Me and the Mountain

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Yesterday I climbed a mountain. I almost didn’t do it because I looked it up online and saw that it was only 5km and thought, bah! that’s a waste of time!  It was much harder than I thought it was going to be. It also took much longer than I expected it to and afterwards I felt kind of dumb for thinking that it would be easy and I was glad I hadn’t expressed any of this to anyone before I went and did the climb.

I’d climbed Mt Walsh when I was in grade 10 back in 1992 and I can’t recall it being as hard as it was yesterday. I’m not sure the school would have had us scurrying up sheer rock faces and lowering ourselves into short ravines, only to climb back up the other side across obstacles and slippery rock faces, all without any kind of climbing or safety equipment or really any discernible skill. But hey, it was the nineties and everyone was still clambering their way back to sanity after suffering through the eighties and those horrendous hair-dos. Who knows and who cares, I certainly don’t.  It was really the only useful thing I did at high school (apart from learning how to type). Mr Goodall taught us how to rock climb and abseil and I’ve never forgotten that. Those climbing lessons have come in handy so many times. “Three points of contact Jenny! he shouted at me. “Don’t let go until you know where you’re going to contact next and pay attention to where you’re going. Make sure the path you’ve picked up the rock face isn’t impassable. Geoff! Don’t grab vegetation. Katrina, what are you doing, you’re dangling in mid-air. What’s Chris doing over there? Ohhhh, come on! Don’t climb trees, Chris! What just happened? Ohhhh,quick, get the stretcher. Keith’s broken his leg!” Keith really did break his leg, but I don’t think he fell off the mountain. I think he just tripped over his own feet walking to the toilet.

As I started to ascend the mountain, gunfire from the nearby rifle range (where we’d camped in year 10) echoed off the bluffs. The higher I went the more I began to imagine that the sound would loose an avalanche of ancient rock that would crush and cover me and that my car would sit alone, abandoned and dusty in a carpark in the middle of nowhere. Rusty it would become throughout the years until it would be hauled away by the big flood of 2035. All of this brought on by my recent reading of The Outsider by Stephen King. This kind of thing is the reason why I had to tone down my reading of books by Stephen King and Dean Koontz. My imagination has a “slight” tendency to run away with me. It’s been doing this since I was a little kid.

The mountain was awesome! I got a bit scared when I got to the rope because I wasn’t sure if I could get up that section of the rock face, let alone get back down it and I almost turned around and went back. I said outloud, “No, that’s just being a pussy.” And I made myself do it. It really wasn’t that scary and neither was coming down.

There were a couple of worse sections up the mountain a bit further and I was ever so thankful for my extra, extra long legs and arms. See, the thing is: I’m actually quite afraid of heights and I knew it would be a bit scary doing this climb by myself because I only had myself to rely on. I’ve just finished reading Write Way Home by Hedley Derenzie, and on the mountain I thought of what she said about no one coming for me, because nobody would be coming for me if I got stuck, so I simply had to make it work. I don’t know if I would have pushed myself so hard if I knew that the cool guy I’m married to could come and rescue me if I got into trouble.

Climbing this mountain also made me recognise how important the effort I put into training is. I don’t like weight training that much, because mostly I think, what’s the point of even bothering with this? and it’s a massive effort to force myself to do it every second day. I particularly hate shoulder presses, but it’s the strength I’ve built by doing shoulder presses that allowed me to hoist myself easily up sections of the mountain that maybe once I wouldn’t have been able to climb. It’s the squats and hundreds of ab exercises I do every week that gave me the stability to get down the mountain in one piece (even though I fell over once) and it’s the general tenacity with which I approach my sometimes extreme training regime that allows me to do things like climb mountains on my own and force myself through fears that at some point in the past would have most definitely held me back.

I love it when I can see how all the the little things I do come together in a way that I never actually thought of, creating synergies where none previously existed. I’ll never be someone who is the best at one thing (certainly not shoulder press), but that’s ok because I’m not seeking perfection or the calibre of excellence in anything I do. Rather, I’m active in the pursuit of living a life that matters; a life spent adventuring and climbing mountains both real and figurative. A life where nobody is coming for me, so it’s up to me to embrace fear, discomfort and adversity and get on with being the person I set out to be; someone who never gives in, albeit someone who might have the tendency to underestimate mountains.

“In the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” ― Jack Kerouac

 

 

 

 

 

I Tricked Facebook

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Haha! I did it, I tricked fakebook.

I set up a personal fundraiser the other day that was rejected by fakebook because it thought that I was using the personal fundraising platform to raise money for a not-for-profit. Obviously they aren’t humans reviewing the fundraisers, but bots, because they picked up on the wording of my story and didn’t like it.

