The Wild Call

Reflecting on family, friendship and big life decisions while walking, chatting and skinny dipping in Tasmania.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.
Extract from ‘Sea-Fever’ by John Masfield.

By Katie Sloane

One of the largest downsides of working an itinerant job, is that even if you don’t move on yourself, your colleagues, who often become close friends, do. I have a number of besties dotted around the globe from NZ and Australia to Kazakhstan, Switzerland and Berlin — and the UK of course.

Two years ago, not knowing when we might have the chance to go again, I booked flights for S and I to go see one such close friend in Tasmania. I’d last seen her in Feb 2019 in Borneo when we’d flown for half term to join her and her husband on their yacht — they were living the dream: they‘d bought a boat and were sailing the world — who knew where they’d end up? It was exciting and the three of us got to join them on this little slice of their round-the-world adventure in Kota Kinabalu, SUP surfing, boat jumping, wining and dining on smuggled treasures on board, occasionally using the tender to eat on land, and when reboarding in the dark, splaying our fingers in the water to gape in wonder at the luminescent phosphorescence glowing beneath our hands— magical times.

And then Covid hit.

Getting ‘stuck’ in Indonesia, from what KB has told me, felt a little like us having Thailand as our playground. So you can’t live the life you want to (travel restricted and forbidden to see family) but are given an extremely fortunate lot in the grand scale of all things Covid: for us it was having the country to ourselves for a year or so; they were adopted by an island to whom they are immensely grateful. Once travel was possible again, they sailed ‘home’ to Tasmania, sold the boat and settled down to ‘normal’ life — whatever that is. While KB is British, her husband is from Tassie. They were there for the foreseeable but maybe had plans to sail another boat across the Atlantic.

With Covid restrictions lifted and no idea when our paths may cross again, we spoke on WhatsApp — if you wanna come visit us, do it now! Who knows how long we’ll be here? So we did, just S and I, a week before Christmas while Joe worked. We packed our tent and camping supplies and headed down under to the land of wallabies and Antarctic winds.

The plan was to hang out and walk — which we did plenty of. S had had a tricky few years at school and she had her IGCSE mocks coming up; a week in Tassie to start the holiday off seemed a great way to blow the cobwebs away and catch up with old friends. KB’s husband (another Joe) was making slow and steady progress recovering from life-threatening complications following a ruptured appendix while they were travelling in Queensland on mainland Australia about six weeks before we arrived. He’d lost a lot of weight fairly quickly and KB had had to manage the driving and hospital visits as they'd made their way back south in time for our visit. It had been touch and go and she had been an absolute trooper at managing and organising everything — while also preparing for us to come. She really is superwoman.

From landing in Hobart, we headed down to Woodbridge (presumably named after the original one in Suffolk near where I hail from) and then up to Freycinet National Park camping in fine weather, hiking up to Wineglass Bay amid intermittent rainstorms, spotting lots of wallabies just hanging out on pathways or investigating bins; a shuffling wombat one merry night while ambling back from their converted van to our tent; dining on mussels plucked from the sea, and showering al fresco with little splendid fairy wrens hopping about, the bright blue of their feathers glinting like sequins.

After a couple of days of lashing rain, we headed down south again to escape to the much drier Lime Bay before S had had enough of camping and we booked a hotel in Hobart for a few days in the lead up to Christmas. Here we enjoyed a truly Aussie panto, Christmas markets, stunning views on Mount Wellington, the Cascade brewery and the sobering stories from the ‘Female Factory’ women’s prison, spending Christmas Eve together before we flew home on Christmas morning (flight prices are slashed on the baby cheeses’ b’day) to spend our ‘Christmas Day’ with Joe on Boxing Day.

Below is an account of a walk KB and I did in Lime Bay while her Joe rested at their converted van and S stayed behind to sketch and have some downtime.

