Snow and sleet are forecast for the weekend of the Koreelah ride. I find the thermals I have not used since Strzcyk; they smell faintly of sweat and Polish air freshener. A. encounters my friend Z. in the bottle shop, mid-antifreeze purchase, and tells her we are going riding for the weekend. ‘Yuk’, says Z., almost shuddering. The following morning A. forgets the antifreeze, and calls Owl 5 kms into the ride with detailed instructions on how to break into his house, and where to find the bottle. I have told the Owl, who is driving the support vehicle, that we’ll meet him at Bindarrabi mid-afternoon, and not to worry until dark, although A. and I are each thinking privately that we will be far too early, and wondering what we are going to do for the rest of the day. We never worry about this again.
We have chosen the steepest approach to Acacia Plateau, for reasons of a rather Catholic masochism (A.) and a deep fear of weakness and an urge to get the worst out of the way early (me). We hydrate at the Acacia Scrub Rd turnoff, talking for some unfathomable reason about hitch-hiking and serial killers. Then we set off in a clean freezing wind up the plateau.
Somewhere halfway up I forget that I haven’t ridden for years, and stop worrying about trying to keep up, because it has become apparent that we are going to stop every five minutes and look at trees, or mountains, or sedges, or a million other intricate and absorbing things. The snow has not materialised and it is a cerulean blue morning that makes me think of Gwen Harwood’s ‘the days extravagance of blue stored like a pulsebeat in my skull’. The terrain changes from the silver-grey granite country with its glimmering surface to a dense, non-reflective red soil that reminds me that we are in volcanic country. Huge white eucalypts with damaged starts to life reach up from the farmland and the wind makes my eardrums vibrate.
We follow the plateau along the border – dense, vigorous temperate rainforest falling and tangling into gulleys on the NSW side; desolate deforestation and the odd anguished tree on the QLD side. Mid-afternoon the road becomes encapsulated by forest and we are protected from the wind completely, although we can still hear it in the treetops and watch their wild thrashing. An eagle falls playfully into the downdraft and spirals above our heads. The road is carpeted with leaves, and in some places a compact and resilient moss. Mountains appear and disappear, then reappear looking completely different as the angle changes. There is a feeling of liminality – not just because we are on the border, but because we have lost track of time and place. I have not felt so completely absorbed by my surroundings for many years. We drag the bikes through tangled lawyer vines and stinging trees that have fallen across the track, and occasionally through a break in the trees we see mountains and debate which ones they are, although we are out of our immediate neighbourhood now, and this is guesswork.
We eventually find the trail down into Bindarrabi, and start to descend. A. is flying downhill, and I am descending more sedately, not trusting my balance yet, when he realises his tyre is flat. We continue, pushing the bikes now, and the countryside changes again, to a sclerophyll that lets in the last of the days light. We will become familiar with this golden, hazy ‘we’re-running-out- of -daylight light in the next few months.
We enter the community that abuts Koreelah NP as darkness falls. Odd lamp-posts, which remind me of the entrance to Narnia, are scattered at the individual driveways. We are now regretting giving Owl an ETA, but it’s beautiful walking through the dusk, and the sleet has obviously been a weather-forecaster’s imagination. We start calling out when we reach a point we recognise as near the campground, and someone cooees back – not, as it turns out, the Owl, but a visitor to the community. By the time we get to the campground the Owl is debating who to call to find our lifeless corpses, but dinner is cooking and there is cold beer and a fire. It still is not snowing.
Quollgirl 