This time I used different wording for THE SAME fundraiser and it slipped right by them. Sucked in you stupid bots!

Click here to see my subversive fundraiser, which isn’t actually subversive at all.

I’m fundraising to buy this tent for a 450km charity hike I’m doing for brain injury:

Nemo Hornet from Wild Earth at Burleigh Heads Qld

 

 

 

Facebook Fundraiser: REJECTED

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Ugh, Facebook is dumb. They rejected my personal fundraiser. They tried to tell me that I can’t use a personal fundraiser to raise funds for a not-for-profit. Obviously they didn’t even read the information because I’m trying to raise money for a hiking tent. I can’t see how a not-for-profit would need a hiking tent, but I could be wrong.

Maybe there’s like this secret society within all not-for-profits that are underhandedly  sequestering hiking tents and fakebook knows this and wants to prevent the secret society from getting what it wants. It all goes back to olden-times when the world was run by the evil Hiking Overlord who ruled with an iron hiking pole and disallowed fakebook from setting up groups and offering boosts and providing audiences. Fakebook over took the evil overlord and vowed to never again to succumb to Hiking’s strict regime. “My own regime I will make!” Decreed fakebook and has ever since feared even the mention of not-for-profits, hiking tents and charity in the one paragraph.

But maybe it’s because it’s not a human and has picked up on the word charity in the story. I questioned them about it and the response from “Alex” made no sense at all, which means that it probably is a computer-generated response.

Below is what I’d originally posted with a link to the fundraiser. You can still click below to see the tent.

Just created a fundraiser on my old “buddy” fakebook. It’s to help with my upcoming charity hike for brain injury.

It would be great if you check it out

Click here to see what I’m fundraising for

Thanks!!

Hopefully I can get them to fix it. If not, I’ll have to delete the whole thing and start again. Poo Bum Wee!!!! Uggghhhhh:

 

 

 

Hervey Bay Section

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I’m hiking from my home in Woodgate to the Brisbane CBD soon (map coming soon). I wanted to do it anyway, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to raise awareness and hopefully some funds for something that’s really close to my heart (or head, if you will): brain injury.

Around 700 000 Australians are living with brain injury (Brain Injury Australia, 2018) and I’m one of them. It’s likely that many people would look at me and think, there’s nothing even wrong with her, which I guess could be right because the impact of being brain injured is pretty difficult to measure, especially in the eyes of those who have no idea what it’s like to claw your way back after losing almost everything. Some people have even sought to use this against me to serve their own purposes. Sounds awful, right? Yeah, it is, but it’s caused me to come at this whole brain injury thing anew and that’s really why I’m doing this hike. I wanted to show these particular people that you can’t keep me down and that what they did was wrong in the worst kind of way because , what they did demonstrates a broader attitude to disability; an attitude that is just not on.

This is the route I will take on the hike, which begins on the 20th of September 2019. There are four basic legs:

1st leg Walkers Point (Woodgate) to Hook Point (Fraser Island) = 138km

2nd leg Inskip Point (Rainbow Beach) to Brahminy (Cooloola) = 98km

3rd leg Tewantin – Caloundra = 60km

4th leg Landsborough – Brisbane CBD = 150km

(distances are approximates taken from Google Earth Google Maps, therefore, not particularly accurate)

The whole thing will take 33 total days and I will be walking for 27 of those days.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was really to write about Old Mate.

I called into a local establishment in Hervey Bay to ask if they had rooms at their venue. The answer was no, which is fine, so I explained what I was up to. A blank look was the response I got, followed by more blank looks when I asked about a road at the bottom of the property. “It doesn’t got all the way through,” he re-iterated several times. I wasn’t sure that he totally got what I was asking and that he even knew what hiking was, so I said, “it doesn’t really matter about vehicle access because I’ll be hiking. What that means is  [insert simplistic description here],” met with yet another blank look, after which I decided that talking to this guy was a total waste of oxygen.

He went on to say that I’d need to contact the owner to ask his permission if I wanted to camp on the property. I wanted to leave, but I was conscious of not seeming rude. I also started to get curious as to if he might actually come ’round. Would something inside him click? Would he think to ask some questions? Would he eventually show some interest? No. It was obvious he thought I was a complete idiot.

me: what’s the owner’s name?

him: John

me: what’s his last name

him: Johnson

me; what’s his phone number?

him: I can’t give that out

me: but if I have to ask his permission, I’m going to need a way to contact him, so maybe you could give me the number of the establishment or the office and I could call him during work hours.

him: gives me number

me: thankyou (smiling on the outside, wanting to strangle him on the inside)

him: Ha, yeah, good luck (said with much derision while glaring at me because obviously I’m the biggest dickhead of all time)

I’d done another long distance charity hike in 2016 and couldn’t recall coming across anyone like this, so I started to worry that I’d imagined the wonderful and encouraging way I’d been received by pretty much everyone I approached for assistance back then. Maybe this hike won’t be like that one, I thought and I got a bit worried because I didn’t know how I’d face someone like this guy at every turn.

