It was Benni’s birthday that weekend. We had planned a short trip to an even more remote northern point of Queensland. It had been three months since we had moved to Lockhart River, an Aboriginal village of 800 inhabitants nestled between a tropical rainforest and Australia’s eastern coastline, from where you could see the Great Barrier Reef – a lost paradise.
At first glance, Lockhart River seemed like the town where I was born: Alta Floresta, at the edge of the Amazon. My parents returned to their hometown when I was two months old, but they kept photographs of the village where I was born. I had never wanted to go back to Alta Floresta. I never liked the wilderness. And the countless stories about man-eating snakes didn’t sound any more appealing than the tales of loneliness my mother told.
There were two things I was sure I would never do in life: follow a man and live in the wilderness.
The night before our trip, Benni and I sat on the veranda. We lived in a repurposed shipping container, with a veranda surrounded by tropical rainforest. Serene, but not silent. The forest screamed every night. Sometimes, we would drive to the nearest creek and sit in the back of the truck quietly to listen to the forest. Its sound was hypnotising.
Silence filled our veranda: a deafening silence between us.
There was a fire pit in front of the veranda, almost always unlit. No matter how much Benni tried to start a fire, it never took off. It would burn briefly, and then thick black smoke would rise. His frustration at seeing another piece of wood turn to dust instead of flames wasn’t greater than the frustration in his voice that night:
“I don’t know if we should travel tomorrow.”
He was afraid the silence of that veranda would ruin the weekend. I was afraid that the veranda would ruin us.
The next morning, while Benni was showering, I finished preparing his birthday cake. When I returned to the container, he didn’t want to celebrate. I sliced the cake and wrapped it up for later. Benni was annoyed at me for being late and eager for us to leave as soon as possible since the road was long and full of potholes, with no phone signal.
With a battery-powered radio in hand, we hit the road toward Weipa, where there was a large market and a liquor store. We grabbed some food and a few bottles of wine, camped there that night, and the next day we headed toward Pennefather River.
On the narrow dirt road leading to Pennefather River, we were surrounded by trees that had already encountered fire. Bushfires are common in that biome. On one of our night drives a week earlier, we came across part of the forest in flames. The fire blazed with a fierce intensity, the air thick with the smell of smoke and the crackling of burning wood. I have no memory of how long we stood there watching it. I only remember its strength, the heat of the flames, the trees standing in defiance, and the dead branches on the ground. Grief was present there, as well as a certain magnetism.
The locals had taught us that natural and controlled burns are essential for the ecological balance of the region. They act like a periodic soil cleansing: removing everything that no longer grows and returning resources to the earth so life can continue.
In fact, beyond the black stains caused by the fire that did not destroy them, the trees in our path displayed a vibrant orange-red perfectly harmonised with the reddish-brown soil beneath them: a living painting. Despite the dry tones, there was undeniable life there. Benni and I were no longer arguing about the delay, the cake, or the radio.
Ahead, we spotted an emu guiding its chicks across the road. We braked to watch. As tall as an adult human, this flightless bird exists only in that part of the planet. Emu chicks are raised by their fathers. The mother lays the egg and moves on with her reproductive journey. The father incubates the egg and looks after the young until they reach maturity and independence.
Even though they don’t fly—or maybe because of that—emus can run at high speeds, and their claws are sharp enough to gouge out a human eye. Encountering an emu with its chicks in its natural habitat is not exactly safe, though exquisite. Once the chicks had finished crossing, the father emu walked toward us for a few meters, as if suggesting we should move along.
Not long after, we arrived at Pennefather River. We entered the vast beach covered in dunes. The stretch of sand was so wide that we couldn’t even see the sea. At first, there was only sand. The car rocked like a boat.
Amid the jolts, heads bumping against the roof, and the engine’s complaints, we were struck by a blue sky-like sea, as the sky itself above it. The dunes ended at the edge of a small hill. At the top of it, trees provided some relief from the scorching sun. Below, another smooth stretch of sand, the sea, and the reef. The reef was within swimming distance—if it weren’t for the crocodiles guarding it.
