Greed Comes Before a Fall

The second time Farmdoc and I walked Tasmania's World Heritage Overland Track, we decided to start at Lake St Clair, so that watching Cradle Mountain loom larger would be the culmination of our journey. Most through-walkers begin at Cradle Mountain, and in fact in-season these days it’s mandatory, but we’d walked it in that direction the first time, and we thought it’d be fun to do it in reverse.

We planned to take five days and to camp if the huts were full, so our packs were heavy. I carried the scroggin, a generous bag of dried fruit and nuts, in a separate compartment my rucksack has at the very top. I wanted to be able to reach it whenever I felt peckish.

On the first day, within the first hour in fact, I tripped on an exposed tree root that had snaked across the path. I was unbalanced, carrying that big pack, and I fell. I put out my hands and caught myself, but just when I was sure I was done falling, the pouch at the top of my pack punched me in the back of the head, forcing my face down onto the track and smacking my nose into the ground. It seemed to happen in slow motion, as though to underline how out of my control it was.

I wasn’t hurt, except for my pride and a cut on my nose. I laughed at myself, Farmdoc helped me up, and we kept walking.

We were walking against the flow of hikers so we were meeting new people all the time, and whenever we stopped someone would ask me how I'd acquired that fresh wound on my face. If they didn’t speak English they’d just point. Sometimes they’d say, ‘Leech?’ and point. I’d shake my head and tell them the story – or mime it.

The last day of our walk was cold and rainy, Cradle Mountain shrouded in mist. Instead of seeing the mountain as we approached, we passed without even knowing it was there. Besides, it was so cold we feared hypothermia if we stopped too long to look.

We walked out of the park, my nose just about healed of its mark of shame, and took a bus back to civilization.

I’m not sure why I feel the need to tell this story now. But I can’t get the memory out of my mind. That day at the beginning of the Overland Track we were alongside Lake St Clair, the water glinting at us through the trees. The air was cold and crisp and sweet with unseen plants and with the promise of the five-day walk ahead through button grass plains and myrtle forests. And then I was pushed into the mud, face down, felled by my own backpack.

I don’t know when I’ve felt more fully human.

Celebration at Cradle

Well, the 12-week cardiac rehab period is officially over this weekend. Farmdoc now graduates back into his own life - or rather into the new life that has been granted to him by a team of doctors and the everyday miracles of modern medicine.

Physically, Farmdoc's almost back to normal, but emotionally...looks like that'll take a little longer.

We talk about it all the time but I'm not sure we're any closer to truly grasping what happened - how bad his heart disease was, how close to dying he was really, and what was done to him to repair it.

And then there's the whole idea of a fresh start. I wonder if we'll ever take that for granted.

Farmdoc the scientist is obsessed with the physical aspects of this new life. He's bought a pedometer which he wears all the time, and every day he walks for at least 30 minutes. Even today in the rain we strode out in rain gear, leaving behind a warm, cosy house. And he watches his diet obsessively.

I, on the other hand, am obsessed with what it means to have a second chance. I look at the long scar on Farmdoc's chest and it seems so strange. I don't associate it with operating theatres. It seems more symbolic to me somehow, a sign that something within has changed.

This week we took Daughter Number Four to stay at Cradle Mountain for a few days. The trip was a celebration and a thanksgiving, a time to immerse ourselves in Mother Nature's offerings at their most sacred and sublime.

It feels too soon to write properly about this experience and what it means, but I do know it feels to me that there's something holy about the responsibility of making a new life count. Cradle Mountain seemed the right place to set out on this undertaking.

Reading and Walking

Farmdoc and I have just come back from almost a week in paradise - otherwise known as Cradle Mountain. The plan was that we would each take a pile of the books that we have been dying to read and just haven't had the time for, and in the bad weather that we were bound to experience, we would simply sit in front of the fire and read.

But then, just our luck, we struck a week of mostly fine weather and so were forced out of our armchairs and into our boots. Poor us!

In the end we hit on a compromise. Every morning after an enormous breakfast we headed off for a walk. In the afternoons we'd light the fire in our cabin and read for the rest of the day. In this way we spent hours immersed in nature followed by hours immersed in literature.

My only issue with the scenery of Cradle Mountain is that it's hard to take a photo that doesn't look like one of those wilderness pictures that people who destroy the environment like to display. The kind of thing you see advertising banks, or toilet paper, or on show in airports.

I read five novels:

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver, a two-in-one novel that explores, in alternate chapters, two possible choices made by a woman who is torn between two men.

The Messenger, by Daniel Silva, a thriller about Gabriel Allon, art restorer and assassin, that moves between London, Jerusalem, the Vatican City, Venice, Rome, Paris and another dozen places at least and is utterly unputdownable.

On Chesil Beach, a novella by Ian McEwan. I often think McEwan's books, including Solar, his latest, would be better as novellas. This one is perfect. I actually read it twice. I especially like how the research is fully integrated into the novel and not presented as undigested lumps as McEwan sometimes likes to do and as Shriver does in The Post-Birthday World.

A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore, a writer who I think does short stories best. I loved this novel because Moore is a superb writer so I was prepared to look away when her plot got away from her. But there are too many word tricks and maybe too much of everything for the book to truly work. Sometimes I found the writing so dense I could hardly breathe but at other times, perhaps when Moore isn't trying so hard, the novel just sings.

Wanting, by Richard Flanagan. I would have liked this novel to be longer. Its two subjects, the famous British writer Charles Dickens and the Aboriginal child Mathinna who was picked up and then abandoned by Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin in colonial Tasmania, seem to me to deserve more space. The Tasmanian section is heart breaking, but though Flanagan captures Dickens's England in all its filth and squalor, I didn't find Dickens himself convincing, so for me in the end the book's themes got a bit lost.

Cradle

Although we live only about an hour from Cradle Mountain we usually need an excuse to go there.

A visitor is always a good reason, especially one from from overseas. Yesterday's justification was the autumn foliage of the deciduous beech, Nothofagus gunnii, Tasmania's only native winter-deciduous plant.

Normally the leaves go from vivid green in spring to dark green in summer, through yellow to bright red in autumn before they fall, leaving a wonderful confetti underfoot. This year the foliage seem to have got stuck on yellow, but the trees are still beautiful. It was a cold day but we rugged up in jackets and scarves, gloves and woollen hats and kept warm by walking.

It's such a magical place. Every corner you turn reveals more beauty.

Whenever we go we say how lucky we are to live so close and how we should visit more often. Then we get busy and forget. This time we swear we'll return in mid winter. I hope we do. These photos are lovely but it's not just how pretty Cradle Mountain is; it's the effect the landscape has on you, the way the spirit of the ancient wilderness reaches out and melts the hard shell that civilisation constructs around us all.