GOODBYE TO BEAUTY
Ka-whump! It was 2am, dark as tar, and a cyclonic blast of wind semi-trailered into the tent. I woke with a spine-jarring jolt. I was 950m up on Southwest Tassie’s Ironbound Range—its upper reaches mimicking a craggy aircraft carrier deck—and in the face of this gale, the ‘protection’ offered by a nearby stockade of trees seemed increasingly scant. In fact, things felt grim. The wind snaked its Herculean arms underneath the tent, doing its damnedest to power-snatch me into the adjacent Southern Ocean. Next stop: Antarctica.
This was the forecast living large. Fate was tempted and fate was cackling. Nature is fine and all that, but this was on the comfort zone’s razor edge (and, more prosaically, on the calamitous drop off the Ironbounds). The incentive that drove me to camp up high—dawn photos—was not feeling so incentivising at this point.
Fierce percussions of rain bullets were being fired, bass booming wind grenades being hurled. It was all very heavy metal; but sleeping-friendly? Not. That blessing was ragged at best.
When dawn eventually struggled out of the banshee night, I gingerly emerged from trees gathered in the lee of the high tops onto an open heath. Then ka-whump! Groundhog Day, Another gust—brawny and steroidal—gridiron-tackled me. I was propelled 15m before octopus-splaying myself to terra firma, suckering on to something, anything, that would help abort another unscheduled Cape Canaveral lift-off.
I stood. I collapsed. I
