The CrossingSecond day on the 90 Mile Straight
It's All Above The Shoulders
A major truck crash broke the stillness of the 90 Mile Straight, thankfully without anyone being hurt. Later, Glenn Carter and the Ride With No Limits crew turned up with company, water and emergency chocolate.
The second day on the 90 Mile Straight started in the dark again.
The morning pattern was familiar now. Wake somewhere remote, get organised in the van and let the first few kilometres happen before the sun arrived.
The sunrise was worth it. There was a proper spread of colour across the sky, and at one point an eagle sat in a tree watching the sun come up. I could not necessarily put my finger on why, but it felt powerful to witness. Out there, those moments mattered. There was a lot of empty space, a lot of repetition, and a lot of time inside my own head. A sunrise, a bird, a sign, a white post, a shadow, a number on a marker - they all became things to notice.
On the 90 Mile Straight, I was also counting.
That sounds ridiculous, but it made perfect sense at the time. The straight was so long that the mind needed something to do with the sameness, and I had started counting paces between the white roadside posts. It was a small private game until somebody else made it public.
At the start of the second session, the day turned into something very different. A truck had jackknifed and taken out another truck coming the other way. That is the kind of thing you do not want to see on the Eyre Highway.
Thankfully, nobody was hurt.
That changed everything about how the scene felt. Once it was clear that everyone was okay, the atmosphere around the traffic control point was surprisingly lighthearted. I chatted with traffic controllers and drivers, and I was not going to take a selfie until Charlie encouraged me, in the spirit of, “why wouldn’t you?” He also asked me how many paces there were between the white posts, because, he said, every time he met someone out there walking or running, they knew the answer.
Of course I knew.
People doing strange endurance challenges tend to know strange details. By that point, I had been on the second day of Australia’s longest straight road, counting every other pace between posts because that was exactly the kind of thing my brain had decided to do.
Somewhere in the middle of the day, Bec Kuss appeared with emergency water supplies and chocolate. The chocolate had been sent by Janet at Norseman, which made it more than just a roadside delivery. People were continuing to watch our progress, notice our updates and concerns, and then take action to do something about it for us.
By the time the walking was done, we had definitely gone through the 1000 km mark and the recorded total was beyond 1100 km. We had also covered about a third of the longest straight road in Australia.
Then the day produced one more meeting.
A truck passed with signs about a cyclist, and then the cyclist himself came through. That was Glenn Carter from Ride With No Limits, about 11,000 km into a Highway 1 circumnavigation of Australia. His support crew ended up at the same rest area that night, so we spent the evening talking, comparing notes, and being fed stew by people who understood something about long distances, support crews, and the peculiar logic of doing something that looks unreasonable from the outside.
Feet, food, sleep and the van all mattered. Walking across Australia was also a long argument with my own mind. Glenn had a simpler way of saying it:
“it’s all above the shoulders.”
Images From The Day
