The ancients called it the sympathy of life. That everything; the individual, the universe, was interrelated and mutally attuned. So from Broome she walked the length of the eastern Indian, giddy with footprints, slept perched on red cliffs with the others. She saw those, the road tired gypsies who she felt were more Australian than herself, walking the longitudinal lines of the flat earth, those who had told stories to the truckers roaring through the endless night. She heard the talk of those there first, saw them pacing out their country. And felt herself settling back, deep into happiness. She was alone. She knew now what she was ready for, what she wanted more of, and as she was there, seeing for the first time, without the baggage of the others, even their love, she shook off the city.
While in a place far distant from thought or conception, he left his friends sleeping on a beach, to play music in a bar for all those stuck in the purgatorial stupor that is the Panama Canal. For five days he played to the smugglers of all imaginable contraband, to the retired Floridian hopefuls, to those salt crusted sailors young and old, unable to stop the stream of wind or rum. On the sixth day, a Briton, the uncertain owner of a concrete schooner, offered him the first leg crewing to the Galapagos.
Striking out the distance from South Melbourne to St Kilda one evening, arm in arm with her mother, she felt the wind from the Pacific and him blowing across with it. At a crossroads of themselves, across continents, across oceans, to one night in a pub. The door swung open and of all the lives floating through the ether, two spirits reached across a bar.
No comments:
Post a Comment