We’ve Come A Long Way
“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Dad?”
“Not really, mate, we’ve only been walking about half an hour. We’ve still got a fair while to go yet.”
That was the repeated pattern of our conversation that day. The only thing that changed was the half-hour remark. Most of the time we walked in comfortable silence, surrounded by the wildest of places, a faraway fantasy for most, but commonplace reality for me. Mostly.
I usually didn’t travel this far from home. “You’re too young,” Mum would said. Usually Dad went alone. But this time—this glorious time—Dad bundled me up with a bit of gear and headed off into the unknown, even before the distant sun marked the hidden horizon.
“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Dad?”
“Not really, mate, we’ve only been walking about an hour. We’ve still got a fair while to go yet.”
Dad was taking me on an adventure. I’d get to fire the old rifle he casually slung over his shoulder. But hunting was only part of the mystery. For me, we were walking in uncharted territory, ‘Maybe I was the first white person to ever set foot here,’ I thought, then noticed Dad’s heavy print in front of mine.
“You reckon we’re the first people to come here, Dad?”
“Nah, I don’t reckon, mate. Plenty people have been here before.”
“But they probably didn’t walk in like us, hey Dad?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
I smiled.
“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Dad? Are we still going the right way?”
Dad stopped walking, leaned heavily against a spindly bush pretending to be tree while he passed me a bottle covered in canvas. Water dribbled off my chin while he pointed way off toward the Northern horizon.
“See that low hill way off up there?”
I nodded.
“That’s where we going. Well, near there, anyway.”
“But we weren’t walking that way before—we were walking toward the sun before.”
“Yep. We had to walk that way or we would have got caught up in some thick scrub that would have slowed us down too much. A bit further up here we’ll have to swing off toward the West a bit, just before we hit the creek, or it’ll be too deep to cross with our gear. But every now and then, we’ll stop and look for that hill, okay? That’s where we’re heading.”
“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Dad?”
“Not really, mate, we’ve still got a fair while to go yet.”
