Lost Worlds Page 30

  Okay—power swimming time. I switched to a steady crawl, but the boat remained just as far away. And the wind became stronger, blowing directly against me. Only one thing to do. Bawl out and tell the skipper to come closer.

  I took off my mask and shouted, but my voice didn’t seem to carry. I shouted louder, but now the wind was blowing the sound back into my face. I tried waving, but no one was looking in my direction. They didn’t even seem to know I was out here.

  I opened my mouth for a real bellow, and a wave—a wave I should have seen but didn’t—crashed into my face and sent water tumbling down my throat and windpipe.

  I was gagging. I swung around away from the boat, letting the waves pound against the back of my head. If I could just get my breath back and my mask on…the mask! Where the hell was the mask? Dammit, it must have been knocked out of my hand when the first wave hit. Now I couldn’t breathe through the tube…and I couldn’t breathe in those waves that thrashed between me and the ever-receding boat.

  For the first time in my life I became scared in water. Initially it was just a little frisson of fear, a faint shiver up my spine. Water has always been my friend, something to frolic in, something to love for its buoyancy, its colors, its dappled intricacies. But now it became an attacker. An enemy. My breath was still weak as the windpipe struggled to clear itself.

  Panic hit. I couldn’t reach the boat, I couldn’t make them see me, and I couldn’t make it to the shore that was now well over two miles away. My energy was draining as I dog-paddled with my back to the waves.

  Turn around again—keep your mouth shut—and wave like crazy…

  The waves hit hard again, angry now. White-topped, and cold. I waved as vigorously as I could with both arms, pushing my body out of the water.

  Dammit, couldn’t anyone see me? Bloody idiots…didn’t they know I was here? I wasn’t going to be able to do this many more times.

  I felt the adrenaline surge but knew that my strength was running out fast…. My heart was pounding…my arms felt leaden…my breathing was hoarse, fast, and shallow. Panic grew as I realized the horrible inevitability of what was happening; it seemed to tighten my lungs so that I had almost no air.

  Stange things were going on in my brain. Two entirely different reactions: one-half seemed to be a miasma of panic and pain from a body too tired now even to swim; the other half was a brilliant kaleidoscope of moving images, a series of fast-forwarding tapes, replaying fragments of memories, sensations, emotions. Friends’ faces flashed by…a sudden picture of me crying as a child when I’d accidentally tipped my baby sister out of her carriage…a fight I’d once had with a bully in school back in Yorkshire…my father’s rare but always loving grin…my first car, a bright turquoise-blue Austin Mini, and the pride of that first drive…a lobster feast on Cape Cod with friends from New Jersey…our first New York apartment with a tiny terrace on the fringe of Greenwich village…a sudden taste of blinding-hot Indian Vindaloo curry…and then Anne, smiling, laughing…and a thought—Oh, God, she’s going to be really pissed if I don’t get home—a crazy vivid patchwork of unpatterned images.

  And then from a newly emerging third part of my brain…something, somewhere, cool and objective…came a quiet, almost disinterested voice telling me, You’re drowning, David…. you’ll be done with all this soon…you’ll be all right…. There are more things to come…things you never dreamed of….

  I could see—not feel—but really see myself dog-paddling more slowly now, the energy fading, the cold being replaced by a strange warm glow. I’d never had an out-of-body experience before, but that’s how it felt—as though part of me, the essential part, was above the thrashing waves, maybe twenty, thirty feet above, looking down at the sad little flailing figure below, waving its arms, fighting the inevitable.

  …there are more things to come…

  A calm came. An acceptance. A sense that for one of the few times in my life I was utterly helpless, there was nothing “I” could do, and that me—my fate, my life, all the me’s that are me—were being given over to something else, something much larger, all-encompassing, something that would take care of me.

  I didn’t really sense the arm encircle my neck at first. It felt, I suppose, like another wave, another battering…and then, with a jolt, my three free-wheeling brains melded back into a single entity screaming out one very clear message: You’re being choked!

  The arm was like a vise, compacting my windpipe and squeezing out the last gasps of air. I lashed out, but the arm tightened even more. Maybe fearing that my apparent panic would destroy us both, my rescuer was determined to control my movements. I managed to turn enough so that he could see my face in the final stages of asphyxiation.

