“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune
Behold, the South-West scrub!
I used to be scared of the scrub. I feared to enter it on my own, to leave the path and to immerse myself in it. Part of this was rational fear. What if I never find my way out of here? A legitimate concern. Or, will anyone find me if I fall over and hurt myself and I cannot move? (Probably not.)
And so I worked on the steady step. The step that never falters and never falls, it simply keeps going in the correct direction with steady determination. Eventually, the steady step always arrives to its destination. Although the destination is not always what one expected at the outset.
Fagus, above sub-alpine tarn.
The scrub appears to be our adversary. It makes walking difficult, it blocks our way and it requires a lot of effort. It can be painful, exhausting and frustrating to make way, when there are millions of woody limbs sprawled out in all directions, preventing easy progress. But if we spend enough time in scrub, the battle to make progress becomes a dance, one we get accustomed to, and one whose rule we slowly but surely learn.
I would define scrub as low, dense vegetation. Sometimes it might only be waist height, other times, it could be several meters tall. The floor of a forest may be ‘scrubby’, but that’s not really what I would call scrub.
Some of the thickest scrub in Tassie occurs above the forests, in the sub-alpine regions. When the fagus shows up, the myrtle beech trees become dwarfed, and scoparia appears, we know we have reached the dreaded zone. Between the luscious forests and the scoured alpine plateaus, the sub-alpine band awaits with deviousness.
800-1100m in elevation is the Tasmanian ‘death-zone’.
As a friend of mine recently pointed out, ‘The thing about this scrub is that it doesn’t really bend and it doesn’t really break.’ Therefore, progress is rather difficult. In order to get through, one must contort one’s body, and wriggle when stuck. Brute force is pretty much useless as a long term survival strategy. It mainly just wears a person out. Although sometimes, it is required. Especially through bauerea. But steady progress in scrub can only be made by acting like a quoll or a wombat. We must become either very nimble, agile and flexible, or we must get low down to the ground, dig in our teeth, and make a tunnel.
The use of a machette would not only be disrespectful to these hardy sub alpine plants, it would also be mostly useless. More energy would be expended in hacking through thick woody limbs than the amount of effort required to pass through, perhaps snap a few branches by accident and leave a barely noticeable line of weakness.
The best thing about scrub is that at some point, we get out of it.
Bushwalkers tend to funnel into natural bottlenecks on popular walking routes, creating these lines of weakness in the scrub, for subsequent parties to follow. The sad part is, eventually most of these lines of weakness become well worn pads, and some of those pads become well trafficked walkways that offer no resemblance to the original experience. Safe passage becomes matter of fact when there is a clear cut track.
Safe passage through scrub is never guaranteed. Skewered eye balls, broken ribs, heat exhaustion, dehydration, are all very real risks when one spends extended periods of time in the scrub. Progress is painstakingly slow, in some places as little as 1-2km a day, and that’s only through severe effort.
Let the scrub be the scrub. Don’t try to thin it out, order it, tame it, cut it or get rid of it.
Take it or leave it. Just don’t bash it.
