The river was swollen. She sat on the bank pondering the endlessness. The water kept coming, running, bubbling, flowing. The noise was deafening. She sat in a trance, her knees pulled up and apart; her elbows lodged in the mud under the blanket. Her eyes involuntarily bulged, not focusing on any one spot in particular; she softly bit her lip. She watched the water caressing and beating the rocks beneath. Thoughts of her father began to creep in.
“Alright,” a voice came from behind her. She leant her head back and watched an upside-down Pete come skidding down the sloping bank towards her, arms flailing. She smiled to herself and sat up as he plopped himself next to her and tried to make himself comfortable on the uneven ground. She shifted to her usual cross legged pose.
“Alright there, Guru Nanack?” he said with a smile and raised eyebrows. He handed her a smoke. She looked down at her crossed legs beneath her.
“More like the laughing Buddha” she retorted “…my body is a temple…etcetera, etcetera” she took a long drag on the joint and stretched her legs out, once again leaning back on her elbows. “What food we got?”
“I’ve sorted some chicken kebabs while you’ve been lazing about down here. You enjoying yourself?” She sighed a happy sigh and lay down. The afternoon sun streamed through the green leaves above and danced on her face. She soaked in the damp autumnal shades – auburns, bark-browns, deep, rich oranges. Winter would soon be here and there would be no more trips until next spring. “Good. Just chill for a bit and I’ll get the fire going, yeah?” He got up and brushed himself down, scattering dead leaves on her upward turned face. He laughed as she shot up, yelping and spitting and wiping her face.
“Christ, Pete!” But he had already scampered up the bank.
“Come on you lazy git, come help me,” he was already ripping open the orange netting of the kindling bag. “Here" - he threw her an old newspaper as she crawled up the bank “screw all this up and get the fire going. I’m sorting dinner” He turned and hopped into the Camper.
“I lost that reefer y’know. It’s your fault. You can make another one.”
It was getting dark by the time the fire had turned to coal and was good enough to cook on. The sun had dipped behind the rolling hill and the shade was chilly and somehow lonely. There was a beautiful mixture of colour made by the sinking sun against the cloud-specked sky. This was her favourite time of day. The hazy, almost tangible air that surrounded them was blissfully melancholic and if you looked to the east, the night sky was hinting its presence with the faint twinkle of faraway stars.
Being out here, with Pete, in the middle of nowhere, was a feeling like no other. A city girl all her life, she had never been camping or out in the wild before she met him. She would never have dreamed of pitching a tent or sleeping what she might have regarded as “rough”. But out here she felt strangely at home. The beauty of nature; the nature of life, was all too apparent to her out here. It forced her to realise the sadness and futility of her life in the city. No matter how hard she tried she could not escape this feeling of being trapped - the buildings themselves seeming to lean in on her, oppress her - but when she was out here she was free. She tried explaining this to Pete but he, being him, treated it as a bit of a joke: “you are just at your happiest when you’re doing nothing” – he was of course, right.
