has the power to think or not to think, to move or not to move…so far is a man free.”
I decided not to think and not to move. Ergo—I was free! Only I didn’t enjoy the freedom. I felt trapped as the rain continued its pounding.
Looking back, I realized I should have relished these moments of pause. After all, there were no jumping ants, no funnelweb spiders, no leeches, no mosquitoes—merely a little rain and a gray dawn. The food was filling and I had a clean, dry set of clothes to climb into. Looking back, it should have been a pleasantly benevolent interlude….
Two hours later the downpour eased and I was more than ready to be off. Again, looking back, I should have stayed where I was and read a book for the day. That would have allowed time for the deluge to be absorbed into the earth, for color to return to the wilderness, and for my somewhat deflated spirits to balloon again into the bombast and braggadocio that often carries me through the “bad bits” of journeys.
But—ever restless for movement and momentum—I didn’t do any of that. Instead I set off around seven-thirty into the moist morning, leaping swollen creeks, plowing along a trail that had now become a mire as I crossed the undulating moor, and climbing up into mists on Red Point Hills. Somewhere below me was Louisa Bay, but all I could see was more mist, cold and clammy. I’d planned to take a detour down to the bay to catch a glimpse of fur seals and other summertime visitors from the Maatsuyker Islands just a few miles offshore, or leopard seals from Macquarie Island to the south, or watch the breeding rituals of the shorttailed shearwaters on adjoining Louisa Island. Most of all I wanted to see the three-thousand-year-old Aborigine middens that were said to dot the shoreline.
I was particularly curious about these few tangible remnants of Tasmania’s Aboriginal culture. This little state has a notorious and embarrassing reputation as instigator of genocidal policies against the thousands of natives who had enjoyed a relatively tranquil subsistence life since around 1000 B.C. in the forests and along the coastal bays. Tranquil, that is, until the arrival of the nineteenth-century explorers and settlers who interpreted occasional protests by the Aborigines as tantamount to anticolonial rebellions. When George Arthur, governor of the fledgling colony of Van Diemen’s Land, failed either to destroy or round up the natives in a campaign mounted in 1830, he sent the explorer George Augustus Robinson as a conciliator to find them and “persuade” them to relocate on the uninhabited islands of the Bass Strait. At that time Louisa Bay was a key focus of Aboriginal settlements, but within a short period of time not a single native was left on these wild shores. In fact, so effective were the government’s destruction and relocation strategies that by 1876 no pure-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine existed anywhere except in the form of mummified specime
ns which toured the world in gaudy anthropological displays.
I remember reading a moving passage in a magazine that captured the terrible sadness of this decimated culture:
The Aborigines believed their souls to be white, the negation of their charcoaled flesh; the arrival of white men sailing down from the north must have seemed a second coming of spectres. Against this incursion, the Aborigines were helpless. Since their sagas were of dreaming not fighting, they produced no bellicose Sitting Bulls or Geronimos; they resigned themselves to their own obsolescence.
And so it was done. Rapidly, cruelly, and, for decades, without remorse. Today, however, I found a belated sadness in many Tasmanians I met and a sense of shame, occasionally tempered with claims of “benevolent relocation” or such odd rationales as “Look—disease had almost wiped them out anyhow. There were so few left. They were moved to help them help themselves.” But generally it’s not a subject of discussion likely to enhance beery camaraderie at the local pub. “Best leave it alone, mate,” one elderly farmer advised me in a smoky bar in Hobart. “Stick to Alan Bond or dwarf tossing. Much safer.”
And I left Louisa Bay alone too. I missed the detour track completely in the clouds on Red Point Hills. When I realized my error I was so bogbound and disheartened by the constant gray drizzle that I just plowed on to my muddy camping ground at the foot of the notorious Ironbound Range.
Some things are inherently amusing—like nose hairs and tables full of empty stubbies; some are not, like gray drizzly days in deepest Tasmania.
