The CrossingToward Nuttbush
Same But Different
The country beyond Iron Knob looked like a mirror image of places I thought we'd left behind. Ben found the perfect interval track, my foot held together and Port Augusta was less than a day away.
I started from the rest area west of Iron Knob, with my foot still needing care and Port Augusta close enough to think about properly.
Close, of course, is a very flexible word when you are walking across Australia. Whyalla appeared on a sign at one point, 55 kilometres away, and my immediate reaction was basically: sorry Whyalla, that’s a whole day away.
The country around Iron Knob was messing with my tired brain a little. After the Nullarbor I had followed a pipeline, moved through agricultural country and mill towns, and then spent days on bitumen and coarse gravel verges. Now there were red mounds, large yellow vehicles, scrubby open country, and this odd feeling that South Australia had somehow built a mixed-up mirror image of the Western Australian side.
Same, but different.
At one point I thought I was looking at a mine site. Then a cemetery sign appeared in the foreground, which did at least prove I still had the capacity to misread the landscape in new and interesting ways.
We passed through Iron Knob after someone messaged to suggest I call in and give the town some “publicity”. It had suffered after BHP closed its iron ore mine, and an ABC Rural article from late 2014 captured the town’s fragile hope. If HAA could point a few eyes at Iron Knob, I was happy to do it.
And yes, the name continued to do exactly what you would expect it to do to a tired Englishman with a schoolboy sense of humour.
The post office was small and weirdly split: classic service desk at one end, mini corner shop at the other, selling a random selection of things. If you’re ever passing through Iron Knob, stop in, even if it’s only to say you’ve been there.
Ben had his own version of making the day work. His half marathon training plan called for 1 km intervals, and HAA provided him with the perfect training track: straight, red, and disappearing into the distance beside the highway. There was something wonderfully absurd about that. I was trying to get to Port Augusta one tired session at a time, and Ben was out there turning a dirt track beside the highway into interval training.
My pace was slower and the breaks were longer. The foot seemed to be improving as the skin hardened again. I only needed to make enough sensible decisions to start tomorrow.
Late in the day I posted that without the SPOT tracker, I’d have been convinced we’d turned the wrong way and reached the Nullarbor again. My tired brain was trying to make sense of the scale and the landscape echoing places we’d already passed.
I walked into Nuttbush Retreat with 51.7 kilometres done. I could have pushed beyond it, but stopping meant Ben and Ols could hook up power and we could settle for the night.
Nuttbush itself sticks in my memory as warm and welcoming in the dark. Part of that was probably the simple joy of light, power, and being stopped for the night. Part of it was the wider feelgood shift around HAA at that point. Photos of the event shirts had come through, and they were now available to order through Oz Virtual Racing. After the stress those shirts had caused earlier, seeing them become real felt like a little release.
Port Augusta was less than 40 kilometres away. Close enough for tomorrow.
Images From The Day
