by David Yeadon
It worked. I tested the fattest one first. A few sprinkles on its lower regions and the thing tightened into a ball like a frightened snail, slowly released its suckers, and fell off with a sickening thump onto the wet moss of the path. This time it had thoughtfully sealed the tiny wound (maybe hoping for a comeback) and nothing except a little trickle of blood escaped. The other two behaved equally politely, so I resisted the temptation to stomp them into a gooey pulp and let them digest their stolen snack undisturbed by a quick belt from my boot. I cleaned the bluish wounds with peroxide, rolled down my shirtsleeve, and zipped the parka, fastening the Velcro catches as tight as a tourniquet.
But I was still curious about these evil black things. I hadn’t seen any sign of them higher up. Maybe I’d been too concerned with keeping to the almost-invisible trail. Now I began to investigate the vegetation more closely and, lo!—there they were, camouflaged among the leaves and ferns in thready black shadows, nothing like the bloated horrors still digesting their meal on the mossy path.
I vowed to be more cautious, more aware. I also vowed to get out of this foul place as fast as my legs and spirit would carry me.
I arrived a few hours later at the graceful arc of Deadman’s Bay enclosing yet another soft white sand beach. Most of the rain forest lay behind me but exuberant flurries of vegetation encroached on the shore and clustered thickly along either bank of Deadman’s Creek. I was tempted to camp for the night but as dusk was a way off and the sky still contained slivers of blue I decided to continue on around Menzies Bluff to the four-mile linear strand of Prion Beach.
New vistas awaited me here. Behind the dwarf forest on the ancient dunes lay the large inland New River Lagoon and, towering over the landscape, the white mass of Precipitous Bluff. Tall eucalyptus forests clung to its lower slopes and rising out of this luxuriant green mass were striated dolerite crags whipped by clouds and sparkling in patches of sunshine. To camp beneath such crags would be fitting relief from a long, weary day.
But as I walked the seemingly endless strand, a dark sense of loneliness and utter isolation descended on me. The place looked so empty. So untouched. Somehow its drama and beauty exaggerated the intensity of my strange mood. Surely I shouldn’t feel depressed in the midst of such magnificent scenery. I should feel elated, full of a sense of achievement. After all I was now well over halfway. Only another three days at most before the cozy comforts of Cockle Creek.
But the mood wouldn’t lift. The beach seemed to go on forever. No footprints. No signs of campsites. Nothing—except me and this enormous awesome space.
Something felt to be banging against the edges of my mind. I remembered a quote from James Hillman: “The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.” I sensed I had reached an impasse of sorts. My expectations of this experience did not correspond with the actuality. And what made it so odd was that, as soon as that impasse occurred, I began hunting my head for a rationale, a definition of my “problem”—my unexpected depression. What’s happening? my mind called out. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. But something on the other side, a whisper, a mere breath of thought, came through: There’s no “meant to be,” there’s only “is.” And a memory. A memory of lines from Thomas Moore’s splendid book Care of the Soul (I found the quotation later):
Modern psychology…is often seen as a way of being saved from the very messes that most deeply mark human life as human. We want to sidestep negative moods and emotion, bad life choices and unhealthy habits. But if our purpose is first to observe the soul as it is, then we may have to discard the salvational wish and find deeper respect for what is actually there. By trying to avoid human mistakes and failures, we move beyond the reach of the soul.
And later—at the end of Moore’s magic book:
We know soul is being cared for when our pleasures [in my case the opposite, but the point’s the same] feel deeper than usual, when we can let go of the need to be free of complexity and confusion, and when compassion takes the place of distrust and fear.
It is the “letting go” that is the key. The releasing of expectations and predigested experiences and the acceptance of “what is”—good, bad, elating, depressing, hurtful, ecstatic—all the myriad range of emotions and feelings and insights that have always been and always will be part of our complex human fabric.
Only then, according to Moore, does soul coalesce “into the mysterious philosopher’s stone, that rich, solid core of personality the alchemists sought, or it opens into the peacock’s tail—a revelation of the soul’s colors and a display of its dappled brilliance.” Moore ended his book with these words and his image of the peacock’s tail had endured in my mind.
And it came at just the right moment. Something was happening. As I slowly began to accept the strange mood that had abruptly swept over me, it no longer seemed to be a problem but merely another nuance, another facet, of the journey’s multifaceted sequence. It didn’t really matter much whether I felt sadness or gladness; the mood was irrelevant to the process—the learning, the insights, the new ways of seeing that were now somehow encompassing the depression and leading me on to another level of perception.
Something definitely was happening. Something I remembered from a Tom Robbins novel (I forget which) that suggested the difference between an adventure and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape, and the narrower the margin, the greater the adventure. Well, I certainly hadn’t come all this way for a lonely suicide in this desolate land; I’d come on an adventure, to narrow the margins, follow the escape routes, and see where they led.
