The Joy of Adventure, Cold Air on your Face...

It's late, somewhere close to midnight and the holes in my cherry-print flats are mashing dirt into my toes.  We walk by the roadside, this three lane concrete lizard that arcs it's back through the middle of suburban Sydney.  On this stretch of road, so like other stretches of over-expensive, under-maintained highway, we could be anywhere.  A girl and a boy.  a red jacket.  A half-empty bottle of coke.
    It is thick night and the cars that normally clog this road like so many grimy scales have thinned to a trickle.  Wild rabbits come out of hiding.  The moon, almost full, glows out from beneath the purple halo of intermittent cloud.  Overhanging branches scratch at our shoulders as we scrape past.  It is not quiet, but it is calm.
   We know this road and yet we don't know it.  Four years I had sped along, swept along, ten minutes with my eyes closed and my headphones in, pressed against the window of a bus.  I had traveled this road every day for different reasons.  I had stared at this road through different emotions.  I remember the red lane through pure joy and laughter, glimpsed for a moment with friends.  The bus stations with frustration, exhaustion, and stress.  The grass by the bridge watched through the intense concentration of tears down a window pane...
   And yet we did not know it.  Though we had ridden it every day, had held every conversation we deemed possible while pounding over it with heavy tires, we had not for one second known it.  We could not, for how could we?  We had not smelled the air once the cars had passed, nor had we felt the way the ground cracked and bumped and rolled beneath our feet.  We had not the chance to feel one moment of that road with the beat of our own physical lives and yet we knew the road by name.  We were certain we knew all the places it led.
   We had walked this night, though the trains were running and we had paid for our tickets.  We had walked because the air was fresh and the night was clear and our love was strong.  It had not taken much thought.  A simple step, and then another and off we went, into the dark and away from the station.  We cut through the university and counted the rabbits.  We took a moment to photograph, in our minds, the way the campus looked with its new half-built buildings, so changed and yet still changing.  In the quiet, in the dark, we had the time to appreciate the transience of the space I had called home and work for so many years and we could walk slowly amongst it, void of cars, void of people.  A beating and impermanent space.
   Coming to the road we could see, for the first time, the way the grass grew in pits and pockets on the sidewalk.  We could note the ways in which the rubbish and debris tossed from windows came to gather in the edges of retaining walls like gaudy jewelery.  We could experience, for the first time, the heart-thudding rush as we dashed along the bus lane having been forced off the shrinking footpath.  We would flit, quickly across the road into the shadow of the bush, safe from the danger of passing cars.
   It was here we found the secret steps.  It was here we found the hidden walkway and darted through the bush that looked like jungle.  Here, we came out at a private driveway and slipped quietly past monolithic houses.  Here I checked my feet for leeches while Matt walked ahead, striding with a giant stick as though he were a sherpa.
   In time, we were back in town, back to the houses and streets we knew well.  But we were different.  We lumbered home, strolling out of the wood like we'd come down from a mountain.  Red-cheeked and dry-eyed we came home, more alive than we had been that day.  We felt as though we had seen a new land, as though we had discovered something that no one else would ever see.  And though thousands of people will pass that road today and tomorrow, and for many years to come, it seems true that few will ever really see.  They will not know the air or the smell or the feel of the wind, nor will they know the fear of the cars or the joy of stepping into the unknown.  For those that never walk the road, never have the time or take the time, there will be no secret stairway, no hidden walkway, no jungle bush, no mystery and no magic.  There will be only petrol and congestion, stereos and radios and the bounce of an engine.  There will be only the disconnection of the drive.