Adventure begins when things don’t go to plan.
Correct creek crossing technique, as demonstrated by the inimitable Stu Bowling.
The first principle of the ‘leave no trace’ code is to ‘plan ahead and prepare’. There are multitudes of good reasons for this. Planning minimizes the likelihood of us coming undone in the bush. Having a plan means we will have enough food to eat, enough water to drink, and ideally end up where we intend to go. If we can boil our billy and have a cup of tea, as per the plan, that is great. However, none of my most memorable trips ended up going exactly to plan. Sometimes, the billy breaks, and hot water goes everywhere.
Now I don’t particularly enjoy hot water spilling unexpectedly from a heated vessel. Especially if I’m in its close proximity. But those times when the metaphorical billy did break and I was left with a troublesome situation, those times resulted in the greatest personal growth, or the building of the ever so elusive ‘character’.
‘Are you sure this is the way Andy?’ -Daniel Panek.
Building character is about surprising ourselves, and undertaking actions we didn’t think we were capable of doing. A lot of the time, we don’t know whether we can do something, and we simply tell ourselves that we can’t. ‘You’ll get hurt’. This voice is worth hearing out, but if we give in to it we won’t grow at all. We need to make mistakes in order to truly learn something. When we really screw up, this gives us the greatest opportunity to learn.
During a difficult trip, we tend to arrive to crux points, or natural bottlenecks, through which we must funnel through, in order to get out of the bottle and reach our destination. It can be dictated by the landscape, by the weather, by our own skill, preparation or equipment list. When we arrive to a bottleneck, the available options to us narrow down. Life becomes very simple, but rather difficult.
Arriving to a natural bottleneck, or a ‘crux’ of our trip could mean we have run out of food many days from the end of our trip, or that the sole of our boots have fallen off, or that we are unable to arrive to a decision with our adventure buddy about something important. It might mean we have become lost, we don’t have enough water, or that we are injured, and unable to move without pain. Having to funnel through a bottleneck might mean having to cross a river, or going across a high pass in a mountain range, or it might mean wriggling our way through a particularly dense thicket of vegetation.
The west coast rocks are not kind to rubber and leather.
There does not exist a definitive guide on how to deal with a crux situation. If someone claims to have written one I wouldn’t trust it. Every situation is different, and hides a subtly different solution.
In trying to find a solution, what will help us is if we are able to focus our awareness on the problem. But there is more to solving a problem than simply paying attention. We must listen with our entire being and react to the challenges presented to us with calculated precision and determination. And sometimes, a bit of brute force and stamina might help as well.
Generally, we are given an opportunity to extract ourselves out of a pickle before we turn to vinegar in our metaphorical bottle. If we continue making bad decisions that are based on our lack of paying attention to our environment, and the dynamic nature of its change, then we will continue to remain in the pickling jar. To find our way out of a tricky situation, concentration is required. What we need is an application of our attention to come up with a creative solution.
A crux sequence will present us with a problem which we don’t really know how to solve. But we have to solve it anyway. We may not be ready, we may not even be willing, but a true adventure will force us to solve a problem we didn’t know we were capable of solving.
The realisation that we are capable of much more than what we thought was possible is the sign that not everything went to plan. When the billy breaks, we have an opportunity to become much more than we were.
My personal rule is that if I can make a cup of tea out in the bush, then everything is fine. Making a cup of tea implies access to water, shelter, and some way of keeping warm. So if I can boil a billy, everything will be just fine.
But I would be truly disappointed if every trip I took included a hot cup of tea at the end of each day. Sometimes the billy needs to break, and hot water must go everywhere.
Pretty sure the wicked witch of the west lives out here somewhere.
PS: I renamed my blog this week to ‘The Boiling Billy’. There was a facebook page called ‘Mountains of Tasmania’ so I wanted to avoid confusion in the long term. If you haven’t signed up to these weekly posts to be sent direct to your inbox, here is your chance!