Against the Northbound Tide

Twenty minutes was all it took to trade the farm tracks for bitumen. The dust settled behind us, Grammy's van holding its place in the mirror, and the road ran south through Young and on into Cootamundra, where we stopped for fuel and little else. There was a train to catch at Albury in a few days, and the knowledge of it rode quietly in the cab with us, the way a deadline does once the drifting has a date on it again. For months there had been no end to anything. Now the road bent toward one.

We were going the wrong way, or the right way, depending how you counted. Everyone else was heading north. We had been passing them for weeks, the vans and caravans strung out toward Queensland and its warmth, and every one of them going north left one more place empty for us in the cold behind them. Bethungra Dam was one of those places. In summer it would fill with families and boats and the noise of them. We came to a foreshore we had almost to ourselves, a scatter of empty sites and the water lying flat and grey under a low sky, the stillness of somewhere caught between its seasons.

We drove the water's edge slowly, and then we saw it, a thin sinuous track folding up the hill above the dam. Anth looked at Sal. Sal looked at the track. Up we went.

The view from the top earned the climb, which was fortunate, because the top was nowhere near level. We worked at it a while, chocks and patience, the bus tipping one way then the other before we called it close enough. We gave up chasing a perfectly level floor a long time ago. There are more pressing questions in a day than whether a marble would roll off the bench. Whether the coffee is close. Whether the bus is facing the right way to take the sunrise on one end and hand back the sunset from the other. Get those two right and the floor can lean a little. And the view held up its end. The dam lay below, the road we had come in on threading north through paddocks gone pale with winter, the whole country tipping slowly toward evening.

We left the bus and Grammy's van up on the perch and took the bikes down. The switchbacks we had ground up in low gear gave everything back on the descent, freewheels ticking, corners arriving fast, the dam swinging into view and out again. A few kilometres around the water and we were done, and then of course there was the way back, which the hill had kept for itself. Our legs were honest with us about the price of the fun. We stood on the pedals for the last of it and arrived at the top with nothing left to say and a good deal to feel.

Then the sunsets. They had followed us from the last camp, the same red climbing out of the west night after night, and here they found us again. We made a point of being out for it, the cold sliding down off the hill as the colour came up, dust and cut grass sharp in the air. The sky over the dam went from bruise to ember to a deep burning red, and the water took the colour and held it, doubled, so that for a few minutes the hill stood between two fires and we stood between them too, mugs going cold in our hands, saying nothing, watching a thing that asked nothing of us in return.

Only two nights. That was the arithmetic, and the arithmetic had Albury in it, and after Albury the train, and after the train Sal's last workshop in Melbourne. Her very last. She had done this whole degree from the strangest desks, from lookouts and riverbanks and the little swing-out table Anth had fitted in the cab, the work folded in around wherever the bus happened to stop. One piece was left now. The placement, back in Canberra, where the cold would be waiting, the real kind, the kind that gets into a bus overnight and stays. The end of it was close enough to see. Neither of us said so aloud. We watched the red go out of the sky instead, and Grammy's light came on in the van behind us, and the dam went dark and still, and there was a train to catch soon enough, and there was still tonight.Read more