GOING GOING GOING ..... GONE

Imagine the world's largest, longest piece of Velcro. No ... bigger than that. That's closer but it's really wide, industrial strength and miles long. Imagine it ripping apart over a year with microphones to pick up the high pitched tearing and the low groans as from a torturer's rack. That's the backing track to my leaving home over the past year.

Now .. yes exactly NOW! .. the separation is complete. Man and dog are in the car ... dog with his head hanging out the window and barking ... man with a head in which the interminable tearing sound has finally stopped. Well the Velcro Symphony at least.

What does it feel like? I am not sure. I can occasionally be intelligent and am always emotional, but those two entities rarely meet as Emotional Intelligence. If they do it is as brief an encounter as a Christmas carol sung on the Western Front. My intelligence singing Stille Nacht in a steady voice while my emotions do a weepy Silent Night. The next day we are at war again.

Amongst the clatter of that conflict I feel lots of things: relief; abandonment; momentum like the first down stroke of a bike journey used to feel when I was a kid; or when I was a man.

All my important belongings are packed in the Adventure Camper. I only have my best pots and cutlery. Clothes are at a minimum. There is plenty of space and I know where everything is because there isn't much. That's one of the tricks I think. Don't have much.

We will drop off the mountain today and I'll sleep in the Italian penthouse somewhere on the Hay Plain. As I cook my dinner it will be bitterly cold and I'll start a fire. Man and dog will huddle around it and I'll catch up with the First Tuesday Book Club on iTV.

I'll lie in the penthouse and fail completely to stop myself from imagining the next decade on the road. The thought that this is now my life will overwhelm me and I'll make an attempt to lasso the vision into some reasonable and logical part of my mind. That won't succeed so my emotional world will ride to the rescue to catapult me into a dream world of wistful wanderings.

I am at an age where I should be thinking of a 'comfortable retirement'. Forget it. I'll keep running my Into the Blue trips. I want to walk, explore, be exposed, feel cold, have to scramble on top of the trailer to sleep, climb down in the morning, weep if I need to, when I need to, collect firewood, wash in creeks.

I also want to write. For years people said 'you should be a writer.' In the pit of my darkest drinking days, 'The Man Who Loved Too Much' was born.

It had, unsurprisingly, rather strong autobiographical elements where I was cast, even less unsurprisingly, as the victim. In any case I was so overwhelmed by the power of my as yet unwritten book, that I became emotionally exhausted and didn't write anything except the first line which I stole from a friend. "he took off his clothes and walked slowly into the ocean, and didn't even wave goodbye to his friends." Some books are best left unwritten.

Now I feel compelled to write so I am a writer. Before I was compelled to walk and so described myself as a walker. I have always felt it is the essence of what you do that makes you what you are.

Others disagree but I intend to go into country where what you or I think is of no consequence. Now that is a place to aim for. Where the horizon absorbs all my head talk like a carbon sink.

So I am off. All things, even waiting, end.

There is an idea in the novel Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier that I love. The protagonist, Inman, is in hospital recovering from a recent battle wound. As the American Civil War rages about him he crawls through the ward window as though it frames the rest of his life. Which of course it does. There is a sense that everything that happens thence is set within the picture frame of that window. Or perhaps, since life moves, a television screen.

The ELECTRONIC SWAGMAN was born out of an idea as I walked from Melbourne to Sydney almost 15 years ago. Now, with the turn of the key, I am driving into another picture frame with the script unwritten and the destiny unknown.

Glad you are coming too.

Raymond

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