Picture yourself in a kayak on a river with paperbark trees and blueberry skies. Somebody calls you, and you answer quite slowly, a kayaker with Tasmania in their eyes.

That’s the effect of kayaking up one of Tasmania’s least-known rivers and it is one of my favourite experiences. One can glide and slide there, drift and dream, and see no one but one’s own reflection.

Start out at the mouth of Pipers River and enter with the helping hand of the moon as it pushes the ocean upriver, swelling into the estuary. If you time it right, you can get a free ride for most of your journey. 

Look over your shoulder downriver to the blue waters of Bass Strait and across the waves to the green smear of Ninth Island in the distance, admire the view and the petrels above, then turn to ride the tide upriver into the estuary that has a soothing, 1950s honey-coloured tint. Indeed, with the skyline trees down to the water’s edge, pelicans lazing in the shallows and a just-visible fisherman’s shack leaking a curl of smoke from a stovepipe from storeless Bellingham on your left, you might as well be in 1958, for it would have looked little different back then. 

It is quiet this afternoon, as usual; nobody else is around but the wheeling gulls, drifting clouds and scuttling crabs. The skies are deep blue and the tide is strong.

Paddle past the pelicans and the pied oystercatchers meditating in the mudflats (they barely acknowledge you), and then veer left, out of the main current, and into the fringe, up into the waters of sleepy Pipers Brook. 

The fringe is always preferable to the main currents of life. 

Paddle without haste; there’s plenty of time, the tide is rising and you will want to come out when the water starts to fall.

Paddle peacefully, like a meditation. Breathe in, breathe out. One breath and one stroke at a time. Your paddle rotates from side to side like a pendulum. Your heartbeat slows and slowly you become in tune with your breathing, in tune and connected with the universe that we are, most of the time, so jarringly at odds with. 

Paddle left, paddle right, paddle left, paddle right, and soon you don’t even know you are paddling. Your thoughts are taken away and you are just drifting in the present, in sync with whatever time or timelessness may or may not be.

Listen to the hush of being immersed in the natural silence – the silence of a plopping fish as you spot some little flicker jumping out of the water next to you, of kookaburras cackling in the surrounding eucalyptus trees, and a feast of other song birds singing unknown songs from the bush. What do birds chat about all day, I’d love to know. They seem to have a lot to say. Is that a pardalote trilling?

I once asked an ornithologist why birds sing and he said, “Because they can.” Lucky them.

. . .

Glide along. Pause your paddle and drift with the current. It’s a slow, free ride. How good is this? How many free rides does one get in life? This is slow food for the soul.

The water is slick and reflects the sky. Squint your eyes and you feel like you are floating in the sky, flowing like a cloud unfurling above the earth. It’s easy to do.

As you flow further up, swinging left into Pipers Brook, you are entering the heart and soul of this north-eastern coastal Tasmanian landscape, into the beating heart of this island. As the river winds around corners and narrows, you can hear the rustle and thud of wallabies and pademelons in the bush, and if you are lucky, like I am today, you can see a sea eagle soaring above you, being harassed by smaller birds to get the predator out of their territory. The eagle seems like a guardian of this river, watching closely who is entering its domain. The eagle reminds me of the natives watching Marlow going up the Congo in search of Kurtz; you are being observed.

Close your eyes and continue to drift. There is nothing to bump into, the current oozes slowly. Keep your eyes closed and the birdsongs you hear gain colour and presence; a honeyeater sounds like yellow, a robin sounds pink. The birds are well named. 

Drift in the water, in the sky, in space, nowhere, anywhere; you are just adrift with your blood flowing in time with the river and tide. The river is there, waiting to take you away.

. . .

Awake when you hear a flapping scamper on the water as a bevy of black swans, startled at your arrival, beat the water and try to get the energy to take flight. They don’t have much time to gain momentum and rustle their gamey wings just above your head as they whoosh past, gaining thrust. You instinctually duck your head. The swans cry whoop as they gain altitude and leave you below, gravity dependent. What magnificent birds. We take them for granted, but really they are a state secret, here for us locals to appreciate in the secret corners of Tasmania.

