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I went for a long walk in the desert night, a little earlier, and from out of somewhere came thoughts of experiences decades before that I haven't visited in my memory for a very long time. And then, from somewhere else, unbidden, came Bob Seger's "Like A Rock," a song I didn't really know the lyrics to. And the two fit together, somehow.
Stood there boldly
Sweatin' in the sun
Felt like a million
Felt like number one
The height of summer
I'd never felt that strong
Like a rock
I grew up in the water and in the bush, learning bushcraft and survival skills while most urban kids were learning how to deal with traffic. I was able to swim since I was literally a baby. I knew how to survive alone in the bush with absolutely no tools, from the age of ten or even earlier -- I knew how to get water, what I could eat and where to find it, and how to get help or to get myself out of there and survive the elements while I was doing it. Drop me back in there right now and I'd be fine..at home. I'm not as familiar with the various American wildernesses, especially with the plants and sources of food, but my background would probably give me an edge anywhere if I was stranded and had to survive. Matter of fact, that's what I thought the Survivor TV series was going to be about -- it should have been, I think -- rather than an ode to the virtues of backstabbing, dominated by people who probably wouldn't last a minute in a real survival situation. When I saw the series MacGyver, after I'd moved from there, the main character didn't seem especially remarkable in his skills and flexibility of thinking because they were basically those of the people I grew up surrounded by.
I was eighteen
Didn't have a care
Working for peanuts
Not a dime to spare
But I was lean and
Solid everywhere
Like a rock
My best friend and I would take off overnight to go camping on the ridges of the bush-covered mountains behind where we lived, sometimes going out for two or three days at a time in the years before we even hit our teens. We did it all. We kayaked miles of ocean water on a regular basis, albeit in whitewater slalom kayaks (I had two, a low-volume and my favorite, a high-volume, and we helped the resident kayak expert -- who'd just returned from kayaking down rivers that flow from Everest as part of a televised expedition run by some Australians -- build my second) that caused us to wander all over the place on flat water and work like maniacs to maintain a straight line. We sailed small sailing dinghies in the notoriously treacherous winds that funneled through the valleys that surrounded our portion of the sea, spending a lot of time trying to right capsized boats (the worst being when we capsized in an estuary and got the mast stuck, upside-down, in thick marine mud). We spent hundreds, or even thousands, of hours snorkeling. We surf kayaked on ten-foot ocean surf. We put our whitewater slalom kayaks up on the shore of local rivers and floated down spectacular rapids in just wetsuits, helmets, and buoyancy vests. I preferred it to the kayaking...I was never as good in whitewater as he was -- almost died, for real, once, too, trapped upside-down in my boat against the pilings of a railway bridge -- whereas he was never able to get the hang of surf kayaking as I did. We clipped on at the top of a 100-foot rock face used by students at the outdoor-pursuits center where we lived and abseiled down before climbing back up and doing it again, and again, all by ourselves...I specialized in coming down upside-down, just to be unique. We made rafts of scraps of wood and inner tubes and propelled them across miles of sea. We rigged up a tractor inner tube attached by carabiner to the metal cable of a 'flying fox' and pulled each other, via attached rope, up to about 50' above the ground and then let go so that the rider was clinging to or supported by the center of the inflated tube and would stay in it until he slid across the pasture below or started bouncing so hard that he'd be rocketing up and down between ground and air -- it was like flying (we were lucky, when the first carabiner wore all the way through, that we weren't more than a few feet off the ground and we kept an eye on our carabiner integrity from then on). It was paradise.
My hands were steady
My eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose
My steps were quick and light
And I held firmly
To what I felt was right
Like a rock
We routinely went on 15- to 20-mile (each way) hikes, with or without camping gear and the intent of staying overnight at the end of the trail before coming back. Often we carried no more than our usual -- a pocketknife each (though I sometimes carried a miniature 'survival kit' in a red waist pack that I still have, somewhere, just as I still have that well-worn multi-tool pocketknife) -- and would walk as far as a 30-mile round-trip or just disappear into the untracked bush and explore. We got trapped out there at night, sometimes, more often than not freaking ourselves out with very odd encounters with similarly freaked-out nocturnal animals that inspired special terror in us after we saw a film about sasquatches. And we knew the local legends all too well, stories of gods and monsters in the mountains we explored, in areas we may have been the first white people to see.
