Between Peaks and Promises

Ten minutes down from the Hartz trailhead there is a car park and a short walk to Arve Falls, which we would have driven past in most moods and did not.

It is a modest thing by the standards of the island: water coming off the plateau over a lip of rock into a gorge below, seen from a platform, twenty minutes of your day including the walk. Tasmania is thick with these. Not more waterfalls than the whole mainland, whatever gets said in the pub, but more per hour of driving than anywhere either of us had lived, and after a while you develop the habit of stopping for the ones with a sign, because the alternative is arriving everywhere on time and having seen nothing.

Then Geeveston, and Huonville for groceries. Standing in an IGA aisle deciding about tomatoes about eighteen hours after Sal had read a university acceptance on the side of a mountain, which is roughly the ratio of ordinary to significant that this life runs on.

Over the Huon and along the north bank, and the day turned out to be the best one in weeks: no cloud, real warmth in the sun for the first time since May, the river doing the thing rivers do when the light is low and behind you.

We were going back to the Gordon foreshore. We had been there in early June, and it was where we met Justin, who was by then back on the mainland having recommended us a cave on his way out. Returning to a camp you have already used is a different arrival to a new one. You are not assessing it. You know which way the door should face.

We took the exact site Anth had used when Sal was in Hobart with Liz and Jan. That felt worth doing, though it took a moment's thought, because that was the week the big gum came down not far from where the bus had been standing. It was still there on the ground, going soft at the edges, on its way to being part of the forest floor. Six weeks had made it look less like an event and more like scenery.

Two nights only. After that we were going to a house.

That was the strange thing sitting underneath the whole day. Somebody had asked us to house-sit, and we had said yes, and it would be the first time since the fourth of January that either of us slept in a building that did not have wheels under it. Six and a half months. We had not planned it or particularly wanted it; it had simply come up, and it seemed daft to say no.

So we sat out for two evenings on the grass above the water with Bruny across the channel, in the last decent weather we were likely to get for a while, and did not do very much at all. The sun went down over the island and the light went long and pink across the water and neither of us said anything worth writing down.

That is most of it, in the end. The walking and the summits and the news on the mountain are what you remember, but the actual texture of the thing is two people in camp chairs on grass they have sat on before, with nowhere to be until Tuesday.Read more