Our mother-son hiking trip was punishing, but it healed something in us after so long indoors
Iwon’t lie: the huge tree toppling over without warning was unsettling. The evening had been otherwise still, without a breath of wind since before dark. The only other sounds in the valley were the songs of the owls and the frogs, and we were - all four of us - quite literally a mile from anything, the nearest sign of civilisation being a fire trail more than an hour’s walk to the north. Our 11-yearolds were zipped into their sleeping bags already, though not yet asleep. My fellow “adventure mum” and I were just about to call it a night and crawl into our respective tents, when suddenly: a loud SNAP, followed by an enormous rolling crunch from somewhere on the hill above.
During that long, roaring moment, my body froze while my mama-brain whirred into action. What’s that?Was the whole hillside about to avalanche down upon us? In choosing this spot to camp, have I doomed us all? What are we even doing out here hiking in the middle of nowhere with randomly falling timber when we could be at home, tucked up safely in our perfectly good beds?
Thankfully, by the time the roar died away to nothing, and the worried little voice called out from the tent (“Mum? Mum?! What was that?!”) my own voice sounded pretty calm. “Just a tree falling, baby. It won’t hurt us. Go to sleep. I’ll be in next to you soon.” As it turns out, a boy at 11 is big and brave enough to carry a pack, to scramble down a rocky hillside, to jump feetfirst into a dark pool on top of a waterfall, and to watch for snakes in the scrub - but not too big or brave for the reassuring nearness of his mum in the dark unknown.
By morning, we were freezing but unharmed, and the Tale of the Falling Tree had become just that – a new legend, a story for our young warriors to tell about the danger faced and survived on their wilderness journey. We laughed over our camp-stove coffees about the fright of those few seconds, while the kids scampered around hitting things with sticks. We traded field notes from the overnight experience: who had the worst sleeping bag, who heard the wombat sniffing around the campsite, who smelled the worst. We ate gluey porridge and struggled to stuff everything back in the hiking packs. The water filter failed, so we set to painstakingly boiling many litres of creek water for drinking. We trekked up the steep hill, now hot, smashing our way through stand after stand of thick bracken. None of it seems like the sort of thing you’d call “fun”, and yet when our little troop emerged tired, insectbitten and victorious from the scrub, the boys moaned that they didn’t want the trip to be over, and started nagging us about the next one.
It’s an odd phenomenon, this “type two fun”, in which difficult, scary or uncomfortable experiences become the stuff of happy memories. As I explained to my hiking buddies on a tough section of the walk, this kind of fun is best when you’re no longer having it. It’s the pure joy of living to tell the tale.
The concept of enjoying self-inflicted hardship out in nature is not new to me. I’ve done a fair bit of outdoor adventuring in my 40-odd years and you do learn to revel in the roughness of it all. It almost never occurs to me any more to ask “why?” Why carry all the gear on my back when I could pay for a nicer stay? Why punish myself with a long, tough walk when I could drive? Why go out in search of these adventures at all?
The falling tree reminded me to ask these questions, because the uncomfortable truth is that the outdoors does come with inherent dangers. Things can and do go wrong on the trail. Despite
my often stated ambition to “be the prepared walker that I would want to encounter if I were in trouble in the bush”, there is no accounting for every possibility – as proven by the busted water filter, the tree, the inadequate sleeping bags and countless other tiny hiccups. Taking young kids out into the unknown feels like a particular gamble. When my friend and I decided on this trip with our boys, we thought we knew our “why”. “It’ll be fun!” we told each other. “They need exercise! Kids need to be out in the bush – to be free to run and roam and be loud!”
I suspect we were both also instinctively seeking out an antidote to a snowball of parent guilt – in my case, brought on by the Great Screen Binge of 2021. We’ve done a year’s worth of Netflix per week and watched probably half of YouTube. That has led to a withdrawal process akin to detoxing hard substances: moodiness, tantrums, sneaking behaviours (and possibly some criminal activity, for all I know). Screen regret definitely played into my decision to launch our adventure well out of range of 4G.
The benefits of hiking in nature are well evidenced. Forest bathing is proven to improve mental wellbeing, and the simple process of walking is medicinal in effect on the brain and body. But in taking the risk on a mother-son bush trip, we got more than we bargained for. As we pushed the physical limits, and forced our bodies (and our sons) to feel that sharp edge of fear and doubt, it felt like we were healing some rift in ourselves, something damaged by many pandemic months spent cowering indoors, wallowing in the necessity of avoidant behaviour.
Our kids embraced the wild with abandon. Sitting back and watching the sunset, we tried not to flinch or coddle as the boys hopped precariously across a waterfall, shouting and laughing. I realised that in opening up to this kind of risk, and sharing adversity with our little people, we were gently reminding ourselves of the beautiful fragility of life. From that awareness comes connection, and out of vulnerability comes resilience.
After just one weekend, the gratitude we feel for the tree, and for being able to breathe the next breath, is profound.
• Meg Hitchick is a midwife, teacher and the campus coordinator of an alternative senior school for vulnerable young people, with a focus on wellbeing and resilience. She lives in regional NSW with her partner, three sons and two dogs
I suspect we were both also instinctively seeking out an antidote to a snowball of parent guilt