Up North
I thought going up there, where I grew up, and looking everything in the face might make things easier. But it didn’t.
I thought going up there, where I grew up, and looking everything in the face might make things easier.
But it didn’t.
Let me start somewhere else.
—
We load his bike onto the trailer first. I stand behind it, hands on the back of the seat, while he holds the handlebars and jogs it towards the ramp. It flies, then slows, but we get it onto the tyre track safely.
Then we load my bike. Significantly shorter, lower to the ground, squat. Same again. Swift push and jog, then slowly guide it into the tyre track.
Both bikes are propped onto their stands, and I go back inside. He watchfully wraps straps around carefully selected parts of each bike and then ties them to the trailer. Later he calls me out to have a look, pushing the handlebar or my bike back and forth.
That’s not going to move in a hurry, he says.
The next day he drove the bikes north, taking his time while Liz and I scooted along without hinderance in our car. He remained at least half an hour behind us the whole way. A six-hour drive. I imagined him watching the bikes in the rear-view mirror, noting every movement past a certain degree from centre.
We’d planned to ride the bikes from Sawtell to Woodburn, about two hours away. We were going to take the back roads, not the spanking new freeway, because sitting on a bike as learner, limited to 90km an hour, is not pleasant when drivers of Ford Rangers want to push the limits of their luck with the Christmas double-demerits being handed out by the cops.
He packed our panniers onto our bikes. I’d never ridden with panniers before. I’d tried to cram as much into the bags as I could, without making them too heavy. They’re deceptively small, he’d told me, when we’d tested them in Sydney.
I took it as an exercise in restraint. Pack only what is necessary. Light clothing. Take only slim books. I left my laptop behind. I had a notebook.
I was nervous. This was the longest ride I had yet to undertake. I told him so.
You’ll be ok, Dash said. We’ll take it easy. You follow me. I won’t take aggressive lines on the road. If you want to stop, put your right-hand blinker on. If I don’t see it, beep your horn, he said.
We formed a small procession and wound our way through Coffs Harbour and west. It was hot. I was not leaning the bike smoothly, taking each corner too carefully, thinking all the time. Like my weightlifting. I watched him as he rode ahead of me: straight-backed but relaxed, making all the right signals, and correctly judging his lines on the road. All I needed to do was follow. I could see he was checking his mirrors, making sure I was still there.
He stopped in Glenreagh.
I just thought you might like a break he said. I took off my helmet and had some water. We were parked across the road from the Golden Dog Hotel, which had a big dog statue standing out front.
He looked at his GPS. 40 minutes to Grafton, he said. That felt manageable.
We got to Grafton. Stopped at a service station. I used the bathroom and when I came back to give the attendant the key, she was having an argument with a small, wiry woman. It seemed to be over firewood. I wondered who needed firewood on a day like this: Boxing Day, 35 degrees, in Grafton. I bought some lollies, but he didn’t eat any.
We had originally planned to go from Grafton, up the Summerland Way to Casino, and then back down to Woodburn. This would avoid the freeway completely. We both agreed this would take too long. It was already 3.30 and we didn’t want to be riding in the dark.
Dash led up the old Pacific Highway, along the river, through Ulmarra and Maclean. We were slowed by a truck but I didn’t mind. When we were separated by an overtaking lane that ended before I could get past the truck, he waited on the side of the road until he saw me, smoothly accelerating away and assuming his lead. We entered the freeway and I braced for the wind. My bike, a single cylinder, vibrates so much at high speed that the mirrors are useless. I just sat behind him and concentrated on hanging on and keeping a strong line. I was not about to allow a Ford Ranger to overtake lazily and push me across the road.
We made it to my aunt and uncle’s well before sundown.
The next day I rode off by myself. I wanted to ride up to Lismore, through Alstonville and then back around to Woodburn, via Wardell.
I’d driven the road between Woodburn and Lismore with my aunt last year, after the floods. It was cut up by the water. I couldn’t know how a small council like the one responsible for these roads could take on the scale of fixes required. Like much of the damage from the floods, it would have been hard to know where start.
My aunt and uncle had got stuck into righting their house immediately, filled with mud when a metre and a half of the Richmond River washed through it, even though the house sits at least three metres off the ground. They have told me about the people who came to help in the days after the water went down. Friends, neighbours, people from their past, strangers. Dash had gone up to help them, taking a carload of supplies. It’s just decimated Mum, he’d told me. Everyone had their sodden furniture, floor coverings, ornaments, books, memories, their lives in muddy crags on the side of the road, ready for a rubbish collection which they hoped would someday arrive.
Watch out for potholes, my uncle had said just before I left the house. I watched the road carefully, ready to shift my body in avoidance but I didn’t see any. The road had been fixed. It stretched across farmland before it started to wind through hills, beyond Tuckarimba. I knew I’d be tested here, but the bike kept going and I was comfortable. Two cars overtook me, which was fine, and a blue Honda Jazz chose to sit behind me at a respectful distance, all the way to Lismore. It was comforting.
