River Dreams: Our Fleeting Paradise

We were slow leaving Samuel's. The hill had sun on it all day and the panels were making the most of it, which is reason enough to stay put until mid-afternoon when the alternative is parking somewhere shaded.

Then twenty minutes north, which kept us inside the rule, to a free camp on the Swan River just past Swansea. Neither of us had been there. That kept us inside the other rule.

The site sits back off the road on the riverbank with a few different places to put a vehicle, and there was nobody in any of them. We took a bit of raised ground with the river turning below it, which is the kind of choice you can only make when you arrive somewhere empty and are the only vote.

That was the day.

It is worth being honest that most of them are. The rule we had set ourselves was generating a string of nights exactly like this one: short hop, new camp, nobody there, set up, sleep, move on. No walk, no discovery, nobody met, nothing that would survive being described to somebody at a barbecue. The Swan came down slow and brown-green past the bank and made almost no noise doing it. Leaves moved. It got dark early, and the stars turned up in the numbers they turn up in when there is no town anywhere close.

We had been out seven months by then and the novelty had settled into something steadier. Early on, a night like this would have felt like proof of something. By July it was just Wednesday. The freedom was still there, it had simply stopped announcing itself, which is what happens to any freedom you use daily.

In the morning we would move on again, another thirty minutes, another place we had not been. The rule was doing its job. It was turning a stretch of coast we thought we knew into a series of small unfamiliar places, and it was filling the fortnight before Sal's flight with something other than waiting for it.Read more