The cross (part ?)

Finally, a few days out bush. Away of the workshop and the 38 hours a week.Going bush is always a little bit like a holiday to me. Being somewhere else, even if it is a well visited community 300 clicks away and on a hill where my nightmare’s come from.

The famous track to the cross. We were send to prepare the top of the hill for a drilling team . The second part of the job was finally getting started. The base, a concrete block from 3.5 by 3.5 and 600 high with eight 6 metre deep steel rio bar right trough the hill, would hold the 20 metre high cross at his place. Our job was to bring up 4000 litre of water up to the hill and make up the foam and steel reinforcement for the concrete base. You have to imagine , the hill is situated in a remote area. Witch means if you stand on top of the hill 386 metre high and you make a full circle , the only thing you will see is the landscape and two endless straight roads disappearing in the horizon. There is no tap of running water nearby , or even something that resembles of some kind of civilisation. Only pure nature since the big bang. 

The truck was loaded with our improvised mad max car and two pods of 1000 litre of water. Those two pods needed to be filled up by the nearest tap an hour away at a little settlement of ten houses. Our days existed about driving up and down our self made track and self modified car. Driving up empty pods, driving up containers of 20 litre water, driving up the steel for the reinforcement. if i think of the job, this one is definitely one of the scariest ones i ever have done. The room for error is really reduced to the minimal. And i know what i’m talking about after my Icarus flight at a certain point on the track. At the moment we are at the count of 35 trips up. from bottom to top , and down again, not counting half way trips and in between trips. 

The drilling team arrived at the lay down area of the hill. 4023 litre of water and 541 kg of steel bars were waiting on top of the hill. There was first a reconnaissance drive up with the driver of the rigging platform . After an hour they came back down, no words were said. I think the driver was manoeuvring his machine on the track in his mind. Shaking his head and walking nervously around ,i exactly knew how he felt. I drove up the track several times already. After a nervous half hour , the decision was made, it was a no-go. the machine would have been on a suicide mission. Certain spots on the track were to steep, and some to narrow to drive up and down a machine that was slightly bigger then our car. But i have to confess , the first time you explore the track going up and down , it feels like you are in a slow motion roller coaster. We know the track by heart, we build it step by step , and we are grown into it. It’s like the workers of a sky tower, they start all at the bottom and work they way up. It’s very rare that new people are employed to aid the progress when the building is already half way up. Maybe the driver should have been there to when we lay down the first mesh on the track. 

It was a disappointment , that moment. The engineer had to come up with another solution, or maybe other possibilities to achieve those 6 metre deep holes to hold the cross in place. Who knows when we were going to be back here, finally starting to put down the first construction elements of the big cross. But Jesus, they even put a 38 metre high Jesus on top of a hill hundred years ago, why couldn’t we put up a tiny little cross up a hill.  After the drilling team went back to civilisation to do easier jobs, we spend a few days more, improving the well known difficulties of the track, having experienced exploding and flat tyres by sharp rocks and short branches, losing parts of the car by hitting the safety hand rail, we know exactly witch spots on the track needed modification. But i love being out there , doing a job like this. Working in a environment that always change. Watching curious creatures come to watch you . Wallabies , lizards , wild horses and eagles all interacting in the area. Nature that shows her beauty by letting thunderstorms passing by . 

Yep, it was good to be out bush again, even if it was for a short trip.