  “…Shoulders…I hold…your shoulders…” Somehow the words spluttered out.

  Whoever my savior was, he nodded, turned, and I swam weakly with him against the waves, one arm across his back, gripping his shoulder. I still had little air in my lungs, but I knew now I was safe, and there was no panic. Just a determination to get back to the boat without making an utter fool of myself.

  Faces peered over the bow, arms reached out, and I was dragged slowly on board. Someone thrust a glass of something sweet and strong into my hand. It burned like ice and fire, but it did its work, making me choke out the seawater in my lungs and sense the warming fingers of sugary alcohol ease through my body.

  I was utterly drained. There was no energy left. The boat bobbed about in the heaving swell. Then I heard the motors roar and saw the shore coming closer and closer…hard land, safe, dependable land…. I wanted to be laid on warm sand well away from that pernicious ocean and just left to sleep and sleep…

  Peter Hillier was the hero of the day. He had seen what would have been the last of my useless frantic arm waves and had leapt off the boat, called to the skipper to follow, and done “one of the fastest racing crawls I’ve ever done, mate,” to save this errant wanderer from an ignominious watery demise.

  Peter was a charter pilot on a brief business trip out of Perth, and we became instant bosom buddies back on land. We caroused together in the local pub that evening with a crowd of other outback adventurers, sang Australian folk songs together at a crooked moon, and made plans to fly south together, back to his home and his family in Fremantle, after a day or two more in the Ningaloo sun.

  I shall never forget you, Peter. You gave me a new life—a life I celebrate now with a fresh sense of wonder and gratitude. You made it possible for me to complete this book and, I hope, many others. You made my smile wider and my spirit far richer.

  For this I will continue to thank you, my friend.

  Every day of my new life.

  8. SOUTH-WEST TASMANIA

  Journeys of Solitude Through a True Wilderness

  “The south-west of Tasmania provides one of the finest walking areas I have ever seen.”

  Sir Edmund Hillary, 1960

  “Among the best wilderness experiences anywhere on Earth.”

  Ken Collins, South-West Tasmania, 1990

  “Could be a bit choppy,” says Phil, the pilot.

  “How choppy?” asks this nervous traveler, unaccustomed to flying in tiny four-seater planes through clouds that crowded in at the Plexiglas windows and made it feel like we were plowing through thick oatmeal porridge.

  “Hard to tell, mate. Over the Arthurs could be a bit rough.”

  “How high are these Arthurs?”

  “’Round about thirty-five hundred feet. West Portal is thirty-six hundred feet.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.” I’d flown over far higher ranges in my travels but usually in a martini haze and couched comfortably with a favorite book, lights and fan that flicked on with the press of buttons, and flight attendants anxious to respond to my every whim. (Well, for the first hour or so. After that they usually disappear. I’ve never found out where.)

  “’S not so much the height, mate. It’s the bloody wind shear you get on those ridges—especially th
e first one. But—take it easy—we’ll know soon enough.”

  Yes—I bet we will. Like we’ll know when we hit one of those vertical air cliffs and gravity takes over and we end up skewered on a needled pinnacle in one of Australia’s last true wildernesses.

  Silence. Too much silence. Phil isn’t exactly sweating, but he’s certainly got a tremble in his hands unless that’s just the judder that constantly rattles your teeth and nerves in this cardboard and paste flying machine.

  Retrospective time.

  How did I get to be here in this cloud-cuckoo land on the lowest chunk of Australasia with nothing between me and Antarctica but fifteen hundred miles of frigid Pacific Ocean?

  Tasmania?

  Most people have no idea where it is. Maybe vague recollections of a remote island that exports apples, fragments of irrelevant information from musty geographical diatribes given by a teacher who’d possibly never left his hometown. An island in Indonesia, maybe? Somewhere in the South Pacific? Near the Philippines?

  The only image that seems to generate a flicker of recognition is that glowering, growling, slobbering Saturday morning cartoon character, the Tasmanian Devil.

