The Curious Case of Jack and the Sea

Australia Day fell on the same day as the ferry, which gave us the morning to do something we had been hoping for. Jack was in Geelong. We had met him weeks earlier, before the trip began, and he had spent Christmas with the family in Queensland, the kind of easy, immediate friendship that does not happen often and had happened with Jack almost at once. He was travelling too, with his partner Nic and a foster greyhound named Odie, and we had arranged to meet at a park in town before the crossing.

The streets were loud with Australia Day crowds, but we found a quieter spot away from the main celebration, set up the awning for shade, and spent the afternoon doing what we had failed to do the last time we were together: finishing The Crew. It was a cooperative card game, the sort that requires everyone to think in the same direction at the same time, and we had come agonisingly close over Christmas without managing to win. With Nic added to the team and Odie asleep under the table in the way that only greyhounds can sleep, long and boneless and entirely committed to the ground, we played again. Lost again. The game had a hold on us now, and we promised each other we would bring it to Tasmania and settle it there.

The farewell was short because it needed to be. Jack and Nic were heading south themselves in the coming weeks, and the promise of seeing them again in Tasmania made the goodbye lighter than it might have been. We drove the ten minutes to the port with the afternoon still bright behind us and joined the queue of motorhomes and caravans and campervans converging on the Spirit of Tasmania. Five months of planning, and here was the moment it all pointed toward: the loading ramp, the vehicle deck, the smell of diesel and sea air, and the particular feeling of handing your vehicle over to a ship and trusting the water.

Our cabin had two beds and a shower, and the shower mattered more than either of us had expected. After weeks of the recirculating setup outside the bus, standing under hot water in an enclosed room with a door that locked felt absurdly luxurious. We stood under it longer than necessary and said nothing about it, because acknowledging the pleasure would have meant acknowledging how far from ordinary life we had already drifted.

The departure was worth watching. The Victorian coastline pulled away slowly, the sun going down behind it in reds and golds that looked, from the deck, almost too deliberate, as though the mainland were putting on a show for the people leaving it. We stayed up there until the light was gone and the air turned cold, and then went below to sleep, knowing the strait had a reputation and hoping the tablets would be enough.

They were not. The swells hit after midnight, five metres according to the ship's display, and the cabin tilted and dropped and tilted again with a rhythm that was not rhythmic enough to sleep through. We took more tablets. Sal lay very still with her eyes closed, which was not sleep but was the closest thing available, and Anth wedged himself against the wall and waited for the motion to ease. It did not ease. It continued until the ship found the shelter of the Tasmanian coast in the early hours, and by the time we walked off the ramp in Devonport, Sal was carrying the kind of careful, upright posture that means the vertigo has not quite left and sudden movements are not welcome.

But we were there. Tasmania, after five months of planning and three weeks of driving and one very long night. The morning air was cooler than anything we had felt since leaving Queensland, and the light had a different quality, softer, less aggressive, as though the sun here had less to prove. We climbed back into the bus in the car park, sat for a moment without starting the engine, and let the fact of arrival settle over us the way the quiet was settling over the harbour.Read more