New Day Rising – Day 13

Marthavale to Tabberabbera Rd

Gunaikurnai Country 

7 March 2025

We wind up the road, my legs pumping in a slow rhythmic churn. Low cloud rims the valley, clustered about the ridge where Baldhead Road runs. We’ve got a 4.5 km climb with about 275 metres of elevation to gain to get to that foggy ridge.

The bike tyres part the thicker gravel like a boat making bow waves. The tyres flick up sandy bits of quartz and ping them against my shins. I ride outside edge to outside edge up the many curves to avoid the corrugated inner parts. 

My breath is even and rhythmic, too, my heart rate elevated but ready for more. I love that I can breathe these days, that I have no trouble climbing hills because of my asthma. Too bad it took until age 45 before I found out that healing my gut lining and eliminating wheat and dairy could make such huge improvements. 

I’ve gone from a moderate asthma diagnosis to almost none. My hayfever is pretty much a non-issue most of the time, too. All that inflammation just gone. So this is how everyone else has felt their entire lives? Wow – I’m still amazed when I do hard physical exercise and I don’t need an inhaler. 

And all my achy joints that the doctor told me was arthritis? They don’t hurt anymore either. I read my old journal entries complaining about trying to fold up tent poles in the cold with such painful joints and I think, “oh my god, I wish I’d known all of this so much earlier in life”! I didn’t know how everything is tied to the gut and how it could be so simple to tame inflammation. 

So I ride up the hill that will get us back up to the ridge that divides the Nicholson River Catchment from the Wentworth River Catchment. Thinking about my fingers, and how I hope today will be more of what I consider a bike touring day, I think of the song “These Days” by Powderfinger, and that is in my head as I spin up the moderate grades.

Finally, we get to a long straight stretch where the grade ramps up. I get down in granny and push the pedals hard. It’s not too bad, but I know there is one steep bit right before the road junction, so I’m just waiting for that. 

We come around a pretty sharp right hander, and I look up, and there’s Baldhead Road. What? Oh, that straight steep bit was the hard bit. Awesome. We’re already to the top. My memory was that the hard bit was harder than that. But hey, we’ll take it.

I turn on my phone. I want to text Nigel. We’ve stayed an extra day down in the depths of the river valley and he was probably anticipating that I would text yesterday. So I want to give him the ‘all clear’ text. But I don’t have phone service just here.

We continue on up the road, weaving in and out of foggy low cloud. It was foggy the two days I was on this road in 2023, too. But eventually, there’s light behind the greyness and the fog slowly begins to break apart. Piece by piece, slowly, the moisture dissipates.

The road is 2WD and in good condition. We are right on the divide between the rivers, at first on the Nicholson side, but then swapping over to the Wentworth. The grade probably gets to 10-11 percent a few times, and we can always see the road ascending ahead of us, weaving up the side of the ridge. But I knew there would be climbing because I rode this the other way in 2023 and remember enjoying a nice long downhill through here after a morning of climbing through low cloud, then fog, then drizzle. 

Eventually we get up to the Morris Peak Road. The sun is out now as the fog breaks apart into clouds. I stop in a big pullout and turn my phone on again while I lay the bike down and grab something to eat. The pinging goes nuts. Yep, we must have service. There’s a whole bunch of email notifications coming through. The phone hasn’t been on since Monday morning. It is Friday now. 

And that is how I know I’m not addicted to my phone. I really don’t even miss it on bike tours when it sits in my panniers for days at a time. I use my phone, it’s a useful tool, and I love being able to get weather forecasts and radar images when I’m on the road. But if we all had to give up our phones tomorrow and go back to home phones with answering machines (my parents still live in that era!!), I would be just fine. I often leave my phone at home when I go out for a walk or a ride or to the store. 

Oh yeah, there’s a bunch of emails there. But I just text Nigel with a proof of life photo, which I also send to my parents with a quick email, and then take some screenshots of the weather forecast and then look up the caravan park website. They do have a cabin available for Mon-Wed nights, so I book that. With my NRMA discount it comes out to $105 a night which is much cheaper than a motel and will mean I’ll have cooking facilities. I will be soooooo ready for some good veggies by then! 

