Tasmania was settled by convicts. In 1824 there were 12,556

Europeans in Tasmania of whom 6,261 were convicts. Living on the island was to

be punishment enough, but convicts who re-offended were sent out to the Tasman

Peninsula, a jut of land south and east of Hobart, which is the state capital

and the island’s largest city. At Port Arthur, the penitentiary still stands,

though with no roof, and tourists wander the beautiful British styled gardens,

or at night tour the sight to feel the ghosts that haunt these hills. To be

imprisoned in such a beautiful place would be a particular agony.

I was not sent to Tasmania as a convict. I was on holiday.

There were lots of reasons I chose Tasmania, some of which I knew and some I

had yet to discover. The main reason was that my childhood friend, Sonia, had

written inviting me to join her family for the holidays in a house they had

rented outside of Port Arthur. It did not take me long to say yes. In the

months that led up to my departure, it occurred to me that I was embarking on a

long trip to visit someone I did not really know. That is, the most time Sonia

and I had spent together was between the ages of five and ten when we roamed

the hills and valleys of Central Pennsylvania under the care and enthusiasm of

her mother.In 1971 her family

moved to Australia. Since then we had seen each other twice, the last time in

1983. A lot had happened in the intervening years. On her side she had married

and had two children, Nina, 14 and Frankie, 12. On my side—well, too much to

tell on my side.

When I walked through the door of the house in Hobart, Sonia

rushed toward me for a hug. She looked just like I remember her mother: an open

face, a quick smile, short dark hair with a bit of a wave. Like her mother, she

is physically strong, and with that her intellectual confidence has a wonderful

grounding. As we hugged hello I knew right away that my young self had been

right: there was and still is something enchanted about being in Sonia’s

presence.

I followed

Sonia and Nina out from Hobart in my rental car. The idea of following them was

that I just had to focus on their car, not on the counter-intuitive fact of driving

on the left. This makes it sound simple, and to an extent it was, but every

time I needed to turn I flipped on the windshield wipers and whenever I had to

shift, I reached down with my right, not left, hand.Plus, I had a poor sense of where the left edge of the car

was, so I kept slipping off the roads that had no shoulder. And—there was no

gawking at the landscape as I drove. So they turned into a pull out to give me

my first view of the Peninsula.

The water of the Tasman Sea morphs from a deep blue to

turquoise near the scallop white beaches. I saw from the start that to write

about this land clearly—and the land itself is clear, the air swept clean by

winds from the Antarctic—was going to take some doing and that everyone was

going to have to forgive me both some clichés and a lot of excess. It was a

stunning view.

I could have dawdled there but they were eager to get home

to the wide roofed house looking out onto the sea, and in the distance Tasman

Island. This stretch of coast was near where Abel Tasman landed while sailing

for the Dutch East India Company in 1642. (The name, Tasmania was not put in

place until 1856; for a long time it was Van Diemen’s Land).

That first evening set the tone for the trip: lobster on the

grill, and as we settled in to eat, Nina called, “Susie, the pademelons are

here.” And they were, hopping out of the bush onto the wide-open lawn, a bit

shy but not frightened as I circled, trying to photograph their quirky beauty.

A pademelon (pronounced paddy-melon) is the smallest in the

Kangaroo-Wallaby chain of hopping marsupials. It has a long fine nose that

comes to a definite tip, dark like a child paints the nose of an animal. The

eyes are black drops, no white anywhere, set against its dusky brown fur. I

admit, those eyes that look like buttons sewn on do not make it look bright. It

often sits on its haunches, little front paws curled over, which brings it to

about three feet high. It hopped slowly, then stooped to nibble grass.

The next morning I woke to a vibrant sunrise over Tasman

Island, and to the calls of the strangest sounding birds I had ever heard.

