Remembering Des
From time to time we remember people whom we lost contact with long ago. For me, Des Shield was one of those people.
I REMEMBER her then. Checked wool shirt of the kind favored by bushwalkers and outdoor types. Warm woolen trousers navy blue in colour. Petite wire framed glasses balanced on a delicate nose. Blonde hair tied back in bunches. Chunky leather boots. Pack on back.
In the good company of others we would trek into the forests and ascend to the mountain ridges for weekends or sometimes longer. Then, weary at the end of the day we would light a small fire and cook a meal together while enjoying the banter of fellow travelers in the wilderness. Next day would being much the same only, weekend drawing to an end, we would not pitch tent and light another fire. Instead, we would board cars and in loose convoy turn with regret to the city, feeling hungry.
Remembering fellow bushwalkers is understandable, but remembering a fast foods takeaway and it’s owner is curious. Lucy was a large woman somewhere in middle age and I think why I remember her is because of her good humor and her welcome when you walked into her takeaway. She sated our hunger. City bound after a couple days or more in the wilderness, we would stop at Lucy’s for a toasted sandwich or hamburger and hot chocolate milkshake. I do recall the probably true story told by Des Sheild of how in walking into Lucy’s shop he ordered a hot sardine milkshake. I doubt she fulfilled his order.
Remembering Des
Des was a Queenslander who trained as a school teacher and who made the move south to Tasmania. Liking what he found, he settled in the state and quickly came to love it’s mountains and valleys through which he walked extensively. I first met him on a weekend walk into the Wellington Range where we scrambled down a steep slope to camp beside the Northwest Bay River, here a narrow, shallow stream of moving water. Des was a personable character with a slapstick sense of humour that he demonstrated frequently. He was always bright, funny company.
We weren’t all that long out of the Vietnam war in those days and I recall Des saying that his brother had been a helicopter door gunner over there. Not the safest posting to have with the green machine but it was one he survived. Des missed the war, his marble not being plucked from the televised barrel of fate by some imagined important person, and so missing out being conscripted for a tour of the Asian tropics.
Vietnam might have been winding down but another war was in the offing and I know that Des had a lot of sympathy for the wilderness lobby that was fighting that war over the future of Tasmania’s wild places.
Around that time, he got into a life changing situation with Catherine, a young woman who would occasionally appear on bushwalks. Catherine was quiet and easy going, something of a calming presence then in the second half of her twenties. She wore her long, fair hair parted down the middle, but what was special about Catherine was that she was an artist who produced wistful, atmospheric images in watercolor of the mountains. Being a sensible sort of person, sooner rather than later Des married her.
Catherine’s painting did figure one last time. The woman of the checked wool shirt and clunky boots bought a painting from Catherine which she hung above her fireplace… an image in faded blues on the white of watercolour paper depicting Mt Olympus emerging from the mists. But, like Catherine, Des and Lucy, that painting disappeared too, lost in a flash flood in a far away place.
As for Lucy and her fast food establishment, I have no specific memory linking her shop in Ouse with any particular journey into the wilderness… just a generalised memory made up of the times we stopped there. One of those stops would be the last time I ate at Lucy’s and the last time that small group of friends would be together, for after that we all went our separate ways.
I lost contact with Des after moving to a city in the north of the state to manage an adventure equipment shop. After that I moved to the mainland and in my decades living there, in quiet moments, I would think of Des from time to time.
In recent times I’ve tried searching for Des and Catherine on the web and on Facebook, but without success. It’s just this curiousity I have to find out how they fared in life. I imagine them happily hunkered down in some rural town, Des teaching, although likely retired by now, and Catherine exhibiting her paintings and both of them sipping good wine around the log fire on cold winter nights. But that’s an idealised image and you never know how life turns out for people… it’s something of an unpredictable experience that is pushed this way and that by the winds of change.
But Des? What of him? After returning to this state I asked that question on the forum of a local bushwalking club. There was no reply the next day so I figured my question was destined to go unanswered. Maybe no one remembered Des. What had happened to all of those we used to go bushwalking with? Had they too left for distant places or signed off from their former lives of weekend adventure?
Then came an answer, and it was one I did not want to hear. Years ago, Des committed suicide.
How could I reconcile the happy, cheery Des Shield with his fate? I am still puzzled.
