That was our Cad. However, that cheeky vision of him, the first for some time, hid the ordeal he had put himself through during the previous three weeks since he’d left Ceduna.
DAY 142, 17 MAY 2011
CEDUNA TO PENONG (69 KM)
Before he left Ceduna, Cad did his biggest shop so far: seventy cans of tuna, ten jars of pasta sauce, five boxes of Weet-Bix, fruit, chocolate, muesli bars, crackers and more were divided into eight food parcels, to be dropped at the Nullarbor roadhouses by a convoy of retirees who were heading to Perth for a navy reunion. Just on sunrise on 17 May 2011 he finally set off west into the vastness on his Nullarbor excursion.
It was just before 7 am as he hit the road and the breaking day was freezing (4 degrees Celsius overnight). Wearing a thermal vest, T-shirt, flannelette long-sleeve shirt and woollen jumper, Cad instantly hit a gusty headwind, which was to be his biggest enemy for the next three weeks. Usually a dry north-wester, it was regularly 30 kilometres an hour into his face and sometimes double that.
Shortly after leaving Ceduna a helicopter hovered above him; at first he thought it was the police (he had advised the local constabulary of his pending departure) but the passenger opened the door and waved to him. Next day they were back, and this time they landed. Peter and Adrian, who had the job of maintaining the electricity wires along the Nullarbor, came over to chat and donate $50, saying they’d checked out his website after seeing it on his pram the day before.
Soon after Cad thought he was about to be mugged by two suspicious characters, who parked their ute well ahead and were walking towards him; one had pulled his hoodie over his head and the other spread metres to his left. ‘I thought, right, it’s on. I picked up a decent rock and started planning my next move. The guy to the left was smaller so I thought I’d peg the rock at his head and I’ll go straight in with a mid-heel kick to the bigger guy’s knee and try to drop him. My heart was pumping. As they got closer I could see they were alright, although I shouldn’t have assumed that, and dropped the rock. It was Terry and Pierre from Quebec in Canada; they were driving from Melbourne to Perth and gave me $5 and asked if they could walk with me.’
The pair, university students, was putting together a film about their travels and taped their conversation as they walked. They’d driven past earlier while the helicopter was hovering, thus Cad hadn’t noticed them; they said they thought it was the police checking Andrew out.
They were the last people Andrew spoke to that day, despite walking until 7.30 pm. His left knee hurt and he was suffering after cutting dead skin from his feet while in Ceduna, exposing pussy blisters underneath; the tenderness this created was a real problem on the first day of this leg.
DAY 143, 18 MAY 2011
PENONG TO WEST OF BOOKABIE (61 KM)
After posting his video blog in Penong, Cad walked past a window sign that said: ‘Last shop for 1000 kilometres. Warning: remote zone ahead.’ He also quickly learned that the next thousand kilometres would involve dodging road trains, and the fact there was no road shoulder made that even more inconvenient with Cad having to push onto the dirt when faced with one (he was still walking into the oncoming traffic).
The convoy from Ceduna that was carrying his food parcels came past, beeping and waving. Soon after a Taiwanese cyclist, riding from Perth to Melbourne carting an oversized trailer, stopped for a chat and advised of an ‘old guy’ walking about 400 kilometres ahead. Andrew had been hearing about the man for a week or so and set himself the task of trying to catch him. ‘The Taiwan guy reckons he only does 40 kilometres a day, so it’s possible,’ he wrote.
Andrew never did catch him, but later found out the man was Mike Pauly, a seventy-one-year-old arthritic who from 1 March to 26 June 2011 walked from Melbourne to Fremantle, an average of 30 kilometres a day. Mike had done the walk in reverse two years earlier and was obviously an inspirational character, and the more he heard about him, the more Andrew admired him. So many mistook Andrew for Mike, and would tell him they’d heard him on ‘Macca’s program’ (Australia All Over with Ian McNamara, a popular national ABC Radio Sunday-morning program), and Cad had to do all sorts of explaining to convince people he was someone else. He spoke to Mike by telephone when he arrived in Perth but they didn’t get the chance to meet.
