Mechanic Mishaps and Scenic Surprises

The mechanic at West Tamar had our appointment, and we took the long way to it. There was a back road out of Westbury we had never driven, so we drove that instead of the highway, up through farmland with the hills stacked behind it and the paddocks doing what northern Tasmanian paddocks do in late May, which is turn the colour of wet cardboard and look better for it. It added time we had.

The job was airbags for the rear suspension, ordered and waiting. The bus went up. Then the wheels would not come off.

Not stuck in the way that a bigger bar solves. Stuck in the way that has a mechanic standing back with his hands on his hips working through the order of things in his head. They tried what there was to try, and after a while it became clear that this was not happening today, and possibly not here. The airbags stayed in their box.

He did not charge us, which mattered more than it should have. There is a version of that morning where we pay a few hundred dollars for a failure, and it sours the week, and we drive out arguing about whether it was worth booking in at all. Instead we drove out with the problem intact but nothing lost, and a plan that amounted to: Hobart, probably, eventually, someone down there will have the gear. Which is roughly how most bus problems get solved. You carry them south and see who has a bigger rattle gun.

And south was where we were going anyway, because Sal's two closest friends were flying into Hobart. Two and a half hours of driving, and ten days to do it in. That is an absurd ratio and we treated it accordingly. No route, just a direction and a deadline that mattered, which is a rare and good combination in this life. Most of the time the calendar is empty. This time there was someone at the other end of it, and Sal had been counting down to it for weeks.

Autumn was nearly out and the light was going by half four, so we did not push far. First night was Epping Forest, behind a Caltex.

That deserves a word, because on paper it sounds like the bottom of the barrel. A servo car park off the Midland Highway. But this is the thing about Tasmania that we had stopped being surprised by and still could not entirely believe: you park behind the fuel pumps, you open the back door, and there is Ben Lomond filling the eastern sky, snow on the tops, the whole massif catching the last of the light while diesel gets pumped forty metres away. No fee, no booking, no walk in. Just there.

It went to two degrees overnight, the coldest the bus had been. We felt it in the way you feel cold in a vehicle, which is from the floor upward and all at once at about four in the morning. By dawn the ground outside had frosted white and every surface of the windscreen had furred over, and the paddock in front of us had gone stiff and pale and silent.

Then the trucks arrived. A convoy of them, old cabs, restored ones, coming off the highway into the servo in a line with their engines turning over hard in the cold. Chrome and deep paint and stacks blowing white in the frost. Somebody's club, somebody's run, out early on a bitter morning because that is when the roads are empty and the light is good. We stood at the door with tea going cold in our hands and watched them fuel up and pull out, one after another, and the noise of it rolled around the paddock long after the last one had gone.

Nobody plans for that. It is not on WikiCamps and it is not why anyone stops at Epping Forest. But it is what we got for being parked behind a service station in the cold with nowhere in particular to be, and after a while we stopped counting these as luck and started counting them as the point.Read more