G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 51. This letter is one of contrasting feelings and thoughts about change. There’s us settling in and getting very comfortable with the people and surrounds of the Big Valley Campsite in Margaret River, while also feeling the pull to hit the road again because there’s places we’ve got to be.
Letters From the Road is the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife and two boys back in 2019.
The story comes to you in weekly installments, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 50 letters here, waiting for a fish to bite.
Be well,
Luke
There are all kinds of journeys, mental, physical, emotional, drug-induced - I’ve even had a chicken parma once that took me on quite a trip. But the commonality is that you start in one place and come out and you’re something slightly different.
Journeys change you.
Travel is one of the best ways to go on a journey, and I am not just referring to the physical trip. Travel, especially if you are lucky enough to be able to do it for an extended period of time, gives us the opportunity to see other cultures and how other people do things, an experience that provides perspective. Trying new foods introduces us to new smells, flavours and textures.
Often you have to develop new routines, out of the necessity of being somewhere different or living differently.
Try wearing the same clothes for five straight days - think about what we take away from that in our thinking about buying stuff. Do I really need another t-shirt?, I often think to myself.
At this point in our road trip around Australia, we’d been camping for nearly 12 weeks straight in some fairly rustic outback settings, and when you do so, you develop a new appreciation for and comfort about being slightly filthy.
Something even as simple as living for long stretches with a refrigerator that’s smaller than most people’s esky will change the way you think about food and preparing meals.
Extended travel allows us to slip slowly and quietly out of the uniforms we wear and into different ones, to exercise this super power that we have, and that’s our ability to be shapeshifters.
But as with many changes, we fail to see the change until we stop and take a look around, like when one morning you’re looking in the mirror and say to yourself ‘Goddamn, I’ve got lots of forehead’, or when you suddenly realise that your kids are taller than you.
Our time at the Big Valley Campsite was one of those times.
Before starting our trip, we’d been a pretty typical family: mom, dad, and two kids, living in a cozy two bedroom townhouse on a busy street in Melbourne’s north. The townhouse had a garage where our car lived, and we had closets full of stuff, rooms full of furniture. We had a stand mixer and a knife set, a fake Christmas tree and a subscription that sent us a box of meat once a month.
Katie and I had salaries and careers. She worked full time for a big insurance company. I worked as a project manager, looking after construction projects. Henry and Oscar walked themselves to and from primary school every day.
We were pretty average in many senses of the word. Nice and clean and sanitary, with the trappings of success.
What we weren’t was anything like the mixed bag of folks living near where we were camped on the north side of Big Valley.
They live in tents out in the bush.
They didn’t have careers, they had jobs.
All of their wordly belongings fit into their tents, and anything that didn’t went into the boot of the car.
These people were different.
They’d traded creature comforts for other things, like going out your front door - or front flap rather - and being able to walk across the grass to check out a view that goes on forever down the valley.
There’s fresh air is in abundance and tall gum trees that provide shelter and shade. There’s a simplicity to it as well, like how the French kids would bring home fresh milk from the farm where they worked, or how one of our other neighbours would catch his dinner from the ocean.
They’d chosen a different kind of life, one that came with a lot of freedom. Live like you want, smoke what you want, and pets are more than welcome, no damage deposit required.
Drink as many Victoria Bitters as you can handle, and if you want to drink those beers in your underwears while watching cricket it’s fine, just don’t scare any kids riding past on their bikes.
A year ago, I don’t think we would have found ourselves brushing shoulders with a group like this. We were on different planets, and our orbits just didn’t come close to each other.
And yet there we were living in Big Valley, much more like them than the people we had been. Over the time we’d spent travelling, we’d changed shape.
The thing is, I think our neighbours at Big Valley were all shapeshifters too.
Take the two 20-somethings, Eva and her boyfriend, the youngest people in the neighbourhood other than my boys. Until not too long ago, they had been students in France. Now they were living in a tent in a quiet rural corner of Margaret River, a place that’s about as far away from France as you can get. They worked on a dairy farm to save money so they could strike out on the road to see more of Australia.
That change, one from being a student to someone who is fully independent, living and working and chewing up life in a foreign country, is about as big a shift as you’ll have in life.
Everyone else had a story too. One night after dinner we were hanging out with them along with two of our other neighbours, Ben and Kim.
Kim is a middle aged woman with sandy blond hair, attractive in a rugged, beachy, sun beaten way. She lived in a tent with her dog, and worked at a cafe in town. Beyond that, though, she did not tell us much of her story, she was more of a mystery.
But that night she cracked open a little bit and let some of her weirdness out by introducing us to one of her hobbies: collecting skulls.
16 December 2019 - Big Valley
After dinner, a skull show by Kim and Ben. Kim also showed us her collection of wedgie claws that she’s going to make into a necklace or something, while smoking a spliff with the Frenchies.
With some encouragement from the group, Kim disappeared to her tent and then came back with a dirty light blue blanket, and set it on one of the big tables in the camp kitchen. Wrapped up inside were at least half dozen skulls of different sizes, shapes and colours.
These are the things you find out about people once you get comfortable with each other. Skulls are a hobby I guess, though a bit further in left field than knitting sweaters or baking bread. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not like the skulls were from small children and their pets or something, they all looked to be sheep and goats, maybe aliens.
