Splitting the Distance West

There was a time, and not so long ago, when our wanderings were decided the evening before we broke camp, the next day's road chosen over the fire or not chosen at all, left to the morning and whatever mood the morning brought. That was the old freedom, the one that asked nothing of the clock. But freedom, we were learning, bends itself around the things that matter, and these days Sal's work and her study and the fixed hours of her online university classes meant we travelled a little more to a timetable than we once had. The next proper leg, out west towards St George, was a long one, longer than a single comfortable day's drive, and rather than push the whole of it at once we settled on a sensible compromise: stop halfway, and split the distance in two.

With the plan made, we found we had time in hand, enough to double back the fifteen minutes into Dalby and stock up properly at the Aldi there. It was a small piece of foresight that would pay off down the track. The run ahead, on through to outback New South Wales, would offer little but the small IGAs of far-flung towns, good shops every one but dear in the way that remoteness makes things dear, so we took the chance while we had it and filled the bus with what we would need.

From Dalby the road ran out flat and straight and due west, the kind of road that gives the country room to show how much of itself there is. Sal made good use of it. She sat at her desk in the cab, the office Anth had built her come into its own now that we were moving, and worked at her study as the paddocks slid by, and at one point allowed herself the small pleasure of a video call to Mack, his face on the laptop screen and the open road rolling along behind the conversation. Ninety minutes or so of this and we arrived at our halfway haven, an off-road quarry site just outside the little town of Westmar.

It did not sound like much, a quarry, and said aloud it conjured nothing you would choose to sleep beside. But the reality of the place undid the word entirely. It sat far enough back from the highway that the road noise never reached us, and the workings themselves were old enough, long enough rested, that the harshness had gone out of them and the bush had begun its patient work of softening every edge. For what we wanted of it, a single quiet night, it was just right. There was dry timber scattered all about, the gift of country like this, and we dragged armfuls of it up and built ourselves an open fire. Grammy settled in on one side of it and we on the other, the three of us ranged around the flames watching the faithful bush telly, that oldest and best of channels, the burning log that never shows the same picture twice.

Then the night came down, and the outback gave us the thing only the outback can. The sky out here is not the sky of towns. With no glow on any horizon to dull it, it deepened and deepened until it was thick with stars, more than seemed possible, the whole vault of them wheeling quietly overhead. We slumped back in our chairs and gave ourselves over to it, hunting satellites the way we liked to do, picking out those steady moving points of light that slide so patiently between the fixed ones. There is an old pleasure in that game, and a newer poignancy to it too, for not so long ago a satellite far above had been the one thin thread carrying Anth's words home from the New Zealand backcountry. Tonight the sky asked nothing of us but to look. And look we did, and were rewarded: the International Space Station itself came over, bright and certain, tracking the dark from one edge to the other while we watched it the whole way across before, at last, we turned in for the night.Read more