Thirty Minutes Out, Thirty Back

Gundaroo sat ten minutes past the state line and thirty from Jan's front door, which was the entire reason for choosing it. The recreation reserve was a strip of ground behind a small town oval, the sort of free camp that exists in every second country town in New South Wales and asks nothing of anybody. We had it to ourselves. Anth took the bus up the back where the mown grass gave out at the fence, well away from the gate, and Grammy brought her van in ahead of him. Two vehicles in a corner, an empty oval between us and the road, and a week to spend in it.

The nights went down to about zero and frost lay on the grass most mornings until the sun cleared the trees. The diesel heaters stayed off. A public ground is not the place to run one, and the bus held its warmth well enough without help, so the cold was simply accepted the way you accept weather you have chosen to live in. A few caravans came through over the week. All of them stopped nearer the gate, none of them came up the back, and the corner stayed as quiet on the last night as it had been on the first.

Anth took the bike out for geocaches. He had always walked them, since the Tasmanian mornings when a find meant boots and a loop and coming back with the day already half spent. This time he rode, and picked up everything the town had to offer in one pass, moving through cold streets at a pace that let him see where he was without stopping to think about it. Coming back past the toilet block he fell in with an older fellow from the local men's shed. The man may have given his name; if he did, Anth did not catch it. What he did catch was the town: who was doing what, what the shed had on, which local matters were currently worth an opinion. Anth mostly listened. It cost a quarter of an hour and he was still turning it over when he got back to the bus.

Thirty minutes away, Sal was in a house. Not the placement yet, that was still days off, but the week before it, spent in a kitchen with a kettle and a spare bed and two people she had known most of her life. Jan, and Sophie for the first part of it, the three of them with nothing to pack and nowhere to be by dark. Then Sophie went back to Sydney, the way she had before and would again, her own road running to its own schedule now. Sal stayed on at Jan's. Anth stayed on at the oval.

Then the last weekend arrived and took the ground over completely. Nosework, formal scent detection, a lead-in to the nationals, which made it a serious event rather than a local novelty. Handlers had come from a distance. Cars filled everything that could be parked on, crates came out of boots, and the far half of the oval turned organised and purposeful for two days. Spectators were not allowed. Anth got as close as the perimeter and no closer. Grammy did considerably better. Her van sat at the edge of the activity and she got talking to owners as they came and went, collecting the thing in pieces across the weekend, and handed it all over to Anth in the evenings: what the breeds were, how a search was laid out, what a dog did with itself in the moment it found what it had been sent in for. He had watched vehicles arrive and leave all day and understood none of it. By the end of Grammy's account he understood a fair amount.

Sunday, and the drive back in to collect Sal. Thirty minutes, the state line twice, paddocks and then houses. Sophie was already gone. Monday would start the placement properly, one day a week in Canberra, which left the rest of every week free to be somewhere else entirely. That was the arrangement, and it had just been tested for the first time without either of us particularly noticing it was a test. A week at an oval ten minutes over the border. Thirty minutes out, thirty minutes back. Not much of a distance at all, once it had been driven.Read more