Lost Worlds (45 page)

The noise maker was an amazing erector-set extravaganza of ramps, rotating drums, and chutes supported by a flimsy skeleton of bleached pine beams that wobbled and shook and looked ready to fall apart at any moment. I’d seen similar abandoned contraptions during my days, many years ago, exploring the gold-rush country of northern California. But I’d never seen one actually working before. The noise was mind-numbing.

Someone was shouting and waving—a small figure in a green sweater, baggy jogging pants and a wrinkled canvas hat. I walked faster. It was Barbara Willson, pushing with a battered shovel at a pile of rocks, pebbles, and earth that slowly descended down a chute into an enormous churning cylinder punched with thousands of small holes.

“Hold on a minute—let me finish this load.”

She was sweating despite the chill breeze and worked furiously with her shovel, easing the boggy mass down the chute. Chunks of bedrock, a few the size of small boulders, slipped down into the maw of the churning drum. This looked like tough work.

“Okay.” She finally pushed the last part of the load down the chute, put her shovel down, and wiped her brow. Even under the shadow of her floppy canvas hat I saw a pair of dark, determined eyes. “So—you made it.”

“Yes—thanks for asking me. I stopped by the house, but there was no one around.”

“No—not till sundown. We’re up here all day. Peter—my husband—he’s out in the bog.”

She pointed across the gray-brown bleakness of the plain. I saw a tiny yellow dump trunk way in the distance digging into the earth.

“That’s the new bed he’s working on. Took the peat off couple of days ago—down to the gravels. Then he brings the loads back here for sorting.”

“And that’s where the tin is?”

“Yep—down in the gravels. Gold too.”

“Gold! I thought they’d given up on gold ’round here years back.”

“Oh you still get some. In among the gravels. But not much. You’d never make a living.”

“But you can from tin?”

“Well—almost. Price is down at the moment, so it’s marginal—but there’s only the two of us.”

“How long have you been here?”

Her eyes twinkled. “Forever!”

“I bet it feels like that. This looks like hard work!”

“Y’get used to it. Keeps you fit.”

“I think I’d prefer other ways.”

She grinned. “So would I sometimes. But there’s compensations.”

“Like what?”

“Freedom.” She said the word the way it should be said—with vigor. “And…well…all this….” A sweep of her arm encompassed the whole wilderness around us.

She reminded me of others I’d met on my lost-world journeys. Individuals who had found everything they needed in a remote, seemingly inhospitable environment. They usually used the same expression—the same outstretched arms to encompass the spirit, the magic of lonely places. I always admired—maybe even envied—their apparent wholeness and certainty. Rarely have I found such a sentiment in cities, where restlessness, anxiety, insecurity, and burnout seem to be the rewards for lives lived out of synch, in pursuit of elusive carrots on overlong sticks, with happiness and contentment always a dream of tomorrow—and tomorrow.

“Y’ever seen what tin looks like?”

“No. Actually, I haven’t.”

“Well—take a look.”

She led me down a slope of gravelly white rocks, skirting the edge of the clammering drum. The size of the gravels and rocks became smaller at each new chute in the vibrating contraption until the sandlike fragments of tin ore finally emerged and slithered in a steady stream into iron drums.

I dipped my hand into the dark brown powder. It was heavy, like lead. I had somehow imagined something white and talcumy—maybe even shiny.

“This is the oxide. It goes a lighter color when it’s purified.”

“Doesn’t seem much compared to what you load in the top end.”

“Y’right. Thousand tons of gravel maybe gets you a ton of ore. If you’re lucky.”

“And are you lucky?”

“We manage. We run test bores to find out where the best pockets are. We found a really rich area last week. We’ll start scraping maybe in a month or two.”

“And what happens when you’re finished working the old beds?”

“We put the peat and the earth back. They didn’t used to. That’s why you get all those mounds you worked through. But we put it back. In a few years you can’t tell where we’ve worked. Goes back to the way it was.”

