A Masters and a Mountain

Justin had told us about Mystery Creek Cave before he caught his ferry, and that recommendation outlasted him by a fortnight. We met Andy at the trailhead, back from a week working his way along the east coast on his own, with oats on the stove and the day already organised in his head.

The walk in is short and muddy, an old tramway grade through wet forest. Sal did not want to go into the cave. She said so on the way and she was still saying so at the entrance, which is a wide dark mouth in the hillside with a creek running out of it, and then she went in anyway, which is the part worth recording.

Inside it is bigger than the entrance suggests and it keeps going. Headlamps on, the creek loud in the dark and running the length of the passage, everything wet and cold and the footing genuinely poor on the slick rock. We worked our way in slowly. The air got colder the further we went.

Then somebody suggested turning the lights off, and we did.

It takes a minute for your eyes to give up on the idea of ordinary sight. When they do, the roof of the cave is full of glowworms, thousands of them, cold blue and completely still, spread across the stone in no pattern at all. Nobody says anything for a while when that happens. You just stand in a dark hole in a mountain and look up at something that has no interest in you whatsoever.

Andy had wanted to do this since he was a kid, specifically a cave with a living stream running through it. He got that.

We went as far as the marker where the passage becomes proper caving and turned around there.

Outside, back in the daylight and the wet green, the forest was going off with lyrebirds. They are not meant to be here, strictly speaking, having been introduced to Mount Field in the thirties and spread south since, but they are here now and they run through the entire local repertoire including a very good black cockatoo. You stand in a Tasmanian forest listening to a mainland bird doing impressions of the neighbours.

Then Geeveston for laundry, because the ordinary parts of the week do not stop for glowworms, and on to the Hartz Mountains trailhead in the dark. Andy had food ready in the day-use area again. He had been feeding us for weeks.

Rain the next morning killed the Hartz Peak plan, so we walked to Lake Osborne instead, which is short and beautiful and requires nothing of you. Glacial lake, alpine country that felt like Ben Lomond in a different key, and the water dead flat under a grey sky with the mountains sitting in it. Pencil pines around the shore, which grow slowly, live for centuries and burn once.

The following day was still overcast but dry, so we went up.

The track to Hartz Peak runs on duckboards across alpine heath, then rock, then a scramble at the top. The recent rain had put small streams across the path everywhere. Snow appeared in patches as we climbed, then in sheets in the lee of things. Near the summit the wind arrived properly, straight off the Southern Ocean with nothing in the way, and we stopped to put on everything we had.

And there, a few hundred metres below the summit, cold, half-layered, standing on rock, the phones found signal for the first time in days and started going off.

Sal had been accepted into a Masters of Counselling.

She read it standing in the wind on the side of a mountain in south-west Tasmania. There was nowhere to sit down. There was nobody to tell. We had come to this island six months earlier with a bus and no plan beyond the next camp, and now there was a course with a start date and a duration and an end, and a version of the future that had a desk in it somewhere.

She had wanted this for a long time. It is a strange place to receive good news, and it was the right place, because it meant the two things could not be separated: the life we were living and the thing she was going to do next arrived in the same minute, on the same rock, in the same wind.

Then we climbed the last of it.

The summit gives you the whole of the south-west. Ranges going back in layers until they stop being distinguishable, Bruny out east as a dark shape on silver water, and cloud moving over all of it. The wind made staying up there a short proposition. We came down inside twenty minutes.

On the descent we detoured to look over Hartz Lake, and stopped at Lake Esperance which we had walked past on the way up. Andy had a meal on when we got back.

That was the last one. He was heading for the mainland to carry on by himself, having come to Tasmania to try this life on and decided it fitted. Six weeks earlier he had turned up at a bush camp outside Bagdad and got lost on his first walk. He left as somebody who cooked for us most nights and had a bus recommendation of his own to make to the next person who asked.

We stayed one more night at the trailhead, then pointed north for the Gordon foreshore, which is where we had met Justin, whose cave tip had started the week.Read more