I began tramping with the Christchurch Tramping Club (CTC) about a year ago. I had tramped a little at University, not having had the pleasure of coming from a tramping minded family, and since then had done a few trips in various places but never anything very constant. Upon my return to NZ after 7 years away I decided that it was time to see more of our beautiful country and meet some new people. Little did I know, in my naivety of the time, that this one decision would lead to an addiction that would quickly come to rule my life.
I got myself some boots, a decent jacket, and headed out on a day trip. Now the CTC is an excellent club, and they are very good at giving you information that you might need when starting out. I remember very well our first lesson of the day with Bruce as he asked the party of 12 what it is that kills you in the outdoors. We confidently came up with various explanations - accidents, hypothermia, bad weather, river crossings, rock falls. All wrong answers. But those were all the things I had prepared for! It turns out that it has something to do with the law of lemons, at which point I began worrying as I hadn’t packed one of those. If all the lemons line up, that is when you might end up with one of those outcomes, and so it is all the decisions leading up to that point which are the ones that really do the harm. The three biggest mistakes in tramping are: sticking to an inflexible schedule; trying to please others; and fear (especially fear of speaking up).
I learnt a lot on those first few tramps - but there were plenty of things that the club failed to tell me. So, here is a list of the perils of beginning tramping, so any newcomer can walk into the exercise completely informed.
I learnt after my first trip that if you are a normal level of fit, even if you go on an easy tramp, there is a very high possibility that you will not be able to walk for two days afterwards. What's more, the pain is not worst the day after the trip, rather two days after the trip, which means you are almost certainly at work. It can be difficult to explain why exactly it is that you are shuffling along the corridor or holding onto both walls as you try to descend the stairs, one at a time, hoping that your tired thighs do not give way underneath you. You may also end up having to wear sandals to work, even in the middle of winter, because you have skin falling off random parts of your feet. People will ask you why you subject yourself to this, and you may wonder why yourself. However, come the next weekend you have forgotten the pain and will happily put yourself through it all over again. Beware, this is the first stage of tramping addiction.
One of the wonderful aspects of tramping with a club is that they will take you places off track right from your first day. This is great fun for a baby tramper as it makes you feel like you are roughing it like the big boys. It comes with its own set of drawbacks though, as if you are like me, you may still be developing your coordination. I did not think much of this until one fateful night when I decided to go for a swim. The exchange went something like this:
Random stranger: Are you ok?
Me (puzzled): Yes, I’m fine thanks.
Random stranger, hand on my arm: No love, are you ok, really?
Me (puzzled and somewhat disturbed): Umm yep. I’m fine.
Random stranger: You can talk to me, I understand what you are going through. (Gestures to my bruises and scratches, accumulated over a couple of weekends of tramping and in various stages of purple / green healing)
Me (finally understanding): Oh these? I fell over, that’s all.
Random stranger (smiling and shaking her head): Ok, whatever you say. But if you need to talk to someone, you can talk to me.
That’s right, become a tramper and you may get mistaken as a victim of domestic abuse. I think it is amazing that someone would be brave enough to come up to a complete stranger and check they are ok, but I really am ok. Unless you can help me with my tramping addiction? At this point it is becoming difficult to turn back.
At around this time the relationships with your family and friends begin to change too. Your family and your flatmates suddenly become acquainted with the standard procedures for a search and rescue callout. Not that you should need them, but someone has to be left with your intentions. My mother was most upset with this to begin with, but now her prowess at knowing what to do is something else on her skite list for her knitting circle friends. Not so much the fact that her daughter is off galavanting around the hills every weekend instead of joining her own knitting circle.
Your normal friends suddenly can’t see you at the weekends. They do not understand why it is that you have to be in the hills every weekend or why they have to book you in for events at least a month in advance, and even then if it is a sunny weekend they probably still won’t see you. If the weather is terrible you may attend social functions in town, but you will spend most of your time either talking about the weather, checking the metservice / metvu / yr websites on your phone, or peering out the window to see if there is any break in the clouds. Don’t worry - you will make new friends who are as obsessed with the weather as you are and all the talk on Facebook from Wednesday to Friday will be about this topic. At the point where you start making these new friends you are perpetuating your addiction. There is still time to get out. It won’t be easy, will involve going cold turkey and through severe withdrawal, but I believe that at this point it is still possible. Beyond this point I have my doubts.
