Cradle Mountain releases her miracles
writer and photographer KATE BOWN
Wind roars down the summit cliffs, storm clouds swirl above, and the afternoon light fades to grey. Cradle Mountain, one of Tasmania’s most talismanic peaks, is furious. And yet, I do not retreat to our hut in the valley below; I dance around a snow-pole on her plateau.
It’s not graceful. The weight of my pack tips me earthward. My thighs tangle. I spin out of control, swept into the mountain’s mood, and my own.
The plateau whizzes past: tussocks of deep green alpine heath, tiny teardrop lakes, tender cushion plants bursting with delicate white flowers, and a silver non-slip boardwalk slithering like a snake towards the lookout. In the distance, the blue spurs of Barn Bluff and Pelion West.
A frog bleats from a nearby tarn, calling and calling like a lamb that has lost its mother. I hang on for dear life, my cheeks flushing in the wind. One arm stretches towards Cradle Mountain, fingers fan like a wave curling to the shore, chin lifts, toes point, and hips thrust cloud-high.
“Go, mum,” my youngest daughter chants.
I beam. It’s ridiculous and joyful. It’s the wildest competition I’ve entered – 1,000 metres above sea level in the heart of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. I may be 40, but I’ve still got it – just a little. My husband is giggling. He is loving this. I bow.
“Right,” I say. “Your turn.”
. . .
Gosh it feels good to be a little wild again, because these days something has taken hold of me. It’s not sadness, that much I know. It feels more like a cool breeze slipping through my house. I’m shivering so much my muscles ache.
Can I tell you?
I’m writing on my phone instead of paper, walking in circles clutching my back, gazing out windows, hiding in the bathroom reading Ernest Shackleton. There’s this too: asking ChatGPT to diagnose the string of little green bruises running down my shin.
How bad do you think it is?
I’ve tried everything to settle the air. I have brewed chai with a different kind of milk,
lain on a massage table with needles in my glute, switched to golden kiwi fruit, flipped the mattress, cycled for hours on the stationary bike, done handstands, hung from the door frame, eaten lunch in the greenhouse, and watched the snow peas ascend the lattice.
I’ve tried everything, and yet nothing helps. I’ve tried everything, except mountains.
. . .
It’s five in the morning and I’m shaking my legs out of my sleeping bag. I pull a woollen jumper over my head, reach my arms inside a down jacket, fleece pants on, then boots, gloves, beanie and a head torch.
I slip out of the hut. Quiet now. My husband and children are asleep. I want this mountain all to myself.
I hit the Cradle Mountain track under the cover of bird song. A black currawong calls: karweek, karweek. The wind is gathering. I follow a staircase of shimmering rock, nod to the snow gums rattling their leaves.
I have no destination. Years ago, I would have made a plan, headed for the summit, seeking the lightness one finds in gaining altitude. Now, I just want to move my body in the company of this mountain: one wild being in conversation with another.
She is rock and water, soil, plants and insects. She is bird and mammal and a quality I feel but cannot name: a circular time and a curious light. I am blood and bone and a mysterious mind: one that dwells too much on the way of things, perhaps.
I pass a tumbling creek. I reach down to drink the sound of its water. It roars and rumbles like a jet plane turning tricks on regatta days. I watch it hurtle through gaps in the dark rocks, fall over dead trees, and blow beautiful tea-coloured bubbles in an eddy beside the track.
Plants reach out to greet me: deciduous beech in full green, spreading cheeseberry with tiny red bauble fruits, and an Alpine daisy almost blooming.
The track bends around a cluster of pencil pines. The rise flattens and I pause. The sky is pinking and this feels like a good place to watch the sunrise. The plants are stopping too, they kneel, barely higher than my boots now. Sharp wedges of rock – a type of schist perhaps – shoot from the ground. I admire their white splashes of lichen; they remind me of the pancakes my children make on special days for breakfast.
The sky is a dreamy blue with a scattering of blushing clouds. On the horizon, an egg-yolk glow pulsing between the folds of Marian’s Lookout and Hansen’s Peak, and just above, all the warm colours of morning: peach, tangerine, caramel. And now here comes the dawn strike: the sun stretching to the other side of Cradle Valley and painting the ridges in golden light.
I stay a while, watching the mountain release her miracles, my body held in her vast and lonely cradle, while she sings the morning.
I should have known that mountains have a way of working things out. Perhaps I asked the wrong doctor. When my pelvis started up its pains, when my heart ached because it missed travelling by bicycle, I booked a GP appointment. The doctor ordered a blood test: hormone levels, red blood cell count, glucose and thyroid.
But what about my geology? Did he check the dirt under my fingernails, altitude in my lungs, my lichen levels, quartz shards in my eyes? How wild did he think I needed to be, to feel alive?
. . .
I slip inside the hut, remove my jacket and boots, slide into my sleeping bag. I close my eyes and listen to my family release their morning. There is a gentle snoring, the rustle of paper, and the soft hiss of socks sliding across plastic mattress covers.
“Mum,” my youngest daughter calls, “can I have a snuggle?”
She pads along the wooden floorboards to my bunk bed. I reach down, open the zip, and she climbs in. She wraps her arms around my neck and nestles her head in my hair: a mess of auburn tassels on a pillow made of my clothes.
We’re barely a moment together and then she is sitting up like the sun, striking my tummy with her toes, wriggling from my sleeping bag like golden light.
“You’re a butterfly,” I whisper, “emerging from my cocoon.” She stretches her arms wide and flaps away towards the table by the window. And I follow her into the morning, flying on my magnificent wild wings. wildandwonderful.substack.com.
