Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
A long, ugly fast downhill from Beechworth. A speeding car honks at me for riding outside the debris-ridden shoulder. On the car side of the white line. I yell back, bearish on all humankind.
At least the terrain is finally flat! I check the cue sheet, check it again. No turns for quite a while. Just keep on.
I've been trying to make time to Whitfield. To get there, we tack around Wangaratta and I have no expectation for anything to look familiar. It's been a long time.
In the openness of the Ovens Valley, a tickling starts. A change in awareness.
It doesn't look familiar, as much as I know it is familiar. This place, I know this place. In a nonverbal way, a re-cognition of something faint, but real.
At any point in, say, the last 20 years if someone had asked for a description of this landscape it's doubtful I could have provided one. My perspective was from a bike riding to and from school, and town. Or from the back seat of a car. Never quite sure where I was.
Still, it seems I know this place. The long, flat valley with gum trees lining the road, occasionally one standing alone in a field. The water tower against a huge sky in Moyhu.
Everywhere we've been, it becomes a part of us.
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