  And ironically most mainland Australians (the “north islanders,” as the Tasmanians call them) often have similarly hazy views of the place. They know where it is, of course—that little heart-shaped blip south of Melbourne, a short air hop across the Bass Strait. But when it comes to understanding its topographical and social idiosyncracies I usually hear such offhand remarks as:

  Oh, yeah, they killed off all the Abos soon as they settled the place. [Then, in a roughish mumble]…Just like we should’ve done.

  Or the dismissive:

  Tassie—oh, yeah—great little place. You can drive ’round it in a day.

  Or the well-intentioned:

  Never been there. Been to Europe, Africa, Thailand—all those places. Got to go Tassie sometime. They say it’s nice.

  And then come the snide jokes that I must have heard in a dozen different guises on the “north island”:

  What’s a Tasmanian Virgin? A girl who runs faster than her brothers [or the alternative])…a girl who doesn’t have a father.

  Ah, yes—Tasmania! Where men are men and the sheep are worried.

  And much more of the same. Far too much triteness for a truly beautiful island of half a million relatively pastoral people living leisurely lives among its soaring mountains, Ireland-green meadows, and lovely coastal coves.

  It was in a pub, way up on the western coast of Australia, when I finally decided to take a trip to Tasmania.

  “Unbelievable place!” The young eager-faced sheila (Aussielingo or Strine for a girl) gushed as she sipped her beer and leaned forward into our group, her eyes sparkling.

  “Southern Tasmania. It’s like no other place in the world. You’re out there in the middle of nowhere—six days’ walk from anything. No people, no farms—nothing except all this incredible scenery. Mountains, lakes, beaches—I mean beaches like you’ve never seen—white, empty—going on forever….” She paused to take a breath. “It’s fantastic!”

  The group nodded. They could feel the enthusiastic vigor of the girl’s experience. Most of them were your typical back-to-the-elements-crowd. Two were suntanned surf bums living a life of ease and frolic among the waves of the west coast. Another couple were from England and, by the tone of their conversation before the girl joined us, more than ready to return. Four others were true outbackers, hippielike, with long, straggly hair, flinty eyes, and of indeterminate gender. Your regular ragtag bunch of world wanderers sharing the magic of new places and undiscovered delights.

  The Foster beer “stubbies” came and went as the girl described her lonely six-day odyssey along a wilderness path from a place called Melaleuca (“There’s nothing there except a hut—it’s just a name”) to the first farmhouse near Cockle Creek. The table was a litter of all those heart-arresting, fat-filled, salt-soaked, deep-fried Aussie junk foods with such palate-pandering names as deep-fried seafood rolls, bacon and potato triangles, meat pies, sausage rolls, egg and bacon pie, deep-fried mussels, deep-fried dim sum, et al. Then she let fly with the kind of comment that is always guaranteed to hook this particular world wanderer:

  You feel like you’re the first person ever to have walked in these places….

  A week later I took the hour-long flight from Melbourne across the Bass Strait and landed with a rollicking thump in Hobart, capital city of Tasmania. As always, my plans were vague. A night in some city hotel and then off to find a small plane to fly me to the start of the South Coast Track at Melaleuca in the heart of the South-West Tasmanian wilderness.

  Apparently this region is so valued as one of the earth’s last temperate wildernesses that it’s been declared, along with other major portions of Tasmania’s western hinterland, a unique UNESCO World Heritage Area. This region, covering almost a fifth of the state, with over seven hundred thousand square miles of some of the most pristine, untouched scenery in the Southern Hemisphere, is thus doubly protected by both Tasmanian government and UNESCO resources and will be maintained in its present natural state forever.

  Way back in the late 1800s, shortly after convict transport to the island from Britain had ended, this portion of “Van Diemen’s Land” (as Tasmania was originally known) attracted the hardiest of adventurer-entrepreneurs. They arrived in hundreds to prospect for gold and mineral deposits, hack down the Huon pine and hardwood forests along the coast, and set up stations for whale and seal hunting. Tracks were cut through the wilderness and even small communities established, none of which exist today.

  As the pine forests and whales diminished, the pioneers moved on and the South-West became a forgotten land. New maps of the territory labeled it impenetrable or unexplored and so it remained until the 1920s, when an upsurge of bush walking and mountaineering brought lost world-lovers back into the territory seeking challenge, adventure, and solace in solitude.

