Mirrors of the Soul: Lake Pedder's Gift

Three vehicles left Mount Field in the late afternoon: our bus in front, Justin's Amarok, Andy's Captiva. We had not travelled in convoy since Grammy and Fran, and there is something in a rear-view mirror with two sets of headlights in it that changes the feel of a drive.

The light went early, as it does in June, and we were on a road with forest tight to both sides and wildlife starting to move. Slow going. Then a gap opened in the canopy on the right and the sky behind the mountains was doing something worth stopping for, so all three of us pulled over and got out into the cold and watched it burn down through the reds into nothing. Nobody said much. Then back into the vehicles and on into full dark, headlights on the verges, looking for the Ted's Beach turnoff.

We found it late and set up by firelight, which is not how we like to arrive and was, on this occasion, entirely worth it.

It was Andy's birthday. Thirty-seven, spent at a campfire on the edge of a lake in the middle of a Tasmanian winter, which was not how he had spent any of the previous thirty-six. Sal had made a dessert from one of Grammy's recipes, kept quiet all day and produced at the fire, and Andy ate it in the way you eat something someone has gone to trouble over.

Then he and Justin took their clothes off and got into the lake.

June. Highland water. The noise they made going in carried a long way across flat water and the noise coming out was worse, and the two of them stood at the fire afterwards shaking and pleased with themselves while we watched from a sensible distance. Neither of them could speak properly for about a minute.

Morning showed us where we were. The lake had gone completely still overnight and the mountains were sitting in it upside down, the whole range doubled, the join between real and reflected hard to find. It was six degrees and we stood out in it anyway.

Worth knowing what you are looking at, though. The original Lake Pedder was a small lake with a wide pink quartzite beach that people flew into on light aircraft, and in 1972 it went under when the Gordon scheme flooded the valley. What we were camped beside was the impoundment: bigger, deeper, and standing over the top of the thing it was named after. Half the reason Tasmania has a conservation movement at all is that people fought for that lake and lost.

We stayed six days.

It became routine quickly. Ultimate Frisbee on the beach, where Andy's throws were on a different level to ours and he was patient about it. Workouts, yoga, the sort of thing that is easy to keep up when the alternative view is a mountain range. The lake changed every morning: mist sitting on it one day, glass the next, and the light on the hills going through its whole range each evening without repeating itself.

The nights were fire and talk. Four people, one of them twenty-seven, one fifty-two, none of us in the same part of life, all of us out here for reasons that turned out to be more similar than not. Justin and Andy had met without speaking, at a silent retreat, and were now several weeks into a friendship built entirely after the fact. Conversations went where they go at two in the morning next to a fire in the cold.

One day we drove out to the Gordon Dam. It was in fog when we got there, which suited it: 140 metres of curved concrete appearing out of grey with nothing visible above or below it. You can walk across the crest. We did, and looked down into the gorge, and shouted things to hear the wall throw them back. The dam is why the lake we were sleeping beside exists in the shape it does. Standing on it, that is not an abstract point.

On the last night Justin said out loud that a shooting star would round things off nicely.

One came over about a minute later. Right across, bright, gone. Four people at a fire making the noise you make when something like that lands on cue.

We packed up the next morning and split three ways. Justin was out of Tasmania within the week and we would not see him again on the island. Andy was still with us for a while yet. The lake was flat when we left, doing the mirror thing again, holding the mountains and the drowned valley underneath them both at once.Read more