Everything in Australia is larger including their raven-like black birds known

as currawongs. They make even more noise than your average crow—there’s a

grating noise that seems to come from the back of their throats. Their calls

sound like a complaint. In short, it was impossible to sleep much past dawn for

the ruckus. That sent me out with binoculars to find the brush bronzewing, its

om-om-om from the bush comforting and then the superb fairy wrens, their blue

collars astonishing. (And, who could not love a bird with such a name? Superb

indeed.)

The next call from Nina came late in the morning. “Look, a

snake,” she hollered from the upstairs. Across the green lawn, the same lawn

that had been dotted with pademelons the night before, was a long black thing,

perhaps six feet long and as thick as my wrist. I rushed out with my camera.

“Don’t get too close,” Sonia called leaning from the upstairs window, “some

snakes will chase you if they feel threatened.” Great. There are three snakes

in Tasmania: the Tiger (that big black snake), the white-lipped whip snake, and

the copperhead. All are poisonous. I saw all three while there, and perhaps a

dozen of the Tiger. I am a fan of snakes, try hard to love them. This doesn’t

mean that every sighting—some unnervingly close to the trails I walked—wasn’t

accompanied by a rush of adrenalin.

And so my introduction to Tasmania began. Puzzling

creatures, colorful birds, dozens of eucalyptus trees, green, blue. Over a

third of the island, which is the size of Ireland, is protected, parks or

wilderness land. This leaves a lot for creatures to thrive, though the

Tasmanian tiger is extinct and the Tasmanian devil, which has developed a

facial cancer, is endangered.

The physical joy of Tasmania is that water is never far

away, but mountains are also close by. We undertook lots of glorious hikes. At Fortescue

Bay we trekked out to Canoe Bay and on to Bivouac Bay, listening to the rich

call of a Golden Whistler, then of a Grey Shrike-thrush. Fairy penguins, those

pint-sized birds, nest in burrows trailside and we spied their sleepy heads as

they sat on their eggs. We hiked the top of the cliffs at Eaglehawk Neck,

looking down steep dolerite cliffs to gin-clear water or into blow holes that spewed

foam as the waves crashed in. After our hike we ate delicious calamari with

chips and wandered Doo-town where all of the homes sport Doo-names (Doo-Mee,

Doo-Write, Doo Drop Inn). One afternoon I took a solo hike out to the long

plateau that is Cape Raoul to look down onto organ pipe cliffs and crashing

ocean. (I missed the trail that would have led me to view seals on the rocks

below.)

All of this was glorious. The sun shone without hesitation

and the temperatures remained exquisitely in the 70s. All of the rain I had

been promised came in small fits in the night. In between these long hikes were

hours of reading (I can recommend Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania, which

gives a sense of the ruckus, often horrendous past of this lush place), card

games, and good meals. I got to watch Sonia in action as the efficient

marvelous cook, the loving mother pulling together a picnic, swinging another

load of laundry, cuddling her daughters. And I got to learn of her intense work

as an immigration lawyer in Brisbane. For both of us with no phone, and no

internet connection work felt—work was—very blissfully far away.

Nestled in there was one, perfect day. It started with a

boat tour with Tasman Island Cruises (an "eco" tour). The guides were both charming and funny,

and the day crisp and calm so we were able to nudge into caves and to edge in

close to the cliffs, to see the Totem Pole where climbers were heading up a

route, and the Pillar, a thousand feet of rock.We circled Tasman Island admiring the now obsolete lighthouse,

the enormous Australian Fur Seals galumphing on the rocks and swimming

acrobatically in the water. Then they took us out to that geographic point

where the Tasman Sea ends and the Antarctic Ocean begins. Thousands of miles

off rested the continent of Antarctica. A shy albatross sailed by in the

distance, pointing us south.

Dolphins bounded by the boat, Black faced cormorants sunned

on a rock, a mass of shearwater or mutton-birds skimmed the water and air. I

returned as if baptized by the air, the sun, the water, the creatures.

