Life-changing moments happen when kids go tramping, writes Ricky French
There are times in your life when being a parent seems like you’re role-playing scenes from Back to the Future. You look down and your son or daughter is wearing the same jersey you once wore, or is playing with the same Lego on the same mat in the same living room. You see a miniature model of yourself, reliving snippets of life you thought you had kissed goodbye decades ago. Sometimes the sight of it keeps you feeling young, other times it reminds you that you’re anything but. What it always does though, is encourage you to do all you can to provide a stimulating and rewarding environment for your children, so that they can gather some of the same memories. For some kids this means getting to learn about holidaying in Hawaii, or being taught how to rebuild a car engine. For my seven-year-old son – lucky him – it means being ordered to trudge through mud. He can blame this on the events of one night, 24 years ago. I was 10 years old. I loved the games and adventures into which two of my adored uncles would include me. Usually it would be exploring the sand dunes at the beach, or hunting down obscure backyard cricket pitches, or (memorably) making a competition out of who could shovel the most dog poo from the garden into the famous tin poo-can. Clearly, I was up for anything. So of course I said yes when they asked me if I wanted to come along on something called a ‘tramp’. It soon became clear that they had chosen the worst possible combination of times and places to introduce a kid to tramping: winter, night, the Tararuas, the old Waitewaewae Hut. I was, of course, totally prepared: I shoved clothes into my school bag, put on sneakers, looked out at the rain and decided this would be a job for rugby socks. My cousin, who was a couple of years older, also came. The four of us strode across the swingbridge over the Otaki River as thick rain clouds rolled down from the tops and shot a million rapid-fire bullets into the water below. I don’t remember the drips leaking down my hood and rolling down my back. I don’t remember the infiltration of wetness into my socks (which would have come at about the four minute mark). I don’t remember the wet jersey clinging to my arms or the coldness in my fingers as they turned red and ceased being able to move independently. But I do remember the joy of being in an alien environment, laughing at the depth of the mud patches, not knowing what was around the next corner, not knowing what I was doing. I guess it’s a little like childbirth (or so I’ve been told). You forget the pain and are rewarded with adrenalin. Our journey to Waitewaewae Hut took us past the famous old steam boiler. It sits there, dead and rusted, eaten by the soil and the moss. Even in death it looks grumpy, like it had no choice being corralled into the bush. But to a 10-year-old it was a thing of wonder. Evidence that souls of the past, much more foolish than you, had voluntarily come here before, and actually built a railway track. How cool was that? Darkness fell on my first night in the bush. We splashed up Saddle Creek and shone our torches down over the plateau, through the dark native bush, the bog and the ever-constant rain. We were soaked. The hut, when we arrived, couldn’t have been less homely. An oversized barn, rotten to the core with moisture a permanent feature of every surface. It was cheerlessly plonked in a razed clearing; the thick vegetation blocking any view of the sun, not that the sun was ever likely to show its face in a place like this. One of my uncles found two mattresses in the woodshed. He dragged the sodden things inside over his shoulder and flopped them on the bunks, like they were a couple of deer carcasses. Then we watched with interest as maggots squirmed out. During the night, rats prowled the rafters and the rain found new holes in the roof with which to seek us out. The next morning we donned wet clothes and walked back to the car, through the rain and past the old clapped-out boiler, which seemed to smirk at me from its jagged, rusty face. [caption id="attachment_3899" align="aligncenter" width="1280"]