Paddle on.

Below you silver streaks, as fish dart past. Soon the river becomes brackish, more river and less estuary, stained dark. There ahead you see movement in the water – is it a platypus? No, it is a water rat spooling along looking for bugs to eat. It now goes by its aboriginal name, rakali, which is much more poetic. rakali skims past you, not in the least concerned about your presence – perhaps it thinks you are just another bit of flotsam or jetsam. I like the idea of being jetsam; something deliberately cast adrift, cast out from the mainstream.

So, as jetsam, I drift.

Crows caw from the trees that surround the narrowing river. The paperbarks grow right down to the water’s edge in the mud flats, looking like a mangrove forest. I didn’t know tea trees could be so salt-tolerant. They reflect in the water and it is hard to tell where the trees stop and the water begins. It is like entering into a mirrored world, and indeed, if someone looked into your eyes, they might see a Monet of reflections.

Drifting up a river, effortlessly through the fecund bush, this is my kind of hiking.

. . .

The weather changes quickly and in the late afternoon the clouds darken the skies and the reflections become subtler, sombre and now monochrome – you have left the Kodachrome colours of the 1950s and entered the gelatine silver world of the 1850s. Kurtz’s world. 

Something stirs in the trees. You are alert to every sound and movement.

The river snakes around more corners and as it gets shallower and turns more into a brook, you need to steer around fallen branches, being careful not to swipe a spider onto your paddle and down your neck – spiders have their place, but one only wants to get so close to nature. 

The reflections are a work of art here and one is reluctant to disturb the patterns as you paddle through the oils and pastels of the creator. No matter, you are soon enveloped in the reflections and become part of the painting; the unexpected movement in a still life, the action in a landscape, an observer to the primitive.

The waters are ink-black now and around the next bend there is a coat of foam on the water, which you sluice through. The foam is broken up into thousands of foamy patterns, like puzzle pieces floating on the water with tree reflections and specks of sky in between; you are now drifting into a Picasso – with jagged lines and suggestive angles all around you. And who or what is the abstraction here, you or the river or the foam or the trees or the sky? What is real? It is hard to tell.

Duck your head as you paddle under a low overhanging branch that arcs the river with an oval reflection, creating a gateway for you to enter. Welcome to wonderland. 

Paddle a bit further and then that’s it, that’s as far as you can go – the brook is now a creek and it is blocked by fallen branches and only the fluffy goslings that you have disturbed can paddle their little feet to motor around the branches and disappear further up the shadowy creek. They may see Kurtz today, but not you; this is where you turn around to keep your sanity … or regain it. 

. . .

The tide is now slack, moving neither forward nor back, neither here nor there. So you can just sit, close your eyes and wait for it in the evening light, wait for the distant sea to decide it is time to call its waters home. Even way up here in the woods, the moon and sea are pulling the strings; everything is connected: river, tide, paddle, dream, reflection, bird and fish.

Through the overhanging branches in the sky above, you see a murmuration of starlings – thousands of them swooping and rotating in unison like a cloud of fish. Somehow they communicate perfectly, like dancers. How do they do this? What connection do they have that we have lost?

That everything is connected and every action has an effect, everyone knows philosophically, even scientifically, but it is still hard to fathom. However, it is a theory that I believe in. I believe that a ripple of water splayed by a paddle on Pipers Brook in Tasmania can create peace in Syria. This is true. Everything is connected. I have to believe this or I would stop my paddling and jump in the river and drown. This is the kayak effect.

The slack tide turns, you are no longer becalmed, and you start to drift back to the sea, back home. Paddle gently, through the reflections and introspection and back into the extroversion of the real world. Don’t make haste; haste and hurry wait soon enough. Leave well enough alone. 

Linger while you can, gently paddling, simply going with the tide, listening to the night slide by. Go with the flow of nature and you will never go wrong. Listen to the birds sing – this is what it’s all about.

As you drift out of the dreamscape and the twilight of the day approaches, think about how you will return someday, a kayaker with kaleidoscope eyes. 

Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 30 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare Tasmania for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian.