Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves

Author:Elisabeth Eaves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2011-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

The best kind of travel—the kind I wanted to experience—involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one’s life changed forever by a chance encounter. After several months of phone calls, letters, and that one long fax, I determined that my tie to Stu, which is to say my tie to home, was not letting me be completely open to the world. It wasn’t letting me be entirely weightless. While I’d already come far away, I wanted additionally to be able to feel that any life was possible. I wanted to be different people, and just as much, to see what sort of core remained as I shifted from skin to skin.

Bruce, Liz, Kristin, and I stayed overnight in Yeppoon, a sleepy beach town near the Tropic of Capricorn. A flat, sandy island called Great Keppel was the designated backpacker destination here, and so Liz, Kristin, and I took a ferry over to spend the day. Bruce, who didn’t think it was worth the price of the ticket, stayed onshore and tinkered with his engine. We planned to leave in the evening.

Before we left, while Kristin and Liz were in the supermarket getting bread and cheese, I stepped into a phone booth and called Stu.

I had to cut my ties, I explained, adding that I didn’t want to get married and was not coming home. It was agonizing to hurt him, and frightening to think that this was it between us. We talked and talked. I knew that the other three were waiting in the car for me, but I couldn’t bring the conversation to a close. When, after an hour, I stepped out of the phone box, night had fallen and a full moon was on the rise. For a long time thereafter, the sight of a full moon would remind me how many months it had been since that phone call.

We drove through the night. Once you’re north of Brisbane, to continue northward is to move farther and farther from the urban rhythms of civilization. Human settlement spreads out. Miles of cultivated fields or long wild stretches of nature take up the distance between towns.

I awoke when we stopped for gas, in a town where the houses had corrugated tin roofs that sloped down over the decks. It was called Marlborough, Bruce said, and then we moved on into cattle land and I fell back asleep, my head on Kristin’s shoulder. I awoke again when we slowed through fields of sugar cane, which looked like high, thick, densely packed grass. We’d come more than six hundred miles north of Noosa and more than eleven hundred since I’d looked at Sydney and decided we couldn’t stay. We turned northeast toward a village called Airlie Beach, where we parked on a hillside at two in the morning. The three of us girls stretched out in the back and slept there.

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