Following Him Across the River

Langfords West settled it. We pulled in on the way down, the only other free camp along that stretch, and looked around just long enough to know we had already had the best of it at Raspberry Hill. Nobody said so out loud. Nobody needed to.

Behind us was the quietest country we had found all spring. Ahead were a busier valley, a train, and a hotel in Melbourne where Sophie and Torrin would celebrate their birthdays together. Torrin had a few weeks left with us before Canada, and we were spending one of them coming down off a mountain. We took the road slowly.

It was not a road that wanted hurrying. Open tops, snow gums bent low by the wind, nothing much between the bitumen and the sky. Somewhere along it Torrin said it looked a bit like the South Island, and Anth had been thinking the same thing. The TA. The weeks the two of them had walked together before the snow turned them back with the trail unfinished. Neither of them needed to say which part they meant.

We stopped at Cope Hut and walked through it. Most of the old huts up here were built for cattlemen. This one was different: the first hut in the area put up for people heading to the snowfields, a roof for skiers rather than stockmen. It sat small and solid in the open, and we stayed inside a little longer than there was any reason to.

From there the road wound on toward Falls Creek, a ski village we drove straight through, and then it began to fall. More than a kilometre of elevation came off in long, looping bends, the air thickening and warming with every turn. We were leaving the true high country, and we could feel it go.

Mount Beauty sat at the bottom. Torrin found his chemist, and we did something we almost never do on the road and bought lunch. Then left out of town, up and over again, and down into Bright, which was as pretty as everyone says and knew it. Every second shopfront was there for visitors. It also had what seemed to be the cheapest diesel in the country, so the bus drank its fill and we did not argue.

At the water refill in a local park, Sal looked at Anth, looked at the tap, and suggested he wash his hair while he was there. Nearly three years on the road. It had never once occurred to him. He bent under the tap anyway and came up dripping, more baffled by himself than by the cold.

Ah Youngs was twenty minutes on, in state forest beside the Buckland River, and it was busy. Not an official long weekend, but nearly everyone seemed to have decided the Monday was theirs. Cars came and went the whole time. We all felt the same pang for the hill we had left. We found a spot as far from everyone as the camp allowed, and Torrin walked a slow circle around it and stopped between two trees. A week after the snow gums at Raspberry Hill had refused him, the hammock finally went up.

The Buckland was a small river, clear and quick and cold. Anth and Torrin waded up it together for a while, knee-deep, Torrin out in front picking the line and Anth a few steps behind. For a stretch Anth was somewhere else entirely: a string of South Island rivers, one after another, that same back leaning into the current ahead of him and always reaching the far side first. He had followed Torrin across more rivers than he could count. In a few weeks there would be an ocean between them, and Anth would not be following. Then Torrin found a deeper pool and decided he was going all the way in. Anth stayed where he was, the water at his knees, and let him have it. Torrin surfaced, swore at the temperature, and laughed, and the sound carried down the river to where his father stood.

An older couple had been parked near us when we arrived, left, and come back a few days later. Sal got talking to them. They were in their seventies and more active than we had thought anyone could be at that age. He had walked the Appalachian Trail in the United States a few years earlier, and he and Torrin fell straight into talk of thru-hiking: food drops, foot care, the long middle stretches where the walk stops being an adventure and becomes a way of living. The couple were about to run a four peaks event: four half marathons, uphill, on four consecutive days. We went back to the bus quietly rearranging our idea of what seventy might look like.

Anth and Torrin took the bikes out for a short explore. At a creek crossing Anth’s front wheel went one way and Anth went the other, sideways and completely into the water. He came up drenched from head to foot. Torrin waited, mostly, until he was standing before he laughed.

In the end we left a day early. The train into Melbourne was an early one, out of Wangaratta, and we wanted to be close to it. All three of us were going in, to a hotel and a birthday for two. On the last morning Torrin unhooked the hammock and rolled it tight. He had waited all week for those two trees.Read more