Nomadic Narratives

By now we should have known better than to follow Google Maps into a forest. Only two months earlier it had sent us down a track to Blowering Reservoir that did not exist, and it had tried the same trick more than once before that. But the camp was close, the day was mild, and the blue line on the screen looked very sure of itself.

The track narrowed, then roughened. The bus rocked from one rut into the next, and branches dragged along both sides. Where a huge log lay across the way, someone before us had worn a bypass around it through the bush, and Sal was out of the cab almost before Anth had stopped. She walked ahead, checking the ground and the stumps, and waved him on a metre at a time. Then she hurried round to watch the back as it came through, the rear of the bus clearing the dirt by so little that she held her breath until it was past. She climbed back in and we were both laughing at once, joking about it the way people do when the thing very nearly happened. Underneath the laughing, we both knew how this was likely to end.

It ended the way it had in the state forests of Tasmania, at Evercreech and elsewhere. The track carried on, but only for something with four-wheel drive and a good deal less length than a Coaster. We found a clearing just wide enough to reverse into, turned around, and crept back the way we had come before giving a second map its chance.

The second map took us back through Bendoc, the small town we had only just driven through, and out on a road that went exactly where it said it would. It was so easy it was almost rude. Another story for the collection, we agreed, and one we would probably tell better than it deserved.

We had wanted somewhere quiet. Canberra had given us seven weeks of good people and a long run of goodbyes. Grammy’s van had turned off Jan’s street, Liz and Jeff had stood at the end of their driveway, and there had been a hard parting at Michelago. Ahead lay Bairnsdale, a train, and Torrin, his trial ending within the week and a month with us before Canada. Between here and there sat a stretch of days with nothing written in them. We wanted to spend some of it where no one needed anything from us.

Wilson’s Hut had no one at it at all. The campsite opened wide and grassy under the forest, larger than we had expected and quite pretty, and we parked right in the middle of the grass as though we had won it. Then we walked the edges and found the spot beside the hut was better, tucked in and sheltered, and moved the bus across. It was a small thing, shifting camp a few metres. It was also how we knew we meant to stay.

We poked around the hut itself first. Then Anth turned to a stack of firewood someone had left at the campsite and worked it down with the bowsaw into lengths that would fit the Pomoly. Rain was forecast for days, and under these trees the solar would get little. The fire would do the cooking so the batteries could keep the fridge cold. It was the kind of arithmetic the bus had taught us without our ever asking.

The rain came as promised, but the cold never followed it. We put the awning out and lived beneath it, the Pomoly ticking beside our chairs and the kettle never far from its top. Water ran off the awning’s edge in a line of drips that pocked the grass. Mist came down into the trees, lifted, and came down again. The air smelled of wet bark and woodsmoke, and Sal’s coffee steamed in her hands, never left long enough to cool. Days passed like that, and we let them.

Somewhere in those slow days a thought settled in Sal that she did not say aloud. For two years every week had been measured against something: an assignment due, a workshop to fly to, then hours of one-on-one counted toward forty. The counting had stopped in Canberra. It took until now, under a dripping awning at a hut with no one around, for her body to believe it. Nothing in these days was owed to anyone.

It was on one of those grey afternoons that we both heard it: a deep, hollow thrumming, so low it seemed to come up through the ground before it reached the ear. We looked at each other, then at the trees. Out of the misty rain a few emus had wandered up close to the bus, and they were calling to one another, that strange drum of a sound rolling out of them and back again across the wet grass, older than anything we had heard in a long while. We sat very still under the awning, the fire between us, and let them talk.

The wildlife there was about as Australian as it gets. Kookaburras laughed us up in the mornings and down again at dusk. Kangaroos grazed the edges of the clearing. At night possums scrabbled through the trees around the bus. And the emus came and went as though the place were theirs, which, for most of those days, they shared only with us.

One night a few campers drove in and set up across the grass, and by the next day they were gone. After that it was ours again, and that was how it felt the whole time: less a campground we had found than a place someone had kept for us.

We wanted to stay longer. We talked about it more than once, each of us half hoping the other would make the case. But Bairnsdale was still a long way off and Torrin’s trial was ending, so we packed up, folded the awning wet, and took the easy road back out.

In Bendoc we found free hot showers and a power point, and we stood under the water a long time. The batteries, starved of sun after days of rain and shade, climbed back to a hundred per cent. Then we set off south, the road winding on through the forest. Behind us, beside the hut, the flattened grass where the bus had stood would already be starting to lift.Read more