Day 559 | Benwell State Forest: some grass and the pegs even go in
53 km | zzOz total: 18,176 km
It’s a dead end, mate, there’s a river to cross down there.
I’ve had an enormous tailwind and I’m travelling on a sublime fine gravel road, hard pack substrate, I’m sailing along.
That’s taken the wind from my sails. I’ve landed in the gap between detailed maps, my big map shows the track but not that river.
I’ll give you a lift back to the turnoff if we stick all your gear in the back of the ute.
In typical Anglo Saxon male style of our age we fail to introduce ourselves.
Mate doesn’t offer much space for slipping words in as he offers his opinions.
The government is stuffing things up with all this environmental flow, he’s talking about 10 or more years of mainly procrastination as we went through the last century’s most prolonged drought, I must have passed hundreds of irrigation pumps chugging away removing flow from the river.
The water has all been allocated but when nature fails to provide something’s got to give. I’ve gone past acres of dead grapevines, failure to thrive once the water was switched off. I’ve also seen spray irrigation to orange groves, the wind blowing the arcs into vastly artistic forms.
Water is obviously the talking point to strangers along the river.
Government can’t make it rain, I say, although the last four years haven’t been so bad, my mate can’t see the sense in letting any water flow out to sea. Guess they are putting the health of the driver into the equation for the first time, you can’t just have it first come first served, with the people in Adelaide way downstream dying of thirst.
I don’t say that this is the first time in over a year I’ve been in a car, I’m more moved by his compassion in helping me out than by the ks into the headwind. It’s not necessarily a purely Christmas thing, some people are just endowed with the empathy gene, but when it comes down to it my mate is just a Good Guy, smiling, happy and basically at ease with himself and the world.
It’s reassuring there’s still a few around.