The Button Man

#35—On enigmatic beings, unsolved mysteries and getting away from it all.

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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Once, after mum had left my place to travel the one-lane road that separates the apples from the walnuts like naughty children made to wait in straight lines, she saw the most unusual scene. Just before the road drops down to the riverbank, under the fat old gum and its spider-web branches, right where the old workers’ shack snuggles next to the storage shed, and across from the farm gate that opens into the orchard, right in that very spot, she saw something the size of a man quickly, though somewhat unnaturally, crawl across the road and slip under the barbed-wire fence. It was wearing a large coat.

I joked it must have been The Button Man come down from the mountains in his leather-aged skin to stock up on apples. The Button Man—a lone figure who lives high in the remote parts of the alpine ranges, wild and free. Some say he’d scare a dead dog, that his eyes can pierce you from one hundred paces away, others, that he’s nice and knows more about those mountains than an Instagram influencer knows about facial filters. He always appears from nowhere, silent and agile, aware of your every move, and wears a coat with buttons hand-carved from deer antlers. He hunts with spears.

Ranges Upon Ranges, pastel sketch by Alia Parker.

Nothing about what mum saw that day makes sense. Was it Old Buttons? Or something else? It can’t be easily explained and so, as we tend to do, we seek to rationalise it. A mysterious sighting linked to a mysterious man and set in a wild and mysterious place. Oh, you’re right, that doesn’t sound rational at all. But it’s intriguing. And it’s the story we naturally gravitate to.

Unfortunately for The Button Man, being such an enigma is an easy scapegoat that’s led to him being accused of all manner of unexplained circumstances, especially murders and missing people, none of which have any veracity and many of which are later solved with reasons that have nothing to do with the reclusive mountain man. Understandably, those who have met Buttons, and are not afraid of him, are endearingly protective of his right to live his chosen life without hordes of self-appointed crime detectives seeking him out.

Our imaginations are nonetheless captivated by the mystery of such characters. We can’t help but fill the void.

Who, with no name and no past, would choose to live in one of the most remote tracks of bushland in Australia, surviving off the land and exposed to bitterly cold winters of snow and ice that give way to raging bushfires capable of ripping up a mountain twice as fast as Usain Bolt? Who is it that finds more comfort in the extremes of nature than the manufactured comforts of humankind?

Is it someone who, from his high perch, watches the sun set over the purple and pink world and its infinite horizon of mountaintops and feels soothed by the evening song of the crickets? Does he feel joy and contentment among the clouds?

Or is he trying to escape a world that rejects him to find solace in the rhythm of nature?

Is it both? Or something entirely different, something I’m yet to understand?

Or does he, every few weeks, pack up and head back to another life—a life with a house and fridge—a life the world considers normal?

Regardless of which above may have some truth in it, would he really have travelled over the mountain ranges and down to my valley to pick apples?

I’d like to think so, it makes a great story. But there’s something I forgot to tell you about my mum and that man-like creature she saw in a coat—that otherworldly being crawling under a fence.

My mum has shocking eyesight.

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Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week

• A Shoal Of Red Herrings—by

  Jonathan Foster

  Musings on love, life and politics as discussed with a very obliging dog.

• Our First Date—by

  Kent Peterson

  ‘Do you eat lunch?’ and ‘I don’t have any money’. How could she say no?

• The Architecture of Running—by

  Nina Schuyler

  For those who enjoy examining the minutiae of a sentence, Nina has pulled out a great one.

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Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, this week’s word is:

dinner

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