We drove to SeaSideCity this morning. Driving out of Bugsplat felt different. It wasn't just a drive to Littlesplat or to Bigsplat for a big shop. Everything looked different because it felt like it was part of a longer journey. In time I'm sure the trips to SeaSideCity will become part of our Bugsplat Life but for now they still play tricks on me, summoning up the bigger roadtrip of 2004, the one that landed us here in Bugsplat. Sometimes that roadtrip comes alive to me, claims that it still feels unfinished. Claims that great big desert plain is waiting for us. Streaky Bay over in South Australia - some little faded white weatherboard cottage with an oleander and an olive tree - waiting for us. I've never been there. It's an imagined destination.
It's not like that place up North, the place with the fishing shack we considered trying to buy - our plan of eating fish (catching fish) and sprouts (sprouting seeds and beans in specially made jars) and growing salty, sandy and windswept together by a salty, sandy, windswept cliff. That's an imagined destination too. It can call me. But I won't go back.
Driving home from SeaSideCity to Bigsplat I noticed a stone farmhouse by the side of the road and with sudden curiousity I thought perhaps I'd been there when I was very young, with my parents. I remembered a small table by a window set with a lace tablecloth and a bible. I remembered that out the back there was a big smooth rock and on the rock, on the slope facing north there was a large flat stone resting in such a way as to look placed there for a reason. Under that stone was a tiny natural spring; you could smell the water down the tube. One side of that stone was damp and cool. The stone was a lid. Put there first by aboriginal people to protect the spring. My father showed me and told me.
Though we have driven past it several times, tonight the sun was setting behind it as the sun set behind the stone farmhouse of my childhood. If I peered in the window would I see the bible? The narrow dark wood dinner table and long thin benches?
Driving home to Bugsplat Gray sang lots songs. He even sang the Queensland Drover. And I sang along. I remember when we used to sing those songs, you used to sing them with me, when we drove home to Hearttown from weekends away camping. How far away am I from that moment, when we are all singing that same old song? How far am I away from the you you once were when you were driving us home? In that sly and pretty melodic sidestep in the chorus? When I'm just here. in the passenger seat, just like I always was back then.
And how far away was I from ~you~ when we sang Leaps & Bounds?
