Nomadic Narratives

The flight was late afternoon, so there was no reason to leave Gordon early and we did not. Then the run back up the channel and over the Tasman Bridge into Hobart, which we had crossed enough times by then for it to feel like arriving somewhere rather than passing through.

Sorell first, to post a parcel back to Grammy. The awning shade and the Camps Australia book, both lent to us in January when she handed them over on the understanding that she would not be needing them again. She was seventy-four and had decided that part of her life was finished.

Three weeks on the road with us undid that. She went home, thought about it, and bought a van.

So the parcel was not a return of borrowed goods so much as an admission that the loan had been made on false premises. She wanted her shade back because she was going to be sitting under it somewhere.

Shopping, a meal, and then the airport, where Anth flew out to Melbourne for a day of work that would go into the Japan fund, and Jack at the other end. Jack had spent Christmas with us in Queensland before any of this started. They had an evening of going back over things, which is what you do with someone who knew you in a previous configuration.

Sal drove to Forcett and set up at the back of the property. She had been there before, on her own, the last time Anth flew out of Hobart, so it was familiar ground in the way that only second visits are. She spent the evening working on a YouTube edit. The channel was new then and mostly an experiment, and there is something specific about sitting alone in a bus in a paddock in June assembling footage of the two of you.

Anth was back the next day, Uber from the airport, and that was the separation done.

What we had not expected was Michael. He hosts the Hipcamp, and by the second day he had stopped treating us as guests. He offered to move the bus up closer to the house so we could plug in, and told us to stay as long as we liked, with no end date attached and nothing wanted in return. It was June, the panels were losing the argument with the weather, and a week of shore power was worth more than he probably realised. People do not usually make that offer to strangers. He made it easily.

Him and Amanda both. We ended up at the local pub with them, eating steak marinated in Jack Daniels that the place is apparently known for, and there we met Ian, a cowboy with the full complement of stories and no shortage of willingness to tell them. Another day they took us into Salamanca for the markets, and afterwards to a friend's bar with live music on, the sort of thing you never find as a visitor because it requires somebody local to walk you in.

The last night was a feast in the cold. Roast lamb and roast pork, the smell of it going across the yard, everybody standing about with coats on. Michael, Amanda, Ian, Liz, us. Pool first, which our hosts won convincingly, and then the table.

That is the part of this life nobody warns you about. Not the loneliness, which we had braced for and largely not found, but the opposite problem: you keep meeting people at exactly the pace you can afford to lose them. Six days earlier Michael had been a booking on an app. Now he was somebody carving pork in a paddock and telling us to stay.

We left the next morning with Hobart ahead of us again and nothing after that on the calendar at all.En savoir plus

The morning at Bannons Park began with laundry strung between the trees, sheets and clothes hanging in the still air until the campground looked like a village wash day. Other travellers saw the idea and followed, and by mid-morning half the sites had lines up, the whole park drying its life in the open. There are worse ways to spend a final morning with Grammy.

After lunch we drove south to Leven Canyon, the gorge we had found by accident weeks earlier when a road sign pulled us off the route to Preston Falls. This time it was deliberate, and the purpose was Grammy. Anth handed her the hiking poles at the car park and walked her through the technique, and she took to them with the focused determination of a woman who does not intend to be left behind. The track to Cruickshanks lookout is not long but it climbs, and Grammy climbed it, poles clicking on the rock, pausing to catch her breath without ever suggesting they turn back. At the top she stood at the railing and looked out over the gorge with the expression she had worn at every high point on the trip: not triumph exactly, but the private satisfaction of having reached something under her own power. Fran took her photograph. Sal stood beside her and said nothing, because the view was saying it.

From Leven Canyon we drove to Lake Barrington, a new camp for all four of us. Garry was already there. A Queensland handyman who had folded himself into the Tasmanian camping circuit, he had the practical ease of someone who fixes things for a living and sees no reason to stop when he is on holiday. Our solar panels had been underperforming since the cloudy days at Penstock, and Garry looked at them, diagnosed the issue, and sorted it with the kind of unhurried competence that makes you wonder how you managed before he appeared. He would not take payment. He would, however, take a beer by the fire.

Nina and Remo arrived later, a Swiss couple travelling Australia in the slow, methodical way that the Swiss travel anything. They joined the campfire circle and the evening expanded the way campfire evenings had been expanding since the first week: stories traded, routes compared, the shared currency of distance and diesel and places that exceeded or disappointed expectations. The fire crackled. The cold pressed in. The conversation ran late.

After the others had turned in, Anth walked to the lake's edge with Nina and Remo to look for the Aurora Australis. The forecast had said possible, which in Tasmania means unlikely but worth the effort. The aurora did not appear. What appeared instead was the Milky Way, thick and luminous across the centre of the sky, and a shooting star that burned a brief line through the southern dark and vanished. They stood at the water's edge for a while longer, watching for a second one, and the silence between the three of them was the comfortable kind that arrives between strangers who have shared a fire and now share a sky.

The next morning brought goodbyes. Nina and Remo heading further south, Garry east, Grammy and Fran one day closer to their departure. Each farewell was small and warm and carried the understanding that the road might circle back, the way it had with Natalie, with Terry, with the Yolla Tavern itself. Grammy's goodbye was still ahead, but it was close now, and the weight of it had been present at every campfire for the past week, growing heavier each evening as the flames burned down.En savoir plus