My New LIFE-O as a FIFO

Do you remember, back in primary school, what it was like when you had a new toy that all the other kids wanted. Briefly your popularity would soar to heady heights and you felt an overwhelming sense of place: you were wanted, you belonged.

It lasted about as long as it took your 'friends' to tire of your toy. As quick as your popularity came, it went again. I recall one occasion when the most popular girl in primary school was my BFF for a whole lunch hour. Unbeknownst to me, Pac Man was her favorite game.

Being a consultant biologist in the mining industry is much like being a primary schooler with a Pac Man hand-held game machine. When you have what everyone wants (knowledge of the biological environment) and you are a dab hand at regulatory liaison you are every mining companies best friend. When  your client gets what they want and you are no longer required you fade into obscurity again.

NOW LET ME BE CLEAR - I am not complaining! I get paid to do what I do and I have many many wonderful clients that send me to fantastic places to do what I love to do - catch animals.

But sometimes I just feel like I just don't belong anywhere. As a consultant you never enjoy the warm embrace of a team and you virtually never get to spend a decent amount of time in any one place because, and rightly so, no body in their right mind is going to pay you a stupid amount per hour to have a holiday!!

Well all that is changing. After 20 years in the environmental consulting industry, working for small private companies, I am now a 'patched' member of a mid-tier mining group. I am loaded to the gunwales with FREE PPE and I am sitting here at the airport departure lounge among my 'hommies'. I don't need to know their names. I see their logos and they see mine. I nod and they nod back. I am part of a team: I have that sense of place I have so long desired.

Eight days from now I will be back in my office, sitting adjacent my beautiful, highly motivated and exceptionally talented wife (co-owner and co-director of APM Pty Ltd) and surrounded by the APM staff that I know and love. We have been spilling the same blood in the same mud in the wildest and most remote places for almost 7 years and we have a spectacular time doing it. I know they will miss me, but it is only 8 days. They will be fine.

Schizophrenia anyone?

Nauseatingly Good Fun

My brain pangs like somebody is scratching at it with a hunting knife via my left eye. 

Question 1 of 1 - What was the catalyst for my brain ache?

a) Fatigue

b) Noise

c) Inhalation of noxious fumes

d) Ingestion of an immense amount of dust

e) All of the above

Yesterday, I woke up at 0330 hrs anxious about the day that lay ahead. After floating around on net for a while I could wait no longer. I jumped in the ute, which I had packed and ready to roll, and hit the road. So in the zone was I that I missed a major turn-off, wasted 15 minutes recovering and then proceeded down the wrong highway to my first ever motocross event. I wasn't going the wrong way, just not the best way and making it to scrutineering on time was looking like it was going to present some challenges. Two hours later I arrived. On my arrival I came to unsettling realisation that I still had to drive for another two hours to get home after a whole day of racing.

The Hotham Valley in Western Australia is both tranquil and idyllic. Fat lambs graze and frolic midst the long green grass and horses stand staunch yet peaceful against a backdrop of heavy early-winter fog. On any Sunday, if you listen carefully you can hear absolutely nothing other than the whistle of the old steam-driven Hotham Valley Tourist Train cascading through the valleys; but not today.

Today, at 9:45 six classes, comprising at least 150 riders, lined up at the starting gate to embark on their sighting lap for Round 1 of the Trail and Enduro Motodynamics Natural Terrain Motocross, sponsored by the ridiculously cool guys at Moto Dynamics. The noise was epic, resonating through the valley like the Tabernacle Choir: the 150 two strokes screaming like children at the treble end of the vocal spectrum and the thundering KTM500EXC growling out a bass baritone and making it's presence felt. It may well be that, what started as a choral suite, became acoustic carnage on my brain by the end of the day causing my current cranial anguish.

I am not a smoker, but I am pretty sure that if I was one I would choose not to inhale Motul 2-stroke Special Light. We have all seen the old Quit smoking add where the man wrings out the sponges and squeezes the tar into the jar. I am pretty sure those sponges quite accurately represent what my lungs looked and felt like by the end of the day. Of course we all know that when your alveoli are choked with hydrocarbons you feel a little lite-headed and a migraine is sure to ensue.

When practice commenced we had four minutes to comprehend what lay ahead of us that day. That was about the time taken to complete a lap behind the Safety bike. The circuit I traversed was not the circuit on the brochure!! I was of the understanding that Natural Terrain Motorcross comprised a nice long flowing flat track through soft and squishy grassy pastures, with loamy, clayey dirt that would feel like mousse when you landed face-first into it. I was hoping that the corners would be bound by warm fleecy sheep ready to absorb your impact when you were high-sided off your bike out of a corner. Moreover, as the race was down south and it was the middle of winter I expected the ground to be moist and the horrible dust we endure during summer rides would be replaced with blissfully soft little bundles of sweet smelling freshly turned earth. Wrong again. To get some appreciation please do yourself a favour and watch this clip.

Having considered the events of the day, my answer to multiple choice Question 1 is (e) All of the above.

Dreaming Up A Mid-life Crisis

Google 'dreams' and 'meaning' and you will be buried under a bazillion 1s and 0s of digital diatribe, with all manner of people (academic and otherwise) claiming to have the answers on what each and every dream means. I don't doubt that some, many or most of their answers have some fundament, reason or logic but I believe the catalysts for our dreams and the way the dreams play-out is unique to every person and every dream that person has.

