I'm trying to beat the time estimate on Google Maps. It says the arrival time at Bay of Fires is 2.12, but if I hit 110 on the straight I can come in at 2.10 or earlier. It's a small and irrational game, but keeps me entertained on the long stretch of highway from Lanceston to St Helens, on Tasmania's East Coast, where the next camp is.

A highway is both a psychological and a physical journey, especially at these distances. I'm listening to Melvin Sheldrake's Entangled Lives, and he talks of the mycellial tips, the hyphae that move forward - action - leaving, symbolically, the past behind. On the road I push through time like hyphael tips. Some living creatures have reached the end of their time line - black ravens tear flesh from roadkill pademelons, quolls, the odd island tiger. It is not safe to be a living thing on Tasmanian roads. Time plays with you and leaves you roadside bones.

On the outer skirts of Launceston are wild hawthorn hedges, planted once by hopeful colonists that imagined a landscape like the one they left behind. Now they are unruly and, untended, straggle along a railway line with other detritus - discarded bottles and other projectiles from travelling beasts. I want to pick some - Autumn is the prime time - but they are inaccessible and difficult to process on the road although sitting and plucking burgundy berries from haw branches would be a little like whittling, I suppose, designed to both while the time and have a product at the end of it.

Then the rosehips appear, red and inviting along the farmline fences where neither poison nor plow nor desire has rid. I hurtle through time. Hyphael action. Past behind. But the hips become so ample, so abundant, so fecundly fantastic that I stop my race against the clock and stop for them.

It amazes me how everyone else is hurtling past. The container trucks, freshly loaded from mainland ferries, indeed have their own clocks to tick to - industry is a strict mistress. Both I and the rosehips tremble before such leviathans. They rush and rumble and thunder, defying space time continuums as the air threatens to break around them.

Safe in the ditches, I have gloves ready, leather ones kept to aid pick up the hot cast iron of the camp stove, but perfect for negotiating with the thorns of roses. Pricks, I laugh. They laugh back, and defiantly scratch my forearm where the gloves don't reach. Touche, rose pricks. Point taken. Still, they offer their seasonal bounty with little fuss. I leave plenty - there is more than enough for both me and the roses.

I drive in yards now, from bush to bush, not miles - why I'm thinking imperial, I don't know. Perhaps it's the old world thinking in this activity. I have slowed down. I'm foraging on a journey, plucking what I need from the autumnal days to nourish me as I go. Hips, haws, apples, fungi - they don't mind. They invite me and birds and possums alike, distribution mechanisms that help them extend their time lines into infinity. Two hundred years ago, the first planted rose. Now, the fence times and the plucking traveller, the quickened pace of the world and the whirling seasons, and the roses stretching as far as possible, til they give way to managed national parks where purity is god, and gum and wattle reign.

I can but fill one bag, though - it is mid afternoon, and one does not drive at dusk or else slaughter marsupials. They'll dry on a hook in the van. I'll add them to tea on cold evenings where the winter chill knocks and the immune system shivers. Others will buy plastic enclosed vitamin C pills from pharmacies, ill prepared and underresourced when it comes to nature's antioxidants. I'll crush them with a rock plucked from the shoreline and add them to a bottle of apple cider vinegar to stew as we go, hyphae-like mortals pushing into the future.

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