I'm trying to beat the time estimate on Google Maps. It says the arrival time at Bay of Fires is 2.12, but if I hit 110 on the straight I can come in at 2.10 or earlier. It's a small and irrational game, but keeps me entertained on the long stretch of highway from Lanceston to St Helens, on Tasmania's East Coast, where the next camp is.
A highway is both a psychological and a physical journey, especially at these distances. I'm listening to Melvin Sheldrake's Entangled Lives, and he talks of the mycellial tips, the hyphae that move forward - action - leaving, symbolically, the past behind. On the road I push through time like hyphael tips. Some living creatures have reached the end of their time line - black ravens tear flesh from roadkill pademelons, quolls, the odd island tiger. It is not safe to be a living thing on Tasmanian roads. Time plays with you and leaves you roadside bones.
On the outer skirts of Launceston are wild hawthorn hedges, planted once by hopeful colonists that imagined a landscape like the one they left behind. Now they are unruly and, untended, straggle along a railway line with other detritus - discarded bottles and other projectiles from travelling beasts. I want to pick some - Autumn is the prime time - but they are inaccessible and difficult to process on the road although sitting and plucking burgundy berries from haw branches would be a little like whittling, I suppose, designed to both while the time and have a product at the end of it.
Then the rosehips appear, red and inviting along the farmline fences where neither poison nor plow nor desire has rid. I hurtle through time. Hyphael action. Past behind. But the hips become so ample, so abundant, so fecundly fantastic that I stop my race against the clock and stop for them.
It amazes me how everyone else is hurtling past. The container trucks, freshly loaded from mainland ferries, indeed have their own clocks to tick to - industry is a strict mistress. Both I and the rosehips tremble before such leviathans. They rush and rumble and thunder, defying space time continuums as the air threatens to break around them.
Safe in the ditches, I have gloves ready, leather ones kept to aid pick up the hot cast iron of the camp stove, but perfect for negotiating with the thorns of roses. Pricks, I laugh. They laugh back, and defiantly scratch my forearm where the gloves don't reach. Touche, rose pricks. Point taken. Still, they offer their seasonal bounty with little fuss. I leave plenty - there is more than enough for both me and the roses.
I drive in yards now, from bush to bush, not miles - why I'm thinking imperial, I don't know. Perhaps it's the old world thinking in this activity. I have slowed down. I'm foraging on a journey, plucking what I need from the autumnal days to nourish me as I go. Hips, haws, apples, fungi - they don't mind. They invite me and birds and possums alike, distribution mechanisms that help them extend their time lines into infinity. Two hundred years ago, the first planted rose. Now, the fence times and the plucking traveller, the quickened pace of the world and the whirling seasons, and the roses stretching as far as possible, til they give way to managed national parks where purity is god, and gum and wattle reign.
I can but fill one bag, though - it is mid afternoon, and one does not drive at dusk or else slaughter marsupials. They'll dry on a hook in the van. I'll add them to tea on cold evenings where the winter chill knocks and the immune system shivers. Others will buy plastic enclosed vitamin C pills from pharmacies, ill prepared and underresourced when it comes to nature's antioxidants. I'll crush them with a rock plucked from the shoreline and add them to a bottle of apple cider vinegar to stew as we go, hyphae-like mortals pushing into the future.
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Excellent writing!
You know, when I was young and living in the States, my game was to play "Close to the Edge" by Yes whenever I drove. If I could get to a certain landmark before the first song ended, I was winning. If I could get to my destination before the album finished, that was an even bigger win.
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Ha yes - on cassette tapes too?
Yep, that's right. Wish I still had all my cassettes. I suppose I must have sold them at some point to fund CD upgrades, but I don't remember.
You must be killin' it out here!
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Oh, how different this post feels! The narrative, the style, the unabashed life-death aspect of existence that you present raw and pure as it is. How you tried to beat the clock to get to those rosehip bushes. Makes perfect sense. What puzzles the mind is why all the other travelers keep speeding by even after reaching those bushes! In the end I had to remind myself that - in spite of your Mad Maxesque writing, you were probably not drying marsupial roadkill in your van, but the rosehips instead. Great writing, I enjoyed it a lot!
Thankyou! Sometimes I write a little more creatively, sometimes more functionally, depending on mood and time. I enjoyed writing this one alot. I did have to laugh about drying roadkill - I went back andread it to see what you meant 🤪😂
It's in your last paragraph, I'm sure you've found it. And no, it only has a double meaning if you really force it into it. However, the image that came into my mind inadvertently was so comically bizarre that I just had to mention it.
Btw, I once traveled with someone who would do just that: stop for roadkill whenever possible, especially for birds of prey, and hold a brief ceremony for them: remove them from the road, sprinkle tobacco onto them, and cut off a piece of its wing, to make a dream-catcher out of it later. This way they would end up as something more beautiful than flattened roadkill.
Wow amazing! What a lovely ritual. In the UK many years ago we would eat roadkill pheasant and deer.
Oh shit... I had the same thought sbout drying marsupial roadkill!!!! Haha
Hehehe, I'm glad to see we think alike! We really should make a mission out of it, and travel to Australia just for the marsupials. I can even see the conversation with immigration: "No officer, we don't want to kill your marsupials. We just want to scrape their bodies off the road to dry them in the van!" Hahahaha!
I've not really traveled on long straight highways for long periods. I am of the go slower and enjoy the surroundings type. But I suppose if there's a bleak outlook and a long way, trying to beat the clock might be one way of dealing with the boredom.
Funny,I wasn't bored really, it was just a game - I always do it. I don't like Google to tell me the future 😂
Sounds like you ended up going slower though, stopping at every rose bush!
I know right! And mushroom!
Muy interesante tu post. Gracias por compartirlo con nosotros.
!LOL I do the time game thing with Google maps as well and even before Google. Just used to just the distance to destination km marker on the side of the road and did a km/hour speed calculation in my head. I think it helps keen your brain active on those long Aussie drives.
I just read and caught up on your east coast tassie solo adventuring. !LUV ed every word. Especially your camping set up, definitely has me wondering what @consciouscat s and mine set up might be like if or when we can get some bigger chunks of time away from work.
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Hmmm, yes. Riverflows' adventures have definitely been reawakening the adventurer in me.
We had a whole long conversation this morning about how we'd travel, where we'd go and who and how to get the house cared for while we're gone. Thanks for inspiring fun thoughts and conversations @riverflows. Brad and I have done very little in the way of big, crazy, wonderful adventures together thus far but we both used to do a lot of this kind of travel as younger people. So who knows what magical mischief we might get up to in the next 5-10 years with a little prompting from our brave and adventure loving friends 😉
Oh my, how I adore your poetic way of writing on this day. And I am delightfully envious of your knowledge of plants that allows you to pause and pick your way through those pricks to hold a heap of (rose)hips in your hands. Lovely 😊
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Picking ouch! Rosehips ouch! is ouch! such ouch! fun! ouch!
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Your post is quite interesting, and your knowledge of herbs is equally impressive. Thank you for making it available to us.
Hey, I play that same game when I drive long distances!!! Vinegar for hair washing when we were kids, this little game... what else do we have in common?
I really have to look into rose hips more... we have these wild rose bushes that produce tiny little rose hips that are very sweet, but all I've ever done with those was collect a handful at a time to munch on while on a hike.
The tea thing's a great idea, I'll try that next time with our rose hips. And what do you do with the vinegar infusion?
Careful out there on the side of these highways!!!!