December, 2023

We left the other two back at camp and set off; the day was chilly but bright. We both wore peaked caps, two layers of long sleeves, long trousers and hiking boots. Used to the average temperature being in the low 30s, I was enjoying the novelty of the cold but was yet to venture into the sea, despite KB’s best efforts so far.

A Christmas beetle had landed on my fleece that morning: a metallic green scarab. Its lime and emerald shimmers fascinated us as we watched its furry limbs catch the fine wool fibres of my top, its back legs almost turquoise. It was the 21st of December and seemed a fitting visitor for the season.

The water filling Lime Bay in this south-east corner of Tasmania was calm with the telltale ripples of distant winds ahead. A low blanket of white clouds obscured the bright blue of the southern sky that peeked occasionally from behind them. It was one of those days where you feel squeezed between land and sky and are sure that if you were to throw a ball or your voice, it would bounce easily between land and cloud for miles before it came to a stop. The tide had come in, washing over the hermit crabs, translucent jellies, starfish and abundance of strange shells and gelatinous bodies of semi-aquatic creatures we’d been picking our way through on the sandy mudflats the night before: as the light had leaked from the sky and the tide slipped away, the vista had resembled a picture constructed from long strips of woven cloth — brown, white, slate grey — long fragments of colour stretched across the warp of the horizon; starkly beautiful, as if under hushed light, welcomingly warm and gentle.

We’d wandered, the four of us, across the dun landscape for a couple of hours, picking our way through startlingly bright natural treasures scattered on the mudflats, hopping over isolated pools of trapped water, and occasionally picking up a shell, a benign squishy jelly or the husk of a creature, bewilderingly asking what is that?!? Slime-green wiggly-fingered anemones looking like some kind of miniature cousin of the face-eating monsters in King Kong; ebony-bobbled cushion stars glossy with mucus and seawater were dappled with sand caught in their crevices rendering them a ‘rock’ leopard-print aesthetic; small jade chiton pods, deeply engrained with the wavy grooves of the creature they once held, like the roof of our mouths, or the pattern of sand under a retreating tide. Forced back by the waning light, we reluctantly returned to our camp site, the grass yellowed by summer’s drought (no rain here!) and bitten down by hungry wallabies: we’d watched them hopping about, happily munching in the twilight gloaming. Like overgrown rabbits.

Now though, the new day was rolling out over the bay – bright, despite the overcast sky – with a fresh chill in the air, inviting us to warm ourselves by hiking westwards from Lime Bay to Lagoon Beach.

Walking on yellow sand up a steep incline through scraggy bushes — long fingered and spiky, catching on our clothing like desperate hands seeking alms — we reached what a map will tell you is a long narrow lake, wider at the base where we were starting from, but spilling round into the shape of what looks like a waving dog on Google Maps. Yet on cresting the ridge that divides lagoon from land through a low rise of trees, we found it was completely dry — a vast expanse of cracked, rust-orange earth stretching out before us, like being on the edge of a desert: strangely apocalyptic and beautifully barren. Deep fissures ran between half-a-metre-wide jigsaw pieces of flaking soil — a land parched of rain — a far cry from the onslaught we’d had in Freycinet National Park a few days beforehand. Here, the ‘lake’ was still surrounded by trees, dull-green from thirst, hardy and resilient against the dry and the cold, and littered with the occasional scorched fish that hadn’t yet had the flesh picked from its bones: a musty cage of scales and moss rotting, drying on an oddly arid landscape. Protected by the trees and with the white orb of the sun intensifying its brightening glow behind the stretched sheet of cloud, the strange dry tang of foreshore felt claggy in our mouths as we worked up a sweat and discarded a layer of clothing to tie around our waists.

