We’re loggers. Not the timber-cutting kind, but the kind who log their notable events in a journal. For years we’ve recorded recollections of journeys that bring a warm inner glow, peaks of joy and depths of gloom. We don’t intend to have others read our journals—although perhaps a later generation might skim them after we’ve gone—and they’re certainly not going to appear on the web. Our records are logs but not blogs.
For the last five years we have sporadically walked the Heysen Trail. Mostly day-walks, partnering with another couple to pre-position a car at each end of a planned day’s walk, sharing their company on the Trail and a few indulgent drinks at day’s end. Each walk has been faithfully recorded in our log, wedged among our other records of the years.
But now we’ve finished the Trail: we emerged onto the Parachilna Gorge Road a few weeks ago, with 1,200 km of sweaty wonderment behind us, and next day wrote our exultant final Trail log. But there are some problems: although we covered the Trail from South to North, not all the segments were done in the map’s sequence and having the individual day logs buried in the stories of five years of our lives is not ideal. We want a connected Trail narrative, from its beginning to its end, as a stand-alone tale. And so the task of extracting our separate logs and reassembling them in ‘Trail order’ has begun.
It’s a process both tedious and fun. Over five years our writing, formatting and documentation styles have evolved and we feel duty-bound to impose some uniformity, reviewing and editing the logs as we paste them together. As we do so, we’re there again, fair weather and foul, steep climbs and precarious descents, rock-strewn creek beds and verdant grasslands. What a wonderful land we live in!
Burnside Writers Group 