Manuscript Material

On a rainy Melbourne Saturday, sober at his launch, trying to make the most of this experience, he hoped his face looked obliging rather than just old and gaunt. Mid-sized, dressed wanly shabby, he had bent rules, been bloodied and broke, but found literary gatherings and the slippery beast of success a challenge. The past, the past. What a minor miracle survival was when traversing North America’s colossal expanse thumbing lifts. He saw them, ironically, as two figures dwarfed by a vast landscape painted by Hopper or Smart, listening to nature’s pungent melody. Were they brave or ignorant? Freeloading? All of these and more.

This driver keeps hammering on about a shack, his hideaway in the backwoods. Language-poor, humourless, he badly wants us there instead of where he agreed to take us. I sense my young wife’s concern amplifying mine, a sudden shadow darkening our life expectancy. She would be enjoying a Women’s Weekly coach tour of Europe with her mother whose disapproval I flamed by whisking her daughter away. Now she would try to text Emergency while I cajole shack man but our mobile phones wait to be invented, like our boys waiting to be born. We are still a massive distance from The Yukon.

He mingled, conversation a murmur around him, nervous about making his required witty speech. Remembering key acknowledgments he needed to nail, he thought of lonely roads, his undying love of adventure, the wishes in his heart and what they made him do. When he read, his words failure to match reality dismayed him. Light slanting through glass scoped dust motes in the listed Trades Hall Building, host to established historic names, ghosts who observed his glib answers when, signing copies, he was asked how much was real, and if he was still in touch with her, ghosts who watched over his shoulder for falsehoods.

Only stuntmen stage escapes by seeming to hurl themselves from vehicles, and what about our packs with my notebooks, her diaries, money, passports; and boys growing into men like our future sons, and the driver’s offspring sitting up front with him, a resilient youth with knowing eyes beyond his years? Traffic would be scarce if we turn off the highway down trails attended by conifers like mute sentinels. Nobody searching for us, we would be swallowed in an inescapable vortex of anguish.

Drained, picturing a grey wolf prowling, injured and alone, words were all he had. Seeing his name printed on a book’s cover as a youth would have thrilled him. His escapades far behind, he remembered a tape carried everywhere. Karen Dalton sang Something on your mind. Her haunting voice. Though he longed for the shock, memory’s lustre of those perilous days, to stand in hope on windswept plains once more, he often succumbed to periods of melancholy solitariness, burying his face in his pillow. He filed this strained day’s details and the weight of hours in his mind’s archive as further material.

Stuffed in the back we crane forward reasoning with diplomacy, goodwill – always respectfully grateful to drivers for stopping – cringeworthy. His clumsy insistence jangles with our believed harmony. I picture graves in a valley carpeted with snow. Wind swirls snowflakes into shrouds seen only by coyotes and crows, footprints almost obliterated, night falling. Familiar movie, book, and art scenes travel these highways and back roads with us. We have journeyed thousands of miles with as many ahead, I hope, targeting The Rockies and Alaska. Ravening for the right gambit to pry us from this predicament I must somehow make these sensations, life’s surging spectacle, last and last until we are gone.

 

Ian C Smith’s work has been widely published. He writes in the Gippsland Lakes region, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.