The Lure of the Road.
The Lure of the road.
I feel the charm there is in a simple life, in camping out in lonely places, under old eucalyptus trees, near a dry creek bed or amongst the rocky shrubbery.
I think of the flour and water damper I ate when I was hungry.
I see the glowing embers of my campfire by night as I fell asleep under a canopy of stars.
I remember those who came to my camp and the black eyed girl who told me my fortune.
And I remember all those that followed in the rosy dawn and moved onwards into the starry night and my heart is filled with rapture at the splendour of those lights above.
Only the traveller understands these things but I cannot tell you why.
Why do I love to wander on the roads, is it to hear the course, repetitive sounds of crows gossiping, or to see old, collapsing, unused sheds afar rising over this flat red land or a river meandering along under a bridge in the foreground and beyond? Or is it the dirt road where there lies the fallen trunk of a termite-hollowed gum-tree around which weeds and wild-flowers are springing up, nourished by its decay.
I love these things better than anything man can make for they are more than the fine art of the painter or the sculpture. For this living image is the essence of being because on the roads, whether in the dry lands or the rained on coast, it is we travellers who inhabit not the houses but the scene because we are as natural to this glorious tapestry, as all these things.
We are the wanderers of our beloved land who live like the dingos and the ‘roos not of the house born, nor the town bred but free and at peace only with nature. I am always home no matter where I find myself.
What wondrous charms lie within my scope?
What beauty and adventure am I such a part off?
So I breathe the often dusty air and blend into this exquisite pilgrimage of life.
John Audet
great post