My question is, where do you keep a bunch of skulls when you’re living in a tent? I wouldn’t put up with it. The boys, however, had none of my qualms. They were enthralled, not to mention a bit jealous.
Once Kim started to show off her curios, another one of our neighbours Ben disappeared to his tent and returned with a few skulls of his own that he’d picked up during his travels.
An affable guy of around 30 years old, Ben also lived with his dog.
In his past life, he was a professional fishing guide. He’d lived and worked on some touristy islands in Indonesia and then up north in the Kimberley, so this is a guy who knew how to catch a fish. The following day he offered to take us with him to the ocean to throw in a few lines.
The boys were very excited to go fishing. The last time they had gone - one of the few times during our road trip - had been weeks ago in Derby, when a lawnmower driving fisherman who called himself Duncan the Drunken had given them bait and helped them fish off the Derby pier. For the majority of the trip the boys’ fishing poles had been tumbling around the back of our car getting broken and collecting dust.
I was excited too, though not so much for the fishing. I’d seen Ben return from his fishing outings with a couple of fresh ones hanging from a line. I was picturing us coming home with a big snapper, or even a couple, and feeding the whole camp.
We’d be forever remembered as heroes in the lore of the north side of Big Valley, the bringers of sustenance, food to the hungry.
How does the saying go? Give the camp a fish, and you feed them for a day. Send Luke, Ben and the boys fishing, and you feed the camp for a lifetime.
17 December 2019 - Big Valley
Went fishing. Caught nothing. Freeze dried meals for dinner.
Perhaps a more appropriate saying is this one: Luke is Luke and fish are fish and never the twain shall meet. Even if it isn’t exactly that, the sentiment rings true.
But our fishing trip was nonetheless memorable.
Ben, the English guy who’s spent a bit of time all over, took us fishing today. He offered after having a chat with Henry when they ran into each other around camp.
Ben told me that he learned to fish from his dad, fishing in the canals around Manchester. He later spent time working as a guide in Broome and the Kimberley.
The outing was super nice of Ben, considering he spent most of his time fucking around with us and getting all our gear set up rather than fishing himself.
The surf where we went, a place called Gas Bay, was booming.
The light coming off the cold blue gray water, shining with patches and spots of yellow from the last bits from the sun, was wonderful. But it seemed that the ocean wanted to take something, not give something away.
The water was foaming, frothing, waves crashing with a force that made me worry about my boys and about Ben’s dog getting dragged out by a rogue wave.
We all made it home safely, however the black magic that forever keeps me from catching fish must have descended on the group, and we went home with nothing for dinner.
18 December 2019 - Big Valley
Last night we sat up until 1 am with Ben, Kim, and Dave. Talking talking talking, drinking, smoking.It was a good night. Colourful, as Ben called it.
Some of the talk was just idle campfire chat.
We talked about Ben and Kim's shared love of buying shit at Op Shops and reselling it.
Just the other day Ben had come back from one of the local ones with two ostrich eggs that he bought for $10.
Why you need an ostrich egg, much less two, is a good reason to avoid spending too much time in Op Shops. Because at some point you get pulled in by a screaming deal on a couple of eggs that you don’t need. Ben would stash these with his bone collection until the price of eggs went up, I suspect.
We were mostly in the dark of the kitchen shed with a candle burning from the centrepiece that Kim had purchased. We laughed, we giggled, we considered the rules about noise and laughed some more after realising it was all of our camps that are closest to the kitchen and our hubbub.
Some of the talk, though, was more serious.
I spent some time speaking with Dave, one of our other neighbours.
Dave lived next to us in a grumpy caravan. He’d created an outdoor space using a tarp, though I suspected the tarp also helped to keep water from leaking into his home.
Dave seemed a bit lonely, a bit run down, and spoke in a tired way like things had been hard. He drank a lot of beer, most of it Victoria Bitter, and watched a lot of cricket. I wasn’t sure if he worked, though he did disappear in his truck for stretches during the day.
Something I couldn’t see from observing Dave, and couldn’t know until I had a real chat with him, was that he was a father and a grandfather.
I had a deep chat with Dave about the future. He has two granddaughters, which surprised me, and he said that they have given him much perspective on the long term, and he’s worried more about it now that he’s got those two little ones to think about.
Worrying about the future, that’s something where I could relate to Dave, and I know that Katie could too.
Another change loomed on the horizon.
In a few weeks we would be back in Melbourne. Katie would return to her job. The boys would go back to school. And I would go back to, what exactly? I wasn’t sure, I had no concrete plans, but I knew that for a few weeks there would be chaos and a cloud of dust while we found a place to rent, moved our things out of storage, and got the boys prepared for school. And then life would be kind of like it used to be again, wouldn’t it?
I could figure myself out once the dust settled.
This had come into stark relief the night before, when we’d found out that a rental property in Melbourne that we’d applied for had ended up going to another applicant. It was a nice townhouse in a great spot that we were sad to have missed out on, and it made us feel like Dave and worried about the future.
One thing I did know is that we needed to keep moving in the direction of Melbourne, so we could begin the process of shapeshifting once again.
It was time to leave Big Valley.
Love this piece! For some reason it made me think of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet's characters.