Way down east, part two.

So you drive away and abandon them. It's hard to leave three teenagers in a remote place without phone coverage. Even though you know it's actually good for them. It's the anxiety of the connected age. 

There had been no flat ground, so I had helped them use stones from the creek bed to build a kind of hollow cairn in which to place their stove, which was a top-heavy unit consisting of a trivet perched over a gas burner and cylinder. Put a pot of water on that, and the serious burns unit is your next stop if you're not careful. It looked like it was designed to be tipped over. And they would have to boil water because there was no tap water.

Of course, I had done the same thing decades ago. Lerderderg Gorge at age sixteen; with pipe tobacco and frightening tales at night of Deliverance-style murderers stalking the valley and carving sleeping campers in their tents. We frightened ourselves half to death. In retrospect it was all good fun. Another time we'd camped by Lake Burrumbeet and walked across fields narrowly avoiding bulls to reach the Windermere Hotel in which we'd played pool and drunk whiskey and dries while a transistor radio on the bar shelf played David Bowie's new song, Sorrow.

I drove back across that flat melancholy part of mid-Gippsland through which pass massive powerlines from the now half-dead power stations. The lines gleamed in a kind of pixilated yellow-grey reflecting the late afternoon autumn sun, like some B-grade 1950s science fiction movie. Three nights, then I would drive back through Gippsland and down into the valley again and see if they were still alive. I've always had an active imagination and sometimes it keeps me awake too long.