A long walk: or...

"Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable" Mary Oliver

Some guidelines on walking, or perhaps life:

1. No matter how detailed your map is, no matter how accurately you can pinpoint exactly where you are on the map, the ground under your feet will not be what you expect.

2. It’s always harder than you think.

3. Where you end up is usually where you are meant to be and if it’s not, it’s often better.

If you fly from the mainland to Hobart, you’ll fly over the Central Plateau. Look out the plane window and you’ll see a dizzying jigsaw puzzle of lakes and tarns. If it’s winter, chances are it will be covered in snow. But flying over this place reduces its scale. You won’t understand how bright green a cushion plant can be on a grey morning. You won’t see a tiger snake, thick as a forester’s forearm, slide off a hot rock and silently disappear into a hole. You won’t lie in a tarn, head tilted back, held between earth and sky, floating over a hole so ancient it feels like a portal to another time.

Really the only way to experience this world heritage area is to walk.

Day 1

The road into Lake McKenzie climbs steeply. The car rocks with laughter. No one laughs as hard as these women. We park at the end of the track and pull packs from the ute tray. We snuggle our toes in wool, pull on boots and gaiters and then packs on our backs we walk through the boom gates at the dam wall and climb gently, following a rough track. We leave the industry of the dam and as we do I walk away from all the anxieties of modern living; the news cycle, the scrolling, the relentless accessibility to a world outside my control. I leave my loved ones to look after themselves. I leave.

We will be out of contact for five days. The simplicity is a luxury. We will walk and talk and eat and drink and swim and sleep.

We disturb three Wedgetail eagles, they flap into the sky, clumsy until they reach the heights and then they hang there, looking down on our ant-like selves. I imagine how they see us, clumsy, foreign.

As the evening closes in we find a flat spot by a lake to put up tents. And, in what will become our routine, we swim, washing the busyness of leaving, the honest sweat of walking, then sit on the side of the lake, baking like the little skinks who have scuttled from beneath our boots all afternoon. We lay out happy hour snacks and watch the evening light play over the rocks and the wallabies come down to feed and none of us want to be anywhere else. Already I don’t know what day it is. Time shifts to be an expansive thing. Tomorrow we will find our way to the top of the Long Tarns. I go to sleep listening to the lap of water against the lake’s edge and the words of a Louise Gluck poem in my head.

You've stopped being here in the world. 
You're in a different place, 
a place where human life has no meaning. 

Day 2

We wake to low cloud. The first part of the day is easy, we follow the edge of a series of lakes. The more difficult part of the day is climbing a ridge to the country of tarns. Before we start to climb we boil the billy. The wind picks up and in moments the rain is pinging off the lake and our waterproof jackets. The temperature drops and all the peaks disappear. We have a moment of indecision. What if it stays like this for the next 3 days? Part of our indecision is the fact we will be walking without the comfort of a track. We have GPS markers with which to navigate if the visibility disappears, but the thought of grey days, no landmarks, makes us hesitate.

We reason our way onwards and walk up into the bush. It takes a moment to orient because we don’t want to face the steep, rocky route. The easiest way is often not the most direct way and over the next few days, as we take turns leading, I am astonished how I subconsciously turn from the hard (think a scramble up rocks, or pushing through thick scrub, or finding a way through tiny creeks, watercourses and tarns) and search for an easier path, even if i know it’s in the wrong direction.

The rain comes and goes and we’re tired by the time we reach Long Tarns. We find the first place we can camp, set up tents and then swim the day away just as the rain sweeps in again. There’s a small forest of pencil pines and we rig up a tarp and have our happy hour in the dripping forest. Tomorrow we will walk down the long tarns and find the beginning of an old droving route. It’s marked on the map as a track. The idea of a track, of allowing our feet to walk with only the thought to find a safe place to put them down, is comforting. Rain falls on the tent, but inside it’s dry and warm.

Day 3

We wake to beauty. The tarn is so still it’s not a body of water, but a mirror. The forest drips, but the day is bright. The tarn is too beautiful not to swim in again and we plunge and then float in water so clear it’s as if we held weightless in air.

