The road I was told wasn’t mine was the one I was already on.
It’s a beautiful, hot, Cape York day early in the season. The wet was late and there’s still water around everywhere. Life abounds, and so do I, bouncing along in my beat up 4WD with my fast-growing dog beside me on the passenger seat. We are explorers and I am following my dream – heading to the tip of Australia, following the footsteps of my childhood heroes Malcolm Douglas and Bush Tucker Man.
I turn onto The Old Telegraph Track, getting only a few kilometres before a massive puddle blocks the road. There is a goat track going around it but, in my inexperience, I overlook it and drive instead straight into the bog hole. Instantly I panic, grab my dog and jump out, knowing there is a service station back in the direction I’d come from, and that I am not yet too far away to walk back to it.
Reaching the station the man greets me, asking if it was the first creek-crossing I got bogged in. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just a puddle.’ In his kindness he drives me back, tells me to get in the car and put it in reverse. I drive out unassisted before following him back to the service station, utterly embarrassed.
‘Don’t worry about it, love.’ He gives me a booby prize of a hat and stubby cooler. ‘For being the first one bogged on the track,’ he says with a wink before advising I take the safer and regularly maintained bypass road rather than the old track. I do. Until a couple of days later, when I pack up my camp and accidentally take a wrong turn.
There’s often an easy way. Rarely have I followed it.
When I first told people I was going to drive to the Tip of Cape York, they laughed. A young 20-something female lacking experience in true offroad driving, heading to a destination that was not only remote but where every water hole housed a crocodile, it was ambitious. You won’t make it, they said. And maybe I wouldn’t. But I could try.
Which was how I ended up on a predictably safe bypass road. The station man had been right. Yet what I have noticed in my life is that while I can accept my limitations and try to do things the ‘right’ way, often something outside of me seems to steer me along another path. Following a crudely erected signpost that day, I was heading in the right direction.
I just didn’t realise until it was too late to turn back that I was no longer on the easy route. I was in fact back on the uppermost section of the Old Telegraph Track – the road I was supposed to be incapable of driving.
Yet when I’ve had no other choice, I’ve stepped up. Maybe it’s fear, or maybe it’s survival, but like that day on the old track with no one but my dog beside me for advice, that same thing which seems to steer me ‘off track’ so often appears to take over and help me do things that at the time, I don’t even know I can do.
Somehow, petrified, after driving through water crossings I should have got stuck in and tipping the car so far sideways on a slope that my dog fell into my lap and the water from underneath poured back into the car, I made it through.
I wasn’t supposed to make it. I didn’t take the easy way. And yet, I arrived. I reached the Tip of Cape York, with no one but my dog beside me. I was elated.
How often life is like that too. Have you ever found yourself on a road you were told you couldn’t travel, and found a way forward anyway?
I think we are all capable of so much more than we realise. By following what we are naturally drawn to rather than what is easiest, we make way for new possibilities. I haven’t always recognised them at the time – I’ve seen them as mistakes, wrong turns or ways that things should be different. But I see now how they are not missteps at all.
They are the way to becoming myself.
I write from lived experience, not as a clinician or expert. What I share is what I’ve noticed and what has helped me, not advice for everyone. [Why I write this way]
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