The moment Margie Bates steps out of the car at the Hartz Mountain carpark she knows the hike is a good idea. The air is crisp on her face and a soft white mist is descending, caressing her with its downy dew. Individual particles of water are visibly suspended in the still air, muting the silvery sheen of tea trees—blushed pink with new growth—and surrounding them like feather cloaks.
‘Thanks so much for agreeing to come, Joan,’ Margie says, framing the scene in front of her with her hands to see how it would reproduce as a painting. ‘I hope you’re feeling all right about leaving Beth with that carer.’
‘She’ll be fine. It’ll be good for the pair of us,’ Joan says, tying a double knot into the laces of her hiking boots.
Margie takes a photograph from her jacket pocket and studies it closely. It shows a millpond-smooth lake within which is reflected a jagged mountain ridge dusted with snow. Beside the lake is Sam’s tent and balanced on a rock at the water’s edge are his boots. A wallaby is staring at the camera. Staring at Sam.
Margie rediscovered the photograph in one of Sam’s albums just days before, and remembers what he told her when he first showed her the picture: ‘You could do that walk, Mum. You’d love it. I’ll take you myself one day. I promise.’ She returns the print to her pocket and pats it through the Gore-tex with her hand. Well, Sam, she thinks, here I am.
Margie can only see five metres in front of her, and imagines painting the veiled scene in watercolour. For the background, a wash—a mix of ultramarine blue and madder brown. While the paper is still wet, she would make soft shadows with tiny dabs of the brush. She’d continue the wet-on-wet technique to build up the tea trees in the foreground, allowing the pinks and green-greys to blend naturally. It would be a challenge to achieve an ethereal quality while still providing enough definition to give the painting some substance. Above all, she mustn’t let it get muddy, always a danger when working wet. She would add highlights of raw sienna in the foreground, as though the sun was just making it through the mist to light the rocks closest to her.
She takes her camera from the top of her backpack and fires off three shots, already excited by the prospect of painting the scene when she gets home.
‘We’re not even out of the carpark, Margie hon!’ Joan laughs. ‘I hope you’ve got a lot of film in that pack!’
‘Plenty.’ Margie chuckles, thinking of the six packets of film stuffed into her sleeping bag for safe-keeping. ‘It’s reference material for painting. But if I stop too much, you just go on ahead.’
Margie remembers Sam complaining about Sascha wanting to stop too often on hikes, to watch a bird, or to eat, or drink, or have a wee. She remembers urging him to be patient and enjoy the journey. It had been good advice.
‘Okay, we’d better make tracks,’ Margie says. ‘So we’re not setting up camp in the dark.’
‘Ready when you are.’ Joan swings the pack onto her back, as if she’s done it a million times.
Margie struggles into her own pack, and suddenly understands the merit in Sam’s dehydrated food. Joan has a few packets of the stuff stowed deep in her pack, but Margie has secretly taken the cans of soup and beans. She takes a few steps towards the start of the track and hopes she’ll survive the walk.
‘Okeydokey,’ Joan says, springing weightlessly into her first steps as though she is moon-walking. Margie watches her stretching out her short legs in Sam’s oversized wet-weather pants and jacket. Both sets of cuffs, at the ankles and at the wrists, have been rolled up two or three times. The pack itself reaches almost to the top of Joan’s head, so that all Margie can see of her friend are a few piebald curls bobbing about.
It had been a last-minute decision to offer Sam’s hiking gear to Joan. At the time it seemed a sensible and obvious gesture, but now she can’t help thinking about the last time Sam wore it, where he had been and what he’d been thinking. A large lump forms in her throat. She focuses on each step and the calming surrounds, allowing herself to be lulled by the simple act of walking up the winding track. Peace descends and she releases a long sigh. Underfoot, rocks, slippery with moss, dot the red clay like dollops of fresh green paint.
A scarlet robin flits onto the track and drinks hurriedly from a pool of water. Margie gasps, and, telling Joan to stop, crouches down to better see the bird. The lump returns to her throat.
‘It’s Sam,’ Margie whispers. ‘I saw a robin at the house the day he died. Every time I see one now I think it’s his spirit paying me a visit.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Joan says, resting her hand on Margie’s forearm. The robin vanishes into the undergrowth and Margie rises to her feet. Joan takes her cue and walks on without words. They have been friends for long enough to know when to talk, and when to be silent.