We let the car rest in the shade and walked down the hill. We strolled along the shore as long as the sun allowed, mesmerised. We passed by a private campsite. There were other similar campsites around that one, with basic survival amenities like a sink and a toilet. One had a disco chandelier and remnants of a recent party, but this one was simpler.
From above, two men and a woman waved at us. We waved back. They signalled for us to come up. And so we did: a convenient solution for a couple in crisis on a holiday. I don’t remember their names or the conversations we had. I remember laughing.
The older man had an old truck, similar to the one my grandfather had when I was a child. He said he would take us on a beach tour and asked us to hop in the truck bed. We stood there —Benni, the couple, a dog, and I—gripping the metal bars behind the cabin, trying to keep our balance as the driver took us through the Pennefather River dunes.
The resistance of someone who avoids risks merged with the thrill of yielding to uncertainty. A jolt, a wind tangling up fears, and a burst of laughter. I suddenly wasn’t there anymore but in my grandfather’s truck bed, gripping the iron bars and dodging branches alongside my cousin as he drove us to his coffee farm. It was the best part of our weekly trip.
I laughed—that was all I could do. Alert and relinquished, like a child on a short-loop roller coaster.
Another jolt, a gust of wind that blinded our eyes, and then a shout. Benni had lost his balance and fallen off the truck, a risk he had eagerly accepted. For him, avoiding the risk was harder than taking it, a fundamental difference between us. His provocative excuse for what I saw as reckless behavior: “I’ve never died.” On the other hand, it seemed like every day for him was a ride on a short-loop roller coaster.
That time, the softness of the sand spared his skin, and we carried on, side by side, balancing on the rolling dunes beneath us. We drove into the forest bordering the beach. Watching out for snakes, we searched for firewood to keep the fire burning through the night. We gathered fallen logs and stray branches. It was an important task, and in it, we got distracted from the dog.
“-Where’s the dog?” someone finally noticed as we were preparing to leave back to the camp. It couldn’t have gone far— it was a small dog. But how long had we been there? And how long had it been missing? The sun started to set, making it harder to see anything wandering between the trees or crawling along the ground. We called, shouted, whistled, spun around. Nothing.
With the sun gone, only the dim light of our phone flashlights remained. A missing dog and five people battling panic. How crucial were those damn branches, anyway?
Suddenly, uncertainty wasn’t all that thrilling anymore.
And then, just like that, a distant bark returned such a feeling.
We called the dog even louder and ran toward its bark. When those little legs finally ran back towards us, we were all looping once more.
We returned to camp and, with the freshly gathered firewood, fed the fire on the edge of the hill. We sat around it, beneath a countryside sky full of stars, in front of a completely deserted beach with a calm tide. There were no disco chandeliers, but there was enough to make for a good night.
After cooking dinner, the fire prepared to sleep, and we followed. Our tent, set up in the open air, didn’t need the top cover that night. It was too hot outside. Not so much inside. There was still something silent there.
I will never forget the moment I woke up the next morning. A beam of light made me open my eyes. Through the tiny holes in the tent’s protective netting, I saw a pink-orange sky streaked with blue, and a gentle fireball touching the pale blue waters, almost still, at the foot of the hill where we slept. If that had been the last time I ever woke up, it would have been the best awakening of my life.
I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat by the extinguished fire, facing the sea, gazing at the ember notably burning within me. Then I felt a slight sadness as I thought about the fire pit in front of my porch, now cold. Since moving to Lockhart River, I had been distracted. Like the trees we’d seen on the road, I had stood in defiance to the undeniable life force sparkling around me. I felt like the loneliest flightless bird and so, flames had given place to dust. I hadn’t even realised I had the forest at my feet and that, at any time, I could gather new wood to rekindle my fire.
After breakfast, we packed the car to return to Lockhart River. The village is the millennia-old home to various Aboriginal peoples and it was named by the British, though the reason for the choice is uncertain. The name “Lockhart,” originally associated with the brave, was later linked to the opening of locked hearts. The Lockhart family crest features the ravenous head of a boar and a human heart, and its motto is “Corda Serrata Pando”— I open a closed heart.
