Stories of the coast…
Woman in a white van
This is a story that took place over a few minutes of a cloudy day by the sea. Nothing exciting happened. There is no dramatic climax to the story. No surprise ending. It is merely the documentation of things seen and thoughts passing—an introverted tale of the everyday.
COMING DOWN the short but steep hill I turn right and ease the van into the space between the white lines that mark the parking slot. Not that I need to be so meticulous. There are only two other vehicles in the car park here at this south-facing surfing venue, this dent in the south-eastern coastline.
I look over to the long sandy stretch of Seven Mile Beach on the other side of the estuary that drains the inland sea of Pitt Water, a large water mass fed by the Coal River that takes the runoff from the agriculturally-favoured region to the north. In my imagination I step back 6000 years and see how the rising sea level at the end of the Pleistocene must have flooded what would have been the lowlands of the lower Coal River valley. There’s east-facing Clifton Beach, another surfing venue, way over on the far shoreline across the grey waters of the bay. What people like about where we are here at Park Beach is how, when a northerly is blowing, it holds up the swells.
Well, there’s no north wind today. No swells. Flat as a tack, as the Australianism goes. It’s like a lake. Here we are at Park on a dismal, cloudy day notable only for its passing showers. We often do this, dropping into Park Beach to see what’s happening. It’s close to home. Last time I was here was with the granddaughters and we spend our time boogieboarding. After that, the 11 year old was given a gift of a surfing school lesson over at Clifton and liked it, especially after she managed to stand up on the board.
Sitting, sipping and chilling out
I said there are only two other vehicles in the car park. In one, a guy sips a takeaway coffee and gazes absently-mindedly out to sea. That is a good thing to do because it allows you to mentally switch off and just be there in the moment while at the same time providing your brain with the caffeine it needs for effective functioning.. “Be here now”. Isn’t that what Ram Dass said back…when…must have been the early seventies? Isn’t that what this guy is doing?
The other vehicle is a white Toyota HiAce van. The nudge bar and roofrack with its photovoltaic panel denote it as a traveler’s vehicle, a home on the road. The type is not unusual around here. I see them frequently, usually with a quiver of surfboards on top and sometimes with a rack of mountain bikes hanging off the back. True to form, a surfboard leans against the fence. The van’s rear hatch is open and a woman who I guesstimate to be somewhere in her thirties, her hair hanging loose and wet, is getting out of her wetsuit below a changing hoodie.
I walk past and say hello. People are friendly around here, even those who are not locals. You can say hello and have a few words without the fear or suspicion you might see in the big city. I glance into her HiAce as I walk past. There’s a bunk for one with a colourful blanket on it and the organised arrangement some mistake for chaos. She is clearly a traveller, a woman of the road, of the coast, of the cool swells of this island.
I’ve encountered woman alone on the road before. Not all that many. I think there is some reticence about women setting out by themselves. Sure, there are bogans about but there are also a lot of good people. There was the woman camped close to our van in that bushland camping area, a solo traveller in an old twin cab ute, her surfboard stowed under her vehicle and she wrapped in a blanket in the rear cargo space, reading a book as evening came on. Then there was the young woman at Carlton Beach who travelled in a newish but small Jeep. Big enough, she said on my enquiring about how she travelled in such a small vehicle, a mattress in the back and a few possessions here and there. She travelled lightly, a true minimalist. There was that middle aged woman with her twin cab ute pulling a small caravan. She set out on the road 15 years ago and had no intention of stopping any time soon. And there was another middle aged woman living in her camper trailer in the small coastside caravan park where we lived through the summer.
It is mostly solo male travellers I’ve encountered making their way along the nation’s highways and coastal roads in vehicles ranging from motor bikes, up through renovated T2 Kombis and an assortment of vans from Volkswagens to vehicles of modern vintage. Solo travellers aside, I see a lot of older Toyota vans done out as homes on the road in a budget-minded way. Like that of this woman at Park Beach this day.
What did all these van travellers do during the Covid lockdown? I read the social media posts and learned that it was a challenging time for them. Fortunately, here in Tasmania, a few farmers opened their land to longer term campers so they had somewhere to wait out the pandemic. Come the end of the lockdowns they were out on the road again, freed like birds from a cage to follow the great grey ribbon that take us to places close and distant, to beaches popular and hidden where the cold seas roll onto the shore.
So, Park Beach on a dismal summer day. As we drive up the hill to I look back and wonder — south or north? Where next for the woman in the white van?
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