DAY 144, 19 MAY 2011
WEST OF BOOKABIE TO YALATA (70 KM)
Cad had asked his newfound friends to drop his first food parcel to what he recorded on his map as ‘mobile’), presumably a Mobil roadhouse east of Yalata. He was alarmed to find on this day, while talking to a road gang at the Nundroo roadhouse, that there was indeed no such place and that the Yalata roadhouse had also been closed for years (since 2006), which meant it was 150 kilometres before the next outpost of any sort, apart from a one-man police station that was all that remained on the highway at Yalata. Cad was desperately hoping his friends had dropped his food at the police station, otherwise he faced two days without adequate food and water.
The workmen warned him not to go to the Yalata community, two kilometres from the highway, as the people there were in mourning and would be drinking; in other words, he might be heading into conflict. The headwind picked up to a good 40 kilometres an hour, adding to his feeling that this wasn’t going to be a good day, although by midafternoon, like a switch had been turned off, the wind dropped to nothing.
So Cad was on a mission to make the Yalata police station by midnight, which would make it a 75-kilometre day. He kept walking in the pitch black, the monotony broken only by the occasional passing vehicle. He was spooked by a bonfire that he guessed was a kilometre off the road, and later by voices in the darkness.
Suddenly a beat-up old white station wagon appeared from behind him and slowed to a halt just in front, then slowly drove off. He knew they were local Indigenous youth as he’d witnessed this for three days, although in the daytime. They kept riding the brakes before stopping at the bottom of a hill about 300 metres ahead, where several men got out of the car, a scene he could just make out in the moonlight that had emerged from the clouds an hour before. I can only imagine how frightening it was to be truly in the middle of nowhere, on foot and confronted by this situation.
‘I thought, here we go,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Then they started yelling and screaming. I could make out a crowd of people in the moonlight beside the car and then someone started kicking into the car and there was a lot of yelling and screaming in Aboriginal. I shit myself and quickly turned off my lights and took off my high-vis. I stood in the dark for a while watching and listening and decided it wasn’t safe to walk past, so I somehow managed to push Redge up a steep sandy bank on the side of the road and into the bush while I scouted around and found a way through the scrub into a clearing. I kept my light off and really couldn’t see because the trees blocked the moonlight. Once in the clearing it was better, I walked through spider webs and was shitting myself that I had spiders on me.
‘I was dripping wet now as the dew was really heavy, the fog was closing in and water was dripping off Redge. I pitched the tent in the dark and stretched, I didn’t dare turn my light on in case I was spotted. They were just below and I could hear them carrying on all night. I was starving but couldn’t cook so I had my last two cans of tuna over crackers. It was midnight before I tried to go to sleep.’
DAYS 145–146, 20–21 MAY 2011
YALATA TO NULLARBOR ROADHOUSE (99 KM)
When Cad emerged from his tent at 8 am he could not believe the thickness of the mist blowing in; it was like it was raining horizontally, with water dripping off his beard. As he walked up the highway he could smell a fire that appeared to be still smouldering and heard voices in the bush. He passed a sign at the junction of the road to the Yalata community which read: ‘Danger, keep out, no cameras, no alcohol.’ Plenty of alcohol had been consumed outside the community’s boundaries.
Five kilometres further on Andrew reached the abandoned Yalata roadhouse (and had phone coverage for half a kilometre) and scoute
d for his food parcel with no success. He noticed the police building at the western entrance and found a line of dongas (used as police cells, he guessed). The policeman was talking to a man Cad assumed was a community leader, and Andrew interrupted to ask if any food had been dropped off; the policeman replied in the negative, quite uninterested, and said to call the Nullarbor roadhouse. Andrew did so and found that it was there – and a further 95 kilometres away.
The policeman seemed aloof as Cad tried to explain his situation: ‘He really wasn’t concerned that some idiot was about to go trundling off into the bush with no food. I suppose it’s nothing new, he would get walkers and riders coming through here weekly, I was just another idiot passing through would have been what he was thinking.’