We walked on this almost otherworldly crisp lake-bed, crunching down dry earth, following fractured zigzags along the lake’s body to its head where it narrowed, unspooling our hearts and sharing our recent stresses. KB’s twin pulls of ill parents back home, guilt at being so far away, torn between responsibilities there and commitments to a life established here with Joe’s recent life-threatening scare: a draining and exasperating tension of arrested impotence — feeling like you’re letting everyone down, pleasing no one and feeling like every choice is the wrong one; every option flawed: helpless. I listened and allowed space to hear her words weave themselves into a confession of sorts, a release of pent up guilt, of worry, of living with the consequences of decisions made years before in response to a series of events that were not in anyone’s control. Such is our lot.

I reciprocated: mirroring her guilt, her worries, with my own: had we raised S in the UK, would she have faced similar issues? Would things have been better? Worse? We will never know; we can never know. We can only move forward; strive to live by the choices we’ve made and deal with them the best we know how.

We poured forth our hearts into the cracks of the earth, into the fissures of each other’s compassion and understanding, releasing our worst fears as they erupted, bubbling from our mouths, and soaking up the cooling burden of the other, supporting each other; each seismic confession a nourishment of sorts; a yin to the yang of the scorched earth we walked on.

We talked, we listened, we leant our heads to the side, nodded, smiled, wiped away tears; knew that we held each other in the smallest places in our hearts, tucked away, safe, for keeping.

As the lake bed narrowed, the trees grew in size and number; they leant away from the wind, battered down by inclement months of violent rain storms that must give this bay its shape. The gnarled roots gripped the earth with desperate knuckles, their spiky wizened branches displaying small khaki-green leaves — life finding a way.

And then all of a sudden the cracked, henna-coloured earth gave way to patchy shrubland before dispersing into huge drifts of sand so white they looked like snow. The solemn mood was broken as we approached the dunes that rose up before us protecting the ‘lake’ from the sea, and I laughed at how white it was, how dazzlingly bright, blindingly so under the glare of the white-hot sun. Like freshly fallen snow, the sand was smooth, unbroken, but for the odd clawed set of paw prints – wombat tracks?

Walking on sand is never easy, but this was the finest, whitest, deepest sand I had experienced in years: each step I took sank my foot almost to my ankle, flooding my hiking boots with ultra-fine grains like heavy icing sugar, increasing the weight of each footfall as I heaved my boot out of its self-made hole to attempt another arduous step up the dune. I stumbled as I tried to follow KB uphill, feeling uncomfortably warm now with the sudden effort, flanked by mean shrubs that were so dark they looked almost black, a striking and almost disorientating colour contrast in the brilliance of the day. My legs worked hard to gain purchase in the drift, my sand-filled boots sinking and slipping up this most beautiful of liquid hills, until, finally, I reached the top of the dune, panting and sweating, awed by my first glimpse of the open bay. I rolled the sleeves of my top up as far as I could, took deep, grateful breaths, and delighted in how weirdly heavy my feet felt. Sated and happy, we stood laughing in delight at the beauty surrounding us and at how starkly different it looked to the earlier landscape.

Before us, a narrow causeway of sand sloped downwards to another lip above a sharp pitch to the steely sea below, rippled with mauve shadows from the now broken cloud above. Beyond that, the low slung distant hills of Sandford stretched across the horizon, (it was too hazy and the cloud too low for us to see Wellington Park tucked in behind) with Bruny island reaching for the south. In the midground, the sheer cliffs and patchwork hills of Sloping Island loomed up, mirroring our landscape. KB looked at me then, grinning, elated, and with a raised eyebrow, and cheeky question in her eyes – shall we?

Smiling broadly and yearning now for anything to cool down, I assented. We trudged the ten metres or so across the sturdier plateau of the dune, then, reaching the lip, ran down it to the water’s edge, giddy and excited, albeit a little bit nervous at just how cold the water might be. I fumblingly untied my laces, releasing my feet from their sandy prison, pouring white gold out of them and peeling my sweaty hiking socks off – it felt great already.

