Lost Worlds (41 page)

And then some wit trying to rewrite the “Evita” song:

But underlying most of the scribbled remarks, varying from boisterous to banal, you could sense a certain pride, especially in those hikers for whom this was the halfway point in their odyssey through the southwest wilderness. They had come from Scotts Peak in the north either across the Arthurs (another quote: “On the crags of Andromeda I died from utter exhaustion and someone else now occupies what was previously me.”) or on the Old Port Davey Track across endless moraine-studded sedgeland plains and fast-flowing icy streams, over Mount Robinson, into the vast gloom of the Lost World Plateau, across the narrows of the magnificent fjord of Bathurst Harbor, to the meager comforts of the Melaleuca hut.

Their remarks were the most telling:

Some entries were a little more uplifting:

And finally my favorite, written by an anonymous writer whose name had been wrenched from immortality by a coffee stain on the page:

Time to warm this dank and gloomy hut.

Someone had left kindling and logs in a neat stack by the fireplace. At first the damp overcame my efforts to get a flame, but after a dozen matches and a room full of expletives, the twigs caught and the smoke rose and heat began to permeate the place.

I decided it would take at least half an hour to eradicate the chill and, as it was warmer outside, what better time to go exploring around my temporary home?

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.