  Much of the region has remained unmolested while the more fertile, low-lying areas to the east were transformed into pastoral havens for farmers, stock rearers, and orchardmen. Hobart became the capital and focal point of the island’s pastoral and commercial economies. Today it is a pristine little place of 160,000 inhabitants or so strung around both sides of the Derwent River and overshadowed by the ominous and often cloud-topped bulk of Mount Wellington. Beyond the elegant church spires and modest glass-walled towers of recent downtown redevelopment, much of the city seems to consist mainly of typical Australian bungalows trimmed with Victoriana fretwork, topped by red tin roofs, and surrounded by privet and laurel hedges. They’re dotted in the thousands up the foothills of Mount Wellington and offer their residents constant vistas of the river, the mountains, and the scraggly eucalyptus-topped hills to the east.

  In recent years Hobart has become a haven for retirees from “north island” and, despite its occasional cloud-and-drizzle climate, possesses a mellow postmenopausal mood. There’s none of Sydney’s flash-and-flurry here, none of the sun-saturated serendipity of the mainland “Gold Coast,” and only fleeting touches of Perth’s cultured cosmopolitan ambience. In spite of its size and its jet-set-styled casino, you sense a small-town spirit here verging on complacency—mom ’n’ pop retail outlets that close early and never open on Sundays, pretty eucalyptus-shaded parks, cozy beaches for weekend barbecues and, for the most part, careful drivers and law-abiding, respectable citizens.

  Hobart’s notorious nineteenth-century reputation as a place of “last exit” for British and Irish convicts seems hard to appreciate in today’s green and graceful city. Admittedly the ruins of the once-dreaded Port Arthur penal settlement (“a natural penitentiary,” according to Lieutenant Governor Arthur in 1830) are only fifty or so seagull-flying miles southeast of the capital, on the tip of the Tasman Peninsula. Doubtless that strange Australian obsession with its criminal origins still ripples close to the surface of psyches, but I sensed none of these ominous overtones. E
ven the rather maudlin tone of Peter Conrad’s excellent book on Tasmania, Behind the Mountain, which I’d read on the flight down, failed to diminish my initial impressions of Hobart as a lively, history-aware community, proud of its new roads and glass towers, proud of its one-time whaling men and its boisterous democratic traditions.

  The day I arrived the Green party claimed they’d jostled the government into a “vote of no confidence” dilemma and were demanding mass resignations and a new election. The next day, however, the “no-fleas-on-me” prime minister had turned his virulent opponents topsy-turvy through a series of postmidnight alliances and “understandings” and left the Greens gasping and gawking at his typical Tasmanian penchant for wile, guile, and political gamesmanship. Ironically, at the time of this minor political flurry, Australia was enduring a period of international rebuke for the “cowboy” antics of some of its leading entrepreneurs—Alan Bond and Kerry Packer in particular—whose widely admired, Trump-like triumphs of the eighties had now degenerated into sleaze ’n’ greed reputations and public denunciations by reputable world economists. Well, apparently Tasmania’s prime minister had a little of the cowboy spirit in him too.

  Unfortunately, nighttime reveals another Hobart, particularly in the empty downtown streets where packs of restless, wolfish youths ramble and stagger through the shadowy alleys looking for a flurry of fists with unsuspecting victims. (Me, for example. Only the presence of slow-moving police cars kept me from a couple of roustabouts with drugged or drunken gangs.) I hoped to find respite in the pubs, but they too were filled with similar huddles of young men whose glazed eyes roamed the smoky rooms seeking easy pickings among the long-haired, cherubic-cheeked (but equally dead-eyed) girls. I sensed all the things that diatribic monologues about “our young generation” proclaim—hopelessness, directionlessness, drug-induced escapism. I’d sensed the same in small-town Australia, where rowdy gatherings at stubbie-stained tables seemed the only outlet for frustrated energies and disillusioned ambitions. The media blames unemployment, lack of parental discipline, inadequate education, a fascination for fast wealth, and “the constant search for instant gratification” in the form of glue-sniffing and stubbie-slurping highs, easy sex, “cool-at-all-costs” attitudes, and remnants of the high-flying eighties’ “me-first” mentality.