“Hey—what about some help up here!”

A small thin man peered down at us from the top of the shaking, banging “sorter,” or whatever they call this strange contraption. Barbara smiled. “Slave driver,” she whispered.

We climbed back to the top of the ramp and Barbara introduced me to Peter.

“Yeah, she mentioned some Yorkshireman might come snooping around,” he said, smiling.

“Well, being from Yorkshire, I wouldn’t normally go visiting Lancashire folk, but seeing as you’re the only people in these parts…”

“Cheeky bugger. What part of Yorkshire y’from?”

I told him.

“So y’know Leeds, then?” he asked.

“Sure. I went to university there.”

“So did I, mate. Thirty years back. Used to live near Rothwell.”

“Rothwell. I lived just a few miles from there, just outside Swillington.”

“Swillington! I know Swillington….”

And so it went on—a mutual naming of pubs, churches, rivers, secret places. A rejoicing in this unexpected bond, with Barbara smiling and wondering if we’d turn out to be long-lost cousins.

Finally she broke in. “Thought you wanted to get this load moving.”

He looked at me and winked. “Bloody woman. Never lets me rest.”

“Doesn’t look like either of you rest much.”

“Aye, well,” said Peter. “The way prices are, you gotta keep going. It’s just us two, y’know.”

“Well, it looks like you’re enjoying the life.”

He laughed. “I guess you could say that. Don’t know what else we’d do. Right, love?”

But Barbara was back at work, heaving the gravels and rocks down the first chute with her battered shovel. Way out in the middle of this vast nothingness, two people committed to a hard way of life that would make most of us weary even at the thought of it.

“Listen,” said Peter as he jumped back on the dump truck. “If you want a beer and a chat later on…”

I agreed to come back to the house after sundown.

It turned out to be an evening of pure northern England hospitality—pies, pickles, home-brewed beer, and long conversations about a homeland I hadn’t visited in far too long.

I rolled onto my bunk bed at the hiker’s hut much later that night, set the alarm for an early start, and sank into happy oblivion, uninterrupted even by Bob’s shattering cascades of snores.

A dour dawn. No sign of any sun. And one of those stiff breezes that felt as if it would cut through all my carefully layered hiking clothes. I could have stayed another day at the hut, I suppose. But I decided to start the journey.

“Well—see you back in Hobart,” said Bob in a cheery morning mood. “With luck!”

The coffee had failed to clear my brain. Either that or Peter’s home-brewed beer had been a lot stronger than it tasted.

Bob looked at me closely. “And it looks like you’re gonna need all the luck you can get, mate.”

“I’m fine. Got to bed late.”

“Yeah, I know. Y’were snoring fit to wake Deny King.”

“I was snoring! You’ve got to be joking. You’re the noisiest bloody…”

Bob gave one of those wall-wobbling laughs.

“Now—that’s better. Bit of fire in your eyes! Y’ll be right, mate. Just don’t rush it. Pace yourself. Oh—and you’ll find a few things you might need in the left pocket of your pack.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, nothing much. Just a few things to get you over the hard bits…. See you in Hobart, mate.”

And that was that. A quick handshake and I was finally off on the lonely hike I’d come so far to experience.

Thankfully there were no “hard bits” for the first few miles. I felt as if I were walking on soft clouds across the bouncy buttongrass path that headed southeast from Melaleuca toward Cox Bight, my first destination on this six-or seven-day odyssey.

It was a couple of hours before the silence began to creep in and I realized that seven days of solitude suddenly seemed like a hell of a long time. On most of my long-distance hikes I’ve usually had company for at least part of the journey. But on this one, I had no one and no real prospect of hearing a human voice for a week or more unless I met someone coming the other way. What should I do with all that time? Dictate some short stories into my tape? Start my autobiography? Compose a few songs? Compress all my meager world-wanderer wisdoms into a few pungent anagrams? Or merely go mad, howling at this desolate unpeopled place like a hyped-up hyena?

