Quiet Country

Silence is more than an absence of sound. Silence can be substance. Can be presence.

The deep quiet of the high country, a silence that is almost a sound.

Then a currawong calls. The sound of your footfalls in gravel and ice, the pack squeaks under your shoulder. The world of noise resumes.

There was snow on the tent this morning, crunching with the frost under the day’s first steps. The rumble of boiling water. The rattle of your spoon as it stirs condensed milk into your coffee. The hiss of a deflating air bed. The silky scrunch as you stuff your sleeping bag into its sack. A sniffle in the cold air as you stand and look about you. Gazing into the quiet. A windy flap and a crack as you shake ice from the tent. Then still.

The long silences are part of the presence of the place, the big brooding mass of the mountain. A very Australian peak, old and worn like the resting bald dome of the world. Big in place and in time. Millions of years, right here. All of human history just a scratch. A break in its long silence. Funny to feel all of that as you walk, to move through the presence of place. To feel its ancientness. To know that its quiet will be the thing that endures. Long beyond all of us, and on, deep into a time that is, again, silent.