The Art of Slow Living

Brady's Lookout came first, which was somewhere neither of us had been, and after nearly a year on this island that is now a rare enough thing to be worth the detour on its own. It sits high above the Tamar with the river laid out below in both directions, the whole valley visible, and it took ten minutes to get to from a road we had driven four or five times.

That keeps happening here. You think you have seen a place and then there is a turnoff you have never taken.

Narawntapu has three campgrounds and we took Koybaa, which is not the one with the best facilities and is the one with the fewest people. Then we sat there and waited some more, because Anth's trial was still unresolved and had been for a week.

The park turned out to have another of the Great Short Walks in it, which we had not known.

It runs out through several different landscapes in a few hours: wetland first, with birds working the shallows and that thick still air that sits over standing water, then coastal heath, low and salt-scoured and completely open, then Bakers Beach, which goes on for a very long way. Then up onto Archers Knob, which is not high but is the only high thing for miles, and from the top you get the beach running out one way and Bass Strait the other and the whole park underneath you.

We had it entirely to ourselves. Six days before Christmas, in a national park, on a good walk, and there was nobody up there but us.

The showers at the campground are cold. Not cool. Cold, in the way that makes you make a noise involuntarily, and after four hours of walking in December heat it was the best available option and we both took one.

Then Sal found protein ice cream in the freezer that neither of us had known was there, so that became pancakes and ice cream in the middle of the afternoon, which is not a bad way to finish a walk.

We were still running. This is the ongoing project: two people who spent years lifting heavy things and are now trying to get to five kilometres without stopping, which is a genuinely humbling exercise for anybody with a strength background. Different muscles, different lungs, different mental problem entirely. We are not there yet. We are closer than we were.

It was on one of those runs that we found Bakers Point, and moved the bus there the same day: right on the water, beach one side, nothing in the way of the view.

Two pieces of news arrived after that. Sal got another High Distinction, which is now two for two. And the trial call finally came, confirmed, with a flight on Monday and a return on Christmas Eve.

So Anth would be in Melbourne for most of the week before Christmas and back on the twenty-fourth, which gives us Christmas Day together on a beach in a national park in northern Tasmania.

It will be the first one out here. Last year we were in a house with the boxes of decorations in the cupboard and the same routines we had run for years. This year there is no cupboard. Whatever we do on the twenty-fifth will be the first version of something rather than a repetition of it, and neither of us has any idea yet what that looks like.

We sat out at Bakers Point in the evening and watched the tide come in and did not settle any of it.Read more