Tent-bound below the forty-sixth parallel

Ponderings of a captive kayaker, by Mark Banham

"I guess we shouldn't complain, we've had more than a week of freakishly good conditions… and look on the bright side, a fifty-knot nor' westerly does keep the sand flies away!" Louise quipped, looking over her book for the first time in hours.

This northwesterly air stream has been pummeling our exposed campsite in Preservation Inlet for two days now, and the novelty of being shoehorned into a six-by-five foot nylon cell is well and truly starting to wear off.

As a kids brought up on a diet of Nintendo and MTV, Louise and I don't do the quiet meditation thing particularly well… and the cracks in our sanity are starting to show.

I've run out of books, and Louise is getting close, my camera lenses are the cleanest they've ever been, I've written pages of rambling notes in my diary, carefully plotted our course over the last week, and even logged every flutter of the barometric pressure's steady decline.

As night finally falls and I manage to grab a few hours of disjointed sleep… I worry about our tent, well designed but long in the tooth. As I watch the tent poles bow and the fabric spasm it seems a fair chance that the entire structure may dematerialize around our ears at any moment.

But as the blackness of night becomes the greyness of dawn it's still standing and I'm wishing I'd worried less and slept more.

I would hide my eyes from the light and try to claw my way back into the realm of sleep, but a strong desire to go 'commune with nature' drives me from my sanctuary into the continuing gale.
As I walk along the beach past the other tents I stop briefly to chat with Mick as he moves through the well rehearsed morning brew-up routine.

"Hellova storm eh - How'd you sleep?"

"Oh… Like a baby… I woke up every hour screaming," he replies.

I guess it's the sign of a true outdoorsman, to have a rapier wit on three-hours sleep. I feel I should some sort of comeback, but a cocked eyebrow and an appreciative grunt are all I can muster as I wander into the bush.

With my official engagements for the morning taken care of, I crawl back into my sleeping bag and try to grab some sleep. Alas my circadian rhythm dictates otherwise and the best I can do is a fitful doze while my mind wanders.

It's hard not to dwell on the folklore of this part of Fiordland - of whaleboats dashed to splinters by irate leviathans, of sealers pillaging the shores of as many as ten-thousand sealskins in a single shipment and of gold prospectors finding gold nuggets lying among the seashells on this very beach… how the rumors must have spread.

The men that followed that auriferous scent must have endured hardships and discomforts that would see the modern day adventurer packing their anatomically designed packs and heading for their centrally heated homes within minutes

But it was this sentiment that was the most treacherous of all.

Stories of men attempting the trek back to civilisation after supply vessels failed to reach them tell of souls driven by hunger, at best returning to their brethren as walking skeletons, or at worst being swept away by the wilderness before they even got close.

How the tide has turned since.

In the days of the prospectors, sealers and whalers men had to fortify themselves against the wilderness. A miscalculation of the amount of food or fuel required could bring the very real prospect of scurvy, starvation or hypothermia.

On this trip the one of the dominant topics of conversation has been how exactly to protect the wilderness from the trampling feet of humanity.

The legislative framework that protects this area is deceptively fragile - given the current political climate this region has ironclad defenses, but who knows what a different electoral term, a different decade, or a different century will deliver. We need to make people aware of the treasures this area holds, lest they be demolished someday by the whim of an ignorant voting public.

However, we've all seen wilderness areas that have been loved to death - Tongariro, Millford, Abel Tasman - Areas which are indisputably still beautiful and majestic, but whose character has been intrinsically changed by the pressures of intensive tourism over the years.

To complicate things further access and impact don't seem to have a linear relationship. Robin, a biologist paddling with us shifted my perceptions on the subject earlier in the trip.

"The whole minimal impact thing seems a bit misleading at times - campfire scars and rubbish are unsightly, but they don't actually damage the ecosystem all that much."

"The real ecological disasters often come from things as seemingly innocuous as a seed brought in on the sole of a tramping boot - and not even the most paranoid trailers are likely to avoid that."

So, are we all just a bunch of hypocrites?

Is the only true act of an environmentalist, as proposed by Edward Abbey to, to shoot oneself in the head?

As with many such issues, the correct answer lies hidden somewhere in the shades of grey.

[Reproduced from the July 2005 Issue of Wilderness Magazine]