Driftwood Dreams and Coffee Steam

Bicheno for diesel, which took ten minutes and involved no ice cream this time, and then north again.

The road out of town runs past Lagoons Beach, and we went by the turnoff without stopping. Two months earlier we had spent Anth's birthday down there, porridge and coffee outside in the cold with black swans working the lagoon and the diesel heater still an argument we had not settled. It was a good camp and we had every reason to like it, and we drove past because the rule was the rule: nowhere we had already been.

That is a strange discipline to keep. You pass a place that was good to you and keep going on the grounds that you already know what it is.

Half an hour brought us to Little Beach State Reserve, where there was one other traveller and nothing else. We took the far end of the road, as close to the water as the sites allowed, which was not right on it but close enough that the surf was the loudest thing all night.

Then we went looking for sticks.

The Solo stove runs on whatever you can pick up off the ground, and a coastal reserve in winter provides generously: dry twigs, small dead branches, the sort of thing that would be useless in a fire pit and is exactly right for a burner the size of a saucepan. There is a specific pleasure in gathering fuel for a fire you will light within the hour. It is a small closed loop of effort and result, uncomplicated by anything, and it takes about fifteen minutes.

We had coffee off it as the light went, sitting outside in coats with the sea working away in the dark below.

The morning was the reason to have come.

We walked down onto Little Beach early and found the sea up. Big waves coming in hard, spray coming off the tops of them and hanging, and the sun low enough behind us to light the spray from underneath. Then it started raining, out of a mostly clear sky, the kind of shower that arrives from nowhere on that coast and passes in a few minutes. And with the sun where it was and the rain where it was, a rainbow came up over the water and stood there.

We got wet. Neither of us moved for a while.

There is no way to plan for a morning like that. You cannot look it up, cannot book it, and the only way to be standing on a small beach in a state reserve at the exact eight minutes it happens is to be living somewhere near it with nothing else on. That is what all the rest of it buys: the batteries, the gas we forgot, the paid night in the car park, the endless calculation about sun and shade and where to park. It buys you being there when the light does something.

We packed up afterwards and drove on to Trout Creek Reserve, and beyond that, in a day or two, Swimcart Beach in the Bay of Fires, where we had spent a week in the autumn with Grammy and Fran. That one is not new ground, and we were going anyway.Read more