Woven Paths: Heart and Horizon

Eight days off the grid had emptied the water tanks. Lake Kara could have held us longer, but the bus could not, and so we drove north to Burnie on the coast for the unremarkable business of filling up and restocking.

There was a parcel waiting at the post office. Weeks earlier, somewhere in the first days of the trip, we had mentioned the flies to Grammy. Mentioned it once, in passing, the way you complain about a small thing without expecting anyone to act on it. Grammy had acted on it. Inside the parcel was a macrame fly-door, handmade, sized to the bus's rear entrance, finished and posted from Gympie without fuss or announcement. We stood in the Burnie post office car park and fitted it to the doorframe, and it worked, and neither of us was surprised because Grammy's projects always worked. The flies would not cross it. The breeze still came through. It was a piece of her, stitched and knotted and sent south, hanging in the doorway of the home she had helped us prepare to leave.

Cooee's free camp sat on the edge of Bass Strait, a basic RV spot with no facilities to speak of but the ocean right there, close enough to taste the salt in the air when the wind came off the water. The first night the wind came hard, rocking the bus in gusts that rattled the cupboard latches and woke us both more than once. We were learning that Tasmania's weather did not negotiate. It arrived, did what it intended, and moved on.

The second night was calmer, and just before dark a lone fairy penguin appeared on the rocks below the camp. It picked its way along the shoreline toward whatever burrow it called home, small and deliberate and completely unaware of us watching from the window. Sal pointed. Anth leaned across. They watched it until it disappeared into the scrub, and the silence it left behind felt like something the evening had offered and they had been quiet enough to receive.Read more