Encounters…
No hurry at all
In his sixties, probably. Slim of build. Not tall. Married once.
I met Steve at Oberon caravan park. He was making something to eat on his little gas stove, a tiny contraption connected to a butane cartridge. A small Bluetooth speaker, from which reggae played quietly, hung from his tent.
He was camped next to us, he in a tent, us in our minivan. His tent, not high enough to stand in, was one of those with two enclosed sections at the ends and a covered floorless part in the middle. Into that he wheeled his white Triumph motorbike when evening came around.
The bike, an 850cc model of recent vintage with retro looks like earlier Triumphs, is a product of Triumph’s second resurrection, Steve said. Triumph the company, version three.
It was getting too much, Brisbane, that is, where he was working. It was time to move on. Time to get out. So he loaded his panniers and left.
Steve passed through Walcha maybe a month after we were there. He said there was no water in the small stream that flows through the town. That’s different to when we were there. There was water then despite the drought. Not much, but enough to trickle along the concrete culvert that is the town’s engineered creek. I wondered how long it would last. Now I knew.
We talked about what we saw of the drought up there on the tablelands. It became clear that Steve has drawn his own conclusions about what he had seen. He attributes some of our rural environmental problems to early settlers “wanting to recreate England”. They introduced hard-hoofed animals that damaged the soil. “We would be better off farming kangaroos,” he said.
As usual, we woke at first light and got up a little later. Steve didn’t wheel the triumph out of the tent until close on an hour after that. Evidentially not a man in a hurry to be any place else, I thought.
That was true. Although he is heading down to Tasmania for some touring and bushwalking, he has no hurry to be out on the road, no timetable. That, I thought, is so appropriate for a man and his bike for whom the road is now his home.
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