Lost Worlds (50 page)

I looked at Lanny. Was he plagued by the same deep-seated ailment? Was that why he carried such books with him to these lonely, remote places? To digest? To face the truths of his origins? To destroy the demons of Van Diemen’s Land and return released, refreshed, to a more familiar life?

I waited for him to speak, but as I waited I could sense him slipping back into the hearty, outback swagger of your typical Australian “mate.” I had to catch him before the transformation was complete.

“And you said your family was part of all this, right?”

He looked up, tottering between truth and bar-brain braggadocio.

He chose truth.

“Yeah, Dave. They were part of it. All of ’em. But they wouldn’t talk much….” He paused. “I mean, this was still going on less than a hundred years ago. My grandfather had seen it all. But…well, for him, for all of them, it was over. It stopped. And they just wanted to forget the whole bloody mess. You can’t go through life carrying that kind of crap inside your head, ’least, not in the head you use every day. Best thing—grab a few stubbies and the racing forms and a bunch of mates and get on with things. Little things. Anything.”

I left it at that and very soon the Lanny of the bacon-and-sausage breakfast returned, grinning, rubbing his straggly beard and talking again like the happy hiker I’d taken him for in the early morning.

“So—let’s get the boats organized and at least you’ll be saved a swim, mate.”

So we rowed the boat across the creek, and he returned to the other side, leaving me dry and safe on the eastern shore.

But not without one gesture….

“Here, Dave, take this book. You seemed like you were interested in the stuff I was reading.”

I looked at the cover. It was Robert Hughes’s
The Fatal Shore
, a book I’d been meaning to find and read ever since I arrived in Australia.

“No, c’mon, Lanny, I can’t take this.”

“You bloody can and you bloody will. Teach you a hell of a lot ’bout this country. Lot of stuff that people’d rather forget!”

I accepted the gift and shook his hand. In his smile I saw the two Lannys again—the silent backpack wanderer in search of himself and his heritage, and the cocky roustabout that I knew he’d be if I’d met him in a Hobart pub. I liked them both.

I silently promised that if I ever wrote about the journey for this book, he’d be one of the first to receive a copy, fresh off the press, and signed with affection.

And I did—and he was.

So—off again into another sparkling day. (Two in a row in South-West Tasmania is a most unusual event.) The straggly, beach-hugging forest had returned, but I managed to skirt around the thickest sections by keeping to a narrow stretch of sand fronting the New River Lagoon inlet. Below Wierah Hill the path turned inland for a while, crossing Tylers Creek, which trickled through patches of buttongrass moor down to Osmiridium Beach. After an hour I was back on open sand again at Surprise Bay. And the bay did indeed have its surprises—vast swaths of Ordovician limestone that originated in the murky depths of the ocean over five hundred million years ago and contained a wealth of trilobite fossils. These blind, beetlelike creatures once wandered the steeply sloping sea floor at a depth of at least one thousand feet, fed on updrafts of plankton-rich currents, and died in countless billions to form dense layers of what we so casually categorize as limestone.

A sensation returned that I’d had a few years back exploring the peculiar limestone scenery of the Yorkshire Dales in England. There, in the midst of sheep-cropped plateaus and steep dry white gorges, the layers of limestone were piled, one upon the other, like books awaiting stacking. The oceans, specifically the Irish Sea and the North Sea, are now both fifty miles or more away from these bleak uplands, and yet the limestone with its myriad fossil fragments told tales of other times, eons ago, when these bleak regions were deep under oceans and teeming with primitive aquatic life.

I think it was the abrupt contrast between the silence of these open, windswept Yorkshire heights and the turbulence of their ancient creations and accumulations that impressed me. I was walking across a vast cemetery, hundreds of feet thick, composed of nothing else but once-living, eating, breeding, and, who knows, maybe even thinking creatures. I had walked these hills many times before and never been struck by this thought. I knew limestone was essentially a composite of shells and calcium and the white detritus of once-living creatures, and that seemed an adequate explanation. But when I looked “into” the rock and touched the fragments of heads, bodies, legs, tails (even the whorling excreta deposits of ancient sandworms), the stuff seemed to come alive.

My fingertips buzzed and crackled as I ran them over the rough edges of the strata exposed at Surprise Bay. Maybe I was beginning to sense what the Australian Aborigines have always known—the total wholeness of all created things, even the very rocks themselves, whose rocklike exterior contains far more fluid and dynamic creative forces and origins.

Eleanor Wilner once wrote:

The Aborigines, with their web of songlines, sensed that the earth had to be constantly “sung” into existence and that it was each bushman’s duty to learn and continually “sing” his songline in order that the earth be maintained in its completeness. Otherwise it would simply disappear.

Maybe in our steadily increasing awareness of the need to see, understand, and work with the world as an intermeshed totality (the Gaia concept of the earth) we will be able to give form and strategy to our cardinal obligation of “earth given to our care.” And yet the mysteries remain, manifesting themselves in flickers of perception and awareness that are still not wholly comprehended as we touch the earth and wonder.

Henry Blount said it well in 1634:

In other words—the magic remains!

And Surprise Bay possessed such magic. It touched me in the same way as those lonely hills of Yorkshire, even though its juxtaposition with the ocean made the limestone layers seem more plausible. Nonetheless, I felt that sense of “life-in-everything” again and the continuity of all things as I sat on a ledge and stroked my hands across the externalities of the strata.

Once again I was tempted to linger and reign in the flow of the journey itself.

