20. The Perfect Day

Day 30 was a short 13 km walk from Mollymook Beach to Conjola in NSW. It was one of the shortest walks of the whole pilgrimage and I covered it in less than 3 hours. Weatherwise, I wished I had spent more time on the road on that sunny day which was pleasantly cool and completely devoid of my nemesis wind.

I had enjoyed a sound night’s sleep and there was literally a real spring in my step, my pack was at its lightest because my tent was dry and I knew I could get away with only 1 l (1 kg) of water for such a short walk. My mood was so favourable that I decided to ditch my boring standard breakfast of granola bars, salted peanuts, and a banana washed down with one of those big full of sugar iced coffees. Instead, I had a real coffee and a cooked breakfast at Milton, a quaint place with beautiful heritage buildings.

Intriguingly, my thoughts went back to the adversities I faced up to that day. I remembered how stiff and sore my whole body was after walking the length of a marathon (just over 42 km) across an undulating terrain and knowing I would not be greeted by a cheering crowd and a sports drink. I also thought about the day I wore every single item of clothing I carried to try to keep warm, but still shivered with cold and wondered why my trusty sleeping bag that kept me toasty warm on a previous trek to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro barely kept out the chill of the night. And then, there was the blood that I had found coming out of my left ear just 2 days ago. I would have to wait a few days to reach a clinic and find out what was going on.

The troubles with my ear turned out to be an infection from the earplugs I wore to buffer the noise, definitely not sound, of the traffic. My rationale was that if I wasn’t talking to anyone or receiving input from the outside world through my ears, why take the earplugs off? It was a great idea, until it wasn’t, and an infection set in. I then swapped the plugs for earmuffs, Fig. 20.1.

But on that day, none of this mattered – it was as I said, a perfect day. Contemplating these personal war stories led me to conclude that in just 29 days I had been challenged in so many ways and had faced daily uncertainty about things I took for granted like having water, food, and a warm and dry place to sleep.

But most challenging of all, far beyond the soreness, cold, isolation, winds, hunger, thirst, tiredness, boredom, troubled ear, mythical idiots, and everything else that the road threw at me, were the bloody double-trailer trucks. These were incredibly big trucks that made me feel foolish for not thinking about them while planning my walk.

The risks of snakes and bushfires fit with my romanticised idea of a pilgrimage. I saw myself walking through grass fields surrounded by idyllic nature and am pretty confident that the dreamers I crossed paths with also pictured themselves in a similar way. Never did huge trucks travelling at impossibly fast speeds come into my image of a pilgrimage.

Unless it was safer to walk in the same direction as the traffic, which was the case if there was only one shoulder available, I would walk against the oncoming traffic. Naively, I hoped I would be agile enough to dodge a speeding oncoming truck while carrying two backpacks. I stuck with this nerve-wracking practice of seeing constant traffic heading towards me, even after a few close calls when all I could do was to close my eyes.

Particularly stressful were the sections of road where the shoulder was too narrow, or there was no shoulder at all.

As if pilgrimages had a pre-set quota of discomfort, vicissitudes, and life-threatening situations, that I had now already endured, I decided on that perfect day that all troubles were behind me. Rejoicing and encouraged by that thought, I finished my coffee, put on my two backpacks, and hit the road.

Everything remained perfect as I reached the outskirts of Milton. But eventually the perfect footpath turned into just a shoulder on the road and then, as it had done so many times before, the shoulder disappeared. I kept the spring in my step until the chilling turbulence of a truck’s side-draft hit me.

This didn’t bother me much, though I would usually end up with dirt which somehow found its way into my mouth, and I was left chewing on sand (I chose to think it was sand) for the next few hundred metres. However, after one too many close calls, I came to dread this ‘road spray’ by association.

Another truck flew past me.

I don’t know how close it was, that didn’t matter. I felt betrayed. After everything I’d gone through, I shouldn’t be going through this anymore! My heart was pounding as if I was sprinting up a hill, and yet I hadn’t moved an inch – I couldn’t. I was in the throes of a panic attack that pinned me to the spot where the truck had sprayed me.

I was too scared to move. The notion of ‘only 200 km to go’, arguably a bit less by now, seemed an impossible feat to accomplish. Slowly, I unclipped the backpacks from each other and let them slip from my shoulders. Hearing the packs hit the road brought an instant relief.

It was over.

The moment allowed me to regain my thoughts which were rushing ahead with an urgency that made my mind spin. I struggled to simultaneously make sense of the situation I found myself in and come up with a plan to get back home.

“So, is this where it ends?” I asked myself, “I should probably move my packs because they are too close to the traffic. Should I hitchhike back to Milton? Should I rename my pilgrimage ‘Sisyphus goes to Milton’?”

It was in the depth of those thoughts, standing next to a busy road north of Milton with the now impossible 200 km to go, that the absurdity of my situation hit me.

Here I was, a middle-aged Mexican in the middle of nowhere, all alone, walking to Sydney. I had no towel or charity, and I was finding meaning in discarded rubbish and pink aeroplanes. I was at risk of getting flattened by a truck and there was dirt, I mean sand, in my mouth. All of this because 2 years earlier I read about the iguanas in the Galapagos Islands on a commuter flight and somehow, they led me to believe it was a good idea to put my life on hold to walk a ridiculous distance, carrying unnecessary clothes, without music, but with an ear infection. All of this in hope of incubating a unique idea about how to design better workplaces!

The absurdity of the situation floored me.

And when I was at rock-bottom, I became empowered by the thought that no machine could ever come up with such nonsense that contained so much purpose and meaning. I felt incredibly human, and my very human panic and distress subsided. I yanked both backpacks back over my shoulders, clipped them tight and began walking again.

This is where Signpost 2 emerged, and if Signpost 13 hadn’t already highlighted the role of absurdity in the creation of purpose, then it would have risen here too.

The distance to Sydney was no longer ‘just’ or ‘impossible’ 200 km away; the distance didn’t matter anymore. I knew I was going to get there.

In a way, my pilgrimage started then and there – it really was the perfect day.