East Branch Nicholson River
Gunaikurnai Country
5 March 2025
I inhale the quiet. I gobble up the silence. I voraciously consume the solitude. It is Wednesday morning. I have not spoken to a human since Sunday morning. And I have not seen or heard a human since Sunday evening at 6pm. This is Thanksgiving for an introvert.
We do not move on today. This little place is just about perfect for a person like me. The track that leads here doesn’t seem to be that popular. It is mid-week. I don’t expect to start seeing people getting an early start for the long weekend until tomorrow. So I maximise the chance of having another non-people day by just hanging out here in a beautiful little bend in the river.
It bothers me to start. This tour just has no flow to it whatsoever. I wonder if I’ve had more rest days than ride days. I feel a bit like a failure for the lack of kms completed and the amount of easy stuff I’ve ridden. I wonder if this is the beginning of old age and getting soft.
But after awhile, that feeling goes away. I come to accept that maybe that this is just what this tour is meant to be. Maybe short days and rest days intermingled with short, tough riding days are what this tour is going to be. I’m out in the bush, alone, sleeping in my tent and riding my bike. And that is what I love. I’m doing that, so maybe this ride is just going to be more low key.
Maybe it was too much to expect that I could launch into days like I did on the 2023 tour when I haven’t really been riding at all over the past six months. I’m working with two injuries that would keep most people at home. And in 2023, I’d already been riding for three months before getting into the mountains. I just need to accept that this tour is not a continuation of that tour and that I need to go with the flow of this tour, whatever that is shaping up to be.
I do use the day to clean up some gear, get the sleeping bag out in the UV rays and catch up the journal. I go through all the bolts on the bike and ensure they are snug. I clean the drivetrain. So there is a bit of productivity.
And there is a bunch of fun, too. The bend in the river creates a slow deep pool with rapids leading in and out. They are crew-sized rapids, so I give the guys a heap of runs down both sets of rapids.
Kermit bounces through everything like a pinball. He never gets stuck for very long. Verne, on the other hand, gets stuck on stuff all the time. The shape of his boat and his weight means he often gets stuck in rapid holes, the boat tipping down to let the backwash of the wave into the boat.
On one run, Verne is floating along, gets stuck in a hole, and Kermit comes along and bounces him out. Thank you, Kermit. I’m convinced Verne is constantly trying to get wet. And that might be okay except that Verne is now held together with silicone, fray stop and fabric glue, and it’s probably best if that didn’t get wet.
So I have a lot of fun splashing through the water chasing after the guys. Adults really need a little silliness in their lives. And since I thankfully do not have children, my silliness comes from my little crew and their floaties.
But there is also time today to ‘just be’. I used to be terrible at this. I like to do stuff, not sit around. But I learned how to engage in mindfulness in those years I was very unwell, and now I can just sit and be and focus on the things around me. For awhile at least.
I’m thinking about how all of this has been logged and re-logged and re-logged, to the point where I wonder if it will ever be able to recover given the pressures of climate change. I think for a long time about what this would have looked like before the loggers came – how those 1.5 metre diameter trees that are the largest to be found now would have just been a median size diameter back in the early 1800s. I try to imagine how majestic and awe-inducing it would have been to be surrounded by 300-year-old fire resistant trees. What would the character of the forest felt like then? What did the character of this forest feel like even 15 years ago, before the 2006/07 and 2019 fires? When was all of that logged over there across the river? How recent were those coupes?
It makes me think how I am just seeing this place at one teeny tiny moment in time. 2 days out of 30 in a month, 365 in a year. Yes, we are here and seeing this for less than a blink of an eye.
I think about how the place Nigel and I used to love to camp changed almost overnight. It was one way for a very long time in human lifespans – for most of Nigel’s life and five years of mine. Then the 2003 fires came through and completely changed the character of the river. It went from having chest-deep holes and slow-flowing sections and shallower sections with rocky rapids to a uniform knee-deep sandy bottom. Rains following the fires washed so much sandy sediment into the river. Then, the last time I was there in 2023, the beautiful old box tree that had always provided good shade was looking pretty sickly with lots of dieback and not so much shade.
So some things stay the same for a long time and then slowly shift and change. But sometimes change is very quick. Erosion is like that. It’s just the way it goes. Unfortunately, with climate change, those quick, seemingly overnight changes will become more common as storms increase in frequency and severity.
I then think even further back. What did this place look like in the Devonian? What did it look like when it was just a volcanic arc of land forming off the coast of ‘Australia’, when the land mass was smaller than what we see today.
As someone with an interest in geomorphology, I can think about time scales for hours. I love thinking on different time scales and how that makes me feel so incredibly tiny and finite. I love feeling connected to all of time, a teeny living being here for a nanosecond of time in the history of all things. That feeling is part of ‘the roar’ – that sense of connectedness to all that has come before and my appreciation of it in the very brief moment that I’m alive.
The video below never ceases to bring me to tears. I think I would get along fabulously with the guy in the plaid shirt at the end of it, who ‘gets it’, too. I love this video because it shows where humans fit in the history of the universe, not just the history of the earth (you’ve probably seen that represented as a 24 hour clock). I love seeing my life as a hair width of time in a 7 km timeline.
So I time travel today while I sit on that log in the shade. The dragonflies, at least three different kinds, periodically line up along the log beside me and stay for a spell before heading back out on another sortie. One even sits on my knee for about five minutes, before heading on. A couple of green parrots hang out in the tree fern above me for a time, tilting their heads to look at me from different angles.
And so goes the day, just sitting there listening to the soft white noise of the little rapids, the background buzz of so many insects in flight, and the calls of currawongs, kookaburras and wattlebirds. Ahhhhh….. yeah, I could probably just stay here, completely content, until my food supply ran out.