I needn’t have worried. The very next person I came across was a breath of fresh air, even if initially I thought she was going to get up me. I guess my meter was set on defensive-disappointment after old mate. Her name was Kim and she was working on road construction. I asked her about a patch of bushland near the site she was working on and if she thought I could camp there. She was so friendly and enthusiastic. She shook my hand  and offered me a campsite on her own property after I told her what I was doing. “That’s a great cause,” she said while shaking my hand again and smiling broadly. “And yes, I reckon you can camp here,” she said as she pointed at the vacant land while I looked at the colourful tattoos behind her right ear.

I hope most people I come across will be like Kim. This is what pretty much everyone was like on my last long distance hike.  Even in non-hiking life the world could use more people like Kim.

I’ll be mapping the Landsborough to Brisbane leg of the hike next week. I hope it’s not too hard to pin it down. I’m not familiar with that area, so I have no idea what to expect, plus I’ll be on my way to the Byron Bay Writers Festival, so I won’t have too long to spend faffing around trying to work things out. Fingers crossed it goes ok!

Wake Adventure Sleep Repeat

Own your own worry

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Last night I had a conversation with some people about the way I live my life. The general consensus from the male perspective is that I’m doing dangerous stuff and shouldn’t be doing it. One man said, “if you were my daughter I wouldn’t let you do that.” Um, but, hello, me and the daughter are both women in our forties who have autonomy over our own lives and decisions, so it’s not up to third parties to decide for us what we can and can’t do. I wonder then, how did he think he would enforce this control or police it? I also have men ask me, “does your husband let you do that?” To which I respond, “It’s not up to him. He’s not in charge of me. I am.”

I do some hardcore stuff. Stuff that I accept is not considered “normal”, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong or dangerous, it just means that it’s not mainstream and when people hear about it, they don’t know what to make of it and it makes them uncomfortable, especially men. I’ve noticed that women respond much differently and are for the most part very interested in what I do. I’ve yet to come across a woman who says, “If you were my daughter I wouldn’t let you do that.”

The main issue that comes up is the idea that “someone” is going to “get” me. And that causes worry, which causes discomfort, which is then somehow my fault.  Ok, so there’s two problems with this. One is the totally illogical idea that someone is going to get me. It’s dumb for several reasons:

  • old mate isn’t just going to hide out in the national park for months on end in the hope that me specifically is going to wander along at some random point in the day or night
  • the world isn’t as dangerous as everyone thinks it is, even though the media and Facebook newsfeeds have brain washed us into believing that everyone is out to bomb,rob, kill and rape us
  • the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home with a man she knows, not hiking alone at night or doing anything at anytime of day or night on her own
  • women can look after themselves and don’t need the constant presence of a man or permission of a man to do whatever the hell they want to do
  • I am not stupid
  • Would they think the same thing if I was male

The other problem is about the discomfort of worry. I get that people are concerned about different things. That’s fine. I get concerned too, but I rarely worry in the sense that thinking about something a certain way elicits an emotional state. That’s because it’s a pointless waste of time. Worrying never changed anything, it just made you feel like crap.

Three men, who are all my friends said, “Don’t do that because I will worry about you.” I said, “Ok, thanks, but that’s not actually my problem.” See, it isn’t. It’s really not. Not at all. If you worry about someone, then that’s your monkey, not the person’s you’re worrying about. Worrying about someone makes you feel uncomfortable, which you then try to transfer onto said person, attempting to arrest their desire to do whatever it is that is causing you to worry, so they won’t do it and thus alleviating your worry and discomfort. Take this little story for example:

Jane: I’m going to hike the Fraser Island Great Walk by myself next weekend.

Dick: Really? I don’t think you should. Not by yourself.

Jane: Why not?

Dick: The dingos and stuff, it could be dangerous. I’ll worry about you.

Then, Jane is who is a really nice chic, but has yet to fully embrace autonomy over her own life concedes that maybe Dick is right. After all, she really cares about him and doesn’t want to upset him. It was silly of her to think that she could do these things alone.

Jane: Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I don’t want to worry you.

Dick: Ahh, that’s good.

And back they go to watching TV and swiping on their phones. Problem seemingly solved, well, for Dick anyway.

Women don’t need to have the permission of men to live the life they want. If you want to do something and a man says that it will cause him to worry, let him own his own worry. You don’t have to be as blunt as me by saying that it’s not your problem, but just remember that it’s really not, not at all, never was.

Embrace autonomy. It’s yours for the taking.