Stories of the road…
Two women in the rain
“We’re from Tasmania,” the slightly built one said. “We camp in a tent. Fortunately, with this rain, it is a weatherproof tent”.
I encountered the two young women in the cramped camp kitchen. We were in the camping reserve at Coledale, a minor township fronting a small beach below the escarpment on NSW’s Illawarra coast. The rain had forced us into the kitchen.
I stood there eating my muesli and boiling water for tea, there being no seats in this too-small kitchen which was almost as small as that in my apartment.
They were in their early twenties, their very early twenties, these two young women microwaving baked beans for their breakfast. One said almost nothing during our brief encounter. It was the slightly built one who did the talking. She asked where I had come from.
“Just come down from Katoomba. Been there doing a few day walks in the mountains”, I replied.
“Is it cold there?”, she asked. “We thought of going to the Blue Mountains”.
“Freezing these past few days”, I responded, recalling the high winds and cold. “Had ice on the windscreen in the morning. But it’s no colder than you would be used to in winter in Tasmania. Where are you headed?”.
“Maybe as far north as Byron Bay”, she said. “After that we’re headed to Asia for a couple months. So might go to the Blue Mountains on our way back”.
“Well, it’ll be warmer we’re you’re going up north,” I assured them.
They were headed up Highway 1, traveling by car and pitching their tent at night. The sight of them in their warm clothes, beanies and rain parkas triggered thoughts of people like them I encountered back in my younger years. People traveling around unconsciously searching for something they didn’t quite know what. Were these women as vague as people back then? I got the impression they had that openness that we had in those days of our footless youth but they were more focused in their intentions. Was this an intergenerational thing? Were young people like that now?
If life is a continuum of encounters, that with the two young women that rainy day at Coaldale beach was a meeting of strangers traveling in different directions, strangers who for a brief moment one grey morning were forced together by the need to eat and by the relentless rain.
Did they get to Byron Bay? Did they go on to Asia? And where are they now? Back in Tasmania? Or like so many of us following the highways and backroads of this country, waylaid in some place that we liked so much we decided to stay awhile or, maybe, a little longer.
