The Road to McCarthy (26 page)

“C’mon, let’s go back to the boat and get a cup of tea. We can find out this kind of stuff in a book.”

They turn and go. Richard, standing among trees by a sharp drop at the water’s edge, removes his hat and unbuttons his long coat. Still talking, this time about the shipyard here that produced more than a hundred other ships, he strips off his boots, shirt and trousers to give a brief glimpse of the wetsuit he must have been wearing since he got up this morning. Then he leaps over the restraining fence and disappears beneath the icy black-brown water. Several uneasy seconds pass—has the bloody island finally sent him over the edge and made him top himself?—before he pops up like a cork, glasses still in position, and starts walking on, or at least just below, the water. It’s a great coup de théâtre, his way of demonstrating that just below the surface the shipbuilders’ slip yard put in place in the 1820s is still intact. “Huon pine,” says Richard, “no other timber like it in the world.”

“He was a strange chap, wasn’t he?” says a woman from Adelaide in a poplin raincoat as we walk back to the boat, “because there was really no need to jump into the water like that.”

As our party reembarks, increasingly tense at the prospect of the almost imminent buffet, Richard waves us off from the water’s edge. Tonight, as he often does, he will sleep rough and alone on the island. Fair play to him. If it’s possible for a place to be haunted, then this one surely is.

I drive northeast
from Strahan in beautiful afternoon sunshine through forested hills. In an hour I see just one house. Two kids are playing on a swing in the garden. I try and imagine what their life must be like, and fail. In the tiny settlement of Rosebery two men are coming out of Kirkpatrick’s Bar. Both have huge beards, just like the guy I was speaking to in Strahan. Either it’s the accepted facial hair code for miners, or there’s a ZZ Top convention on.

The quiet A-road becomes an extremely quiet B-road which I follow for a while before turning sharp right onto an utterly deserted C-road. I consult
the map, but there aren’t any D-roads. I’ve been climbing all afternoon and I’m on high ground, a wild and empty sparsely wooded plateau, when the giant razor-backed silhouette of Cradle Mountain looms on the horizon. As I get closer to the mountain the ground is littered with dead, bleached-white trees. A tall, thin, metallic windmill stands alone among them. The emptiness is beautiful, but also menacing on both physical (how would you survive?) and spiritual (what can it all mean?) levels. The island’s cruel history lurks always in the background. Have I overdone it and filled my head with too much horror? Or does the past live on in the landscape, speaking out whether you want it to or not?

I check into the Cradle Mountain Lodge, where I’m assigned a cabin a few hundred yards from the main building. It’s comfortable, spacious and wooden, with a huge pile of logs outside the door, and a cast-iron wood-burning stove that dominates the room and encourages the feeling that you’re living like a pioneer, which in a way you are. It’s just that there’s a five-page wine list.

Unidentifiable twilight noises are emanating from the dense bush that touches my veranda as I walk down to the lodge in the darkness. On the edge of the car park I bump into a litterbin, which grunts and turns out to be a wombat. I arrive at the lodge just in time for the early-evening wildlife slide show, and go straight to the bar instead. Slides might be an anticlimax after actually bumping into the wildlife, and I’m in no mood for disappointment.

The bar has a big lounge with a huge log fire and stone chimney in the middle. A tree trunk supports the roof. A well-fed Australian woman in her forties is holding court in the corner. She’s decided against the no-frills, I’ve-just-walked-five-miles-up-a-mountain clothing favored by everybody else, and has opted instead for the crisp coiffure and gold-and-chiffon trim of a bookmaker’s wife on a Russian cruise ship who’s hoping to sleep with the captain. She’s shouting a conversation at a fit-looking old geezer sitting on his own on the other side of the room, whom she seems just to have met. A man her own age, who I take to be her husband, is sitting next to her looking on in silence.

“Graham’s from the Gold Coast, but I’m a Sydneysider born and bred.”
She takes a glug from what looks like a vase of white wine. “Still, at least you get a bit of exercise up here so you feel justified about having a few drinks, a feed and a bit of fun in the evening.”

“Well, I’m seventy-two years old and I don’t need to feel justified. I can have fifteen meals a day if I like. I never put on any weight.”