Smells from the land and the trees and scrub came into my helmet. One smell hit me in the guts. It was my childhood. I don’t even know where the smell originates. A shrub? Lantana? The grasses? Maybe my grandmother could have told me, but how would I describe this smell, which I’d only ever remembered coming in the windows of cars without air-conditioning and now, on this bike. It was from a time of possibility, when I felt like the best was yet to come. I was impatient to grow up. To find out what I would be. It often involved a red Subaru Brumby and a large white dog, the combination of which seemed to symbolise freedom and independence.
I rode into Lismore on Wyrallah Road, around a roundabout and into Keen St. I went to the other end of the road and parked my bike at a café. The median age of patrons at the place seemed to be about 60, except for a young couple who were taking photos of their food. Do I know these women, the ones who definitely looked like locals? Have I seen them before? They looked familiar, but maybe I was imagining it. The food and coffee were good. A ham and cheese toastie, the ham off the bone, on bread without pretensions.
I took some notes while I was in the café and I realised I was sitting there, knowing I was a bit different, but somehow the same, as the people around me. I have an unrelenting need to record things. I notice. There’s also that other thing – I am married to a woman obviously - which was possibly the more difficult one to accommodate, or even acknowledge, when I lived here as a 17-year-old. As a kid I knew I was different and it was confusing and, I thought, disappointing. Who wants that?
I rode up past the Base Hospital, where I was born. I tried to look at it, and contemplate what that meant but it’s just a building and on a motorbike you don’t have time to think about anything else, other than the job at hand. I went up the road my parents used to call the Ballina Cutting. It’s a winding road through some deep trees. At the top of it I turned onto Ballina Road and headed east. I thought about riding down past my grandmother’s old house but did not. I didn’t think that would be wise.
I kept on. Past Pineapple Road. I heard it in my grandmothers voice. Down through Alphadale and on to Wollongbar. The road was eerily familiar. I realised I could visualise this trip, wherever I might be. I knew where the bumps were, when to expect dips, when the lanes ended. And it smelled exactly as it did 40 years ago. There had been no real development, the scrub and paddocks grew as I saw them then. The scents.
At Wollongbar I left the highway and veered onto the road that used to be the highway. Past the service station, now under renovation, where my brother sold avocados he’d borrowed from a local plantation, for 10c each, to people filling their cars. Past the place where the little shop used to be, where we’d get lollies, bread, the local paper and a packet of Benson and Hedges Extra Mild for Dad. Please.
I turned left into Francis Ave. A German Shepherd ran out of the house where Paddy Dunne used to live and chased me. I opened the throttle and swerved into Campbell Ave. The dog gave up about 30 metres up the road. There was the park where we used to kick the ball, the little fence no longer there. There were the trees my father had planted in our yard. There was the Norfolk pine my youngest brother had climbed and from where he had waved at my parents through their bedroom window on the second floor. There was the Flatley’s place with the steep driveway; the house next to them, they owned a mini but I can’t remember their name. I stopped my bike and rested my foot on the gutter, out the front of a house that was new, built on the expanse we called “the spare block”. I didn’t turn the engine off. I looked at our old house. I don’t know what I expected to see.
It was our home, and it wasn’t.
I rode up the street, churning through the gears, turned left to avoid the dog and down Francis Ave.
I visited another of our old houses, in Alstonville. A grand place that is now surrounded by large trees, planted by my father. I rode back down our old street, turned right, to the corner of the highway. I used to ride this route on my bike, the one without brakes, up to the library. That was freedom.
I stopped in the Main Street. I bought a coffee. I sat on a bench outside the butcher, which used to be called Spearings. It had a little railing or shelf that ran along the outside of the glass cabinets that held the meat. You could put your bags on it, or a small child. That is now gone.
I don’t know why, but I sat there and I cried.
I don’t know what I expected. I don’t know why I thought coming here would fix things. I don’t know why I thought I needed to “go home”, or why one day here would be enough to achieve anything.
It was around then, I think, that I realised I needed to look forward. I had been living for some time, looking backward. I thought going north was what I needed. If I could look those houses in the face. If I could see those paddocks. If I could see the fig trees in the primary school at Alstonville. If I could be in Lismore. If I could buy that notebook from the Alstonville Newsagent. If I could see that the service station was still in Wollongbar. If I could negotiate this place as an adult. I could just make some kind of peace.
But it didn’t work. I was trying to get away from what’s inside my own head.
And of course, that’s fruitless. I’ve tried it before and believe me, it doesn’t work.
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If you’re reading this newsletter for the first time, this piece may leave some questions unanswered. Why am I seeking peace? What am I tying to fix? Well, myself. I’m in “recovery” and as Octavia Bright made plain to me last year, it’s a long freaking process. This piece is just one sliver of the story.
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