Day 53-54 Home

Wed-Thurs, 21-22 July 2021

We ride the long spine of Western Australia’s great north-south highway like a super slide back to our home in the southwest. The mighty Hamersley Range with its ragged ridges of iron ore boast of both the beauty and richness of W.A.’s superlative resources. The last of the scrubby red rock land we’ve grown accustomed to on this long journey starts to recede after our last night, parked behind a pile of picturesque boulders near a roadside rest area north of Meeketharra. The usually dry salt lakes south are teeming with a thin layer of water. North of Wubin, farmlands appear, wide stretches of bright green wheat fields, lush from above-average winter rains. Then the sunny yellow expanse of canola fields, bright and magnificent in their bloom. And water everywhere, turning the normally arid southern lands into squishy pools of fecundity. Wildflowers colouring the receding bush with pale soft colours, purple, magenta, and creamy golden hues.

Thursday, our last day, the setting near-full moon tricks us into thinking dawn is near. The eastern horizon glows with its reflection. We rise at 4am, pack up and drive for 12 hours, covering the 900 kms to home with only a few stops, including a late lunch in the Swan Valley northeast of Perth to celebrate our trip. We arrive home as the day gives way to twilight, our 10,000 kilometre journey complete.

There’s a sadness sits in me whenever we finish a trip. The lived reality of life on the road slides into second place as memory takes over. Then even that fades after not too long a time. I love our home, the life we’ve created in the Australian bush outside urban centres. But camping provides more of an opportunity to be outside, soak up the intensity of nature in a way that never really lands when you spend the majority of your days indoors. I form a relationship with the night sky, the birds and their quirky calls, flora and its mellow aromas, tracks and scat, and an unsatiable curiosity for rocks, their age, shapes, designs, colours and incredible long history, some back to days before anything we know of was in existence. All these things recede into the background, behind a veil that obscures their presence and intensity when life is lived primarily indoors, all too often at a desk looking into a screen.

Before embarking on this trip, I said to Johan I thought this could be our swan song, our final long journey into Australia’s magnificent outback. For fifteen years we’ve explored it, visiting popular tourist destinations and penetrating the more hidden gems on off-the-beaten-track routes. It’s a way of life that suits us both. Like two kids in a playground, we’re energised by nature’s wonders, both simple and grand. Living outside, on the land invokes a wakefulness and immediacy that doesn’t always present itself so fully in the habitual patterns of daily life back home.

But still, it’s not an easy mode of travel. By the time we arrive home, we and our gear are grubby and grungy, everything covered in red dust, which has penetrated even the most well-sealed compartments. Showers are few and far between and clothes don’t stay clean for long. We get used to being feral and unconcerned about how we smell (human!). The rickety ride on corrugated beat-up roads is rattling, taking their toll on our car, camper trailer, and nerves. This style of travel requires strength – physical and emotional – stamina, tolerance, and a love of whimsy and faith in serendipity that aren’t so present in more planned and prudent forms of travel. It’s both energizing – and exhausting. And strikes me as something you gradually give up as aging takes precedence.

And alongside this sits another issue. More than once Johan and I have debated – and I often think about -- the ethical issues surrounding long-distance travel in a world that’s slowly spinning out of control because, primarily, of the way we live. What in our lifetimes has been mostly taken for granted – our ability to move across the globe with ease and comfort in ways our forebears never imagined possible – is now becoming an increasingly urgent question. The travel industry – from the low-brow stuff we do all the way up to the high-end cruises and 5-star vacation packages – is a major contributor to degradation of our planet. Not just its carbon footprint, but the toll those footprints (from feet, cars, motorbikes, ships, planes, hotels, resorts and yes, even campgrounds!) have on nature and its often fragile ecosystems. The millions of cows we herd across the planet may trample the land, but the millions of tourists that visit the many natural wonders around the world trample not only the land, but culture, a sense of the sacred, the endurance of things like silence, darkness, solitude and wonder.

Plus we burn a lot of fuel. How much longer can any of us justify the impact our way of life has on the growing calamities of climate change? Though a global problem, tied up with big giants like industry, politics and capitalism, there must come a time when each individual decides its time to pull back on some aspect of their lives that is contributing to the problem. A small but important contribution to changing the destructive way we live.

We hold this question next to our heartfelt love for travel, especially into the deep recesses of nature that aren’t available to us, even at our relatively nature-centred home. Whether I (or we) can say, No More Travel – I’m not sure yet. My aging body may give a shout out before then. Or life circumstances – our own or society at large -- may preclude any more long trips.

The day after we get home, I fall exhausted on my bed. A day of cleaning, organising, washing, and restocking has left me spent in a different way to how I felt at the end of a long hike. My body aches and my spirit is worn. I pick up my phone and settle back for a bit of relaxed reading. An email from one of my favorite writers, Paul Kingsnorth, includes this extract from Robinson Jeffers’ long poem The Tower Beyond Tragedy. It sums up nicely why we spend time in nature, and offers a fitting conclusion to this chapter of our travel blog:

I entered the life of the brown forest

And the great life of the ancient peaks,

The patience of stone,

I felt the changes in the veins

In the throat of the mountain, and I was the streams

Draining the mountain woods;

and I the stag drinking,

and I was the stars boiling with light,

wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit,

and I was the darkness

outside the stars I included them.

They were part of me …

How can I express the excellence I have found

That has no color but clearness;

No honey but ecstasy.

 As my Dad would say, Yes, Yes, Yes...