In 2018, a weekend adventure gone wrong changed Explorer Emily’s life. She reflects on how the lesson she learned from that fateful day gave her a deeper understanding of life’s impermanence.

The Day

The day began with that quiet thrill you get when you remember it’s the weekend; it was sunny out, the air crisp, the mist lifting. When you can almost smell the unadulterated gift of life. The late light warmed us on a fresh winter morning in the Adelaide Hills, coupled with coffee and a sense of possibility.

My mate Dave and I dropped into a friend’s place for pancakes and decided to meander to a well-known crag just down the road. With full bellies and bags packed with helmets, ropes, carabiners, harnesses, and climbing shoes, we were set. Dave remembers a chopper flying overhead as we waved goodbye to our breakfast friends, we’d see another sooner than we realised.

Arriving at the top end of Morialta Conservation Park, we spent some time climbing on top rope. We’d just been on my first trad climbing trip to Arapalies the week before, and I was into it. Romantically so, energetically so. Climbing felt like accessing that inner adventurous child, and I loved how it made me move my body in non-adult ways. I could feel the texture of the rock underneath my fingertips.

Read more: Rock Climbing Slang and How To Use It (Beta)

 

 

Dave was experienced and came from a bloodline of climbers. ‘Safety never sleeps even if you do’ and ‘Helmets are sexy’ were examples of the mottos he learnt from his late father, who was known to traverse icy mountainsides deep in New Zealand. It was the safety of wearing a helmet that saved me that day.

After a morning of climbing and a picnic lunch, we decided to check out a less-visited crag, so little-visited in fact, that it proved a bit of a bush bash to arrive. It was a bit average, but we had a go and soon left, making our way back to the main site. I had my climbing shoes off, protecting them from the non-rock terrain, and was enjoying the earth under my bare feet as we zigzagged back up and around to where we’d come from.

Where we were in the Adelaide Hills, most trails offer views over the city. The suburbs blend into the lower foothills, and structures slowly fade into bushy sanctuaries.

You can be in dense scrub yet still hear the traffic, still only be a ten-minute walk from your parked car. Perhaps I felt safe not being super remote, and it relaxed me into just being. Being in the bush, being with my bare feet. Still to this day, I’m not sure I have any regrets about this being.

As we traversed back to the main crag, I remember a big boulder, and at this point, to this day, I have trouble describing my decision or lack of decision. Was it inexperience or was it just unlucky? I’m not sure. Perhaps a combo deal. The decision was, why go around when I can go over?

I’m by no means a free soloer or a huge risk-taker, but I’m not risk-averse. I’ve hiked rocky terrain with 20kg on my back literally for a living, and volunteered with the SES.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes shit happens, sometimes you learn from it, sometimes there’s a smattering of unluck or inexperience. Sometimes, it’s just a combo of things, and there doesn’t need to be blame or shame.

So I chose to scramble over rather than around, and that boulder, in the warm wet of the winter’s day, was not solidly planted in the hillside. It was dislodged, and as I lifted my hands above me and pulled my weight onto the rock, we became weightless, as if gravity didn’t exist for a moment. As if we were both floating in the air for a second, the heaviness of my body no longer lifting me up but rather buoyant in a sea of air.

As if realising nothing was holding us to the ground, my new boulder friend knocked me in the face before falling past me and cascading down the hillside below. I followed, with blood from a new broken nose outwardly flowing down my cheek. I landed with a thump on my back that took the air out of me. I slid downward a bit further, facing uphill, facing the sky, facing the place I’d fallen from. I slid to a still.

Dave somehow swiftly leapt down to me. ‘I can’t breathe’, I said, and he was quick to reassure me, ‘You can breathe, you’re talking’, and I found my breath. Really, I found my life. (Thank you, Dave.)

 

The Impact

With fractures from my nose to my toes, I was ten days in the hospital, with a bunch of aspirin for a year to ensure my dissected vertebral artery didn’t clot.

 

 

I had three ‘wash out’ surgeries for a gaping wound in my foot and two months in a neck brace. My spinal cord remained undamaged. I still have altered sensation in my lower back, what a registrar titled a ‘Frankenstein scar’ on my foot, and perhaps a slight lack of head rotation.

Mostly, though, I now get vertigo. At heights, on rock, when someone else trips…

Another Lesson

I hiked the Overland Track a few years later with some friends, and as we reached the peak of Cradle Mountain, I put my arms above myself to haul myself over some boulders – the very same motion I’d made that day back in 2018. My whole body internally jolted in what I think was quite simply fear.

 

 

I wasn’t thinking, I just felt a wave of full-body freak out. I stopped and sat down to safety and burst into tears, of embarrassment, of uncertainty, of the unknown, of some deep knowing of mortality, of my body remembering. This was the point I realised the fall had impacted me more than I knew.

As a social worker and counsellor, I knew the concept of ‘the body keeps the score’ – that is, memories can be stored in felt memory, with our senses rather than just our cognitive brain, with thoughts and words. Memories, often traumatic or visceral ones, are known to the body not in our narrative or ability to recall them, but at a deeper level, at the level that knows how to survive, even if we don’t THINK we do. The fight/flight part of us. On this day, summiting Cradle Mountain, my body FELT something I wasn’t expecting, and couldn’t understand – until I could. 

 

 

What I felt was my body and brain communicating a perceived threat of danger of death and a grief of lost innocence, innocence that allowed a sense of immortality. 

And although I’ve lost this freedom of pretend immortality that feels deeply embedded in our society, I’ve gained the wisdom of impermanence (although still a lifelong undertaking to learn in full). 

Impermanence understands the fragility of our lives, the ever-changing constant in our lives. Like the leaves that always colour and fall, the day that rises and fades, our breath that does the same. Nothing is here to stay forever, and there’s so much meaning in how we participate in this cyclical nature of life and death that we’re a part of. It’s what we do with the wisdom of impermanence. Taking care whilst allowing for spontaneity, knowing what to hold onto and when to let go.

The Now

I’ve learnt to honour the ebbs and flows and unknowns that arise as I continue navigating paths both literally and metaphorically. If anything, I go slowly now, I go mindfully. Not necessarily due to cautiousness, but due to a deeper respect for being here, and the urge to savour it all.

Every moment, every smell, every way I can feel the Earth touch me; snot running from my nose as I traverse the rest of the Overland Track in the rain, the smell of eucalypts, the granite underneath my fingertips, and my wind-burnt lips.

 

It’s a letting go of, allowing for the next adventure, the next day, the next breath. It’s honouring the depth of this experience and the lessons learnt. It’s getting back on the horse, humbled. It’s knowing the possibility of anything, and that this anything is unimaginatively broad and bloody beautiful.

 

 

Hard Lessons Learn on Adventures

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