Anticipation, Adventure, and Awe

Hobart took a morning. New boots for Anth, the old ones worn through at the sole. Then the post office for the passport applications, because Torrin had been in Japan since November and we were going in November ourselves, and everything about that trip started with two forms. The post office could not print the forms. We got the photos taken and left the rest for the end of the week, which is how most government errands go.

A second post office, closer to where Sal was staying, had the parcels: a few things ordered for Anth's birthday, and the diesel heater. Portable rather than fitted, a stopgap until we could install a proper one, but it was in the bus and winter was coming and that felt like getting ahead of something for once.

Then the Airbnb, four nights for Sal with Liz and Jan. Anth took a hot shower and put a load of washing on while it was available, because you use plumbing when you have it, and then drove an hour south to Gordon and left them to it.

The camp at Gordon sits right on the water, looking east across the channel at Bruny Island. He had it more or less to himself. Four days of quiet and one job: pulling the garage apart and rebuilding it around the heater, which is the sort of task that expands to fill whatever time you give it and is oddly satisfying to do properly. Everything out, everything reconsidered, everything back in a better order. Between that he made a start on the next piece of the online business, the thing meant eventually to make the trial money unnecessary.

The mornings were the payment for all of it. The sun came up out of the sea behind Bruny and put a line of light straight down the channel to the bus, and he watched it happen four times. The days after were mostly overcast, which the panels resented, but the reserve was deep enough to carry it. The SOTO burner Torrin had sent from Japan did the cooking. The last two days the wind got up hard, the kind that had come at us on the north-west coast months earlier, and the bus moved with it all night.

In Hobart, Sal had cards and wine and the harbour and three decades of material. She had known Liz and Jan through marriages, pregnancies, births, house moves, things ending and things starting, and there was no agenda to the weekend beyond being in the same room again. They talked about the old days at length. By the end of it she had eaten more cheese and dark chocolate than her body had opinions about, and was ready to go back to a life with fewer soft furnishings in it.

Anth drove up on the Friday and collected her. The passport applications finally went in, printed this time. Food, water, the usual restock, and then south again with the whole thing to be seen properly for the first time by both of us.

Gordon had changed while we were away. A big gum had come down close to where the bus had been parked all week.

Nobody was hurt and nothing was hit. But it had been standing there for the four nights Anth slept under it, and it was on the ground now, and there is a particular arithmetic you do when you see that. We moved to a spot further out from the trees, still on the water, still looking across at Bruny, and did not talk about it much beyond agreeing that we would.

Five more nights there. Sal took to the place as quickly as Anth had, which had not been guaranteed; a camp that one person has fallen for can be a hard sell secondhand.

Ruth and Darryl arrived in a Coaster, same bus as ours, down from the north of the state. That alone was enough for a conversation, and the conversation turned into an invitation to their fire, and the fire turned into several evenings of the usual exchange: where you have been, what broke, what you would do differently. Then the rain came in and stayed, and Bruny disappeared into grey, and the island became a suggestion of a shape rather than a place you could see. We liked it. Ruth and Darryl did not, or at least liked it less than they liked the idea of home, and packed up and went north with numbers exchanged.

The camp did not stay empty. Two vehicles came in a day or so later carrying Tevin, twenty-seven and travelling full time, and Justin, fifty-two and a plumber. They had met at a ten-day silent meditation retreat, which is to say they had spent ten days beside each other without exchanging a word and come out the other side friends anyway, and were now travelling together for a while to see how it went. We fed each other and talked for a few days.

Then the phone rang with another opportunity to top up the Japan fund, this one needing Anth in Melbourne for a day. Flights went in that evening, and a message to Jack, and suddenly there was a departure date on the calendar again.

We packed up for Forcett, the Hipcamp near the airport we had used the last time Anth flew out. Behind us the gum lay where it had fallen, already looking like it had always been there.Read more