Pull on boots and then our packs onto sore shoulders and walk down the long tarn, which is indeed long. At times we’re walking on top of the river and I can hear it rushing away beneath the forest. We stop at the place on the map where it says the track starts. There is no track. It’s been taken back by the bush. We spend the rest of the day giving up on the idea of a track.

All the while we’re walking, especially if I’m finding the way, I’m thinking how this is like writing a book. How you have an idea where you’d like to get too, but the ground you’re walking over, the path you’re trying to find is not how you imagined it might be and even when you get to the place you were aiming for it looks different to how you imagined. I tell myself to respond to what is in front of me, not what I imagined might be in front of me. I tell myself to find a way.

It’s hot. The terrain is not especially hard, but the concentration to navigate across trackless country, around tarns and little creeks, small lakes that are in the way of where we want to end up, is tiring. A few times the only way across creeks is to wade, so our boots are heavy too. We have a cuppa in the shade and debate going on, it’s almost too early to stop, so we push on until we look out over a piece of country dotted with tarns and scrub and all of us feel too tired. When we turn around we see a hidden tarn. It has a view to Mt Jerusalem and is sheltered and perfect for our tents. It’s the most beautiful evening and after a swim I lean against my pack, utterly content. I could not imagine where we were going to end up today, but now we are here, I do not want to be anywhere else.

Day 4

We swim again in the morning and then find our way across the ground, which seemed impossible yesterday, with ease. I pack this thought away for when I am tired: Stop, turn around, look where you’ve come from, sit down and rest.

The landscape is changing. We’re walking out of the puzzle of tarns, the forests of cushion plants, the thickets of low firs, and pockets of pencil pines. We sit on the top of a bluff, let the breeze dry our sweat and the talk and laughter flows in and around us. None of us consider the time. Beyond stretches the country we will walk through. We can see Forty Lakes Peak and behind it, marked on the map, is fisherman’s hut. When everyone is ready we start walking. We find a cairn, and scouting ahead, there is another. It feels like civilization. A track of sorts. It’s so easy to walk from cairn to cairn, each one feels like we have arrived somewhere. We walk past the hut and camp further down the lake. It’s our last night. We swim and then lie drying on the lake’s edge sharing our dregs of gin and whisky and sweaty cheese. The trout rise.

Day 5

The walk out is easy to follow, though kilometres of boulder hopping, balancing on rocks, is another sort of puzzle. As we get down towards the head of Lake McKenzie I drop back. I don’t want to leave this place, or perhaps I don’t want to swap the simplicity of my backpack for the responsibilities and rushing of time. It’s been a few days of living moment to moment. I gather the feeling like a cape around my shoulders. The walk around the lake’s edge requires more boulder hopping. We have one last swim and soak up all the minerals the lake gifts us. We push our way through scrub to the faintest hint of a track, which becomes an actual track and we follow this and arrive back where we started. We’re all a little different to the women we were at the start. We have found our way through new country. We’ve shared friendship and laughter. We’ve swum in the tarns and stared at the stars. This huge expanse of space polishes the good, scrapes away at the anxieties and worries, none of us come away unchanged.

mm

A few things I’ve read:

TasMap, Jerusalem TL06.

Liz Evans assured debut novel Catherine Wheel. It takes a moment to get going, but if you enjoy a nuanced psychological almost thriller around friendship and betrayal, well pop this in your beach bag. It took me a few chapters to get into it, but then it built pace and had me reading into the night.

Loved this short essay by Rick Morton in The Saturday Paper section, Life Sentences, which is what is says on the packet - a rumination on sentences that change your life.

And this long review essay by Lucy Van, Agent of the Year, which won the Woollahra Library Non Fiction Digital Award and is totally worth taking the time to read. Then Raven Leilani (whose novel Luster was a debut hit) writing in N+1 on grief and writing, is right in my sweet spot of the personal essay saying big stuff.

Loved this Like A Version - Missy Higgins singing Troye Sivan’s One of Your Girls, which made me remember a podcast episode on Song Exploder which I really enjoyed where Sivan explains how he came to write the song.

That’s enough. Wishing you all a moment - be it a minute watching a sunrise or a 5 day walk - to feel connected to the world outside your phone.