Most often I find that my dreams are some twisted take on events that are going on at the time: for me the dream is usually the complete opposite of reality. Take last night for instance.

I dreamed that I was coming home from primary school (as an adult [i.e. the age I am now]) walking among the kids pointing out all the things that had changed in the neighborhood on the way home. I cautiously acknowledge that I was not walking, but trundling along in something that resembled a mash up between a wheel chair and Green Machine (if you remember those you are about my age). The explanation for my mode of transport is simple: I saw one the other day and I am probably not long out of a wheel chair.

The school crosswalk experience was surreal and tranquil, so much so that all the kids around me were espousing quite eloquently how pleasant the experience was (that was weird!). The white lines and bright orange flags were replaced by a giant and very robust looking boom gate and a ridiculously chilled-out, almost drone-like YOUNG bloke was in attendance. This is the polar opposite of the twice-daily cross walk experience I remember; dozens of hyper kids jostling at the road side like greyhounds ready bolt when the whistle screams the signal to go, and the poor geriatric on the flags and whistle being all but mowed down by the throngs of screaming kids anxious to dump their bags at home and run off to play until sunset. All the while the geriatric crosswalk attendant feigning his expressions of concern, authority and responsibility for our safety.

I think that Old Man Mitch dreaming of trundling home from Primary School is my acknowledging what seems to be a perpetual Mid-life Crisis. Why now? Why last night?

By the end of this week I will have experienced two things that I have never done before. The first is Competition Trampolining. I have a trampoline, but compared to a comp tramp it is like jumping up and down on the roof of a convertible (i.e. bouncy but not really really really bouncy). Why am I trampolining all of a sudden? It is because my Acro students are starting to catch up with me; they can do nearly all of the tricks in my repertoire and I need to learn some more....STAT!. So expect future blogs on broken bones and strained muscles as I attempt tricks best left to the young and bendable. 

The second event is competitive motocross. Some say this is super dangerous and probably not a good sport to try for the first time at the age of 40something. All I can say is that at least all the bikes are going in the same direction at roughly the same rate. As a recreational trail rider, I make it my business to know the risks I face and, out there in the bush the biggest killer of recreational riders is other recreational riders coming the other direction at the same speed.

See you all in Triage! (I'm the guy in front BTW, but you get the idea).

Eat my dirt!

Sometimes when you ride trails your momentum is symphonic and your body moves in harmony with your bike. Your bike performs as it should; just as it did the day it rolled off the show room floor. Your senses become heightened and your mind's eye enables you to transcend the obstacles immediately in front of you and you feel as if you know what is around the next corner long before you get there. You develop somewhat of a sixth sense which facilitates a relaxed response and subtle reactions to whatever is coming your way at great speed. But it is not always so.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts to the contrary, you demonstrate all the competence and composure of a train wreck. Instead of using the perturbations in the trails to propel you from one corner into the next, those same perturbations seem to just propel you from one obstacle into the next. On days like these there are a number of things you should remember. Your bike weighs about 115 kg and the crushing force caused by inertia increases exponentially with an increase in speed. Though the sand, loam or clay on the track may be soft like a baby's bum, the underlying sandstone, quartzstone, granites, bauxite or ironstone is neither flexible nor malleable. Tree trunks are immobile and fallen logs are very cryptic. When you ride you paint a target on your back and you invite any and all of these exigences to take you out.

When we are having a good ride, we feel like we are pretty accomplished riders. We don't crash very often and we feel like we cut a pretty quick pace through the scrub. We have been doing it for a while, we have all the right gear and we pilot pretty decent bikes. It would be safe to say that, for the most part, we are satisfied with our own ability.

And then it happens: we cross paths with a couple of other riders that look the same as us, ride the same bikes that we ride on the same trails that we ride; but they ride so very much better than we do. It shouldn't be humbling or disheartening, but it is.

Riding a tight twisty single track in Mundaring just recently my buddy and I were pulled over track side when two such riders came upon us. We chatted for a while exchanging trail tales and bike settings, We sniffed around each others machines like dogs smelling each others backsides. I took them to be no different to us in any way; as riders I did not anticipate their being any better or any worse than us because, in our minds, we are good enough to be average and average enough to be good. I could not have been further off the mark.

When they launched away from our track side pow wow I shot off in hot pursuit. I felt my light, agile KTM Freeride was easily the bike most suited to the trail we were riding and I felt like I was riding well. Thus I imagined myself nipping at their heels for as long as I felt the desire to put the wind up them. I could not have been further off the mark.

They vanished. It was like Blair Witch. Within meters, along the thinnest and most contorted single track a dirt bike was capable of negotiating these two guys literally vaporized. It was only that the shrub was impenetrable in every other direction that I could even conceive they had disappeared along the very same trail I was on. The only evidence of their presence was the faint odour of four stroke exhaust and freshly turned soil.

From this encounter I conclude the following: the ability to be a good rider is solely dependent on only one thing; a complete disregard for self-preservation. As to how these guys, and girls, can function like this with a helmet on and then function normally in society with their helmet off is beyond me, but I admire them for it.

This little log hop could be considered a rather skillful maneuver, but the track marks left by those two riders that went before us suggest that they did not even slow down to consider how they would negotiate this obstacle. Respect!