Old Neighbours on the Horizon

The short town day behind us, the last of the Walgett resupply stowed, we carried on. It was not long before we swung east again and left the bitumen, the tyres settling into that lower, looser note gravel gives once the sealed road runs out, Grammy's van holding its distance behind us in the dust. We passed the oddly named settlement of Come By Chance, and pulled in at Pilliga, the town, for a coffee taken standing beside the bus. There was a clock running under the whole morning. Sal had a video call for her placement, its start time fixed, and that deadline set the outer edge of the day's driving. So we did the sum that had become second nature, kilometres against the hour, and kept moving with one eye on the time.

Then the forest took us in. The Pilliga is a vast thing, close to half a million hectares, one of the largest stretches of forest left in the state, and for the week ahead it would be the whole of our world. We had chosen the campground at the Salt Caves for our corner of it. When we rolled in there were four sites and no one else about, so once again the choosing was ours. Grammy brought her van in near ours, and we levelled up with only minutes in hand, the kettle on while Sal found her signal and her seat. The deadline we had chased all morning arrived, and she met it with time to spare.

While she talked, the forest waited on us. Above the caves stood a fire tower, and once the call was done we walked across to see what the place was about. The Salt Caves, so the story runs, were once thirty metres deep, salt hanging from the roof in columns like stalactites. Whether any of it had ever been true, no one seemed able to say, and standing over what time had left of them we found it hard enough to believe ourselves. Some stories outlast the thing that made them. This felt like one of those.

The tower gave us the better reward. We climbed it and the country opened on every side, flat and running clear to the edge of sight, broken only by two shapes we already knew. The Warrumbungles held the southern horizon, and away to the east rose Mount Kaputar. We had camped high on Kaputar more than two years back, and spent our nights among the Warrumbungles in those same first weeks of this life, on the long road that eventually carried us down to Tasmania, when everything about the bus and the life in it was still new and unproven. To find them again from a fire tower in the middle of the Pilliga, plain and familiar as the houses of old neighbours, was to feel how far we had come, and how much of that distance had quietly curved back to meet itself.

The week found its own rhythm after that. The Pomoly Dweller earned its keep again, lit every evening, the cooking done over its heat while the light went out of the trees and the smell of woodsmoke worked its way into everything we owned. One night Sal made her first camp oven damper in the Snow Peak, turned out of the coals better than either of us had any right to expect, split and eaten warm with the fire still going. The weather could not decide what it wanted. We had days of rain, the sort that draws the forest in close and lays a steady hiss across the roof, and then days of hard clean blue that made the wet hours seem like something we had dreamed. On one of the fine ones we took a short ride out to a small lake nearby, no reason to it beyond the wanting to move, to set a different piece of the same quiet in front of us for an hour.

Eventually the week ran itself out, the way they do once you stop counting the days of them. We packed down, Grammy's van swinging in behind us as it had all the way south, and pointed the bus towards Dubbo. Behind us the Pilliga closed over in the mirrors, another long stretch of road laid down and let go of, and the two mountains we had known when we were new to all this still sitting out there somewhere, holding up their patch of sky.Read more