Meadowbank Moments

REVIEW BLOCK

Source word count: ~400 words
Target range: 500–600. Six days, one couple met, one lake, and a lot of nothing happening. The nothing is the point.

Tic list hits:

"our home-on-wheels" (home on wheels)
"each mile a brushstroke in our ongoing canvas", "a fleeting brushstroke" (brushstroke twice, canvas)
"a living testament" (testament)
"taken root in our souls" (souls)
"a serendipitous moment" (serendipitous)
"the warm embrace", "ready to embrace" (embrace twice)
"our sanctuary", "wilderness haven" (sanctuary, haven)
"the call of the road eventually whispered its irresistible invitation" (siren song + whispered)
"our spirits expansive" (spirits)

Register offenders:

"our home compact, our spirits expansive"
"those precious moments now softened by memory's tender filter"
"a breathing, living testament to the nomadic spirit"
"weathered faces told stories of countless adventures" — third face-reading in this sequence

Fabrication watch: the weathered-faces line again. Also "their brief intersections with our lives adding depth to our journey" is asserting significance for people who are never described.

The honest read: six days at a lakeside campsite watching television. The source is embarrassed by this and dresses it in brushstrokes. It shouldn't be. Anth had shingles and a throat infection three days earlier, Sal had just finished a trimester with a High Distinction, and they had months of open road ahead with no ferry until June. Six days of doing nothing is exactly right, and saying so plainly is more interesting than pretending it was a spiritual pause.

The good material: Graham and Angela handing over their address in Western Australia. That's a standing invitation to a place they have never been and might not reach for years, and it's the sixth or seventh instance of unprompted generosity in this sequence.

Canon notes:

Day 330–335, November 29 to December 4.
Bethune Campsite, Meadowbank Lake. Previously visited with Grammy.
New cast: Graham and Angela, retired, Western Australia.

REWRITE

West out of Sorell at last, after weeks of saying it.

Full diesel, full water, which is the whole ritual before a long leg. Then over the Derwent, which we have now crossed at more points than we could list, and out through the Midlands into the country that starts climbing toward the middle of the island.

We stopped at Hamilton and got talking to Graham and Angela, a retired couple from Western Australia doing the same thing we are, at a different pace and with several decades more practice. The conversation went the way these do until, at the end of it, they gave us their address and told us to come and camp at their place if we ever get to WA.

We might. It is a long way and we have no plan for it and no date, and they know that, and they offered anyway. That is the seventh or eighth time somebody has done something like this and we have stopped knowing what to say beyond thanking them.

Then in to Bethune, on Meadowbank Lake, which we had camped at once before with Grammy back in March.

We stayed six days and did very little.

That was the plan and it was a good one. Anth was finally past the shingles and the throat infection, properly past it rather than pretending. Sal had submitted her last assignment and got her result and had nothing academic until the next trimester. There was no ferry until June and nowhere we had to be. So we sat by a lake.

There was a television series and we watched all of it. Not in the evenings as a treat, but during the day, with the door open and the lake outside, which is the sort of thing you feel vaguely guilty about doing in a beautiful place and should not.

Bethune is not one of the wild ones. It is a proper campsite with other people in it and vehicles coming and going, and after ten months of pointing the bus down forestry tracks looking for solitude it was fine to be somewhere ordinary for a while. People arrived, stayed a night or two, left. Nobody bothered anybody.

The lake sat there. We looked at it a good deal.

Then, at the end of the week, we packed up and kept going west, which is where we had been headed since the middle of November.Read more