And this one was leading to somewhere rather wonderful, a place an Aborigine had tried to explain to me a few weeks previously during my journeys in the wilds of western Australia. He talked of a web, a web of song (songlines) and legends that enveloped the world, a web in which time was irrelevant. Everything that is and ever was is part of that web—everything in constant interaction—everything in kinship within the web—all humans, all creatures, all mountains, rivers and streams, trees, even individual rocks, all animate and interrelated within an all-enveloping web.
My walk was no longer a morose, bad-mood-bound plod. In fact, I was now unaware of actually walking on this immense sandy strand. I was becoming part of it; the still silent place was buzzing with “presence” the web was forming. The sheafs of dune grass, the fuzzy huddle of dwarf forest on the lee side of the dunes, the soft slitheriness of trillions of sand grains, the tiny marks and footprints etched in the grains, the hiss and suck of the surf, the breezes swirling among the marram grass, the slowly undulating movements of the clouds, the fractured complexities of the distant dolerite crags—even the silence itself both in the land and, growing more each minute, in my mind…all part of this eternal web. Another reality, where things are not fractured, fragmented, labeled, separated, but rather bound together in an inevitable totality that melts the barriers of insight, merges the boundaries between things, and lets the incredible wholeness and completeness of everything come roaring through into a previously blinkered and now suddenly unlocked perception.
All the clever doodads of the mind—rationales, expectations, critical faculties, intellectual framings, prejudices, fears, measurements, discretions, manners (you know all the rest)—seemed to drown in a deluge from some subconscious force that had laid dormant for too long and was now released with such vigor and clarity that “moods” seemed to be easily breachable barriers—even welcome doors—into the miracle of the now, the infinitely intricate web of a reality without time and without boundaries.
The inner self becomes turned inside out. It no longer resides with the head but transforms into a transparent funnel linking mind and this newfound actuality. I’ve experienced similar fleeting sensations before, particularly in spaces whose immensity seems to threaten the stability of the rational mind. It occurred when I was crossing the Sahara with the “Blue People” of Morocco, the Tuareg tribesmen. Left for hours ab
ove the infinities of sand on a camel’s back, I found my mind at first desperately rushing around within itself trying to maintain the edges, the flimsy superstructure, of sanity. It was only when I learned to let go and become part of the rhythm and flow of the journey itself, to enter into its timelessness, that the antics of my overcharged brain no longer seemed relevant to the larger patterns of perception emerging out of that apparent nothingness.
And in other places too—on the plains of Venezuela’s Los Llanos, in the vastness of the Inner Mongolian grasslands, across the white infinities of India’s Rann of Kutch, and even in the intense head-blasting riot of stimuli that is Nepal’s Kathmandu—all places where nothing makes any sense until you stop trying to make sense and let the incredibly rich totality of each place deluge and envelop you in its own overwhelming web.
And so back to my beach, my seemingly endless strand of soft sand, where my bad mood was no longer even a memory and I gave myself up, for the first time on the journey, to the wholeness and wonder of the place itself. And my soul slowly became a peacock’s tail….
At the end of Prion Beach a campsite was indicated on my map. Unfortunately, it happened to be on the other side of a fast-flowing river linking the New River Lagoon to the ocean. On the map it was a mere trace of blue, hardly noticeable. In actuality it was almost a quarter of a mile wide and deep in the middle, where the water eddied and churned through the inlet. Someone had arranged a remarkably civilized way of crossing in the form of two boats, one at one side and one at the other. However, on this particular evening, both boats were on the other side. Some thoughtless hikers had forgotten that they were supposed to return one of the boats to its starting point on my side.
Normally I might have indulged in a minor fit of curses and expletives, thrashed the sand into muddy pulp on the riverbank, and wished all kinds of calamities upon the lives of the boats’ previous users. But now it didn’t seem to matter at all. The boat wasn’t there, so I could either swim across and then return with the boat for my backpack or I could wait and see what else transpired. I felt the water. It was bitterly cold. So—no swimming tonight. I decided to make camp on the edge of the dunes and let the problem resolve itself. Tomorrow.
And it did. As such things usually do, if you give them enough time.
Shortly after dawn my tent began a Saint Vitus’ dance followed shortly by a roar of sound that broke into my sleep in such forms as “Oi,” “Ay,” “Anybody home round ’ere,” “Jeez, you must be a bloody ’eavy sleeper, mate,” and more of the same.
I slowly unzipped the flap and peered into a face—a human face. My first in four days.
And a very peculiar face it was—a broad, sun-scorched, furrowed face framed by a long mop of once-ginger hair and a matted beard of indiscriminate color. And a grin—an enormous grin that revealed a mass of stained chipped teeth behind a mustache that hadn’t been trimmed in months.
“Well, g’day, mate. The boatman has arrived. Betcha weren’t looking forward to a cold swim, were yer?”
I blinked, wiped sticky sleep from my eyes, and heard my cracked, unsteady voice mumble some inanities. I hadn’t spoken aloud in a long time, except for occasional curses and quiet conversations with my maker. I don’t know what I said.
