Frost and Flames: A Forest Interlude

Scamander first, and not for anything interesting. We had a load of rubbish that needed a tip, which is one of those problems that does not exist when you live in a house and is never more than a few days away when you do not. The GPS wanted us to turn off before the town. We went through it anyway, found somewhere to dispose of it all, and only then went looking for Trout Creek.

The obvious way in is off the highway. We took the forestry roads instead, gravel through plantation and regrowth, corrugated in places and slower than the map suggested. The bus handles that sort of thing better than people expect, being built for exactly this and considerably tougher than it looks.

Trout Creek Forest Reserve had people in it when we arrived, which after a fortnight of empty camps was almost novel. John and Sarah and their kids, and a bloke called James, all out from towns nearby for the weekend, all with fires going. We talked. They were the sort of campers who are pleased to see somebody rather than resentful about it, and John gave us firewood before he left, unprompted and in quantity.

By Sunday night they had all gone home and the reserve was ours.

We cooked on the fire for the rest of the stay, which is a different proposition to cooking on a stove. There is the wood to process first, splitting and stacking and getting it to the right sizes, then the business of getting a bed of coals rather than flames, and then the food, which takes as long as it takes and cannot be rushed by turning a dial. It occupies an afternoon. That is the point of it. After a fortnight of induction hobs and battery percentages, standing over a fire working out whether it was ready was a genuine pleasure.

The second morning came in frosted. Everything white: the ground, the windscreen, the roof of the bus, the grass in the clearing all stiff and pale, and the sun coming through the trees at an angle that lit every bit of it. Fog was sitting on the river and lifting off it in strands. We stood out in it with cold hands and made the decision then, more or less, that we were not leaving the next day.

One night became five.

The birdlife there was better than anywhere we had camped in Tasmania. Not just more of it but more kinds, going all day, and the river had fish in it that came up regularly enough that you would catch the splash out of the corner of your eye and look over too late.

And on one of those nights, the aurora came back.

Not like May. Nothing is going to be like May, when the sky went red over the Great Western Tiers and Sam swore at it and Sal stood in the wet grass crying. This was quieter: a green glow low in the south, structure in it if you watched, more obvious through the camera than the eye. But it was there, in a forest reserve on the east coast, three months after the first one. We got it on camera with the Milky Way standing up behind it, and stood out in the cold looking south for the second time that year.

Sal saw an aurora once in her life, having wanted it since she was a girl. Then she saw a second one twelve weeks later, in a paddock by a river, because we happened to be outside.

Those five days were the last easy ones for a while. Sal was flying to Brisbane to see her family for the first time since January, and Anth was going to Adelaide for another trial to put more into the Japan fund, and the two trips did not overlap, which meant a stretch of being apart with a bus and a schedule between us.

We did not talk about that much either. We put wood on the fire, and cooked slowly, and let the frost do what it did each morning, and stayed a day longer than we meant to, twice.Read more