Echoes of Home on a Nomad's Heart

North up the channel with Bruny on the right the whole way, through the string of small towns that sit along that shore, and into Hobart for the third or fourth time that month. The city had stopped being a destination and become a place we passed through to get things.

Macpac first, for proper cold-weather gear. We had been getting away with what we brought from Queensland and were no longer getting away with it. Buying serious thermals in July is an admission that you are staying for the winter rather than outrunning it.

Then lunch with Michael and Amanda, a month after Forcett. It was easy in the way that new friendships occasionally are when the calibration happens fast, and they had the local knowledge and the willingness to use it on our behalf, which is worth more than either party usually admits.

Then fifteen minutes to Clifton Beach, and a house.

Somebody needed their place looked after for five nights and we had said yes. The last time either of us had slept in a building was the fourth of January.

You notice the things you have stopped having. A room you can leave and come back to. A door you close behind you for no reason. Space to put something down and not immediately need that space for something else. The bus is well designed and we love it, but every surface in it has at least two jobs, and a house has surfaces that have no job at all.

There was a fireplace and we ran it constantly. And there was Eddy, the cat, who inspected us on arrival and then decided we were acceptable, and who spent the next five nights sitting wherever the heat was, which is a reasonable philosophy.

Halfway through, Anth flew to Adelaide again. Another screening, another possible trial, more money toward Japan in November. So Sal had the last of the house-sit on her own, in a stranger's living room with somebody else's cat, which is a specific kind of quiet. She had done the solo stretches before, but always in the bus, where the walls are close and yours. This was different. There was too much room for one person.

The source of what we wrote at the time says we spent the week getting restless and confirming that the road was who we were. That is half true and it is the easier half.

The harder part is that Sal had been accepted into a Masters of Counselling three days before we walked into that house. She would need to study. Studying takes a table, and reliable power, and internet that does not depend on which side of a hill you parked, and a set of hours that are the same each week. Sitting in a warm room at Clifton Beach with a fire going and a desk available, that was not an abstract observation.

We did not talk about it much. But it was in the room with us, along with the cat.

So both things were true at once, which is usually how it goes. We were ready to leave by the fifth day and we did leave, gladly, back into the bus and the cold and the business of finding somewhere to park. And we also now knew exactly what a house was for, which we had not needed to know in January.

We locked up, left food for Eddy's owners to find sorted, and drove out with the heater on and everything we owned around us again.Read more