“Gawd, blimey, y’need some coffee, mate. Y’still got a bit of fire out here. Y’wanna get dressed and I’ll get a billy on.”
“Good idea,” I think I said.
“Right y’are, mate. Take yer time. S’good morning out here. Bit on the chill side, so wrap up. See yer.” The flap dropped and then opened again. “Name’s Lanny, Lanny Riley.” I shook a huge hand and introduced myself. “Right, Dave—well, take your time, mate.”
And he vanished. Beard, willowy mustache, big grin, and teeth.
I heard him blowing the embers back to life and rattling pans.
How nice. Coffee being served by a stranger. A noisy stranger too, who began to sing what I later learned was one of Tasmania’s unofficial anthems—a microcosm in song of Tasmanian history. The tune was rather unsteady and off-key and the words were not clear (I found them in a folksong book a few days later in Hobart), but it went something like this:
Come all you gallant poachers that ramble void of care,
While walking out one moonlit night with gun and dog and snare,
With hares and lofty pheasants in your pocket and your hand,
Not thinking of your last career upon Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s poor Tom Brown from Nottingham, Jack Williams and poor Joe,
They were three daring poachers, boys, the country well did know;
At night they were caught by the keepers hid in sand—
For fourteen years transported, boys, upon Van Diemen’s Land.
The very day we landed upon the fatal shore,
The planters they stood ’round us full twenty score and more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They roped us to the plow, brave boys, to plow Van Diemen’s Land.
The cottage that we lived in was built of sods and clay,
And rotten straw for bed, and we dare not say nay,
Our cots were fenced with fire, to slumber when we can,
To drive away wolves and tigers come by Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s ofttimes when I slumber I have a pleasant dream;
With my pretty girl I’ve been roving down by a sparkling stream;
In England I’ve been roving with her at my command,
But I wake broken-hearted upon Van Diemen’s Land.
Come all you gallant poachers, give hearing to my song:
I give you all my good advice, I’ll not detain you long:
O lay aside your dogs and snares, to you I must speak plain
For if you know our miseries you’d never poach again.
Between coughs and spits and all the sounds that suggest the sear of early morning cigarettes, his raspy voice rolled around the campsite, setting birds singing in the dunes and in the forest along the shores of New River Lagoon.
Out of the rear “window” of my small tent I could see the surf gently prattling up and back on the sunlit strand. A huge black bird, a wedge-tailed eagle, soared on the air currents off Precipitous Bluff and peered down intently at our camp. Its enormous tail feathers and six-foot wingspan distinguished it from the smaller white-bellied sea eagle I’d seen a couple of days back. It looked a very serious and determined prey-seeking creature. I learned later that its strength and broad talons enable it to attack not only lizards and mice but even moderately sized wallabies. It seemed to be sizing us up for a possible breakfast snack.
“Well—welcome to the world, Dave. Grab yourself some coffee, mate.”
I emerged in a semi-somnolent state, but the coffee worked its magic as Lanny began to pull out exotic delights from his backpack. No dehydrated mulch for him. Instead he carried lean bacon, fat Australian sausages, and thick slabs of bread.
“Fancy a bit of this bush-tucker? Nice sausage and bacon sandwich? Was gonna make you some real ‘damper’ bread, but this stuff’s okay, right?”
“Sure,” I gushed.
“Y’need decent breakfasts on this trip. What yer been eatin’?”
I almost apologized for my meager morning fare of muesli and raisins.
“Well—that stuff’s okay. But you need stayin’ power. Bit o’ meat and fat. Nothing like it for getting goin’.”
He was so right. My palate pounced on the now-unfamiliar textures and flavors. The fat oozed out of the thick slices of bread onto my jeans as I gorged on these forbidden delights.
“Lanny—this tastes great!” I managed to get out between chews and swallows.
“Right y’are, mate. Grab another one. Y’can get worn down on this walk. Need yer tucker.”
We chewed in silence. The coffee gurgled in the billy; the eagle still hovered above, and gentle breezes blew over the dune tops. We finished by wiping the pan clean of every morsel of fo
od and fat with more slabs of soft bread.
“Good on you, Dave. No need to wash this lot. Cleaner than when I started.”
“You carry stuff like this with you—bacon, sausages, bread….”
“First couple of days. After that it gets more basic. But I like to start off right.”
“You’ve done this walk before?”
“Done the lot, mate. Overland Track over Cradle Mountain, Walls of Jericho, Port Davey Track, the Arthurs, South West Cape…. Done this one, South Coast Track, three times. This’s my fourth.”
“By yourself? You walk by yourself?”
“Most the time. Best way. Too much baloney when you go with company. If I want company I go to the pubs. Here I just wanna…well…y’know….”
I knew. Walking alone, shrouded in solitude, is an acquired habit but one that can become addictive.
“I’m glad you turned up this morning. I wasn’t looking forward to swimming across for the boat.”
“Don’t blame y’mate. Catch yer bloody death in that stream. Dangerous too. Them currents a bit rougher than you think….”