Lost Worlds (46 page)

Claude Lévi-Strauss bitterly denounces the paradoxes encountered in travel for travel’s sake:

Leed himself sums up the quandary of today’s adventure-traveler:

Yet I know such “alternatives” still exist. Hence my search for—and exploration of—“wild places” and “lost worlds.” To know that such places are present on our poor, overworked, blighted earth, I find one of the most stimulating and exciting of prospects. To be in such places, to sense their moods, to attempt to understand even a little of their complexities and beauties, is adventure enough. To share such experiences with others who may never choose or who are unable to experience these places for themselves is reward enough. To be “here” is all; to understand the inner impetus that drives me “here” is perhaps not all that important. Or, as Alan Watts once said, possibly impossible:

I am here and—for the moment, at least—that is enough.

The sun was giving me more of those bright light shafts between the ominous clouds. The heath was speckled with pools of color: I saw bosky clusters of
Melaleuca squamea
, with pretty pink thistlelike blossoms and the brilliant iciclelike shafts of the white waratah; I could smell the lemon-scented leaves of the boronia, speckled with white, four-petal flowers. The vast dunness of the plain at first seems devoid of anything except the bitter stalks of buttongrass, rattling and moving like slow tides as the wind sweeps across their dry tops. But as you look closer you see not only the tiny shrubs and bush blossoms, but the green, spotted backs of carab beetles, the beautiful deep bronze of grasshoppers, the antics of a tiny gray-furred jumping spider; you can hear the high-pitched
e-gypt-e-gypt
cry of the tiny honey eater with a strange, dark crescent of feathers across its upper breast and splashes of gold-yellow on its wings.

The plain appeared as timeless as the mountains, although the peat beds that form the nurturing ground for buttongrass are possibly less than four thousand years old. The Willsons had told me that occasionally, five or six feet down into the peat, they come across complete pine trees preserved in the acidic accumulation of decayed shrubs and grasses. Farther down they hit the hard bedrock of Precambrian metamorphic strata. They painted an enticing word-picture of vast forests along this southwestern coast in which evidence has been found of human habitation more than thirty thousand years ago. The explorer George Augustus Robinson recorded sightings of Aborigines in Louisa Bay in 1830 and noted the use of flaked stone for spear and arrow making and the skinning of animals. During the last ice age, when the sea level was almost four hundred feet lower than today’s level and a broad land bridge existed across the Bass Strait linking mainland Australia with Tasmania, early inhabitants moved from the north across the bridge and lived along the more hospitable coastal margins of Tasmania below the towering glacier-filled ranges. Caves have been discovered, particularly in the magnificent gorges of the Franklin River eighty miles or so to the north of Melaleuca, decorated with “hand paintings” created by blowing a moist mix of dust, animal fat, and blood over hands pressed on the rock walls. Shards of chert, crystal quartz, and quartzite found in abundance in such places suggest that they were used both as workshops for the fashioning of tools and hunting instruments and as seasonal lodgings.

I had been told that Louisa Bay at the foot of the Ironbound Range was perhaps one of the richest sites of Aboriginal occupation in Tasmania and I hoped to arrive there tomorrow. Meanwhile, I had another two hours of bouncy hiking across the buttongrass to reach my first camp at Cox Bight.

What could have been a rather dull journey turned out to be full of unexpected delights and one not-so-pleasant moment.

I was learning to look into the plain and see its signs: the networks of runways through the marshy sedgeland that were the routes of swamp rats (otherwise known by the far more illustrious Latin name of
Rattus lutreolus velutinus
!) to their nests among the marshy buttongrass clumps; I noted the apparently innocent-looking mounds of stone and vegetation fragments that mark the home of the notorious jumper ants, whose bite can leave allergy sufferers with severe respiratory problems (Bob gave me a small plastic bag of antihistamine “just in case y’get unlucky, mate”); I saw the tiny burrows of delicious yabbies around peaty ponds but never caught a glimpse of these shy nocturnal crayfish.

And I learned to listen too. I heard the faint clicks and chirps of frogs off in the hidden pools, the frantic scurrying of the marsupial mouse deep in the knotted grasses, the odd ticking call of the flame robin, and the ringing “whit-whit-whit” of the shrike-thrush. Steve had told me to look out for the elusive ground parrot, whose orange and green plumage resembled that of his favorite, the orange-bellied parrot. “You more’n likely won’t see them during the day. They like the dusk best—or the sunrise. Just before the sun comes up listen for a sound of little bells—like a wind chime. That’ll be them. Lovely way to wake up.”

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:

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.