We rounded the corner into Norseman, bodies and minds primed for a long day’s drive, and hit a traffic jam. For a town on the outskirts of nowhere, with a population of 500, traffic jams don’t usually occur in Norseman.
Alex and I fell silent in confusion.
We rolled up behind an old Nissan Patrol with a rooftop tent and turned off the engine. Alex hopped out and said he’d find out what was going on and I said “OK” and hopped out too, trailing two steps behind because I’m a coward.
Before we got to the council workers behind the ‘Road Closed’ sign, a voice from above told us not to bother. A truckie, donned in hi-vis and clutching a jam sandwich, was trying to catch our attention from his seat a metre above our head.
“You’re not getting on that road today,” he said after taking a mouthful. A string of air fresheners shaped as minions hung behind him. I’d say there were about 15 or 20 and they made his cab look like a shrine.
“There’s been a fatality – a cyclist they reckon – so they’re waiting for forensics to fly in from Perth.”
We were silent while we figured out whether to believe him or not. Eyes squinting, necks craned.
“I’m serious. Go for a drive down the coast or something, you’re not going anywhere today.”
We said thanks and that sounded like a shame and we hoped the cyclist was OK. Alex continued to walk up the road to the council workers anyway and I loitered around the front wheel of Truckie’s truck, pushing gravel around with my sneakers. Truckie saw a friend of his steam in from the west and he started waving excitedly, climbing down the side of his vehicle so quickly he almost fell out of it. Yelling a name over and over, he walked speedily across the road. I could hear him gathering more information, sharing what he knew, still holding his jam sandwich between his index finger and thumb. He was the most powerful man in Norseman that day.
Despite Truckie’s insistence for us to take it easy, it took a few more hours of waiting before we called off the day entirely. Alex did pushups in the bush and, like, 30 rounds of Duolingo. I read my book. Others shook out camp chairs and boiled pots of tea. The Eyre Highway is the only way to get from south-west Australia to the east via sealed road, so as long as it was closed, none of us were going anywhere.
Slowly, more trucks and cars lined up behind us and in the turning bay to our left, snaking to a standstill on the road they came on. The Truckie was doing the rounds with all of them and had even attracted two hangers on. These men followed Truckie around with their hands in their pockets and when they reached us again, Alex asked for an update.
“Yeah, like I said, they’re not opening the road until the morning,” Truckie said. “Even then, it’ll be trucks first.” His cronies nodded. Another couple from South Australia overheard this and asked another question and Truckie became hysterical, complaining about entitled caravanners. “You guys are on holiday, WE are working.” It was stressful being a truck driver and the Mayor of Norseman. The cronies nodded. “YEAH!”
While they went back and forth, we slowly got out of the car and let them continue their bickering front of the hood, voices fading as we walked across the road to the Norseman Roadhouse and booked a room.
An hour or so later, I watched our clothes trundle round and round in the town laundromat. It struck me, as they lifted up and got tossed back down, that we started this journey delayed. It was peppered with inconveniences and broken plans and thinking on our feet and it’s ending that way too.
Four days before we landed in Norseman, we were starting our journey south and our van broke. We were 130 kilometres from anywhere, winding up the roof on an old sheep station at the southern end of the Ningaloo Reef, when it collapsed in on itself. The sound echoed across the station and into the sea.
Alex and I stared at each other for a long time. “What are we going to do?” I asked. But I knew we’d have to go straight home.
Never one to give up so easily, Alex tried calling a repair place in Geraldton and all the ones in Perth and they were booked until June. Then he spent a day and a half at the Bunnings in Midland, the roof propped up with a piece of timber and a clamp, his tools splayed across the caravan floor, to try and fix what he could. Turns out, the van needed a whole new winch, which needed to be ordered from the manufacturer, which was already on back order.
We tried to negotiate a solution with our bank account, eke out these last few weeks of adventure, but it would have been too expensive to keep going without our own place to sleep. Happy that he had done his best, Alex settled into the view I had quietly held all along: we needed to go home.
So a new plan arose in the Bunnings parking lot. We’d drive from Perth to Kalgoorlie the next day and then hit the Nullarbor the day after. That’s how we ended up in Norseman.
Stuck in a place between going and staying. Waiting, not knowing, coming to terms with things being out of our hands. Again.
One year before we landed in Norseman, I quit a great job that I loved. Not just because I wanted to set off on this trip but because I had a feeling there was something else out there for me and this trip might be a good way of finding it. Then two weeks after my farewell, Alex was told he needed surgery and we’d have to wait four months. Then a friend was getting married and we’d have to wait two more. (Both of which, I have to stress, were well worth waiting for.)
Faced with that unexpected stretch of time, I started flailing. Sleeping in a spare bed at my Mum’s house, all our belongings in storage, I worried endlessly about how I’d make money, what I’d do, who I’d be. Whether all of this was the right call. I watched friends and family carry on with their careers and lives as I struggled to find words to justify what it was we were doing.
Or, in the far better words of Ann Patchett:
“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”
Then a funny thing happened. My old boss had bought me a beautiful red and gold notebook, poised to be filled with travel entries, and it sat limp and empty on my bedside table. One day, I decided to open it and a version of myself much more brave than the usual one wrote down that I was a writer. I am a writer. Then they wrote it the next day. I am a writer. And every day since, again and again. I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer. To make it come true. Moreso, to will my regular self to believe it.
I wrote it down until I had the guts to start this newsletter and the guts to continue working on another project. By the time we started on our actual trip, where I was supposed to find myself and to recognise what it is I value, I felt I was already clutching it in my hot hands. I had found it – or resurrected it – and I was sure.
A part of me feels like that was the lesson in all those stops and starts. Make the best of what you’ve got. That – if you’ll forgive my cheesiness – transformation can happen on big adventures but it can also happen in the pages of a notebook.
Or maybe, as my friend Katie said to me the other day in the car, life is just a random series of events and we’re at its mercy. Our job isn’t to plan but to go with it and see what happens.
I’m finishing this newsletter on my Mum’s dining room table. The story of our trip ending the same way it started. Here. Still trying to convince myself I’m a writer, still trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to do.
I’ve come to really love and cherish this newsletter and even though it won’t be filled with stories from the road anymore, I hope you’ll still read it.
I started it as a way to document people and ideas that were “off the well-worn path” and that didn’t really happen, but I’m still interested in that topic. As a 30-year-old who feels forever searching, it still feels right. I’m hoping it can become a way to channel all of my loves: writing, adventure, travel, sustainability, community. People.
I’ll send an update on that soon but for now, as always, thank you for reading.
Josie xx
YOU ARE A WRITER. Ann Patchett is a genius. So happy to have you home and so happy you had this adventure.
You are a writer. A very good one.