On the road with Joe by Lisa Upton

Toddlers are always a handful and bringing one up in a caravan can be challenging – but Joe’s inquisitive nature is not without its rewards

On a good day, we don’t hear a murmur from the cot until 6am. Today is not one of those days. It is an icy mid-winter morning in Alice Springs and Joe has decided 4:30am is wake-up time. He scrambles out of his cot at the other end of the caravan and Greg gets up to put on the jug. I pull a pillow over my face and try to pretend this is not happening. Somehow, I slip back to sleep.

The next thing I know the caravan door is wide open and a woman is standing on our front step. “Excuse me,” she calls out. “Are you the mother of the little boy wandering around in the dark with a mobile phone in his hand?”

I am outside in a flash. The first thing I see is Greg emerging from the toilet. “Isn’t he with you?” I screech.

“No,” says Greg, alarmed, “I left him with you.”

A moment later, I spot him. He’s just down the road, chatting contentedly to an imaginary friend on my mobile phone. The Great Escape has been thwarted, but I spend the day waiting for somebody from the Department of Community Services, or whatever the Northern Territory equivalent is, to arrive and tell me I’m not fit for motherhood.

We’ve been on the road for seven months now. We left Sydney just before Joe’s first birthday. Back then he couldn’t walk, and he certainly couldn’t open the door of the caravan and let himself outside. But somewhere between Lightning Ridge and Longreach my baby became a walking, talking little boy who invites himself into camps and caravans and personal lives, opening all sorts of doors for the three of us.

In Karumba, he endeared himself to a fisherman called Rick who took us out in his tinny and filled our freezer with fish. In the Tanami Desert he was involved in a fierce tussle with an Aboriginal boy over an ice cream. Joe lost the initial battle, but the boy’s mum rewarded him with a double scoop. In the Torres Strait, having Joe by our side earned us credibility with the Islander kids and an invitation to go octopus hunting.

There are some people, I suppose, who are not so enamoured with his inquisitive streak. Just the other day, Joe raced into the annexe of a caravan in Kununurra, with me a few feet behind, to be greeted by a red-eyed man smoking something other than tobacco. I’d figured I had more than a decade before I needed to worry about my son being introduced to drugs, but as ‘The Sunscreen Song’ says, the unexpected will “blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday”.

As any parent knows, there’s no such thing as an “idle Tuesday” when you share your life with a toddler. Greg and I often look enviously at the grey nomads enjoying happy hour while we struggle through arsenic hour. We’re not people to miss out though. We get stuck into the booze a little later in the evening, and very often our daily ritual extends well beyond an hour.

Friends at home want to know about two things in particular. How we manage the washing and how Joe copes with all those long car journeys. The washing is simple. Three bucks a load in most caravan parks. Often we’ll go a week without washing our clothes, which means we’re all dirtier than we would be at home.

The car trips are rarely a problem. We try not to drive more than three or four hours at a time, although occasionally we are forced to do an eight or ten hour trip. On those days, we reach for The Owl and the Pussycat and The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Hairy Maclary. We play a lot of peek-a-boo, sing bad songs and throw plastic balls into buckets. Pulling out a box of sultanas and offering them one at a time can often get us 60km or more without a grizzle.

Generally we’ve adapted to this life on the road, but I still dread those nights when Joe decides to wake the entire campsite with his screaming. Greg offers reassurance. “Lisa, a lot of these grey nomads are on the best drugs that medical science can produce,” he says. “Combine that with one too many drinks at happy hour and nothing will rouse them from their sleep.” He’s wrong, of course, but it does make me feel better.

The toughest part of being on the road is that we never inhabit a safe space. There is no backyard to leave Joe in while we duck inside to grab a coffee or call a mate. We are constantly on what we call “security duty”, alert to all sorts of potential dangers – cars travelling too quickly in the caravan park, swimming pool gates left open and, these days, illicit drug users!

But the joys far outweigh the burdens. Sometimes Greg will be playing hide and seek with Joe, or tickling him, and he will look at his watch and say, “Babe, I could be stuck on the Anzac Bridge.”

We also have solid support from Granna, who arrives every six weeks from the Blue Mountains, determined her grandson will not forget her. It is lovely to witness Joe’s big grin of recognition at every airport reunion.

And he’s at a delightful stage now where his language is exploding. Bird is his favourite word, followed by rock, dog and moon. He lulls himself to sleep practising his new vocabulary and we usually wake in the morning to hear him reciting, “Bird, biiiird, biiiiirrrd.” We look in to see him pointing skyward with a crooked finger.

We wonder what our bush baby would be saying if we were still in the city. “Traffic, pollution, timesheet, stressed,” we joke, even though he’s yet to master a word containing more than one syllable.

One of Joe’s new friends here in Kununurra is a five-year-old girl called Shakana. “Does Joe like living in the caravan?” she asked me today.

“Yes, I think he does,” I replied. “This is the only home he knows.”

He’s on the adventure of a lifetime, and he won’t remember a thing.

Lisa Upton is travelling around Australia with her partner Greg Bearup and their 19-month-old son, Joe. Greg is writing a book about their experiences called Adventures in Caravanastan. Their trip is sponsored by Volvo and Jayco Caravans.

Open Road e-zine October 2008

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