As they talk she’s absentmindedly peeling the bark off the tree that’s keeping the roof up. The fit old guy wants to stop her but doesn’t know what to say. He half gestures with one finger raised from the arm of his chair.

“Er ….”

“Ah, don’t worry. It isn’t real. I think it’s been stuck on.” She peels away a big length of bark and dumps it in the hearth.

“It is real,” says the old guy. “It’s called pencil pine.”

“Hey,” she says, “did you ever do the Gordon River cruise?”

“No,” he says.

“Oh, you really should. We’ve done it twice. You have to go to this horrible island but it’s worth it. The lunch is just”—she’s rolling her eyes to heaven now—“out of this world. Serve yourself, take as much as you like. You should do it. Hey! Liddle tip. Take piles and piles of smoked salmon. They always bring out more.”

While she’s been talking the barman has walked across and whispered in Graham’s ear. Graham waits patiently for her to draw breath, then claps both hands down on his knees with cheery finality and says, “C’mon, Annette. Our table’s ready.”

During dinner I notice that Annette and Graham have acquired a twenty-five-year-old man from somewhere. I saw him standing near their table chatting earlier, and now he’s sitting with them. He’s saying something to Graham over the pudding, but I can’t make out what it is. Perhaps it’s, “Will you be filming, or just watching?”

This morning
I plan to walk up the mountain. I haven’t done any hiking for months, as the English countryside’s been closed due to the foot and mouth epidemic, and I’m not sure how I’ll cope. My boots are in good nick though, cleaner than the Gordon River thanks to the quarantine department
at Sydney airport. Any new arrival from Britain or other contagious third world countries had to go and stand in one of the Obnoxious Disease queues and wait to be examined. A stern young woman made me raise my feet and show her the soles of my shoes, like a horse being examined by a farrier. I owned up to the South Downs–encrusted boots in my bag before she found them and had me put in a detention camp. She took a close look, then popped them in a sterile forensic evidence bag and took them off to the nuclear cleansing sheds to be zapped. They came back cleaner than any boots I’ve ever seen, even in a shop. I don’t know what they do with all the polluted soil. Squads of government-funded Aussie backpackers may already be flying incognito to Gatwick and Heathrow to dump it all in the corners of filthy London pubs, where it will lie undetected for years.

My fire was still glowing when I woke this morning, which was just as well, because the temperature had dropped to five below in the night. Halfway through breakfast a water pipe burst and we all had to evacuate the building and shiver in the car park under a clear blue sky. There’s frost and ice on the path as I set out along the track that follows the shore of the lake at the foot of the mountain. It’s completely still and totally, unnaturally silent. The stark mountain and azure sky are reflected so perfectly in the water that when I get the photos back I won’t know which way up to hold them. I hit a good walking rhythm, reveling in the solitude as the trek takes me over massive boulders, through an enchanted forest and past a gushing waterfall.

I’m taking a rest just above Wombat Pool when I hear sounds in the distance, a bird-like yakkering and screeching that’s getting closer with each passing minute. And then I see them on the track below: six hikers carrying enormous packs and talking and shouting to each other nonstop. I decide to wait and let them pass. Five men and a woman go by with cursory grunts of recognition. They are all in their twenties, kitted out in pukka hiking gear: map pouches, ski poles, stretch fabric shorts worn pervily over thermal tights, all that kind of caper. “We’re the real thing, tourist,” say their scientifically engineered fibers to my jeans and woollen lumber jacket. They’re all talking at maximum volume, apart from the guy at the back. As he passes
I hear the tinnitus rhythms I associate with the London underground, and see that he is, unbelievably, listening to techno music on a set of headphones. He’s staring at the path as he walks, rather than bouncing along waving his arms in the air, so maybe he’s still waiting for the ecstasy to kick in.

Hiking alone offers different therapy from walking as part of a group. With friends or family you conform to a communal rhythm and subsume your own thoughts to the conversation of the group. Alone, it’s a more primal experience. The walk sets the rhythm for what’s going on inside your head. It’s even better if you’re in a place you’ve never been before. Away from the influence of favorite walks and landscapes, thoughts spring unexpectedly from nowhere. Your mind can wander free over concerns, worries, ambitions, loves. Key moments from your past spring uninvited into focus. Strong emotions are stirred up and then, without realizing, you’re where I am now, standing on top of the world.