So to last 100 kilometres and the two days it would take him to get to the Nullarbor roadhouse, Cad had a can of spaghetti, two chocolate bars, two muesli bars, some pasta and cereal but no milk (and no baby wipes or toilet paper). The headwind became ‘ferocious’, which inspired him to do his video blog on Day 146 as a silent film. Flicking from page to page of the exercise book in which he recorded his diary, in the howling wind, Andrew posted this message: ‘These / #@*?ing / headwinds and hills are / #@*?ing / really starting to / #@*?ing / piss me off!!’
Any vegetation more than knee high had disappeared, which gave him no cover from the wind, and he had intermittent rain all day. He walked well into the night, although only completing 40 kilometres, arriving at the roadhouse at 8.30pm – he had no choice with his food supply having been exhausted.
The experience caused him to write: ‘I realised out there tonight that there is something about my brain that is different to just about everyone else. I never thought “I can’t do it”, never thought about giving up or anything like that. I just had to walk to that servo and that was that – I didn’t have a choice because of the food situation but that didn’t have anything to do with it. I was in agony, my blisters were killing and I was hobbling badly, wet socks made it worse. I stopped for a piss and saw I had blood all over the tops of my legs. I was shocked and horrified at the state of my testicles, they were raw, literally rubbed back and pissing out with blood. I had been walking in pain all night but didn’t bother to check what was going on. I stopped and covered myself in Savlon cream. My legs and knees and hips were stuffed, my lower back was killing me and it was raining again but I just kept putting one foot after the other like I was going down the drive to check the mail – didn’t faze me at all. I would have made a good soldier.’ While I greatly admire his resilience and determination, if he was here now I’d rib him about giving himself such a rap when the seventy-oneyear-old arthritis sufferer Mike Pauly was ahead of him and, as I found out, would have been in as much pain and did his entire trip in the same pair of sandshoes!
So fatigued had Cad become that he inadvertently crossed to the wrong side of the road and had a road train almost hit him from behind, causing him to leap from the bitumen a second or two before the truck reached him. The driver was among the truckies he encountered soon after at the roadhouse; Andrew apologised and explained the only reason he was walking so late was because he’d run out of food. He was soon chatting away to the truckies over dinner, and at least they told him his headlamp and high-vis vest ‘lit up like a Christmas tree, which was good to know’.
DAYS 147–150, 22–25 MAY 2011
NULLARBOR ROADHOUSE TO EUCLA (197 KM) – ENTERS WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Andrew’s sleep was interrupted by mice getting into his food, and one even making it into his sleeping bag. It didn’t put him in the best condition to battle the headwinds the next day that he estimated reached 60 kilometres an hour, literally pushing him backwards if he slowed too much. ‘The wind didn’t let up for a single second and was physically exhausting. My arms ached like they hadn’t before and calves felt like they were going to pop. Every time I felt flat I kept thinking of Simmo today. Today would have been his twenty-fifth birthday and I posted on his wall this morning. I thought about his family a lot today and what a shit week for them having his birthday and anniversary of his death in the same week.’
As he camped that night his legs were too sore to touch but he badly needed sleep, which was difficult to get with dingoes howling near him all night. He knew he was sleep deprived next morning when he could walk only two kilometres into the driving wind before having to lie down or pass out. He laid there, his back on the rocky dirt, for about an hour before he was woken by raindrops on his face. He felt he needed sugar quickly so ate a chocolate bar and six biscuits, but more desperately he needed a day off. However it had been in his mind to walk 100 kilometres on the anniversary of Simmo’s death, 28 May, and to do that he had to finish at a roadhouse so he could have a full day off to recover – that meant he was looking at finishing at Madura, three days past Eucla, his next piece of civilisation. This meant he was ignoring several lookouts over the Great Australian Bight that were so close to the highway on this stretch. Sightseeing was no longer a consideration, which was a pity.
That night Cad calculated that, despite the weather and his exhaustion, he had walked 377 kilometres on the first week of the Nullarbor section, which was his best effort since leaving Sydney.
