A Convoy of Two Homes

The day came, and we headed out once more onto the open road. Six months had passed at Grammy's, and though every week of them had been a gift, the long unhurried stretch of family that this life so often keeps us from, the time with the kids, the time with our parents, the slow ordinary days of being near the people we love, we had felt for a while now the old pull returning. We were long overdue. The bus had sat too many nights in one driveway, and a home built for movement begins to fret when it is kept still.

Grammy was ready too. Her van was fitted out and packed, her own small home squared away for the road, the three weeks she had spent travelling with us in Tasmania having quietly relit something in her that had never fully gone out. We were as ready as she was. There were goodbyes to be made first, the ones this family has learned to make so often and never learned to make easily. We farewelled Torrin, Soph and Mack, each of them setting out on adventures of their own, each road bending away from ours in its own direction. We had stood in this exact feeling many times, the strange double pull of being glad to go and sorry to part, and we had long since stopped expecting it to soften.

Then we turned the key and went. It was not a long drive, and the bus purred along beneath us, settling back into the work it was made for as though it had been waiting all those still months to be asked. Grammy followed behind in her van, the two homes moving in convoy through the soft green South Burnett country, hills folding gently away on either side. Our first destination lay only a couple of hours off, the small town of Maidenwell, a quiet village set in the hills at the gateway to the Bunya Mountains. There was a particular rightness to that, though we hardly spoke of it: the Bunyas had been our very first stop at the beginning of all this, near two and a half years ago, and here we were again at their foot, the long circle of the journey turning over once more beneath our wheels.

The camp was nothing more than a peaceful oval in the middle of town, a few vans and caravans scattered loosely across the grass, the kind of modest free stop that asks nothing of you but to settle and be quiet. We settled. And the sleep that came was extraordinary, deep and unbroken and complete, the sleep of a body that has finally been returned to the thing it knows. It was good, simply, to be sleeping somewhere other than a driveway again, to wake in a place we had driven to rather than one we had been waiting in. There was a small irony in it that did not escape Anth, who had only weeks before spent six weeks sleeping in the backcountry of New Zealand, in huts and on hard ground far past the reach of any town. He had slept rough in some of the wildest country either of us had ever seen, and yet it was this, a flat town oval in a forgettable little village, with Grammy's van a few steps away and Sal breathing softly beside him, that felt, that first night, like the truest rest of all. Home, it turned out, had never been the wildness or the comfort. It was the moving, and the each other, and the simple fact of being underway again.Read more