MUD

Howdy Dudy,

Did yall git the story about the fish(shark)? A few people have told me they didn’t, if not lit me know and I’ll send it on.

Here’s another story about Tazzie, hope you likes it…..minorly crass language wanrning, rated pg13...

Since our last fishing adventure the wiffie and I have been doing some more thorough exploration of Tazzie, what a crazy place.  Literally just today got up; 2 jackets, long underwear, wool shirt, hat, 2 hoods, then one hour later I was wearing shorts and no shirt. 

Never mind, that’s boring stuff, this isn’t a story about the weather it’s a story about mud!!!  Tazzie mud!!

Mainly, as there’s been absolutely zero surf and its been so damn cold we’ve been doing lots of bush walking (ie hiking). 

Now the first thing that comes to peoples minds when you talk about bush walking in Tazzie is mud, not just kids mud that makes your shoes dirty but real mud, the kind you can disappear into.  We kept hearing stories about multi day walks where you spent a good part of your day literally covered head to toe in mud and we’d seen brochures with big warnings about the treterous mud.  ‘A muddy puddle’ you might interject, ‘why not just walk around it?’  Because the reply would come, ‘that’s just not what you do!’  Just like you don’t cut off switch backs out west and you keep off the fragile moss in the white mountains, in Tazzie you straight through the puddle to cut back on trail impact and reduce erosion.  A lot easier said then done I might add.  Imagine this, your feet are nice and warm and your socks are dry, your walking along enjoying a beautifully sunny day when all of a sudden you come across a bogie patch in the trail.  What do you do?  You could be a good bush walker and tromp right on through, guaranteeing your feet will be saturated for the next 6 to 8 hours of walking your gunna do, or…you could just take one step to the side, stand on that nice dry green bush and your feet would still be dry. But; what if everyone did that?  Pretty soon that nice green bush would die and the mud pit would become twice as wide, do that a few more hundred times and the mud pit, and the trail for that matter would be as wide as a school bus.  That’s exactly what started to happen to a lot of Tazzie’s most famous walks, life filled wetlands were quickly turning into ugly lifeless mud pits, walkers were trekking 100’s of meters out of their way just to get around them and inturn making the mud pit even bigger, ok enough of that onto our mud experience.

So Rachael and I were on a four-day bush walk with Rachael’s sister Rebekah and her boyfriend Grant, both of whom are bushwalking guides in Tazzie.  As such Rachael and I were determined to be on our best behaviour, ie not walking around mud pits, even knowing all this its nearly impossible to deliberately let your feet get wet, it’s kind of like getting yourself to use a water sprayer to clean your bum instead of toilet paper, it just seems wrong.  If there’s a choice you’d just grab the TP and never try the bum sprayer, until one day you’re your travelling around Laos on motorcycles and you get food poisoning, then your bum is so sore from all the explosive die-o-ria that you just go ahead and try the damn bum sprayer…and to your amazement, its not half bad, in fact it is kind of nice, come to think of it, it’s down right amazing, you’d probably never use TP again if you had the choice, maybe install one in your own home. 

Kind of like walking all day with wet feet, sounds absolutely awful until you go ahead and try it, and once you have you realize its not half bad walking with wet feet, in fact it’s kind of pleasurable being able to just trounce straight through the mud bogs and river crossings.  But then you wouldn’t know unless you’d tried, and Rachael and I still hadn’t, we kept finding ourselves hop scotching around the mud when Grant and Beck weren’t looking…then came the moment of truth.  We were lagging a bit when we looked up and they were standing atop a little knoll waiting.  Weather deliberately as a test or just coincidently there happened to be a particularly wet section between them and us. What were we going to do?  Be mice or men?  Our feet were still dry and we hadn’t yet learned that having wet feet wasn’t the end of the world, ‘at the time it did kind of seem that way’, like being permanently defeated by letting our feet get wet. 

Dumb struck like deer in the headlights we just stood there……..  Then…Rachael went first…….. what was she going to do?……..  I didn’t even know…...  It was something in between full blown blatant bush killing and deliberately sinking calf deep.  She didn’t get a triumphant cheer of success from the peanut gallery but she didn’t get scoffed at either, it was good enough.  Then……… it was my turn….. I couldn’t decide……….. I had three choices, around, through or something in between and none of them sounded attractive………. I really bloody didn’t want we feet!………. And then like a moment of clarity it came to me, take your shoes of!!  Holly shit!! I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that before.  “Watch this” I shouted, a raised shoe in each hand, as I stepped right into the center of the muddiest bit.  And watch they all did, watched as I virtually disappeared, instantly sinking waist deep, “holly f*&^ng shit” I yelled as the icy cold mud took my breath away.  Immediately realizing not only was I saturated but the camera was in my pocket a foot deep.  “F&#^$” I shouted again for the second time in less then one second, snatching it out of my pocket and pitching it at Rachael like a base ball, nearly taking her out.

Somehow the camera had survived, but me, I was still stuck in the pit and the three of them were all just standing there looking at me, as if trying to decide if they should be laughing or if they should run over to my rescue. 

I was the first one to laugh.

That was it, I’d learned my lesson, it wasn’t worth trying to keep your shoes dry, just go through the mud, having wet feet actually feels pretty nice. 

Now my problem was that I’d only brought that one pair of pants and no shorts; walked the rest of the day in my underpants. 

Hope everyone is Stupendous!!!!!!!

Love US!!!!!!