or The Many Dangers of the Australian Bush
“Doovdé, is that you?” one of us called into the darkness and nervous giggles erupted from the rest of us.
We were camping. Five of us had trekked out in canoes loaded down with tents and food and—I’m pretty sure—too many clothes to get away from it all. It was my first time in the real Australian bush. It was Shaz’s, Katie’s and Fletch’s first time to go camping “as adults.” And it was Austin’s first time to take the young bucks into the wild without an actual expert to be our guide.
And we had heard some rustling behind us.
We knew there was a opossum out there somewhere. We had seen it scamper up a tree a little while before as we were sweeping the woods with our torches (Aussie code for flashlights) for the source of a rustling we’d heard. But even knowing it was very likely the opossum (who we nicknamed Doovdé out of respect for his brother Vhs, who we’d met at youth camp), our imaginations began to grow with visions of giant, pounding kangaroos and fierce, rabid wombats. Actually I’m pretty sure mine was the only imagination to conjure visions of rabid wombats because they actually don’t have rabies in Australia. (Another fact this camping excursion provided me with awareness of.) Rabies or not, the potential for creepers in the darkness was still scary.
The five of us were huddled around our campfire on our air mattresses eating s’mores (something I was proud to introduce these best-campfire-snack-in-the-world-depraved Aussies to) attempting to ask each other deep and meaningful life questions and answer them while jumping every time someone moved their feet too quickly and knocked something over. Fletch had spooked us with a few false alarms: “Back there, back there, I see eyes glowing.” Nothing in our light beams. “Did you guys hear that?” We had all been silent, and, no, none of us had heard it. A few minutes later Fletch suddenly turned his torch on, as the three of us who were lucky enough to actually be holding one of the three torches we had brought were apt to do, and scampering about four feet in front of us was a bushy tailed opossum. The audacity! To come so close to us and our fire. All I could think was what if it had jumped on us? on me?!
I tucked my feet up close to me, thankful that in the firelight no one could really see how curled into a ball I was to protect myself from the imaginary predators. I had to fight several urges to turn my flashlight on and flash it frantically on the trees in front of me. It’s amazing what peer pressure will do. I wanted to be cool, unafraid of the dark, not showing my weakness to the others, so I didn’t turn my torch on, didn’t let myself jump at the noises.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I turned clicked my torch on and about two feet away stood the opossum, staring into my light, eyes glowing red.
“Uhh…” I said.
Even though there was no way I was going to take my eyes off the opossum in front of me, I felt like I could see everyone’s neck snap in my direction and, after a moment of stunned silence, we all started yelling and laughing and hollering at Doovdé to get away from our fire. Austin jumped up and grabbed a pot and a pair of tongs, banged them together and chased the opossum up a tree. We shone our torches on him for a while, teasing him, making sure he stayed up in the tree where he belonged and didn’t try to come and steal our s’mores.
Suddenly aware of how easily an animal could sneak up on us, we comforted ourselves with thoughts like, “If a opossum’s here, there must not be other predators around” and “There isn’t really anything out here the eats humans.”
When we all finally succumbed to the feelings of exhaustion that were attempting to take control of our bodies and crawled back to our tents to spend the majority of the night in them, every twig’s snap, every branch’s rustle popped our eyes wide open, and we’d toss and turn in an attempt to remind whatever visitor we had at our camp that we weren’t going anywhere and they’d have to get used to it. Well, that’s why I did at least.
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http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=135324&id=646871400&l=6c203cdc63





