Ruins to Raindrops: Nature's Path

The track out of Barmah turned out to be bitumen. After the fallen logs and mud on the way in, we had braced ourselves for more of the same, and instead the road smoothed out within a few hundred metres and stayed that way. We laughed about it, the kind of laugh that comes from the tension going out of your shoulders. The national parks website, it turned out, had not kept up with the roadworks.

Between Barmah and Lerderderg we passed a homestead that had given up. The walls had folded inward, the roof was gone, and what remained was mostly outline: the shape of rooms open to the sky, timber grey and split by decades of weather. Only the fireplace still stood, upright and solid, the one part of the building that had been made to survive heat. We stopped and walked through it without speaking much. There was nothing to say that the place was not already saying for itself. Anth took photographs. Sal stood by the fireplace and ran a hand across the stone, and the coolness of it in the January heat felt like touching something that remembered a different life.

Lerderderg State Forest was the night's stop, the campsite set among tall gums on ground that felt, after the flat river country, like proper Victorian bush. We set up in the last of the afternoon light and barely had time to eat before the rain arrived. It came gently at first, tapping at the roof the way rain does when it is still deciding whether to commit, and then it settled in, steady and even, and the temperature inside the bus dropped like someone had opened a window to a different season. We lay in bed and listened to it. After days of thirty-degree heat and dust and flies, the sound of rain on the Coaster's roof was so welcome it felt almost personal, as though the weather had noticed what they needed and provided it without being asked.

The hill on the way out the next morning was steep enough to earn a comment from a park ranger, who watched the bus climb it with visible surprise. He had seen plenty of vans and caravans fail on the same stretch, he said, and wanted to know what we had done to the Coaster to get it up without trouble. Anth had built a rear locker as part of the conversion, which shifted the weight distribution enough to keep traction on grades like this. It was a small piece of engineering foresight that had not been tested until now, and hearing the ranger confirm it mattered was the kind of quiet validation the build kept delivering, one hill, one storm, one rough track at a time.Read more