The Sea Found Us Again

This draft gives the sea the weight it deserved. The beach walk becomes the heart of the entry, with the Spirit of Tasmania crossings, the penguins and the Swimcart aurora as the memories. It also sets the forest meeting about the future against the evening spent looking back, and lets the first night of waves land as its own moment.

The Bonang Highway gave us a few more cars this time, and some motorcycles, though every one of them was parked, and we never did settle whether that counted.

Just before the forest let us go, a sound started up from under the bus, a dry scraping that had not been there a minute before. Any strange noise in a vehicle is a worry. In a vehicle that is also your home, it goes straight to the stomach: the bed, the kitchen, the whole of our life was riding on whatever had just begun to drag. We pulled over and Anth got down to look. A stick. Just a small stick, caught underneath and bumping along the road. He tugged it free, and we drove on in a quiet that felt better than it had any right to.

That afternoon we had an online meeting for the business we were setting up. We had meant to be out of the trees by then and we weren’t, so we pulled over where the canopy thinned and held it from the roadside. It dropped out now and then, but it held. For an hour, in the middle of a forest, we sat and talked about the work we hoped would carry us into the years ahead.

Orbost brought us out of the trees at last. Rubbish gone, water tanks full, a few groceries in the cupboard. There is a quiet satisfaction in those small jobs that is hard to explain to anyone who doesn’t live this way. Then right onto the Princes Highway, left down a dirt track, and suddenly there was nowhere further to go. We had run out of Victoria.

Pettmans Beach had four sites, and one was taken. We tucked the bus into another, and within ten minutes the last two had gone. Luck, again.

We went straight down to the water.

Somewhere across Bass Strait, too far to see but not too far to feel, was Tasmania. We had crossed this water twice: once through five-metre swells with everything we owned chained down below decks, and once on a rainy morning a year and a half later, leaving. Standing at the edge of it, we started remembering out loud. The little penguins on our first nights on the island. The red rocks and the aurora at Swimcart. All the beaches we had walked, and the ones we had kept coming back to.

Then further back, to the Sunshine Coast, before any of it. We used to walk those beaches while the bus was still being built at our place on the lake at Wurtulla, talking about a life on the road as if it were somewhere we might go one day. We did not know then what it would hold. We did not know about Tasmania. Now here we were on another beach, with all of it behind us, still talking.

That morning we had sat in a forest planning what came next. That evening we stood at the sea, remembering where we had been.

Paul had given us a big wave and a grin when we drove in, so as the light went we wandered over to his fire. We liked him at once. Before long Jack drifted across from the camp next door, a young bloke on his way north to Queensland, back toward where all of this had started for us. The stories and the jokes came easily, and none of us was in a hurry to call it a night.

Then we walked back to the bus in the dark and lay down, and there it was. The sea. Wave after wave breaking somewhere beyond the dunes, the sound coming through the walls the way it used to in Tasmania. It had been more than a year. We lay awake longer than we needed to, just listening, as if the sea had found us again.

Jack left in the early hours. We heard his car start in the dark and fade away north.

Paul had told us about a red-bellied black snake that lived around the camp, so the next day we went looking for it. It stayed hidden.

On the Friday morning we had a coffee with Paul before he packed up to go home to his family in Melbourne. We swapped details, and he passed on the best camps in the country we would be travelling through in the weeks ahead, the sort of thing you only learn from someone who knows. Once he had gone, we moved into his spot, which was better than ours; the bus was ready to roll in minutes, the way it always is. We set up the shower and stood under it in the sun. The days were warm enough now that it would be coming out a lot more.

The weekend crowd arrived not long after and filled every site. We had planned to leave on the Saturday, and the next camp was less than an hour away, so there was no rush at all. We packed slowly, then more slowly still. Neither of us said we didn’t want to go.

On the dirt track out, stretched across the road in the sun, lay a red-bellied black snake. Perhaps it was Paul’s, come to see us off. We steered wide around it, and left the sea behind us.Read more