In between scaring the crap out of ourselves with dangers real and imagined, we found beautiful waterfalls, caves, cliffs (sometime by slipping and tumbling down a leaf-and-humus-covered slope...it really is a wonder we didn't kill ourselves and that none of the broken bones I've sustained results from any of our adventures), and 'highways' through the bush that consisted of downed scrubby tress covered with a species of ivy that led us on a bouncy tour through the bush at canopy height. Sometimes we'd get to running as fast as we could on these flattened, elevated trees and drop a leg through into oblivion or would just plain fall through, bodily, slowed on our descent to the ground by the grasping, scratching branches of the trees and creepers we used as our bush autobahns. It was a kind of magic, this world of horizontal trees, magic carpetways in the treetops, and slow-motion falling earthward. It was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon done without wirework.
Like a rock, I was strong as I could be
Like a rock, nothin' ever got to me
Like a rock, I was something to see
Like a rock
Thinking about it, it'd be natural for me to worry about my future child or children having access to these kinds of activities and adventures (the dangers thereof, specifically) without me being there to protect them, but I could only wish that they might experience some of that freedom and exploration that I was given the opportunity to have as my everyday experience for so long. My parents were not neglectful or negligent, but they also knew better than to coddle me or encourage me to afraid of everything. Maybe they knew that I'd eventually find out that there is enough to fear out there, almost all of it in the world of humankind, without robbing me of a childhood and adolescence that was more Huck Finn than the overly protective parenting I see among so many in this country these days.
There's a line, somewhere, between protecting your children from the world and letting them experience it. I can't presume to know where that line is, and I suspect it moves depending on situation, location, and the people involved. Perhaps I and my family are just plain lucky that I did not die...injury, even quite serious ones, can heal, especially at that young an age, but some of what my friend and I did was at a lethal risk level. Then again, a kid or an adult crossing the street faces at least as much risk and -- as I've argued several times in GD in relation to Steve Irwin, alpine climbers, etc, the difference is that I was well prepared to take the risks I took, even as a child, because I knew what I was doing, knew the environment, and knew myself and my capabilities, and that makes all the difference. A hundred years earlier, my childhood rough-and-tumble in the wilderness would have been soft by comparison.
And I stood arrow straight
Unencumbered by the weight
Of all these hustlers and their schemes
I stood proud, I stood tall
High above it all
I still believed in my dreams
We knew like the back of our hands the bush on the mountains that surrounded us. We'd often venture into it with tents and sleeping bags, and all the accoutrements of modern camping (well, modern in the late '70s) -- 'Camping Gaz' gas stove, cooking utensils, etc -- whether we went miles from home or just slept out on the boundaries of our domain, usually near a river we favored. One time we kept our camp site there at that creek for a week or more, commuting to it from our other world of seaborne adventure, hot meals, school, family, and color TV, and it got wiped out by a flood. We lost a smuggled Playboy, among other things, to that deluge. That was also the camp where I took a wood chip near my eye while chopping wood (still got the scar) and we decided to just skip the water boiling and eat our supply of powdered milk and Milo (chocolate drink) straight from the bags (I was fine, after, but my friend sent a few days in bed, throwing up, afterward).
Other times we would head into the thick of the bush with our trusty pocketknives, flashlights, my tomahawk, and some tea or Milo and powdered milk, a single metal cooking container, some home-made bushman's food that was the precursor of modern energy bars, and trail mix, and some matches. That was it. Those were the best times. That's when we'd find a good spot in the bush and build ourselves a bivouac from tree branches and fern fronds, lashed together with strips of bark or flax or other suitable lashing material. We'd used downed trees where we could, but usually took a lot of fresh fern fronds from the fast-growing tree ferns, both for our roof (it was sort of a lean-to construction) and as the ground covering we needed for insulation. Sometimes we had sleeping bags and so on, but usually we made do with all of our insulation and covering coming from trees and ferns. We did make bivouacs the easier way, with a bivvy sheet or groundsheet as our roof covering, but we much preferred the natural approach and we made our bivouacs so tightly that even when it rained we stayed pretty dry. We'd return to some of these bivvies more than once, usually, once we'd made them. They basically became green caves, getting overgrown with time and even more impervious to rain.