It was a day I’d prefer to forget.
And the next day too. Although for different reasons.
Dawn was promising enough: a crystal-clean light pushing the night clouds out to sea and touching the land with gold. No rain, no winds. A fine day for walking. The surly Ironbounds rose up in front of me; gilded peaks with jagged summits, flecks of ice and snow on the ridges. An ancient bulwark of Precambrian metamorphic rocks. Very impressive.
A majestic bird flew overhead as I collapsed the tent and loaded the backpack. The large white head was hawklike and its white belly sparkled as it soared the updrafts with a broad wingspan of five feet or more. I learned later I’d seen a sea eagle, a voracious eater of reptiles, other birds, and, when available, even penguins. Not a very pleasant creature—but on that sparkling morning it seemed an omen of better days ahead.
The path climbed steadily up open sedgeland onto a broad subalpine zone. Pockets of King Billy pine clustered in gullies and sheltered places, their deeply furrowed trunks and branches contorted, juniper-fashion. Small white daisies with golden centers glowed in the wind-scoured scrub; compact clusters of dainty red Christmas bells rose among the grasses.
In spite of their ominous name, the Ironbounds peak at little more than three thousand feet, and while the climbing was tough going, it was made easier by the benign weather and ever-broadening vistas of mountains and bays. The wind increased as I approached the summit and I spotted places where previous walkers had camped, huddled in the low bushes. I considered calling an early halt to the day and hunkering down to enjoy the views, but my legs kept on moving and I followed the contours around the northern rim of the massif, humming happy songs and wondering how to prepare a celebratory feast of my one solitary steak (another gift from Bob) for dinner that night.
I saw new patterns of vegetation from these heights, patterns that were invisible at lower elevations—brilliant green swatches of sphagnum moss invading the small ponds and pools that lay scattered across the mosaics of darker green and bronze cushion-plant plains. The patterns were jigsawlike, thousands of micro-environments from the sedge grasses to the mosses to the lichen-blotched rocks and strata. Patches of pink mountain rocket and cheeseberry bushes adorned with bright red berries gave a rich resonance to the more muted tones of the buttongrass plateaus.
On a dull day the colors would doubtless be leeched out to an army-tent khaki, but today the sun revealed the land’s true richness: a brilliant panoply of tones and textures that made me wish for canvas, palette, and brushes; a magnificent display of the subtleties, the intricate juxtapositions and meldings of plant colonies set beside the milky whorls and snakelike doodlings of sand patterns beneath the blue-green waters of the bays. And yet, despite all these delights, I could sense the restless riot of the land itself: towering broken cliffs; spars of brittle basalt; fjord-like incisions where the warmer, higher post-ice-age waters had penetrated deep into once-forested valleys; bold bluffs and phallic intrusions of dolerite into the spuming surf; the bleedings of frost-shattered ridges and razored escarpments in the form of peat-brown streams pouring from the hills; the bleached bones of ancient bedrocks protruding through the sloozy-oozy mud; the wind-torn trunks of trees, blasted of bark, blanched and twisted by a tempestuous climate that just never lets up—scratching and scraping the land down to its ultimate peneplain in the hollow howling vastness that is South-West Tasmania.
I had a sudden flash of the neat little hedge-rimmed fields, ordered orchards, and Ireland-green, sheep-studded vales that awaited me way to the east around Hobart, far beyond these tumultuous ranges. I thought of the curling country roads, the pie shops smelling of fresh-baked pastry, the rowdy smoke-filled pubs, and the demure tin-roofed bungalows adorned with red and white trim and set in gardens of privet, hollyhocks, and geraniums.
I would be there soon, I promised myself—showered, deloused, primed up on Foster’s ale, choosing dinner from menus with frilly borders, sleeping on soft mattresses, dry and warm, and savoring all the wonders of a world that, up here, seemed very far away.
But enough of such hedonistic imaginings! I was less than halfway to such bucolic destinations, with a lot of tough hiking ahead and challenges to be overcome.
