Stories of people…
Memories of Peter
I wrote this story some time ago when I published it on my old website. I ignored it over the years but now I think the time to republish it has come. It is a story of remembering, of a time and of a person who came into my life for a few years.
I’VE BEEN THINKING of Peter. It’s now some years since my friend, Yvonne, spoke of him. Neither she nor I had seen him for quite some time. For me, that was years.
I was managing a small adventure equipment business when I met him. The store was in downtown Launceston, the would-have-been capital of the state of Tasmania had Hobart not won the title. Peter probably walked into the shop one day and we got to talking. That happened a lot, people walking in and starting a conversation. I got to meet a lot of interesting people that way. I don’t know how else I would have met him.
That was more than 40 years ago. It was well over a decade ago that Yvonne and I were walking by the Tamar. As we approached the effluence of the South Esk River where it joins the Tamar at the end of Cataract Gorge, Yvonne stopped and pointed to a sailboarder out on the water. Look… it’s Peter, she said. Peter! Peter! she called loudly. The figure on the sailboard looked up, lost his balance and fell with a splash into the murky brown water. He made his way to shore. You should remember this person, Yvonne said to him as she pointed to me. I could see him mulling over how I fitted into his life. He was hesitant, as if trying to place me in his catalog of past friends and acquaintances. Then the penny dropped and he remembered. Or so it appeared. I’m unconvinced about that.
I don’t know how long it was after I met Peter that we started connecting socially. We went for walks in the mountains, caving below them and cross-country skiing across them. Peter introduced my partner at the time, and I, to Northern Caverneers, the local speleology group. Friday nights after work we would catch up with Peter and others of the Northern Caverneers in Pierre’s restaurant where we would share a meal and plan future expeditions down into the caves and up into mountains.
I never again saw Peter after I left Tasmania. I remembered him, but that was in the way we occasionally think about some part of our life now gone.
Cave and mountain
One day after work Peter took my partner and I to Croesus Cave, an active stream cave ornately decorated with stalactites, stalagmites, flows and other formations. It was our first cave. Others followed.
He also introduced me to rock climbing on a cliff in Cataract Gorge. When I was walking past the cliff a couple years ago there was a young woman climber teaching people there. We spoke briefly. I told her that the cliff was where I was introduced to climbing. She offered me a climb, saying she had some friction shoes that should fit. I thought about it but declined, recalling that day there with Peter and others now decades in the past. The cliff persists. The cast of climbers changes.
Our bushwalks took us further afield. One Friday night we drove out to Mt Field and overnighted in what we knew as Rangers Hut, then a disused shack at he start of the walk out to Mt Field East. There was nothing in the hut. We collected wood and got a fire going in the fireplace, rolled out our sleeping mats on the floor, spread our sleeping bags and talked as people do in mountain huts.
One summer I made a memorable trip with Peter and two others, a weekend on Mt Anne, highest peak in South West Tasmania. It was to be a light and fast trip, so Peter and I took our frameless, blue canvas, Joe Brown packs. Made by Karrimor and named for a noted British climber, these were tough alpine packs which held just enough for a lightweight weekend.
Ascending the dolerite peak involved scrambling, chimneying up a short vertical pitch and traversing an exposed, sloping ledge. I remember how Peter offered a reluctant party member a length of climbing tape to hold. It gave him psychological assurance but absolutely no physical safety.
The weather was sunny, windless and warm so we spent time on the summit that day. Peter and I took off our shirts to make the most of the day’s warmth. It was a glorious half hour or more in the sun on the summit’s flat dolerite slab with a vast landscape of mountains and ridges stretching to the far horizon and the oceanic mental state induced by the mountain refreshing us. We camped on the summit plateau where in the morning we were treated to a superb sunrise as the great red orb rose into a clear sky above the Snowy Range.
A life with complications
Peter was a light and optimistic presence with a sense of humour and irony, always ready to crack a laugh over something. His working life was sporadic. At one time he worked as a diver doing wharf inspections. Later, he found employment at the Maritime College in Launceston. He told me that before we met he worked for a surveyor.
In the time after he walked into the shop, we and our partners got to know each other. Peter and wife Rhonda, a school teacher, were living an itinerant life in Launceston, house-sitting for the state roads department and occupying, rent free, houses acquired for demolition for road construction. Later, they bought a nice house at Gravelly Beach, a village on the western bank of the Tamar to the north of Launceston. This they shared with a large red dog called Selkie and their young daughter. There, they appeared to be settled.
That might have been so and it might have continued had Peter not revived an earlier friendship with the petite, blonde wife of an outdoor education instructor at a prominent private school. Jane was a mother of four who had an on-and-off again relationship with Peter that spanned years. As Rhonda told it, he and Jane once eloped only to come back to their respective spouses a week later because they ran out of money.
Jane’s was not the only affair before, as it was told to me, Rhonda packed her bags and headed south to find another teaching position. The other was with the partner of a friend with which Peter used to go caving and bushwalking. That ended with one partner quitting the state to restart life in Sydney. The other stayed in Tasmania.
Yvonne, a vicacious, extraverted woman who I have known for decades, moved to Launceston after she returned from working in China. There, she got to know Peter. Over the years I would occasionally ask her about him. I was curious to know what had become of him. She told me of his maritime misadventure when he lost a sailing vessel on the Tasmanian East Coast. I learned of how he and his then-partner had a child and how they were living in Hobart. Yvonne had little contact with Peter over recent years. News became sparse and there was nothing for quite some time.
Surprise
Years went by before I heard news of Peter. Then, one day when I was on the road, travelling in my minivan on the Mid-North Coast of NSW, my phone dinged. A text. On setting up camp that afternoon I recalled the text and clicked it open. It was from Yvonne.
“Have you heard about Peter?”, was her cryptic message.
Curious, I replied “no”.
“He died”, she responded.
I was stunned.
Sojourner in wild places
So, I sit here in this coastal town still feeling stunned and a little sad. Peter was someone who left my life years ago but who lingered in memory. That memory was stimulated not all that long ago when, clicking through old photos of my life in Tasmania, I came upon an image showing three people, a couple of us shirtless, sitting on the dolerite slab that is the summit of Mt Anne. One of the shirtless was Peter.
How do I sum up Peter in those years when our lives coincided in this southern state, when we explored the caves, ski-toured the winter landscapes and trekked the mountains together?
Well, Peter’s was an adventurous life focused non the outdoors. His was an easy-going presence and a personality that lived life one day at a time. He didn’t seem to spend much time thinking about the future. Peter was a lover of the mountains and the sea, a frequent sojourner in wild places both above and below ground. He was also a family man who strayed. I see him as a wanderer in life and, in that, I think we share something in common.
The wayward life…
