None of It Reached Us but the Light

The snow gums came slowly, and then they were everywhere. For the first part of the forty-five minutes up from CRB they stood scattered among the taller forest, pale and crooked and few. By the top of the climb they were the forest: low, wind-bent, their trunks streaked grey and cream and olive, no two leaning the same way. This was the true high country, and we had been meaning to reach this hill for more than a year.

Justin had rung us about Raspberry Hill not long after he got his Starlink. Justin of the Gordon foreshore, who had shared a stretch of road with us in Tasmania and still thought of us when he found a good spot. We had carried his recommendation across a lot of country and through a lot of other plans. Now we were finally close, and we had Torrin with us for the few weeks left before Canada. It mattered that the place be good.

We looked in at Buckety Plain first, since it sat only a short way from Raspberry Hill and it seemed silly not to. It was pretty enough. But a camper already held the best of it, there were no views to speak of, and the trees closed over the sky we needed for the panels and Sal’s Starlink. We turned around.

Raspberry Hill, then. It was what we had hoped for. The ground fell away in every direction we cared to look, ridge behind blue ridge, the whole high country laid out and open to the sun. There was one other camper.

They had claimed the only level patch. Our view was better, we agreed, and we said so to each other several times while Anth eased the bus back and forth over the levelling blocks, Sal calling the inches from outside. It took longer than any levelling had in months. Torrin pitched his tent a short walk away. He gave the snow gums a hopeful look for the hammock, but they were too short and too crooked to hang anything from, and the tent it was.

The sun up there had real warmth in it. Sal took her coffee out into it each morning, and as ever it never had the chance to cool. The next day our neighbours packed up and left, and for a few hours the hill was ours, until a second group drove in later in the afternoon.

The Pomoly did its duty each evening, though we spent less time sitting around it than we would have liked. Training went on as it had at CRB: rings, pistol squats and bodyweight work, Torrin doing the sets alongside us. It was an ordinary thing, the three of us puffing in a row on a hilltop. Sal noticed herself counting. Not reps. Mornings. How many more of these before an airport.

Then the cold came up the hill. Torrin crawled out one morning to find icicles the size of his fingers hanging from the base of the tent, while he himself had slept toasty warm inside it. He showed us as if he had grown them. Anth looked at the ice and thought of where Torrin was going: a whole season of mornings like this one, only colder, and too far away for us to see.

Storms and rain had been on the forecast all along. On the second last day the rain came, steady on the roof, and the smell of wet earth and gum leaves rose off the hill. That night, from the bus, we watched far off to the south as lightning broke over Melbourne. At that distance it made no sound at all. The clouds lit from inside and went dark again, over and over, above the city where Torrin had spent fifty days inside a trial earning the season he was about to go and have. Up on our hill the rain eased, and none of the storm reached us but the light.

We would have stayed longer. All three of us said so, more than once, and meant it even more than we had at CRB. But Torrin needed a chemist, and a chemist was a long way down. We packed up slowly. Torrin shook the last of the rain off the tent. Anth drove forward off the levelling blocks, and the bus settled back onto the slope of the hill as though it had never been asked to stand straight.Read more