And this time I did. I remained at Surprise Bay. After all, I had no one to meet, no deadlines, no schedules, and a day spent lingering and looking here wouldn’t matter a damn in the grand scheme of things.

I was pleased by my decision. Sometimes the momentum of movement for movement’s sake becomes tiresome and rather pointless. Every journey is, or can be, a means to larger ends. If it is not, then the integral point and purpose of the journey—of journeying—can be lost.

In one of my notebooks I’d jotted a couple of lines from Aitareya Brahmana:

Close by was another quote—one of the briefest—said to be the last words of Buddha to his followers:

Walk on!

Both used the wandering and walking metaphors to suggest a broader meaning which, in my particular circumstance at Surprise Bay, I took to imply the inner journey, the journey of self-or soul exploration. So that day I gave myself the gift of open-ended time and walked inwardly. My blister-plagued feet tingled with gratitude at this time off from their external journey.

Eric Leed suggests that travel today, “once the agent of our liberty, has become a means for the revelation of our containment” and indeed, in much current travel literature, even the epics of V. S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, John Krich, and Claude Lévi-Strauss seem to echo such a sentiment.

Leed continues: “The modern structure of global tourism annihilates a time-honored escape from the limits that have always defined human existence; a means of liberty from a fixed and predictable death; a method of extending the persona in time and space…travel is no longer heroic or individualizing.”

Even Paul Fussell, that most notable exponent of the travel genre, finds the dominant emotions of what he labels “posttourism” to be “annoyance, boredom, disillusion, even anger.”

I occasionally seek solace from the hard-edged perceptions and cynicism of many contemporary travel writers in the more dulcet tones of a Jan Morris essay or the exuberance-in-solitude of Freya Stark, who wrote: “People who know nothing about these things will tell you that there is no additional pleasure in having a landscape to yourself. But this is not true. It is a pleasure exclusive, unreasoning and real.”

Yes, indeed. Following my little frisson of last night I delighted even more in the solitude of my journey. I had the land all to myself but, much more than that, I was, as an Aborigine might say, “in” the land, bound to it, immersed within its own spirit and completeness. Leed also returns to this idea, perhaps his most compelling, that contemporary barriers to true “exploration-travel” and the predominance of homogenized experiences “create a necessity for the journey back, inward, to origins and what has been left behind. Thus originates a new species of the old tradition of philosophical travel, a search for origins, stimulated by a hunger for meaning and content which is itself a product of generations of wasting, simplifying, and reductive journeys. On these return journeys the old motives may operate in a new way, and a modern death may be avoided, postponed. Those do not die who connect their endings to their beginnings. Therefore wander.”

And wandering (both inner and outer) is what I intend to keep on doing as long as the leeches and the lions and lonely challenges of solitude do not block or eliminate my serpentine paths.

That day at Surprise Bay brought to the journey a depth and a peace that is not always present in the itinerary of my other adventures. I felt whole again and saw the world, as my high school art teacher used to say, with “fresh eyes.”

I’d been warned by Bob back at Melaleuca that the last day and a half would be the most wearying of the walk. He was right in one way. The land delighted in its own extravagance and exuberance, making me clamber up and down roller-coasting, scrub-cloaked ridges, across the sandstone-capped dolerite plateau of the South Cape Range (easily resisting the temptation to take an even harder trail to the nearby summit of Pindars Peak) and then plunging down again through more tangled, tortured rain forest to a cold little campsite on South Cape Bay at the side of the boisterous South Cape Rivulet. All in all, one of the most exhausting segments of the journey.

And yet as I sat by my evening fire on that last night of the journey, nursing my blisters and massaging my crampy thighs, I sensed my temporary tiredness easing away and being replaced by more of what I’d now labeled my “Surprise Bay mood”—a glow of inner contentment, merged with a tolerance and acceptance of the walk’s vicissitudes; a sacrifice of body, bones, and blisters on the altar of innocence and wide-eyed wonderment at everything around me. It no longer really mattered what the weather was like, how hard and how high the hills, how deep and cold the streams and bogs…or even how tasteless those terrible dehydrated food packages had become. Whatever happened was fine. The journey was teaching me many things, giving me new insights, and, in a way, a new sense of me and my relationship to everything within me and around me. I had become the journey itself and the journey had become me. And that was more than enough.

Even the wade through the blood-freezing (and overdeep) South Cape Rivulet in the early morning in no way diminished my mood. I knew this was my last day in the wilderness and although the external journey would soon be over, the inner journey that had begun would continue, and continue.

A period of soft walking along the beaches of South Cape Bay led me across an unusual outcrop of exposed Triassic coal seams, hard and black against the seething surf. Then it was time to climb the sand dunes and turn inland along the heathland bottoms of Blowhole Valley. The winds blew hard off Pindars Peak and Mount Leillateah, whipped through the scrub and over the two ponderous domes, Bare Hill and Honey Smith Hill, to the south. A last blast of farewell from the wild elements. I left the beaches that had been my resting place behind me and passed over the watershed to the sinuous curl of Cockle Creek and the deep blue of Rocky Bay.

Already the hedonistic pleasures of Hobart beckoned me. I thought of frothy beer, the camaraderie of pubs, grilled steaks and other “real” food, a soft bed, music, company—and tales to tell. I had no idea how I’d reach the city, but, as usual, something came up in the form of a farmer in a four-wheel drive truck who greeted me with an oh-so-welcome “Jeez, mate, you look like you could do with a bit of sit-down for a while….”

And so I sat down on the unfamiliar softness of his truck seat and we banged and clattered off along rough roads into the greenness of small fields and farms and orchards and places with people.