Then I turn off the phone and look at my map. I had been thinking about continuing down Baldhead Road (I haven’t ridden any of the upcoming sections) and then checking out Blaze Road. But there is just something itching at me to ride the Morris Peak Road. 

It’s not a new road for me. We rode it the other direction in 2023. I really much prefer to ride new roads – I don’t understand people going back to ride the same things, or holiday in the same locations. I’m always ready for a new challenge. 

I enjoyed that road, though. It had a good surface and the grade was very rideable except for the very last bit before this road junction. But… that day, the weather was poor, and the views were non-existent even though I knew there were views out there… behind all the low cloud. 

So something in me says we need to go that way to go catch all those views we didn’t get two years ago. I don’t know why, but I just have the feeling we need to go that way.

So we do.

Wow, the rocky bits near the top are even rockier. I remember having to push right toward the end because I wobbled on a rock, had to put a foot down, and then couldn’t get going again. But the surface is a lot worse today, and I wouldn’t have made it as far. 

But yeah, those views start up right away. We can see right up the Wentworth Catchment and over to Mt Steve. Gorgeous. Very, very good. 

Now here is the song that is in my head as we ride the next bit. 

We continue down the road along the side of the spur, and then get to the rollercoaster as the road starts to run along the top of the spur. It’s like the Deptford Road pic I showed you from Sunday. You pedal like mad on the downhill, hang on for the soft and rocky bits down in the saddle and then let the speed fling you up the next uphill as far as possible. Crest that hill and then pedal like mad down again. Repeat. 

In 2023, all of the tops of the hills disappeared into fog, so you didn’t really know how tall the next uphill was going to be. But today, it’s all visible. However, the road is so much rockier and loose. I remember not really needing to pick a line that time, and not really worrying about the surface.

But this time it is more of a mountain biking experience. It is still fantastic fun. I am really proud of my line-picking skills and how well I let the bike run through this section. I feel like an experienced, skilled cyclist through this bit today instead of some middle-aged chick on a bike.

I ride with no fear and actually hit 62 kph on a super rough and rocky downhill.  This is the awesomeness of Atlas, front suspension and 2.8 inch tyres. We just fly over the top of a lot of it and don’t have to worry about any of the fist size stuff. We can just go through or over it. 

As we get maximum speed at the bottom and hit that saddle and all the sandy and rocky detritus collected at the bottom of the downhill, I just get my butt right back, get my knees all flexi and my grip all tight. And we just smash right on through that, and then I’m trying to pick a line on the uphill still doing 40, then 35kph.  Oh my freaking god, is that so amazingly fun!!!!!! We get to do three of these!!

The adrenaline and dopamine gets flicked on and The Roar is flowing. Yes, yes, what will you do with your one, tiny, finite life?!

Now, I must tell you that I picked up a passenger through this bit. I think he joined me at the road junction and gave me the nudge to come this way. Yeah, my friend Eric came along for the ride today. Eric died in Sept 1997, a few months shy of his 23rd birthday. But Eric still comes to visit me once or twice a year.

Yes, I’m an atheist. I’ve never seen a ghost and I have absolutely no explanation for his visits. But I absolutely feel his presence, like he is right there with me. It’s never for very long.  Sometimes he comes to visit at odd times (once when I was hanging out in Southwest baggage claim in LAX on a layover), and a couple times he’s been right there in a dream and talking to me. So I don’t know what to make of it, but I just accept it for whatever it is. And I welcome it with all my heart because I miss him in a way I’ve never missed anyone else.

I met Eric when I was 12. He was 13. Eric was very unwell his entire life. He had multiple congenital heart defects and multiple other heart issues. He was not expected to survive birth, then given about a week to live, then given to age one, then three. When he lived to age 10, the doctors told his parents to just love him and the time they had with him, because they really had no idea when his heart would finally give in. He also had some weirdo metabolic issues, and cysts would grow in his right lung until his breathing was so restricted that they’d have to go in and surgically clear them out. He was in and out of hospital his entire life and had gone through more than 30 surgeries by the time I met him as a kid. 

