The Rule About Arriving in the Dark

The bus went back to the mechanic at West Tamar in a week's time, which gave us seven days and a radius rather than a route. There is an ease in that arrangement. No ferry to catch, no one flying in or out, just a loop to draw at whatever size the days suggested.

We started it at the Tamar Wetlands, one of the sixty Great Short Walks, where a boardwalk runs out low across the reed beds and open water. Mid-May had taken the warmth out of the air and most of the colour out of the landscape. The reeds had gone the brown of old rope. A cormorant stood on a post with its wings held open, drying them in a breeze that was not going to dry anything, and swamp hens picked through the shallows without hurrying. Underfoot the timber was damp and slightly springy, and the whole place had the hush of a landscape that has finished its year.

Anth had brought something home from Adelaide besides the money. Somewhere in those seventeen days he had fallen in with a few of the others on the trial and picked up their training method, high frequency, small efforts stacked through the day rather than one hard session. In practice this meant that a flat boardwalk over a wetland was not a walk but an opportunity. He worked his way along it in walking lunges, one knee dropping toward the planks and then the other, while Sal covered the same ground at ordinary speed and then stood at the far end waiting. It looked uncomfortable. Anth maintained it looked deliberate.

She watched him come. It was an odd thing to see, and not only because of the lunges. The method had come from a room she had never been in, from people she had never met, during weeks she had spent alone at a farm stay with her laptop and her clients. He had been given something in that time, and here it was, arriving down the boardwalk toward her a lunge at a time. Seventeen days was not long. It was long enough for a person to come back slightly rearranged, and for the other one to have to make a little room.

From the wetlands we pointed south toward Mole Creek, thinking about the Honeycomb Caves. Only a few weeks had passed since the last night there, the four of us together before Grammy and Fran flew north and Anth flew west, and the pull toward familiar ground was strong. But the afternoon was already going thin, and the distance was more honest on the road than it had looked on the screen.

Which brought up the rule. Since the first weeks of the trip we had not driven after dark, and it was never about nerve. Anth liked night driving, the narrowed world inside the headlights, the road emptied of everyone else. The trouble was the arriving. A camp reached in darkness gives you nothing: no read on the ground, no way to tell whether the flat spot is flat or whether the track out is going to be a problem in the morning. And Tasmanian roads after dusk belong to the wildlife. Wallabies and pademelons come to the verges to feed and freeze in the beam, possums cross without looking, and the evidence of what happens next is spread along the bitumen every morning for anyone who cares to notice. So we pulled up short.

Hagley took us in instead. We had used the place once, a stop at the post office to collect a parcel back in March, the way you use a town without ever really seeing it. The RV park was plain and level and did not pretend to be anything else. We arrived with the last of the light going out of the sky and the first stars coming through, ate something quick and hot, and were done well before it was properly late.

Nothing about the day would survive being retold at a dinner table. A short walk, half a drive, a caravan park in a town of a few hundred people. But the reason we had built this life was sitting right there in the shape of it: the caves would still be there, the mechanic could wait a week, and nobody needed us anywhere by dark. Outside, the paddocks went quiet in that thorough country way. Inside, two people who had spent three weeks in separate time zones sat in the same small space, no longer with anything urgent to say.Read more