And the challenges came fast. Actually a mere hour or so after my contemplations on that Ironbound ridge, as I left the heights and began my descent toward the long beach of Prion Bay, everything changed. The bare, wind-tossed tops gave way to some of the thickest, most tangled and tortured rain forest it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. Out of the bright light and into a gray-green gloom of a nefarious netherworld.
Now, rain forests have their fascinations. Even that eerie dwarf forest I’d discovered at Cox Bight possessed, in daylight, a certain rampant, raging charm. But this was altogether different—a far more intense, menacing place where there seemed to be little in the way of order or subtleties. The forest just flared up and thrust me into it, following a trail that had the remarkable ability of vanishing in the difficult places, leaving me scrambling through mud and slime and decaying moss beds without any sense of direction—except down.
And down and down, deeper into the sticky gloom of ancient Gondwanaland species—more tall King Billy pines, eucalyptus, myrtles, celery-top pine, and a tangled understory of laurel, whitey wood, waratah, dwarf beech, and ferns, all competing for scarce light and root space—oh, and mosses too, in strange and exotic forms: pillars, mattresses, balls, bouquets, and furry smotherings of trunks and branches. Had the mood been more conducive I might have dallied here and undertaken a photographic essay of these myriad species, possibly even bagged a few samples for later identification. But the mood was definitely not conducive to anything except survival and eventual extrication on the beaches of Prion Bay, far, far below.
And then I noticed the leeches.
Well—not so much noticed. I merely sensed something peculiar on my left arm under layers of damp clothing. Something moving very slowly. Almost like an involuntary muscle spasm except it was happening in three distinct places simultaneously.
I looked down. I’d forgotten to fasten the Velcro cuff of my parka. Either that or it had been ripped open in my frequent fights with vines and branches. And so there it was, dangling loose, allowing whatever it was easy access to the soft flesh of my lower arm.
Actually, I knew what I would see even before I pulled back the layers. Once before, during my adventures in the marshlands of the Caspian Sea
(recounted in a previous book, The Back of Beyond), I had experienced the stomach-wrenching sight of slimy black creatures growing bigger by the second as they sucked the blood from my legs and shins.
And, oh, yes, there they were. Three big ones this time, happily slurping away on my precious life fluid, oblivious to the discomfort they were causing in the pit of my stomach….
Think back. How did my friends tell me to get rid of them in Iran? Something hot. A cigarette tip, a match—burn their tails and off they drop. But I remembered that method had not been too successful. In their haste to remove their blood-gorged, balloonlike bodies from my flesh they forgot to coagulate their incisions and left oozing wounds in their abandoned snacking spots. But what the hell? Anything was better than watching these miniature monsters have their way with me. So out with the lighter: flick…another flick…and another…and nothing. Not even a spark. Certainly nothing like a flame. Useless damned things, these lighters. A bit of damp and they seize up like oil-starved engines.
Okay. Next solution? Salt. That’s it. A scattering of salt on the tail and off they come. But I didn’t have any salt. All the dehydrated fare I carried in little aluminum pouches was already presalted. I had a tiny bottle of soy sauce I always carried with me to perk up bland restaurant meals, but…aha! I did have one possible resource. Bob’s bag of “emergency goodies.” I’d already found his antihistamines for the bites of jumping ants. But what other delights had he shoved into the left-side pocket of my backpack?
With amazing grace and delicacy, I removed my backpack and used my right hand to burrow into the pocket. His gift was larger and more varied than I’d realized—mosquito repellent, high-energy health bars, Band-Aids, a large bandage, iodine, hydrogen peroxide, and—voilà—a small cylindrical container of common table salt. A message was scrawled on the outside. “So—they got you too! Best. Bob!” Yes, very amusing, my friend. Quite droll, really. You knew the damned creatures would find a way in somewhere. Well—you were right. And thank you for your gift of salt.