The Wilderness, Part 2

This is the second column describing my life in the great outdoors. I’ll pick it up following my retirement as a Missouri pastor, when Wendy and I were invited to join the faculty of a theological college in Australia. Despite my undying affection for concrete and asphalt, during our five years in that sunburnt country, time was occasionally spent hiking. Here are just two of my Australian wilderness adventures.

Nothing in that part of the world is wilder than the island of Tasmania, that lies off the State of Victoria’s southern coast. It must be noted that hiking anywhere in Australia is dangerous, and that certainly includes Tasmania. There are more deadly snakes per acre in Aussie-land than in any other place on earth. And then there are death-dealing scorpions and equally as deadly spiders. Inland lakes as well as the sea are alive with ferocious crocodiles growing up to15 feet long, and capable of devouring a human in less than a minute. Then there are the great white sharks. Whee!

So I was legitimately intimidated on our hikes around Tasmania. Wendy grew up in Australia and was fearless. As a result, it was our habit that she would usually walk a few feet ahead of me, so if we encountered one of these malicious creatures she would just stare it down. However, on one of our hikes, for some reason I was walking a few paces ahead when I heard Wendy shout “STOP.” The bite of a tiger snake untreated grants the victim about thirty minutes of remaining life, and one of these creatures had wrapped itself around my shoe. As I was wearing heavy pants, the fangs never got to my leg. I screamed and took out in one direction and the snake took out in the other. Oh, isn’t the wilderness fun!

Another time we were hiking on the far northwest coast when we were persuaded to spend an overnight trek inland, sleeping out in the open. To get to where we wanted to end up, it was essential to wade in waist-deep water through a tunnel. It was pitch-dark as I enter the water, and looking ahead I saw six tiny red lights.

“What is that,” I inquired.
“Those lights are just the eyes of crocodiles.”
“CROCODILES???!!!”
“Don’t worry. They are just s fresh water crocks, who wouldn’t want to eat you!”
Talk about fun in the wild.

Some time later, after an exhausting week on a mission trip to India, we decided to go to Nepal and hike to the base camp of Mt. Everest. However its 29,000 foot peek looked just too imposing, so we journeyed west to Annapurna which is only 25,000 feet. One morning our guide hauled us out of bed well before dawn, and up and up we climbed, aided only by the lamps in our helmets.

At about 7:30, the sun peaked over a ridge, and there she was – Annapurna! Nepal’s most beautiful---and most dangerous mountain. I knew we were nowhere near the summit, but thought we might have arrived at an expansive ledge somewhere near the base camp. But our guide informed us that base camp was five days away and ten thousand feet almost straight up, and from there it was another three days to the impossible summit.

That humiliating revelation ended once and for all my mountain climbing adventures. From then on anything higher than the wooden platform on which stood the Camp Castle tent that attacked me was off limits. From then on my hiking has been limited to the marvelous nature films I have viewed courtesy of National Geographic. It’s so much safer-- in addition, in the wild nobody had offered me a gin and tonic.