In the sand flats where a glaze of sheer water sits on the surface as seawater rinses over it from the tide, we noticed an eleven armed sea star (although this one had only ten) curling its ochre limbs in apparent frustration at having been washed up about a metre from the water’s edge. Bare foot, we approached it, the curled tentacles revealing a brighter orange underneath and soft tubular ‘feet’ as it tried vainly to manoeuvre its way back to safety. We coaxed it back to the water proper, tentatively gripping a spiny limb to drag it back in. As we did so, we noticed a dark shape lurking in the water just behind the point at which the small waves rose to a slight swell before rippling to the shore – what was it? A few moments of scrutinising and pondering until we realised – a ray! We watched it for a minute or so, yet not wanting to cool off before we lost our momentum, returned to our shoes to strip off.

Looking up and down the beach to double check for interlopers and finding none, I slightly self-consciously removed my clothes: trousers, top, bra and finally pants, leaving them folded in a neat pile on top of my boots (my tidiness more a distraction than a character trait), and at ten past 11 on a Thursday morning, stone cold sober, I walked naked into the Tasmanian Sea with KB at my side.

Google tells me the Tasmanian Sea temperature averages 15.9℃ in December. I have no idea what the actual temperature was. It was cold, refreshingly, but not horrifyingly so. There was not a breath of wind so the air felt warm in comparison as the crisp water gripped our ankles and tickled our calves. We waded into the water, gasping slightly as we lowered ourselves in – the ray was still there but moving northwards along the coastline, remaining in the safety zone behind the tide-break line. We followed it cautiously, not wanting to scare it off, awed to be sharing this moment with it: remote and free on this December morning, cleansing ourselves in crystal clear water, the glacial freshness soothing our aching limbs, feeling deliciously calm and giddy at the same time, purging ourselves of our sweat and worries. Up to our necks now, we swam to keep the blood moving, kicking out to sea, keeping an eye on our winged fishy friend, giggling at our audacity, at the expansive view, at how lucky we were to be here together in this stunning part of the planet with not a soul around but ourselves and this small, friendly ray.

And this, surely, is what life is for: to take those opportunities, book that flight, hit ‘send’ on that message you’ve been writing inside your head for weeks, make those tentative steps, take the plunge. With your heart racing, head dizzy with what ifs, ignore the niggling voice of self-doubt that quiets you as (too loud and muppet-mouthed) it boasts all the reasons WHY NOT, like an inflatable Nigel Farage, full of hot air and nonsense. With a little encouragement from friends, say, Yes! Do it! and pop it out of existence. We may not see each other often; we may live continents apart – but what matters is how we connect when together, relishing these moments – whether its wiggling through a narrow cleft in the rock to steal into a hidden cave to peer out, unseen, from its TARDIS dimensions at the waves crashing below; or spending a gorgeous afternoon walking, talking, and messing about on the River Deben; or driving a detour to snatch a precious hour in a pub garden in the Kent countryside – these chances may not come again: sharing our griefs and delighting in joys, belly laughing, faces aching from smiling.

To be, here, now, in the silken folds of the sea beneath a mirroring sky.

We were chatting and when we looked again, the ray had gone. Feeling the chill now, we decided to get out: the rising breeze that had dispersed the clouds above to reveal patches of lapis-blue sky carried an Antarctic bite magnifying the cooling effects of the sea. Reaching the shore, shivering a little, we ran up and down the beach in opposite directions — a mad sight, if seen from afar — to dry off and warm a little before beginning the arduous process of dressing: shaking out sweaty, sandy clothes to cajole numbing limbs back in, glad of the warm layers against our refreshed and slightly salt-sticky skin.

Rebooted, damp but warm, we walked northwards up the beach and found an alternate route back to camp through tall eucalyptus trees on the edge of the Lime Bay state reserve, leaving the snowy sand behind us, walking on solid ground, and savouring the trees’ minty-camphor freshness — inhaling it deeply into our lungs and breathing out again: big contented sighs through the cavities of our nose.