Leeches, hills and hard beds

Today I was speaking to a certain anonymous someone. I'll only tell you that their first name was David and their last name rhymed with book. Anyway this mystery person was claiming that there's no point to beautiful scenary unless you can get there in a car. As someone who used to do a lot of pretty serious bushwalking I had a few things to say . . .

1. Life is simple out there. Everything gets pared back, reduced to a purer form. Responsibilities and roles drop away and you simply exist.
   
2. The challenge is enjoyable. Having to be tough and savvy enough to achieve physical - and perhaps technical - feats is stimulating. There's an air of valour about the whole endeavour.
   
3. It's a world of technical knowledge and skill. Bushwalking and rockclimbing (etc) are not unlike an artisan craft. That world can be intoxicating once you've stepped in.
   

I might have spoken about how beautiful it is out there, but I guess my adversary acknowledged that. It is beautiful though. It's hard to convey to people who've only ever seen wilderness calenders. For seven years whenever I was visiting or living in Tassie I would routinely go bushwalking with my friends and see the most sweetly beautiful and staggeringly majestic sights. We'd wander through lush rainforest and make our camps by pretty mountain tarns or at the base of soaring cliffs, and think it unremarkable.

It's funny though . . . I've barely been bushwalking these last few years. Doing multiday walks takes a degree of mental toughness that I can't seem to muster any more - becoming a Christian has made me a little softer. And for a while there I was felt as though bushwalking was somehow incompatible with femininity or intellectualism. I'm over that now, yet I still don't find myself rushing out. It's partly because all my bushwalking friends have got little kids, but mainly because I find it near-impossible to do anything by half-measures. I can't quite see my way clear to going bushwalking from time-to-time. I know it's strange, but there it is. Ah, but I'll still defend it to the death.