Field Notes: Merriwa, NSW
I’ve dealt with hay fever for the best part of two weeks — or is it three now?
Already I feel it sneaking over the edges of my personality and burrowing like a worm as part of my identity.
What does it feel like to live without managing hay fever? Despite double dosing on the standard anti-histamines, my eyes still water and I sneeze so violently I’m unable to see the road as I drive.
Why have I taken on this feeling of helplessness with it, impotent to change the factors in my external landscape? Try as I might, though I worked through some issues yesterday, the irritation to my surroundings has only abated mildly. I want to get out of New South Wales, but I also don’t want to look back and regret not having the fortitude to grin and bear it, so to speak.
I guess there is always next year.
Too, I feel alone but not lonely.
I feel a little untethered, unsure which direction to go now that the whole of Australia is available to me.
On the northward journey I always had Tenterfield as a pin in the map, but now it’s more about escape than it is about finding my way to a particular spot.
Maybe I’m not cut out for road life after all.
I am in Merriwa — where to from here?
I don’t have the time to sit and allow that answer to arise because my time at the free camping area is finishing today, so I must move whether I want to or not.
Go back to where I’ve been before?
Gilgandra? The dust and the dryness there incited this unstoppable hay fever.
Retrace my steps from Merriwa to Tamworth and head to Glen Innes?
No, that doesn’t feel right either.
Add to that the fact there’s no laundromat here in Merriwa and I’m running out of summery items to wear…
Now is the time I wish I was already back in Victoria — where I know the layout, the road surfaces, where to plug in, and where to find laundromats. And it’s cooler and less dry and dusty than New South Wales.
Right now, adrift in my mind and heart as well as in my van, I long for the familiar.
No — not the four-walls kind of familiarity, just the arrangement of the universe so that I know where to find what it is I want or need.
Even in a strange town.
What does it feel like to live without hay fever?
Will I regain my mojo, my inner fire that directs me to where and what I am doing next?
The persistent issue with my body is draining, and taxes my soul. I do not feel like myself — and no, I don’t want comfort or answers.
The raw reality is, road life is not full of diamonds every day. An old echo from my days of grief circles as I write this entry — some days are diamonds, and some days are stone.
Despite feeling physically unwell, I know I’ll find my way to a new town, a new campsite, new faces, new experiences.
Which is what road life is about — sometimes it’s about enduring.
Sometimes it’s about finding the absurd in the everyday.
And sometimes it’s about meeting each new event with grit and humour and an open heart.
Christine Writer 