Back “home,” Sonia had a hike planned for all of us. Now,

I’m not going to name the location of this hike because it was so perfect, so

isolated. That was the pleasure: to hike through low-lying scrub on a high sandy

plateau, with views of the ocean all around. From time to time we passed over

emerald green moss, or trod on dolerite flecked with orange lichen. After about

two and a half hours of walking, we dipped down onto a pure white, purely empty

beach. (Sonia says that if you come and find her, and are nice to her, she will

take you to this beach.) It was ours for the few hours we lingered to play and

discover, rock hopping to find our own private blowhole.

Paralleling my pleasure in the excess of natural beauty was

my enchantment with Nina and Frankie. They came alive in this world, and their

excitement became my own. I saw through their eyes as we rock hopped and they

pulled up starfish calling, “Look, Susie, look, it’s beautiful.” There were

colorful shells and anemones and grotesquely large gelatinous jellyfish in

shades of orange or pink, and creatures we could not name that looked like

large shelled slugs. They ran up enormous sand dunes and raced back down,

plunging into the water as if they might swim to Antarctica.That seemed possible. Anything seemed

possible. We all body surfed in the cold water until a wave folded me in two.

When I stood on shore and squinted, I could see past the Tasman Sea to the

Antarctic Ocean, and there to the end of the world. When I turned to watch Nina

and Frankie run down the sand dunes I could squint past the present and into

the past.

Watching Nina and Frankie reminded me of E.B. White’s rich

essay, Once More to the Lake, where watching his son in the water of the lake

of his youth he loses the line between self and son. Watching Nina and Frankie

was seeing my sister and me at the Indiana Dunes, or Sonia and me hiking up

Shingleton Gap, brushing past rhododendron in bloom, and finding stones that

shimmered like hope.

 *

On the flight to Tasmania I met a woman in the airport. “You

live in Tasmania?” I asked. She nodded with a smile. I figured I would not meet

many people who lived there, but rather tourists galore (I did, but I met only

two Americans the whole trip). “Was raised in England. Had five brothers who

spoiled me. My husband took over right where they left off. Been mollycoddled

my whole life,” she explained, still grinning. I wanted to ask more questions,

but she turned to her magazine. This was the end of her story, sweet and

simple: from one happy set up to the next, and Tasmania was perfect.

We all boarded the plane—a much more relaxed affair than

traveling in the States, I have to add. Sitting next to me was a woman with a

similarly direct story. “I got married and moved to England. Then things went

bad. Well, they went bad when my son was born. I came home to Australia, met my

husband and we moved to Tasmania.” She didn’t even need to finish the story.

Happy ending for all. Music swells, everyone smiles, green and lush and birds

flapping in the breeze.

These people hadn’t just reduced their lives to a good short

story, they were haikus.

I have a good life.

I live in Tasmania.

Please do envy me.

And I did envy them, the good life, but also that they could

tell their stories with such conciseness. Whenever I launch into a story I have

to give the pre-story, which leads to a few small anecdotes, which leads to

more pre-story until I get to the story story, which always has too many

details. Perhaps like this blog post.

There’s no simple story here. There are superb fairy wrens

and shy albatross, convict’s ghosts lurking in the cliffs, picnics and card

games. There is the past swimming into the present, and the present energized

by the past. Here is what I want to say: Old friends, those you make when you

are a child, have a purity to them that friendships later in life can not

duplicate. As a kid the desire for a friend is strong and uncalculated. Sonia

was that friend. She is the friend who knows the bones of my past, as I know

hers. There’s no other way to say it: this is friendship that is like family.

It has endured 27 years of absence and yet was still there with the strength of

acceptance and affection I only expect from family. We had lots of details

about our lives to catch up on, which we did in a meandering way, on rides to

the trails, while hiking, late at night when everyone was asleep. But catching

up is not really about the details, it’s about recapturing the immediacy of

life that we had shared, of running down the sand dunes and plunging into the cold

sea, headed for Antarctica.