A Farewell Left for Morning

We left Smithton heading east, the north-west coast that had occupied most of the three weeks with Grammy now receding behind us. A fuel stop, a last look at the Bass Strait coastline, and then Rocky Cape appeared, the same national park where the couple had walked the ten-kilometre coastal loop weeks earlier. This time we did not attempt the full track. We found a lookout that gave Grammy and Fran the view without the distance, the headlands and the rough water spread out below them, and Grammy studied it with the quiet attention she gave to places she would not be coming back to soon.

Penguin was a fish and chips stop, the four of us at a table on the beach with paper-wrapped parcels and the surf close enough to salt the chips further. Natalie was there. The same Natalie from Lake Kara, from the Yolla Tavern folk night, now sitting at a table a few metres away having arrived by an entirely separate route. She had spotted the bus driving through Queenstown days earlier and had wondered whether the roads would cross again. Tasmania kept doing this: the same faces surfacing in different towns, the island small enough and the travelling community tight enough that coincidence stopped feeling like coincidence and started feeling like the way things worked.

From Penguin we turned south toward Bannons Park, back to the Leven River campsite where we had spent three quiet nights near the start of the trip. The place had not changed. The river still ran beside the camp, the trees still blocked the worst of the wind, and the silence still held the same quality it had held when we were new to this life and still learning its rhythms. Three months later the rhythms were familiar, and sitting by the Leven felt less like returning to a place than returning to a version of ourselves that had not yet known what the trip would become.

The campfire that evening was the last with Grammy and Fran. Nobody said so outright, but the knowledge sat among the four of them like a fifth person at the fire, and the conversation moved more slowly than usual, as though slowing the talk might slow the hours. Grammy had been with us for three weeks. She had climbed the Nut by chairlift, stood at the Edge of the World in horizontal rain, watched wombats on Maria Island, drifted in silence on the Gordon River, and eaten pizza at the Yolla Tavern twice. Tomorrow she and Fran would leave, and the convoy would become a single vehicle again, and the trip would shrink back to two.

The fire burned low. Nobody moved to add wood. The cold came in around the edges and eventually moved them all inside, and the last night with Grammy ended not with a farewell but with the understanding that the farewell would come in the morning and was better left there.Read more