I’ve scrambled over the last few boulders to find myself on a summit plateau, looking down on three lakes. Across to my right mountains and dense forest stretch away as far as the eye can see. To my left the six noisy hikers are standing staring at a camera balanced precariously on a rock. “Okay? Grin!” shouts one of the guys, but before the time switch activates itself the camera blows off the rock and disappears over the edge. “Oh, no,” they chorus, but it’s only caught on a ledge and is quickly retrieved.

“Would you mind taking it this time?”

Of course I wouldn’t. They explain how the camera works, but I already know. You just line up that white square you can see through the viewfinder so that their bodies are in the picture but their heads are just cut off, then
click
.

“Thanks, mate.”

“No worries.”

When they’ve gone I stand and gaze out at the 360-degree wilderness. It’s astonishing to think I’m looking at places where no man has ever trodden; but even as I stand here admiring it in glorious sunshine and a cutting breeze, I find my thoughts straying against my will to the comforting human-designed landscape of home. There’s something about the way that
fields and churches and orchards and houses and dry-stone walls have been artfully arranged over the centuries that nourishes our inner life and calms the human psyche; wilderness, on the other hand, is just saying “Woooaaahhh!” I don’t think you’d want too much of it, or you might end up like Jack in
The Shining
. As I begin my descent I find myself thinking, and not for the first time, just how useful wilderness must be when it comes to burying a troublesome relative, or a complete stranger.

A couple of days later
, and I’m on the sixteenth floor of a casino in a room made of prefabricated concrete slabs watching a British TV detective show starring that actor who’s always a bit blank behind the eyes, as if he’s taken a nasty knock on the head. Somebody’s just been murdered with an antique chest of drawers, which is fine if you’re watching in England, but seems hopelessly arch and pouffy on a windy Saturday night in Van Diemen’s Land. I missed the first quarter of an hour because the hotel had hidden the telly inside a great big cupboard and I presumed I didn’t have one, but I think I’m up to speed with the plot now. I reckon the posh alcoholic who runs the post office did it. Her, or the unconvincingly heterosexual vicar. I hope Tasmanians don’t think England’s really like this.

I had hoped that a sudden transition from rainforest wilderness to urban jungle might prove stimulating, and Hobart Casino seemed like my best, indeed only, option. An evening or two rubbing shoulders with a few high-rolling movers and shakers might exorcise the ghosts of Sarah Island and the spirits of the roadkill before I head off into the wilds again in search of the Young Irelanders; but the sudden jerk-around from where I was then to where I am now was unwise in the extreme, and I’ve taken refuge in my room to nurse my damaged psyche.

It was already dark when I got here. A man in a uniform flagged me down outside the main entrance. I thought he was going to tell me to clear off, but instead he took my car keys and drove it off to park it for me in some secret place. I thought that kind of thing only happened in movies. Valet parking, like pillow menus, has never previously featured in my life, and it
looks like I’ll be heading home a more sophisticated man-about-the-world than when I arrived.

As I was checking in I took a daily paper from the free pile on the desk. “Hang on, mate,” said the desk clerk, “I’ll give you a better one than that,” and produced a different paper from underneath the counter. Nice touch, I thought. He’s spotted that I’m an upmarket, erudite kind of guy who merits a better class of journalism. It was only when I stumbled upon the telly in the cupboard and couldn’t find any of the programs in the listings that I looked at the date and realized he’d given me yesterday’s paper. Why did he do that? Is he part of some campaign being waged by the Tasmanian authorities, an artful and knowing program of pranks and stunts designed to send up their clichéd image of being seriously behind the times? First there was the slow clock at the airport carousel; now this. I think it has to be deliberate.

I took the elevator downstairs for a slice of Saturday-night action and there it was again: on the menu on the wall of the lift, among the starters, above the drizzled this and coulized that, right where you’d expect to find the soup of the day.
Soupe d’hier
, it said, followed by the translation: soup of yesterday. “As it should be, made the day before,” read the explanation. Well, that’s as may be, mate, I thought, but you don’t fool me. This caught-in-the-past routine? A façade, probably the brainchild of an expensive image consultant, designed to appeal to the subliminal nostalgic in all of us.