Nothing Left Behind

After a week of kerbs and driveways, the trees closed back in over the road to Honeysuckle, and the city was gone behind the first bend. We had two nights before Thursday, when the dinner at Liz and Jeff's would turn the last of the goodbyes into something real. What we wanted in between was quiet.

The one clearing at the campground with enough sky for the panels and the Starlink, the spot Anth had used on both his earlier stays, already had someone in it. So we drove the extra thirty seconds up to the day use car park at the tracking station itself. It was Anth's third time at Honeysuckle and Sal's second, and the first time either of us had slept up at the station rather than down among the campers. Strictly, it was not a place for camping. But the bus asks for very little. It parks, the panels see the sky, and when it goes there is nothing left behind to show it was there. A setup that small can sit in places not quite meant for it without anyone being the worse for it. Up there the sky was wide open, which suited the solar and the Starlink better than the clearing ever had.

It suited us too. The car park was quiet in a way the suburbs never manage, and the kangaroos and wallabies were thicker on the ground up here than down at the camp, grazing between the concrete footings that are all that remain of the station. A month earlier we had slept in the Erindale shopping centre car park, where Sal lay awake all night listening to the town. This car park could not have been more different.

On a walk down to the toilets we found out what we were missing. The campers below were loud, in the best way, a group plainly having a very good time. By the time we climbed back to the car park the noise had gone into the trees, and from where the bus sat we could not hear a thing.

On the first evening the light went slowly off the hill. Half a century ago this ridge had been listening to the moon. Now there was nothing left of all that equipment but its footings, and the loudest thing up there was a kangaroo tearing at the grass a few steps from the door. Our Starlink sat pointed at the same sky the dishes once watched, quietly doing its own small listening. For the first time in seven weeks, there was no school day waiting at the end of the week. Sal's one on ones were done. Nothing needed us in the city until Thursday.

We walked the loop tracks around the station the next day, less than two kilometres all up. It was nothing that would trouble legs that had covered sixteen on the Settlers Track a fortnight earlier, but it was good to be walking under trees again. Anth picked up the geocaches he had missed on the last visit.

On the second day the campers below packed up and left. Their places were taken by a group of about twenty school girls on a hiking trip and their teachers, who had the look of people who had not sat down since it began. Twenty teenagers in a campground ought to carry a long way through the bush. Again, from the car park, we did not hear a sound.

On the Thursday morning, as we were getting ready to go, a ranger drove through. It was the one visitor we had half been expecting since we arrived, parked where we were. He lifted a hand from the wheel, waved, and kept going.

It had only been two nights, and a short stay by any measure we had used on this trip. But it had been better than the suburbs, and it had been the right place to be before what came next. We packed up, pulled out of the car park and drove down the hill toward Liz and Jeff's, toward dinner and the goodbyes. Behind us the car park was empty again, with nothing to show we had been there.Read more