The last time I was in Forster was in my shiny, baby blue van ‘Papa Smurf’ with Mereki and two friends. We rolled in late and used Cindy’s looks to charm a hotel owner into admitting NO VACANCY was more of a loose expression. I had all my boards in the back of Papa, CD’s in the front, a double bed in the back with a clown blanket and two fluffy white pillows. I filled him up with gas constantly but at little inconvenience. Our airport job kept the dollars and cents flowing through my pockets and into the hands of the creepy service station check out guy. Too easy.
The last time I was in Forster, was on our way back from Byron Bay. Another adventure fruitfully filled with frivolous frolicking and free flowing pheromones. I was young. I still am. I cared about a couple of things. Meeting girls, surfing good waves and banana smoothies. A small but important list for a 20yr old. I wasn’t short of the latest trendy clothes I remember that. A plethora of brand name caps sprayed across my dashboard. An accessory of Cool for any given situation. With my big blue van and my brand name persona I was the happiest kid in the world.
Forster wasn’t that cool. It was a place to crash on the way back to the promise land. I knew Byron and I knew Sydney, what was in between was hours of highway monotonously mixed with intermittent toilet breaks. Port Macquarie for instance was too far out of the way for a toilet stop. Hold it in till by some miraculous intervention of the Gods of the Western World, some golden arches would rise fourth, penetrating the crowns of the forest and screaming ‘Stop here weary traveller and use our toilet! Eat our food, drink our drinks, eat, eat, eat!!!’
I knew Forster had a bridge. I only knew that because I had to drive over it seven times back and fourth looking for hotel rooms as the blue sky slowly desaturated. The bridge was frustrating, it made me feel like I was travelling further than I was, burning more fuel than I actually was. Forster was a roof over our designer heads. The perfect place to wake up early and race back to Cronulla.
I turned back to Mereki as we pushed our legs up a long and arduous hill and laughed. “How dominating are the golden arches hey!” He shook his head. So did I. We don’t need words anymore. Any of us. I can feel what he’s saying. I look back ahead at the beautiful forest that is engulfing our ascent and I too shake my head. So yellow and bold. So solid in their dominance. Through the tree tops we see the golden arches glowing. A bright flame to the travelling moths stuck in the darkness of highway travel uniformity. We stop at the top of the hill, covered in sweat with the arches behind us through the trees. In a neat line we all dispel unwanted liquid from our bladders like an obscure and unpleasant backyard water feature. We sit on the side of the road with our backs to the spinning wheels of semi-trailer trucks and nibble on dried fruit and nuts.
The blue of the water under the bridge between Tuncurry and Forster just about hit both breaks for me. There is an unbelievable glowing blue, a product of the shallow bottom and sunlight. We stop half way across the bridge to talk to some locals and take photos. Then on the other side we take time to marvel at the repetitive sculpture that arches its back over the light blue river. What a bridge. What a river. “We’ll have to come back here and do that bridge again”, somebody says.
We ride past the motels and hotels as if we were flicking through the full page supermarket advertisements in a newspaper, looking for something worthwhile reading. I notice every cafe. I notice the little Aztec restaurant overlooking the river. I look at all the little boat sheds scattered along the shoreline. Forster is a beautiful place.
It’s not that long ago I was flicking through the hats on my dashboard searching for the appropriate type of Cool. It wasn’t that long ago I sold my big blue van to invest in my trusty two wheel steel. Nor was it that long ago that I used to race up the east coast looking for my destination, stopping only for convenience and the comfort of shiny toilets and illuminated menu options. How could I have appreciated the beauty of a thousand painted rocks against a stormy backdrop along Port Macquarie’s break wall, when in the past it existed as little more than an inconvenient place to relieve the pressure on my bladder?
It really wasn’t that long ago I’d been to Forster. It really wasn’t that long ago I’d been to a lot of these places on the East coast. Funnily enough, I’d really been to none.
Quote of the Day
“Miranda Kerr says when her modelling career has finished, she wants to move to the country and have lots of kids and live in a solar powered house and do the ‘environmental thing’. But she still won’t tell us about Orlaaanndo!” – Television gossip news presenter in an unfortunate display of the realities of a world completely disillusioned by the comforts of mass media distraction.
TG
tom@mypower.org.au