Goethe got it right, as he usually did: “In every parting there is a latent germ of madness.” Or Father Navarette: “It is no small contradiction to human nature to leave one’s home.” Well—home was a long way off, just about as far as it could be on any part of the globe. But I’d found a temporary home of sorts in Deny’s little fiefdom, populated by Bob and Steve and the Willsons. Was I crazy to have left there? Should I have stayed and learned more about Bob’s thirty years in the bush, or Steve’s love for the orange-bellied parrot, or the tenacity of the Willsons’ hard lives?

The balance will come, I told myself. It always does. In any situation, a benign reality usually composes itself out of the oddest of circumstances. Just let it come in its own time. Let the journey take on its own rhythm and pace and flow. And just flow with it….

The path stuck to the plain, which narrowed gradually between the misty New Harbour and Bathurst Ranges. Mount Counsel with its quartzite flanks glowered down. My map showed an enticing place—Hidden Valley—high on its upper flanks and normally I’d be tempted to take such a diversion. But the land discouraged such fancies. I knew this kind of country well from my days among the Pennine bogs of Yorkshire. I knew how the seductively soft surface of the heath could give way without warning to pernicious mud holes that sucked and gurgled at unsuspecting limbs and devoured boots with malicious glee, leaving walkers in goo-laden stockings while their footwear was absorbed forever into the acidic mulch of the mire. The hardy walkers who ignore trails across such territory are known as “bog-trotters,” as they leap like oversized, overweight ballet dancers from tussock to tussock. Some are lucky and escape the embarrassing boot-losing predicaments. Many do not and end up being half carried, half dragged off the stagnant plateaus by their grinning colleagues, to the warmth and nurture of valley inns.

I hadn’t brought a spare pair of boots, only some soft sneakers for evenings by my campfires. If I lost my boots I wondered what I’d do—or, more precisely, what the trail would do—to my feet. Not to mention the leeches….

Here it starts, I thought. The old mind-yammer. The silly fantasy-plagued “what if” scenarios that can wear a bouyant spirit down to a morose depression in a few unchecked reveries. None of those on this trip, please. All I have is me this time. No company, no helping hands, no jolly singsongs in the evening chills, no one to set perspectives straight, no one to calm fears and chase away fickle thoughts that appear—unexpected and univited—out of the miasma of the singular mind.

I tried to lift my confidence with memories of other solo journeys: that trek through Panama’s Darien, those days on the deserted beaches of Barbuda; my unsuccessful climb up the Ruwenzori. They all began this way—a little wobbly at first as the spirit finds the fine line between freewheeling fantasy and the darker deeps of the mind, and then on into the days of balance and balm when the experience becomes pure, clean adventure.

Back in the United States before leaving on these lost-world journeys, I’d read Eric J. Leed’s
The Mind of the Traveler
and was intrigued by some of the quotations he’d selected to explain the altruism of travel. I noted one twelfth-century excerpt in my journal from Chrétien de Troyes’s poem “Ywain” in which a knight attempts to seek stimulus for his altruistic journey from a peasant who, when asked to identify himself, explains simply, “I am a man…. I am nothing but myself.” The concept of adventure for adventuring’s sake was obviously unfamiliar to such an individual:

Sometimes I wonder who I admire most, the adventure-seeking knight or the “realness” of the peasant. Was the knight’s admission—“I am, as you see…seeking what I cannot find”—the admission of a lifelong dilemma or merely a plea for specifics? Possibly both. My “adventures” create a schizophrenic situation—the search for specifics: history, people, experiences, insights, joys, adrenaline highs but couched in a context that is less definitive—the search for something deeper and far more elusive. Myself? My spirit? My “soul”? A pushing out of boundaries in order to find a higher boundary? Or merely a perpetual discontent with the “smallness” of things—an inability to find the universe in a daisy’s petal, a rejection of the predictable, a constant search for the “new” experience?