Five Days That Will Not Vanish

The drizzle came with us out of town and gave up somewhere on the road south, and by the time the bus came down into Orroral the cloud was pulling apart over the ridgeline.

The camp sits at the head of the Orroral Valley. A fortnight earlier we had ridden five kilometres uphill out of Honeysuckle to the boulders at Legoland and stood looking down into it, a long trough of pale grass held on both sides by the range. Now we were on the floor of the same valley looking back up at where we had been standing. Anth knew the ground regardless, from the end of last year, the corridor that had taken him through the Cotter and Honeysuckle and on to Mount Clear. Third of those four, come back to with the bus and with company this time.

Grammy had beaten us there. She had driven straight from Higgins while we did the second placement day, found the camp, taken a spot that suited her and left room alongside, and in the process had handed us the one patch of ground in the place that would hold a Starlink signal. That mattered more than it sounds. Wednesday was a full day of SMART Recovery meetings for Sal, video sessions run to a timetable with people at the other end of them, and a connection that drops is not an inconvenience but a failure. Whether she worked that out or simply parked where she liked the look of, the result was the same.

Wednesday went the way it needed to. After that the week opened up.

We walked twice. A kilometre or so out to the rock pools first, easy ground, done and back well before the day got away. The longer one waited for the end of an afternoon, up the valley with the sun dropping, because that was the hour Anth had been out here jogging last year when the place turned out to be full of kangaroos. It repeated itself and improved on the repetition. There were more of them this time, well spread through the grass in the flat light, taking almost no notice of us.

The camp stood among ghost gums and the birds ran all day. Not the occasional call but a continuous overlapping business of them, more species than could be picked apart, going from early light and not letting up until it did.

The Pomoly went every night. It has crossed over from being equipment we carry to being simply how the evening works, lit without anyone proposing it. Sal had another go at damper and then went further, setting the camp oven on top of the fire with a curry in it, which came out well.

She also made a video. Nothing elaborate, an update for the travel channel, where we were and what the last stretch had looked like. Her coursework had finished eight days earlier, and this was the first thing she had made because she wanted to rather than because it was due.

Which is roughly where the thought landed. It is not our line and we cannot say where we picked it up: routine is the killer of time. The gym years proved it well enough. Whole years went past in that place and left almost nothing behind, each week filed under the same heading as the one before it, until we looked up and could not account for where any of it had gone. Out here it runs the other way. One of us will say do you remember that campsite, and it will feel like a year ago, and it will turn out to have been three weeks. Two days a week in Canberra is going to be routine, and the routine will disappear the way routine does. The five days out here will not.

Then the weekend, doing what weekends do. Cars came in, the sites filled, the valley acquired neighbours. And on the Sunday morning, before the bus went anywhere else, we took the short drive around the corner to the Orroral Valley tracking station.Read more