The wind was so strong overnight he feared it was going to blow his tent out of the ground. Next day gave him some comic relief when he found a hula hoop on the side of the highway, which led to a funny video blog of him, quite impressively I might add, swinging the hoop around his hips and yelling, ‘Hula-hooping on the Nullarbor, yeeew!’
He made it from Nullarbor roadhouse and crossed the South Australia–Western Australia border to Eucla in three days, starting the third in the dark on the treeless plain. Hours later, a Malaysian cyclist named Malvin who he’d met in Ceduna caught up to him and they chatted briefly, mostly whinging about the wind, before heading off; 13 kilometres further, at a rest area, he caught Malvin who was lunching with some young European backpackers.
Cad recovered his food parcel at Border Village, 11 kilometres east of Eucla, his final destination for the day, and was joined again by Malvin, who walked alongside and informed Andrew that he was averaging 7 kilometres an hour, a fair pace considering he was pushing up to 80 kilograms inside of Redge into a headwind. They camped next to each other and Andrew enjoyed the company; he had little for the next week.
DAYS 151–153, 26–28 MAY 2011
EUCLA TO PAST MADURA (182 KM)
Cad had breakfast with two families he’d met the night before, and during conversation agreed to deliver a speech about his walk to the Perth primary school class of Sam, the son of Cathy and Neil Pitcher. It was a commitment he was to keep (and enjoy) and another friendship formed en route.
Next morning he’d set the alarm for 3.30 am so he could get an early start and walk the 40 kilometres that would get him in the right location to be in bed early for a midnight start for his 100-kilometre stint for Simmo. It was important to him to stretch his willpower further than he ever had before on the anniversary of his mate’s death and to finish at Madura, then send a video blog to be played at a fundraising tribute being held for Simmo on the Central Coast after a golf day that was coined ‘Sink One For Simmo’. That part of the plan went awry; he’d had network coverage at all the roadhouses to Eucla and assumed that would continue, but he was to have no more reception until he reached Norseman, just over 700 kilometres away. He knocked over his 40 kilometres and was in his sleeping bag at 5.30 pm. He wrote of the challenge he was about to set himself:
‘I’ve got no feelings about tomorrow. I thought I’d be excited or nervous or anxious or something but nothing at all. I just want to get the hundred over and done with, and I’m never going to bother again unless I’m still walking next 28 May in which case I’ll beat it. I’m not really up for 100 kilometres tomorrow physically but I’m doing it for Simmo so end of story. It’s kinda not good doing it for Simmo because I know I won’t stop until I hit that servo, broken leg or whatever, I’ll craw
l there if I have to. I suppose it’s a good thing though because I’ll never have a better incentive. If times get tough tomorrow I just need to think of him fucked up in hospital with tubes hanging out of him. I know my pain won’t compare.’
Minutes after midnight he was dressed and ready for the assignment. After some cereal, a video blog and sparring with the thought of going back to bed, he packed up his tent and was finally away in the dark at 1.10 am. He wore six layers of clothing, including thermal vest, raincoat and socks on his hands as gloves, yet he was still freezing. With his torch strapped to the solar panel on Redge and his headlamp on, he turned left on the Eyre Highway and embarked on the mission he called ‘Sink 100 for Simmo’.
Every 10 kilometres he filmed the road signs for his blog. He’d walked almost 30 kilometres in the lonely darkness, while even the dingoes and snakes slept, before the sun joined him. He was halfway at 9 am, right on target. With 40 kilometres to go his feet were in pain but the rest of his body was holding up surprisingly well. At the 70-kilometre mark his left knee was pinching badly every ten steps or so, which would make the leg ‘go tingly and weak’. After 75 kilometres he was in trouble.
‘I was whinging and making noises so I stopped. I ripped my shoes and socks off and lied on my back with my feet on the back of Redge whinging for about ten minutes. Then I got up and ate a can of spaghetti and my last two pieces of bread. I tried to rub my feet but couldn’t touch them. I could see the blue bruising coming out on my left foot on the inside near my big toe. I pushed a few more biscuits into me and yelled at myself out loud – don’t start whingeing now, get back into it. It took a while to get going but I found my rhythm again after a few kilometres.’
With Every Step Page 10