Sombering.

A word I said into the helmet mic without thinking, riding past a flipped car at a historic-site sign on the way to Omeo. The whole day after that is named for it.

The word isn’t in any dictionary I’ve checked. I said it into the helmet mic, half to the camera and half to nobody, and I didn’t notice I’d said it until I was watching the rushes back a fortnight later in the edit. Sombering. Somewhere between sobering and sombre, with the slow-vowel weight of both. The kind of word a brain makes when it has just been shown something it doesn’t want to hold for very long.

The day starts at Stacey’s Bridge on Wheeler Creek, the way it ended the day before. A purple tent on grass. A picnic table. The first long ride of the morning up the dirt road out of the Nariel Valley with the tank bag in the wrong place again. Hundred and seventy kilometres on the schedule, most of it dirt, climbing all day to one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five metres at Mount Hotham — the highest sealed road in Australia and an empty ski resort in the middle of a thirty-five-degree summer.

The flipped car is at the historic-site sign on the way into Omeo. Roof down on the verge, four wheels in the air, a thin spray of glass and trim picked clean into the grass. Nobody in it. Nobody hurt, as far as I can find out at the next stop. It has been there long enough for an emergency tow to have come and gone without bothering to move it. The driver has walked away from the kind of crash I’ve been talking, all morning, about not having.

One small mistake. That’s the line.

I have been talking, all morning, about not having one. I’ve been telling the camera about how one small thing — a tank bag in the wrong place, a strap that’s come loose, the wrong eye-line through a corner — is what ends trips. Not bravery. Not skill. Geometry plus inattention. I had been very pleased with the sentiment. The car at the sign is the universe’s way of saying: yes, all right, you can stop explaining.

I get to Omeo at lunchtime and find a cafe and a hot tea, which is most of what you can have on day thirteen of a fast. Omeo is a gold town that survived three fires and one earthquake and is now the kind of place you can stand still in for twenty minutes and have three conversations. The cafe has a tin roof and a kelpie under the table. I sit, I drink the tea, I look at the photos of the flipped car and decide not to put them on the internet, and I get back on the bike.

The strap comes loose somewhere on the climb out of Omeo. I don’t notice for the first kilometre. I do notice the noise the second kilometre — a small tick, then a small slap, the sound of something light hitting something hard on each revolution — and I pull off the road at the next clear shoulder. The strap that holds the tank bag onto the back seat has come loose at one corner. I find it wrapped around two of the rear spokes. If it had caught at speed, the wheel would have locked. Best case: shredded spokes and a bike that doesn’t roll out of here. Worst case: I am on my back in the gravel watching it slide away from me on the same road as the car at the sign.

I had just been talking about how one small mistake ends a trip. Then I did exactly the opposite.

I unwrap the strap. I unclip both bags from the back. I put them on the ground. I sit on the verge for ten minutes and look at the rear wheel. The strap is undamaged. The spokes are undamaged. I have used up some quantity of luck I didn’t know I had a balance on. I tie the bags down a different way — under the load, not over it, so the failure mode is different — and I get back on. The next two hours are the slowest two hours of riding I’ve done in months.

Mount Hotham is empty. A ski resort in summer is one of the strangest places I’ve ridden into — lift towers running to nowhere, hire shops shuttered, a single pub with a couple of cars outside. I get a second tea. I walk to the lookout. The sun is going down across an ocean of blue ridges that runs to the horizon in every direction, and the last light catches the side of the bike where I’ve tied the bags differently, and the camera comes out for the kind of shot I would not have taken three hours ago.

Sombering, I think, is what happens when the universe shows you the line you are riding next to, and you realise you have been riding next to it for longer than you thought. It is not fear, exactly. Fear is for the corner you can see. This is the slower thing — the recognition that there is a version of this day in which I do not get to Hotham, do not get the sunset, do not get the tea. That version was not far from this one. A strap. A lapse. A bend.

The bike clicks its heat into the evening on the lookout. The tea is the best tea I’ve had in weeks. The line is exactly where the line has always been. I just got to look at it.

A written companion to Australian Alps Solo on a Himalayan 450 — Episode 9 on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel. The full long-form trip report is at Journey 09.