The day I met Eric, I felt whole for the first time in my life. I had not known I was missing something until I saw him and he came over to say Hello. He would say the same thing about me. Eric was just the other half of me. It’s like I had known him for all of time but had only just met him. I’d never felt anything like that before (and never have since). I felt instantly connected to him, as if he was as much a part of me as my right ring finger. 

We talked about this and pondered this as kids. How could we be so absolutely connected? We wondered if we were a reincarnated soul that had been split in two. We just knew we were two halves of a single soul. We never had romantic or sexual feelings toward each other – it would have felt odd, because it would be like being in love with yourself. We just knew that we were each other. 

We finally decided that we must be distantly related somehow, like our ancestors were from the same town in England or Scotland (we both had other bloodlines, both those ones we shared) and somewhere in there we had a mutual great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother or something. 

Eric rang everyone he loved the afternoon and evening before he died. He had pancakes for dinner that night (his favourite meal) before he passed away in his sleep. I woke very early the next morning, around 3am, and felt like there was this big weight pushing me into the bed and then, as it lifted, I felt this strange hollowness settle into me. 

And I’ve had that hollowness there ever since. I know that Eric was my true soulmate and his part of my soul left me that early morning. The hollowness is not a physical feeling anymore, but rather just a sense that there is an unfilled chamber inside me. 

This is how I learned there is a difference between hollowness and emptiness. The former is associated with the grief I carry for Eric. Emptiness is the grief I carry for my grandparents and aunt Pam and other family and friends that have died. They are simply gone from my life. It’s just empty where they used to be. But the chamber that Eric filled is still there, just without him in it. Yes, hollow and empty are two separate things, as is the grief associated with them. 

So Eric comes flinging up and down those hills with me. I talk to him as we go. The road comes off the top of the ridge to round Morris Peak itself. They’ve logged that hill and it was burnt in the 19/20 fires, so it is full of young dense saplings that form a wall of vegetation on the uphill side. The surface remains rough and rocky and we still have great views all the way to the ridges past Dargo. Yes, I really did miss out on some views in 2023!

We round the corner and start heading south, stopping for a moment to take a photo at the spot where I remember it started to drizzle and get cold in 2023. There are great views from here today. So good!

The surface has deteriorated so much though. In 2023, I would have said this was a great climbing road – easy enough grades and a good surface. Now I would tell you that it’d be better to do the road downhill so you can get some momentum over all the loose stuff. And I’d tell you to do it soon, before the road gets worse, and before all the regrowth on the downhill side gets tall enough to block the view. It’s already a lot taller than two years ago!

Eric and I head on down the hill and I stop every so often just to take in the view, as you need to look at the road a fair bit to avoid the crappier stuff. Yes, there are long views here, all the way over the Mitchell River (what the Wentworth drains into) and on up to the Pinnacles and the peaks north of there. In the far distance, the smoke smudge of the bushfire near Mt Margaret (over near Licola) is visible. 

Eric was very big into sunsets. And we are facing west here. I guess it means someday I need to come back here for a sunset. I can’t do it today. I don’t have enough water to camp up along the ridge tonight. But we enjoy the view just the same. I sit down for a little while at one point and just sit there with Eric and enjoy the view. I shed a few tears. And soon enough, Eric goes and I’m just there on the side of the ridge with my crew. 

We ride the gentle ups and downs as the spur drops down to meet the Tabberabbera Road. My map says there are potentially two informal campsites along that road. It is a new road for us. 

Knobbed hills poke above the trees in a semi-circle of sedimentary deposition to the south of the road. Deep drainages run between those hills and then branch out to the north. There hasn’t been any fire down this way for some time, so it is nice to get back to bigger trees that overhang the road and provide some shade. 

The road is in good condition. It’s 2WD and eventually drops us right down to Sandy Creek. There is no one camped in a little clearing carved out of the bush just beyond the creek. So that will do us. My back is pretty done, and the next potential site is another 10 kays further on. I have fears that site could be taken, as it’s late afternoon at the beginning of a long weekend and that site is closer to town. This spot will be just fine. Water and a flat, grassy spot for the tent – what more do you really need?

Thanks for coming along on the ride, today, Eric. It was a blast. I miss you so much. Come again anytime.