I guess I wouldn’t mind a bit of getting back to nature…even though for me it’s not really getting back, because I’ve never been. Yep, born and bred in the city my whole life, so when I saw the flyer for a wilderness survival course at uni, I initially thought nothing much of it. That’s a thing for country people, or…just people who actually enjoy camping. Camping is the worst, am I right?
And then I got to thinking…because I guess it was a really compelling flyer. It talked about how you could learn new skills, gain fitness and generally improve yourself. That all sounded pretty good, I guessed. My closest connection to the outdoors was that time I did an internship in Melbourne at a tree pruning business. It doesn’t exist anymore, but I didn’t get my forms in on time and Mrs Aldergate at the end of our road needed someone to help with her pruning business, so I just told the school I’d be helping her out. It wasn’t so bad; Mrs Aldergate knows pretty much everything about the area going back sixty years, and she had breaks every fifteen minutes because of her aching joints so we honestly spent most of our time just very slowly walking around the local neighbourhood, drinking tea on the grass and talking about the war. I think she finally retired after she started pruning a certain tree and had to be told that it was actually a street sign and that counted as vandalism. Didn’t have her glasses, maybe.
So yeah, that’s my grand level of outdoor know-how, which is to say that I don’t have any at all. I can prune trees, and I helped my Dad with some stump grinding once, so those will have to be the skills I bring to the table. It’s going to be a group of us out there for two weeks. So far from Melbourne, tree pruning skills at the ready…that’ll be me.
-Martin