At the top of the incline, Margie drinks in the vista rising up above her. Hartz Mountain looms majestically over what is now a level, duckboard track. Off in the distance, Margie glimpses Sam’s beloved southwest wilderness.
‘You don’t get away from it all, you get back to it all,’ Joan says.
‘I’ve heard that somewhere before.’
‘Peter Dombrovskis, the landscape photographer.’
‘That’s right. Sam had a poster with that quote on it.’ Margie shakes her head in wonder, taking this as another sign that her son is with her, here and now. She peers down into the crowns of regal forest giants in the valley below. The treetops merge into one another in an ancient mosaic of every imaginable green. She wonders which of the trees rallying for supremacy are myrtles and which are sassafras, Huon and King Billy pine. Once they are in timber form, made into tables and chairs, Margie can pick them a mile off, but seeing them here, in their natural state, she is at a loss. Sam would have been able to show her, she thinks.
‘Isn’t it incredible that these forests have been growing since before white man even set foot on this island?’ Joan says. ‘Do you know there are animals down there that are no longer found on the mainland?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Margie says. It is as if she is sailing above the sea of green. ‘Can you smell smoke?’
‘Yep,’ Joan says, as they wind their way around the mountain track. She points beneath them and both women stare at the ugly blackened scar of clearfelling still smoking from a recent forestry burn.
Margie feels personally assaulted, her inner peace shattered. It’s a bit like a death when a forest is logged, she decides. All the structures, the complexity, that were a person or a landscape are erased in one fell swoop.
In silence, the women wind their way further around the mountain, leaving the deforested valley in their wake. They walk for another hour across an undulating plateau, before being greeted by a perched lake nestled at the base of a rocky peak. Margie recognises the campsite straight away. She pulls Sam’s photo out of her jacket pocket and uses it to locate his exact tent spot, and the rock where he left his boots. It sends a sharp pain through her like an invisible winged arrow. Sad, yet strangely happy at the same time.
‘Here we are.’ She stops in front of the lake, close to where Sam must have stood to take the photo that now rests in her hand. ‘Our campsite. Sam’s campsite.’
Joan releases the hip strap of her rucksack and lets the weight of it fall heavily to the ground. ‘And a beautiful one it is.’
Margie unloads the tent and starts to erect it, fibreglass poles and pegs going in all directions.
‘I take it you didn’t do a practice run in the lounge room?’ Joan teases.
‘I did actually, but you’re one of the few people I’d admit that to.’
A fine rain starts to fall as the tent is raised and the two women make for its cover, dragging their packs in behind them.
Through the smoky haze of the tent fly, Margie watches the rain fall on the lake. She imagines that each delicate drop of water will be casting minute ripples over the dark surface. Perhaps, in some immeasurable way, the tiny ripples will make it to the other side. A feeling of peace again washes over her, a feeling that she might just survive after all.
‘I’ll get some water for a cup of tea,’ Joan says, grabbing the pot and squeezing herself out of the tent. Margie watches her pull the hood of Sam’s jacket over her head and crouch beside the rock where her son sat his boots a lifetime ago. Tears well in her eyes as she imagines that it’s Sam collecting water for her. She can’t even remember what she said to him when he promised to bring her here one day. She’d probably made a joke that he’d have to carry her half the way. How she wishes she had simply said yes.
As the women boil the billy, Margie wonders how Dave is coping today, Sam’s day. Whether he can take a few moments to lose himself in the stars and shed a few tears, or whether he’ll be having to be Mr Cool in front of his crew. She doubts he’ll mention Sam’s anniversary to any of them.
She serves the tea in metal mugs, handing one to Joan. ‘Do you mind if I light a candle? It’s something I do every year at this time.’
‘Of course not. You don’t have to ask my permission. Would you like some time on your own? I could go for a walk around the lake.’
‘No, you stay put. I’d like the company.’ Margie reaches into the side of her pack and locates a large candle the colour of a summer sky strewn with clouds. She climbs out of the tent and walks over to Sam’s rock, placing the candle carefully in a hollow that seems to have been ground out of the stone for just this purpose. Once lit, the candle forms a beautiful beacon in the fading light, attracting moths and small insects that fly to the borders of its warmth before disappearing into the night.
It is in this space, that ancient lichen-encrusted rocks and gnarled, wind-worn alpine vegetation speak their stories to her, and, along with the ripples on the lake, cast their hypnotic spells. All things seem connected, and, for just a moment, she almost forgives the world for what it has taken from her.