Laundry, Lakes, and Late Nights

The morning at Bannons Park began with laundry strung between the trees, sheets and clothes hanging in the still air until the campground looked like a village wash day. Other travellers saw the idea and followed, and by mid-morning half the sites had lines up, the whole park drying its life in the open. There are worse ways to spend a final morning with Grammy.

After lunch we drove south to Leven Canyon, the gorge we had found by accident weeks earlier when a road sign pulled us off the route to Preston Falls. This time it was deliberate, and the purpose was Grammy. Anth handed her the hiking poles at the car park and walked her through the technique, and she took to them with the focused determination of a woman who does not intend to be left behind. The track to Cruickshanks lookout is not long but it climbs, and Grammy climbed it, poles clicking on the rock, pausing to catch her breath without ever suggesting they turn back. At the top she stood at the railing and looked out over the gorge with the expression she had worn at every high point on the trip: not triumph exactly, but the private satisfaction of having reached something under her own power. Fran took her photograph. Sal stood beside her and said nothing, because the view was saying it.

From Leven Canyon we drove to Lake Barrington, a new camp for all four of us. Garry was already there. A Queensland handyman who had folded himself into the Tasmanian camping circuit, he had the practical ease of someone who fixes things for a living and sees no reason to stop when he is on holiday. Our solar panels had been underperforming since the cloudy days at Penstock, and Garry looked at them, diagnosed the issue, and sorted it with the kind of unhurried competence that makes you wonder how you managed before he appeared. He would not take payment. He would, however, take a beer by the fire.

Nina and Remo arrived later, a Swiss couple travelling Australia in the slow, methodical way that the Swiss travel anything. They joined the campfire circle and the evening expanded the way campfire evenings had been expanding since the first week: stories traded, routes compared, the shared currency of distance and diesel and places that exceeded or disappointed expectations. The fire crackled. The cold pressed in. The conversation ran late.

After the others had turned in, Anth walked to the lake's edge with Nina and Remo to look for the Aurora Australis. The forecast had said possible, which in Tasmania means unlikely but worth the effort. The aurora did not appear. What appeared instead was the Milky Way, thick and luminous across the centre of the sky, and a shooting star that burned a brief line through the southern dark and vanished. They stood at the water's edge for a while longer, watching for a second one, and the silence between the three of them was the comfortable kind that arrives between strangers who have shared a fire and now share a sky.

The next morning brought goodbyes. Nina and Remo heading further south, Garry east, Grammy and Fran one day closer to their departure. Each farewell was small and warm and carried the understanding that the road might circle back, the way it had with Natalie, with Terry, with the Yolla Tavern itself. Grammy's goodbye was still ahead, but it was close now, and the weight of it had been present at every campfire for the past week, growing heavier each evening as the flames burned down.Read more