Than, one day, we found the Big Bivouac. We were following one of our jungle highways when we came to the site of a big native tree that'd been split, somehow, such that one half stayed upright in true tree fashion whereas the other leaned over at an angle to where it touched the ground. Inside that angle was the ultimate bivouac, thickly overgrown by ivy so that you could probably pour buckets of water over the top of it and not get a drip on the floor inside, and ready-made except for the fern-frond floor we installed. It was huge -- the Astrodome of bivouacs -- and we slept up there many times once we mapped out the bush canopy-highway path that'd take us there (we also crept there through the bush understories, that was a significantly dirtier, sweatier, and bloodier way to go).
Twenty years now
Where'd they go?
Twenty years
I don't know
Sit and I wonder sometimes
Where they've gone
Years later, when I paid a short visit to where we lived all those happy years of my pre-teen and teen adolescence, I walked up to where the edge of the bush began -- a green, tangled wall -- and took the plunge...somehow I still recognized the place, though the bush had changed and the highways we followed had sagged to become just an impediment to ground travel through the thick bush, and I found the Big Bivouac. Like everything, from the rock face to the bush itself, it seemed smaller. And the bivouac portion had sagged over the years. But it was still there, and it would still have made an excellent shelter. I'd changed, too, but I was still there. I imagine the Big Bivouac is still pretty much as I remember it, though probably overgrown some more and melting into the bush as is the way of ecological succession, and in the memories I have of it it will always be more than just a damaged tree in a forested area thousands of miles from where I sit tonight, a natural construction known only to two people on this planet.
And sometimes late at night
When I'm bathed in the firelight
The moon comes callin' a ghostly white
And I recall
Recall
My friend fulfilled the background we shared most directly by climbing some of the world's toughest alpine routes and by kayaking in some of the most remote and forbidding corners of our planet, where no kayak had been before his. He was the Best Man at my wedding, many years after the Big Bivouac. Marriage to a California city girl undeniably slowed me down. I went from exploring on foot the canyons, mountains, and gulches of the West -- venturing barehanded into caves into which mountain lion tracks led and getting lost in the Mojave Desert but finding ancient pictographs in the process -- to getting by in the concrete and palm-lined jungle of Los Angeles, a few outdoors excursions (camping, hiking) more notable for my no longer being alone in the wilderness (making love in broad daylight on a wide river bed in Redwood National Park, for example, or in the Oregon Sand Dunes -- Federal preserves just seemed to make us amorous, before we got married and it all changed again) than for pushing my limits to any extent. Only later, diving on the edge of the world on coral reefs never visited before by submerged humans, did I explicitly return to the days of my youth, when I looked Nature in the eye and knew she didn't really give a damn about me and that it was up to me whether I'd survive her.
I always knew, though, that the high adventure my friend and I for so long shared, and that we continued on and off since, was just a subset of life's real adventures. The reality is that we can experience adventure in the most humble, prosaic, and familiar of workaday places. Every day is a journey, and in every second we are traveling through time...we needn't travel through space, also, to live life in full. Between adventure expeditions, my friend works in financial areas I don't even pretend to understand -- he has an MBA now, the result of going back to university once he finally figured out what he wanted to do. He wears a suit and a tie. Since I started my hiatus from the scientific career that took me on journeys through the reefs of the world (and that had a business dress of T-shirts and cargo shorts for everyday use and a proud collection of Hawaiian shirts for conferences and other special occasions) my expeditions have been more modest in scale and intensity, but they are still there...indeed, venturing on to the Las Vegas Strip remains one of the hairier adventures out there.
I'm not always a very good correspondent. My friend's a terrible one, and always has been. I've heard he's got two children now, just recently. He hasn't heard of what's happened in my life these past three or four years. I'll write again one of these days. But he will always be my best friend, no matter how many best friends may follow.
Like a rock, standin' arrow straight
Like a rock, chargin' from the gate
Like a rock, carryin' the weight
Like a rock
I am a relatively young man -- far younger in thought and outlook, and in how I feel, than might be suggested by my calendar age. But the Big Bivouac was 30 years ago, or near enough to it. Thirty years. It doesn't seem possible. But it's also right here with me, now, in my memory. And, in a very real sense, it and all of the adventures we had on those green highways and on the sea are within me still, and always, just as is that kid with the pocketknife and the bush survival skills. I liked that kid, and he will always be part of the best of me.
Like a rock, the sun upon my skin
Like a rock, hard against the wind
Like a rock, I see myself again
Like a rock
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