Joy & wonder

A meditation on lockdown

HERE I sit under a gnarled she-oak that’s been contorted and twisted by sou’westerly squalls.

The battered old casuarina clings to a craggy headland in Frederick Henry Bay in southern Tasmania. The tree is a weather-beaten testament to survival, its roots reaching and swelling, degree by minuscule degree, since its seed dared to sprout in less than a handful of wet humus wedged between the shale of a rocky crevice.

Its roots have divined and navigated the rock fractures for decades in a tenacious hunt for moisture. Prizing apart hairline cracks into fissures, the roots lock their grip on the headland in stubborn defiance of the lash from wild storms that snap the tree’s limbs and rattle its leathery needles.

The old survivor need not brace itself on this perfect day though, because it is one of those precious early winter mornings when there is no resistance to life, no test for existence, no need for ardour nor struggle. Heavy low clouds trap the warm rising moisture and swaddle the landscape like a woollen blanket cossets an infant. The quiet is ethereal. Each gentle ripple laps the shore with a crisp, delicate crunch, full of presence, no echo, just stillness sublime.

Frederick Henry Bay has exhaled and appears in no rush to take its next breath.

A sooty oystercatcher and a fledgling Pacific gull saunter among silver gulls that tap dance with comical orange webbed feet in sodden sand in search of a morning’s morsel.

I hear a child’s voice. It’s a boy, about six years old, leading his father and sister slowly around the headland. The boy is telling a long and seemingly very happy story. I can’t make out his words, but his family is captivated as he enthusiastically waves his arms in the tale’s joyful telling.

I catch a glimpse of the father’s bearded face. It’s a picture of contentedness that reminds me of walking these shores with my son when he was a child. I remember fantastic tales of boyhood fancies; of rock pools, rainbows and crab carapaces; of cowries, kelp and mandarin peels; of skipping stones and chocolate eggs. They were precious days of simple joy and wonder.

I have seen many families on my trails in recent weeks. These often empty coastal tracks have been filled with their chatter and fossicking.

I wonder whether these lockdown days will become cherished childhood memories of when the maddening rush to get in the car for school, sport and play receded and Dad and Mum stayed home; when time was as sticky as the sap of a black wattle, and life’s essence was extracted from the cantankerous daily hurry to be distilled in simpler pursuits.

(Parents, rest assured, the exhaustion of raising a child is forgotten long before the joy.)

AS the banter fades and the young family meanders off to other headlands, I sit under the old she-oak and wonder how the world beyond our benevolent shores must appear to the boy.

The mayhem consuming the globe is one huge madcap bedtime horror story, a black comedy with a cast of feuding villains, from the big bumbling fool, played hysterically by Trump; the delusional despot astride a rickety nuke, hammed up to the hilt by Kim; the sullen megalomaniac, menacingly portrayed by Xi; and the vain sneering assassin, performed with gusto by Putin using all of Miser Meanie’s trademark sniggers and evil asides.

Truth is not only stranger than fairytales, as the boy will discover all too soon, it’s uglier, scarier and more farcical.

As a chap I met the other day on the shores of the bay exclaimed, arms aloft like an evangelist and palms face up in praise of a woolly blanket Tasmanian sky: “Where in the world would you rather be?”

Where indeed.

YEARS ago, I paddled to a small sandstone island in the bay to search for evidence of preinvasion Aborigines.

I had visited the island many times but not seen any middens, which are prolific elsewhere on this coast. Had those who lived here before British occupation not gone to the island? If not, why not?

I rummaged over the island all afternoon but failed to find anything. The sun began to set so I started back to my kayak, which I had dragged ashore on the island’s sandy western tip.

I didn’t want to scramble over wet rocks in the dark or over the shearwater rookery and risk ruining burrows that these birds fly the length of the world to reinhabit. So, I ignore the setting sun and hurry back.

As I come to a rise from where I can see my kayak, just a stone’s throw away, I resist no more, and sit to watch the sun’s awesome splendour.

From my front-row island seat, the bay’s water stretches 6km or so to other shores. It is alight with colour. Silver-satin undertones of the aquamarine sheen reinterpret the sunlight reflected in clouds; blues, pinks, lavenders, oranges and purples. An ocean swell like a heartbeat pulses under shimmering hues.

The rim of the mountain’s silhouette sparkles as the sun drops below the horizon. The epic scale of the spectacle is majestic, the entire biosphere as far as my eyes can see, and all around, is awash with kaleidoscopic shifts of colour.

Overcome with joy and wonder, my reverie turns to deeper questions. Who gave this gift? Does a gift imply a giver? Why do I feel gratitude? Why am I here? What’s it all about? Is it about anything?

Suddenly, in that moment, I knew. I needn’t have looked. I just knew. In fact, I smiled and laughed before I looked. Then I glanced down at my hand to where I sat. And, sure enough, there it was. The midden.

Generations before me, perhaps for millennia, had been drawn across the water to witness the setting of our sun from this same magic spot.

The ancients’ folklore, like mine, must have framed any meaning they took from their awe, but beyond culture, to deeper within, those who sat here were stirred, like me, by joy and wonder at their own existence and at our world.

The lessons of lockdown, of joie de vivre and life’s essence, were long ago inscribed in this divine and ancient landscape.