Pleasure, and the other thing.

A campfire reflection on the difference between pleasure and the quieter, internal version of happy. Hill End, twenty-eight pubs, the Bridle Track.

The fire took on the third try. Ferro-rod scrapings on a small nest of dry grass, the spark catching, the grass darkening at the edges, the first thread of smoke, and then, finally, the small honest yellow of a flame that intends to keep going. The sky above the campsite was the colour of a tea-stained envelope. The kettle, on its side by the ring of stones, was waiting to be told what was next.

Hill End is three and a half hours from Sydney if you go the easy way. The hard way is the Bridle Track from Bathurst, which is gravel and clay, narrow enough that two cars cannot pass without one of them reversing for a kilometre, and steep enough on the river side that a careless line costs more than pride. Hunter handled it well. I, in the section where the surface went from gravel to wet clay just past a switchback I had taken at the speed of a man who has not learned the surface yet, handled it less well. The bike stayed upright. My pulse, for the next ten minutes, did not.

Hill End in 1872 had twenty-eight pubs and eight thousand people. Hill End now has about eighty. The buildings are mostly still there, repurposed or kept as a museum-village by the National Parks people, the streets wide enough for the bullock teams that no longer come, the hotel on the corner serving counter meals to a Saturday crowd of about nine. It is the kind of place where you stand in the main street at four in the afternoon and the only sound is a magpie a long way away deciding it is not, today, going to swoop you.

I camped on the Bridle Track itself, on a flat by the Turon. Different river to Sofala, same rush, same patient water doing the heavy work for anyone willing to stand in it long enough. I panned for an hour. Found enough to know the river had not been worked clean. Stood up with a sore back and the small, unreasonable cheerfulness panning leaves you with — the cheerfulness of a thing earned slowly, not given.

Pleasure is taken. Satisfaction is earned. They are not the same currency, and they do not buy the same things.

By dusk the camp was set. Tarp on the windward side, tent under it, ferro rod and tinder by the ring of stones, the small pile of split wood I’d gathered on the ride in. None of it is fast. The tarp takes ten minutes to get right because the wind keeps changing its mind. The fire takes three tries because the kindling is only nearly dry. The tea takes longer than tea takes at home, because home has an electric kettle and a spoon that hasn’t fallen in the dirt. All of it is slow, and all of it is the point.

There is a thing I keep circling, and I’ll try to say it plainly. There is pleasure, which is the dopamine hit, the easy thing, the second beer, the video that auto-plays when the first one ends. Pleasure is taken. It arrives quickly and leaves about as quickly, and it does not, in the morning, leave very much behind. And then there is the other thing, which is harder to name. Some people call it satisfaction. Some call it contentment. Some, more carefully, call it meaning. It is a quiet, internal kind of happy, and the thing that distinguishes it from pleasure is that it only ever arrives on the far side of some discomfort.

The camping is the discomfort. The wet boot from the river crossing, the ten minutes of swearing at a tarp guyline, the fact that lighting a fire from a ferro rod is, every single time, slightly humiliating until it isn’t. The peace at the fire — the bit where the kettle finally goes on, and the day’s small competences are stacked under you like firewood — that is the other thing. You cannot take a shortcut to it. The shortcut is what makes it not arrive.

Pleasure is taken. Satisfaction is earned. I think a lot of what is wrong with how I have spent some of my hours, on some of my years, is that I confused the two and kept reaching for the cheaper one. The bike is, in part, an attempt to stop doing that. So is the fire. So is the tea, made slowly, on the side of a road, in a town that mostly isn’t there any more.

The fire settled into coals.

The kettle whistled, low.

I went to sleep.

A written companion to Episode 2: Hill End moto-camping on the Himalayan 450 on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.