I’m pretty sure my favourite part is when they’re all stumbling toward one another in the glowing dark with pointy sticks at eye level, enthusiastically offering up the charred remains of their marshmallows for inspection.
“Mmmmm, perfect!” everyone’s saying with too much enthusiasm. Clumps of soggy charcoal are landing in laps and on bare feet and there’s a lot of squealing with waving of firebrands. “This one is exactly right!”
I hate marshmallows, actually. And every time we go camping I tentatively suggest there might be a rule about children/sticks/fire in combination with wild and/or vague arm waving. Every time we go camping I get quietly ignored. Which is fine, because so far no one has been disfigured for life.
Our girls go feral when we camp. They wade in streams and swim naked in waterholes, carry sticks, eat out of cans, head bush for a wee rather than risk “Poo Hill” with its (actually pretty decent) pit toilet. They get enthusiastic about climbing the steep side of hills, play cricket and soccer with a wild and desperate look, sing loudly and unashamedly tell embarrassing stories in the flickering light of the fire. They smell of woodsmoke and their hair is tangled.
They are never more beautiful. They’re away.
At night when I fall into my sleeping bag my brain is roasted from hours spent staring into the mesmerising flames of a fire, my veins silky with alcohol, my jaw either sore from grinning or slack from simply sitting wordless. The monkey that usually comes alive in the tree of my head about this time of night lies prone across a branch, too sun-warmed and lazy to lift a finger. And for minutes I lie curled listening to the whisper of water over rocks, birds nickering quietly in trees, the gentle sigh of a tarp. Air is cold on my face; moonlight reaches one solitary finger into a corner. Sleep sidles in.
I’m away.
We Aussies are big on holidays. These days, a record number of us take them overseas- about 9 million OS hols this year alone. Aussie dollar being what it is, why wouldn’t you be winging it off into the wild blue yonder? And resorts. Resorts feature large on the Australian wish list for a decent getaway. Cocktail by the pool- children in the Kid’s Club. What’s not to like?
It’s maybe too easy to make ‘getting away’ a grand affair, that’s all. It costs money. You have to plan well in advance- take a decent amount of time off. Where to go? What to see? In the meantime, the spontaneous getaway goes begging. Not that I’m suggesting throwing everything in the trailer and heading bush is easy either- or everyone’s cup of tea. Sixteen loads of washing later, have we recovered from the camping trip?
But a commitment to the idea of the getaway seems like a good one. The getaway on the back deck or the local park on a Friday night with a picnic. The one-night house swap with a friend between the city and the coast. The unexpectedly long lunch-break by the water. The Mindfulness App that chimes twice a day and asks you if you want to meditate… (Well no, actually, I’m in the middle of wrangling the three year old and we’re in a supermarket queue but yes… I could take three minutes to breathe a bit more deeply.) The DWA with the Man in a B&B on the Mountain. The one night solitary retreat (yes, solitary, as in ‘on your own’. Totally recommend. Google a place- actually not expensive at all).
Sitting in the bed of the creek on sun-warmed stones, some discussion arose over buying the property we were camping on: to own this patch of secluded, rugged, mountain land with river frontage, full of memories to make and share out with others.
Nope. Not for me. Part of the appeal of ‘away’ is that it’s there, but it’s not mine to keep. Like the ocean, it calls, but I don’t own it. It sends me home warmed and loose in the back and seeing the world differently. I don’t want it to become normality.
I long after it. It’s slightly out of reach and all the more beautiful because of it. That’s away.
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