Rivers, in turn, symbolise the flow, interconnection, and impermanence of life. On the way back to Lockhart River, swept up in the adventurous spirit awakened that weekend and driven by the need to claim my independence in that life context, I decided to drive again.
My driver’s license had never seen consistent use. But there were no subways, trams, or buses in Lockhart River. For three months, I had depended on Benni to go anywhere. By that point, my fear of driving was smaller than my terror of being so dependent on someone.
So we switched seats. After adjusting the seat and fastening the seatbelt, I started the car and gently released the clutch after shifting into first gear. I slowly accelerated and shifted the gears to the second, then the third. Benni, surprised and excited by my sudden act of courage, recorded a happy me driving—well enough, we would say—along an empty gravel road. The car vibrated a little, and Benni suggested I accelerate slightly to stop the wheels from shaking.
I pressed the gas pedal lightly, just as I noticed I was driving toward a sign on the left side of the road. On impulse, I yanked the steering wheel to the right. Benni lunged at me and grabbed the wheel, trying to reverse the inevitable.
In that gap between what has already passed and what is about to come, in that fleeting space between the reality once known and the one unfolding ahead with every millisecond, there is no room for distraction. There is not even room for fear.
The car veered off the road to the right, crashed into a tree, and rolled over. From inside the car, we could barely hear what was happening outside—only the sound of wood being crushed and glass shattering. I held onto the car’s roof as it spun. My eyes wide open. After three rolls, we came to a stop, upside down.
“Are you okay?” Benni and I asked simultaneously.
We jumped out of the car as fast as we could, each through a shattered window. Benni, ran around the car and came to me. He had a small cut on his arm and I had a scratch near my knee, nothing else.
Benni panicked: the car was hopeless. It was fully destroyed.
At that same moment, I felt joy.
Soon, other emotions and worries took over. But at that exact moment, I felt sheer joy. I wanted to jump and shout.
That feeling was unlike anything I had known. It was like a full-body combustion.
My numbed mind took a few minutes to land in this new reality. Benni found the radio and called our boss to report the accident and ask for help. Due to the area’s geographic isolation and weather conditions, sometimes weeks—or even months—passed without a car crossing those roads.
Without internet, we couldn’t send our location. The description of the route we had taken didn’t match the route we should have taken. We were lost and on foot on a road cutting through a tropical forest.
All we could do at that moment was pick up what we could from the car and wait for someone to show up.
Covered in dirt, with no idea where we were headed, we gathered what was left of our belongings. All the car windows had shattered—but the two bottles of wine in the trunk since Weipa remained intact. The mini fridge had a crooked door but still kept the food fresh, including Benni’s birthday cake.
Dusk was falling when a couple passed by and offered us help. With some effort, we squeezed our belongings into their car, and they took us to the nearest town, where there was a travellers’ stop with a small hotel and a campsite.
The hotel was full, so we set up our tent again and opened a bottle of wine to go with the cake, cheering to the uncertain flow that brought us somewhere between rivers that night.
Silence gave way to tears for what could have been, to relieved sobs for still being there, side by side. We cried in mourning for the death that touched us, and for the one that reached us.
In the warmth of that tight embrace—the kind shared when reuniting with a long-lost loved one— mutual combustion removed resentment, resistance and distraction, returning to us the magnetism of burning flames and the attention required to unlock a heart, or two.
That night, the tarp covered the tent, and it was colder outside than inside.
About the Author:
Andressa Ambrosi is a Brazilian writer and language teacher based in Berlin. Her poetry and essays explore identity, belonging, and reinvention, delving into the emotional landscapes of grief and resilience. Rooted in personal experience, her writing often contemplates life’s inner shifts and turning points. She holds a Master’s degree in Human Rights and has worked with gender equality through legal, academic, and creative lenses. Her poetry was first published in Brazil in 2024, and this essay marks her English-language debut.
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