Day 38 – South Cape Rivulet to Cockle Creek

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Each night I filter four litres of water. Two for dinner and breakfast, and two that I leave in the bladder to fill my water bottles in the morning. This morning I was confused to find only a litre in the bladder that had been sitting out. Some little bastard has chewed a tiny hole in it in the night. I thought I heard scampering.

I shoulder my pack, and very nearly walk away leaving my hammock straps still hanging from the trees. What is it about the last night on trail that makes that happen? Luckily the neon green cord I put on them after last time catches my eye.

They say that before you start a thru hike, you had better know your reason for doing it. I was wondering what my reason was when I started walking the AAWT in November 2023, and I was still wondering when I finished it five weeks and seven hundred kilometres later. I liked Bill Bryson’s reasoning in A Walk in the Woods:

When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, “Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods.”

I ended up settling on the pithy throwaway: “because it looked at me funny”. But both Bryson and I were performing that expert humour judo of the inveterate avoider of uncomfortable thoughts. 

The forest over Coal Bluff is dappled with morning sun, the leaf-strewn track easy and open.

Maybe a year after my big walk I was sitting round the campfire on a CBC canyoning trip. Zoe was barely out of highschool and still riding the high fresh off the thousand kilometre Bibbulmun Track south of Perth. We swapped stories, compared notes, struggled to find the words to describe a shared appreciation of how transformative our respective hikes had been. There’s a sort of kinship between long distance hikers. A club anyone can walk into if they can manage the excessively long hallway. I told her how I never figured out my reason. She stared into the campfire’s mesmerising heart for a beat and said something like;
“I wanted to do something big. Something that would prove unequivocally to myself and the world that I have value.”

I think a better name would be Tiger Rock.

Tilley

That hit uncomfortably close to home. A great many of the things I have done in life were poured into my own personal yawning gulf of insecurity in an attempt to fill it. I wondered how many long distance hikers hail from the same shores. The AAWT actually had an effect. Gave me a sense of self-confidence I didn’t explicitly realise I’d been lacking. Since then, I could ask of any prospective task or challenge; is it harder than walking 700km? and the answer would usually be no. My eyes had ever so slightly taken on the hue of chipped granite.

They tell you that you have to know your reason so that when you’re feeling low; when your hands are cold and your socks are wet, and you’re peeling bits of your feet off, and the wind is threatening to drop a gum tree on you, and you can’t stomach the notion of eating the same fucking meal for the fifth time this week, and all you want is to click your heels and go back to Kansas… When you’re trying to convince yourself not to tap out, you can curl yourself around the tiny ember of that reason and fan it and feed it into a cheery little fire that will warm you enough to get through the night and keep going tomorrow.

But Zoe and I both ended up agreeing that you don’t actually have to know your reason; it’s enough to be driven by sheer, white-knuckled, bloody-minded stubbornness, and a desire to see what’s around the next bend.

The track leaves the beach to head up and over to Cockle Creek, but there’s one last thing I want to do first. The South East Cape is the southernmost point of Tasmania. There’s apparently a low tide route part of the way out there. I’ll give it a go.

I cross rocky shelves cut with shallow pools and sea moss.

The low tide route climbs — marked as all these beach trails are by a washed up buoy — to a small campsite where I ditch all my overnight gear and proceed thus enlightened. Some marvellous bastard has marked the at-times indistinct track with copious tape and cairned the clifftop sections. Even so, it can be an easy path to lose.

Finally, after what feels like hours struggling through scrub and fighting to stay vigilant to the track, I emerge on the southern tip. It’s a hell of a feeling. Cockle Creek might be the end, but this is the destination. I read the log book that’s sealed in a plastic ammo tin. Somebody back in January reached here after apparently running from Cape York! Ridiculous the things some people will do!

I sit and eat my lunch and look out across the vast blue ocean towards Antarctica. Small boats sporadically make their slow way around the cape. The waves smash and churn themselves to foam on the rocks below. The sun is warm on my back, the breeze is gentle, and everything is quiet and slow. I’m grateful to myself for pushing on yesterday so I could have such beautiful weather for this bit today. I’ll have to start back soon, but for now I want to savour this.

I drink the last of my water before heading back. There’s a creek near where I dropped my bag, but I intentionally slow my pace to so as to reduce my exertion. Don’t want to get too dehydrated, and the scrub uses a lot of energy if you fight it.

I notice on the way back that my hip pocket has been pulled open by the scrub. My NZ possum and merino gloves are gone, and one buff. I backtrack a little bit and thankfully find the gloves. The buff I can more easily replace.

By the time I get back to the campsite, clouds are moving in. The creek is a little brackish, but I have a little drink anyway. The tide is coming in, so I’ll have to take the high route back to the South Coast Track.

More scrubby, winding trail. I startle a copperhead sunning itself on the track. A beautiful, sleek juvenile. It disappears into the brush.

And then before I know it I’m back on the SCT. That little diversion out to the tip has wrecked me, but it’s head down and nose toward home now. Six kilometres to go. Maybe six and a half. It feels a lot like coming down Mount Tennent to the visitor centre.

The last section of a long walk is always a bit of a daze. You can almost smell the fish and chips (though that’s going to have to wait for tomorrow). A kilometres-long semicolon with no following clause. An open ended question; what now?

The track passes through tea tree; open eucalypt; raised boardwalk amongst bracken and tree ferns. I pass an old couple looking at a map and say hello. He says it looks like halfway to go. She says less.

I glance at the numbers on my watch. Just 2.7km, I say.

He smiles warmly and says that sounds like a good number.

I think so too. It passes by, slowly at first, then all at once.

The clouds are blowing in behind me from the west. The wind has a chill edge to it. There will be rain tonight.

Civilisation opens its hot-wet slavering maw — a toothsome thylacine jaw, impossibly wide — and swallows me whole once more.