Halfway to Dubbo

The run to Dubbo was only a few hours, but we had learned long ago not to swallow a drive in one gulp when we could halve it. Our days had no fixed shape any more beyond the one Sal's study gave them. Her placement hours and her sessions were the only fixed points we had left; the driving, the camps, the where and the when all arranged themselves around those. So it was that we were not yet an hour down the road when we turned off it again, into a park on the edge of Coonabarabran, and Sal settled in for an online counselling session that would run ninety minutes.

The hour and a half was not wasted. It gave us time to run down a bin at last for the rubbish we had been carrying for days, and time to sit with the phone and work out where we would sleep. It was proper inland winter now, the kind of cold that sits in the shade and does not lift, and we did the small chores of the day with collars up.

There was something we had come to like in a stop like this. Somewhere on the other end of Sal's screen sat people we would never meet and could not name, and yet their ninety minutes set the clock for the whole of ours, decided which town we ate in and which paddock we parked in. Our free and shapeless life now bent itself, without complaint, around the work of somebody else being helped.

Mendooran came up on the screen as the answer. It sat almost exactly where we wanted it, a short hop past the halfway mark, close enough that the morning's run into Dubbo would be under an hour. When Sal came out of the bus, blinking, done, we pointed the nose that way.
The camp was nothing more than a park in the middle of the little town, and we were far from the only ones to have thought of it. A scatter of vans and camper rigs had settled on the grass, other travellers running the same arithmetic we had, splitting their own long drives at the same convenient middle. We nodded to a couple of them, the small free-camp courtesy, and they nodded back. Nothing fancy. A mown patch, a few tables, a quiet street beyond. But it would do, and doing was all we asked of it.

We pulled up beside one of the tables. A minute later Grammy's van came in behind us and settled alongside, the convoy of two drawn back into one small huddle at day's end, and she leaned out with news that changed the shape of the evening. She had a beef stew on. It had been cooking in her Dreampot all day, sealed and slow while the kilometres passed beneath it, needing no fire and no power, only the long patient heat it kept to itself. When she lifted the lid the smell of it reached us across the cold air, beef and onion and hours of dark gravy, and any thought of our own small dinner went quietly out the window. How could we say no.

We did not say no. We ate at the table as the light went out of the sky and the cold came down harder, three of us and a pot that had ridden the whole day to be ready at exactly this hour. It was, without exaggeration, delicious, the particular gift of a hot meal at the end of a day spent mostly waiting, and better still for being one that neither of us had cooked. We went back for more. We were not shy about it.

Afterwards, full and slow, we said our goodnights and crossed the few steps back to our own bus. Somewhere a dog barked once and gave it up. The town had gone quiet in the way small towns do early, a light on in a house or two, the road empty. Tomorrow would be a town day, Dubbo and its errands, water and fuel and a supermarket and whatever else a town is for. But that was tomorrow. Tonight there was only the warmth of a good stew sitting easy in us, and the dark settling over a borrowed patch of grass we would leave in the morning and never think of again, and the quiet knowledge that this, too, was the life. Not the grand days. This one.Read more