The browser history of your work computer begins to show the ill effects of your addiction from around this point onwards. Your favourite websites will include the weather websites aforementioned, and a range of sites containing trip reports, topo maps and mountain photography; collectively known as mountain porn. The lure of this mountain porn is especially strong on a Monday morning after a weekend out in the hills. Luckily on Mondays you not only have these wonderful mountain porn sites, but also Pat Barrett’s column in the Escape section of The Press. My workmates are all aware of the importance of this piece of literature on a Monday and save the section especially for me to drool over as I drink my morning coffee. Trying to remove this reading is like trying to pry food away from a polar bear after 6 months hibernation. If you are at this stage of addiction I hate to tell you, but you are beyond help. Accept and embrace the new you.
As you now have a fully ceded addiction it is time to know a few others truths about your transition from sometimes tramper to always tramper. 1) Long johns under shorts will become normal weekend wear. They are now acceptable at anytime during the weekend, any place, including in the city. You will have no problem walking into the supermarket, around Merivale or popping into town to pick something up in this attire. In fact, you will find that the shorts even become optional. 2) You wake up on a Saturday before your 7am alarm and spring out of bed to go tramping. Every other day of the week it is a struggle to climb out at 7.30am. 3) You have a total disregard for how bad the weather may have been - as far as you remember the wind and rain never even touched you, it was an amazing trip. 4) You begin to check weather websites more than you even check for Facebook updates, and become an expert weather forecaster just from the hours you spend looking out your office window.
And the strongest and scariest part of the addiction is the overwhelming need for more, to go higher, to go further. I remember my first real mountain, in Arthurs Pass National Park. It is not a named peak, rather the grandly named Pt 1844 directly across from Avalanche peak on the way to Mt Aickin. We had driven to the pass for a basecamp weekend, and a late start ‘wander up a hill’ was suggested. I confessed that I hadn’t done a lot of hill climbing but the leader gallantly took me along anyway. I remember about half an hour into it being ready to give up. The path was insanely steep (in my baby tramper opinion) and there had already been three signs warning of the dangers of the steep path ahead. After a strategically placed muesli bar stop and a lot of good natured cajoling from our amazing leader, we continued slowly (very slowly), upwards, and up and up and up. As we popped out of the bush all the hurt was forgotten. I was into the majesty of the mountains and they erased all of the pain to get there. From there it was ‘well maybe just to the next knob’, until it was ‘can we go to the top?’ The achievement of standing on Pt 1844 (now forever known to the three of us as Mt Karen), surveying the surrounding peaks, valleys and rivers on a bluebird day was the end of me. Elation, euphoria, grandeur, the words mean nothing. At that point I graduated from being a beginner tramper, a sometimes tramper, someone who tried tramping, to being a forever tramper. The need to go higher and further really began that day, and I hope that it never ends.
I have been informed by my ever patient teacher of that day that there is in fact a cure for tramping addiction. In his words: ‘The only proven cure for tramping addiction is to work a little and go tramping more often´. In his wisdom he has so far been totally correct, and I fear that this may be the truth.
So what is it that keeps me going back for more? It is like a drug, and it is difficult to quantify. For me, the backcountry contrasts from everything that we rely on in the city. The grand scale and basic premise of putting one foot in front of the other belittle the real benefits of something that seems so easy. The hard part is to let go of everything that goes out there with you and to allow yourself to just be there, a part of it all, neither dominating nor submitting to the surrounds. It is the art of being still of mind and allowing the invasion of this grand space into your body, your spirit, soul. And when this happens, you may just find yourself renouncing the clutter and heading for the hills, over and over and over again.
No comments:
Post a Comment