It is a long distance traveling through this area of giants, and it makes you feel humble but also privileged to move in such majestic surroundings -- with little disturbance by traffic and no buildings for some 50 km.  Further down, the countryside opens up; smaller trees reemerge with dense green ground cover.  I am rolling along, sometimes singing and losing myself unless a climb or head wind distracts me and makes me concentrate on the road and the km still lying ahead. 

 I cannot help my thoughts going back to the “hermit”, as I am moving down the road.  It was last evening, while I was writing my notes at the Pemberton Hotel.  I heard him speak in that remarkable accent of his at the next table, pontificating to the three workers from the Pemberton mill with whom I had earlier exchanged a few words.  With his eccentric British public school intonation, he was talking about some town’s people who felt that he was a hermit; but he and his neighbor didn’t agree, he said.  He elaborated on various subjects and voiced his expertise in some anatomical peculiarities of women native to southern Italy and the Greek isles.  That topic created great interest in the three lumberjacks who listened fascinated with open mouths. 

 Later on, after the men had left, he passed by my table and I wondered whether he was British.  “Not at all”, he retorted, “I am as Australian as can be”.  When I remarked about his pronunciation he corrected that this was typical Australian, but that Australia was a class society (“not like the US”, he says) and that there was a clear distinction between the diction of the different classes.  He himself descended from the very first white man borne in Western Australia, he said, and therefore belonged to a different class – la crème de la crème, I suppose he wanted to imply.

He repeated this point several times, but was evasive when I proposed that in that case his parents must have taught him to speak like he does: “no, it’s simply a class distinction”.  He has spent some five years in the UK and some ten in the US.   But he likes it best here in Pemberton.  He has a marron (a large sweet-water lobster) farm from which he sends his crustaceans to Japan, France, the US.  The water here is the purest you find on this earth; the marron is the best food there is; Paul Bocuse is buying directly from him; he guarantees the survival of his marrons at any place for ten days after they arrive; he has it all nailed down.  His house and farm are next to the river here; riparian problems are being worked out among the neighbors themselves – no authorities need to be involved; he handles every financial and marketing matter from here via Internet.  This is the place to be, Pemberton with its great nature in the backyard.  His stints in the UK and Us have convinced him of it. 

 He was smoking his self-rolled cigarette as we talked.  His teeth are yellow, horsy, long and high in the jaw, as his gums have receded.  His hair is long, flowing gray halfway down his neck; the eyebrows bushy over steely eyes behind rimless glasses.  His roundish nose does not seem to fit into the elongated face with its trimmed salt-and-pepper beard.

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