trekking through snake country in a black dress and ballet flats

I have always been amused by people who have a whole wardrobe of wilderness clothing – you know the type, they always have a bike rack on the top of their car and wouldn’t be caught dead in the mountains without a $300 polar fleece, $35 titanium water bottle, and a bottle of bear spray. I went to school with a lot of these people and some of them are amongst my closest friends – but I still find it hilarious. My family comes a special breed of tavern going, hard working, good, honest, nature lovers – and we don’t shop at REI. My best childhood memories come from sitting around campfires with my cousins and we never wore anything special. While in university where everyone in my department even wore Carhardtt and Northface clothing just to sit in a lecture, I would often march in with sequined mini skirts and hot pink tank tops – and I’d wear the same things out into the rainforest or mountains or wherever it was that we were going for field trips or to do research. I know a lot people found this peculiar but oh well, it was just what I did. Mind you, when surrounded by sorority girls or big groups of classy business students, I would then rush to put on any piece of “wilderness” clothing that I did happen to own – or that was lingering in my apartment that a friend or boyfriend had left behind. I guess it was just fun to be different.

I had a sudden flash back to these days a couple of months ago when I drove out to Namadgi National Park to time how long the drive would be before taking a film crew out the next day. I left at about 4:00 pm and got there a little before 5:30. Perfect, it was less than an hour and a half’s drive – the film crew wouldn’t hate me too much for trekking them out all that way. Namadgi is an incredibly stunning National Park on the outskirts of Canberra. It’s Australian wilderness at its best and is the old stomping grounds of the early Australian pioneers, Banjo Patterson, and home to some of the most important aboriginal rock art sites in South Australia. Despite all this, it’s a relative unknown and on this particular outing, I didn’t cross another human being for the entire hour and a half’s drive. By the time I reached the site where we’d be filming the next day, the sun was still smack in the middle of the sky and since I was already there, I decided I might as well head out for a little walk. I was wearing a 1960′s style long sleeved black dress with ballet flats and left everything in the car except for a bottle of coke and a little black purse that could hang off my wrist. As is usual for me when left alone in a beautiful place, I soon lost track of time. Before I knew it, I was a half hour’s walk from the car and trekking through knee length grasses at the height of the snake season.

All of Canberra’s snakes are venomous – and the most common of them can quite easily kill a grown man within 15 minutes. I’m not usually bothered by this, though. Even though they are extremely toxic, the Canberra snakes are relatively docile and just want to be left the F alone. Even if you surprise one and they strike, most of the time they aren’t going to inject venom because they know that though they could kill you, they can’t eat you and they aren’t gong to want to waste their precious venom on something they can’t put on the dinner table. Being a half hour from the car, though, with no phone reception or compression bandages and wandering in and out of long grasses on the edge of a river, I did this time start to think I was a bit of an idiot for not at least wearing a pair of boots. Within a second or two of thinking of this, I looked up and to my shock and delight, spotted a dingo. I had never before seen a wild dingo – it was not a pure dingo, it had clearly come from both dingo and wild dog heritage but was beautiful none the less. I didn’t have a camera with me but stood and watched it for a while and it watched me too. It didn’t stick around for very long, though, and so on I continued with my trek. Then, almost immediately after seeing the dingo, I came across a pair of tiger snakes in the middle of a heated mating escapade. I thought that humans had come up with some pretty interesting sexual maneuvers, but these two snakes were wrapped up together in what could only be described as a DNA double helix. The entire lengths of their bodies were twisted into a tight spiral showing off the gorgeous browns and reds and blacks of both their back and belly coloring. I had never seen snakes having sex before and found myself paralyzed, unable to look away – immersed in total voyeuristic wonder. Eventually one of them hissed at me and I realized that I was being a bit of a pervert and decided to leave them to their love making.

I headed back the car and all was well. I can’t help but wonder, though, if I would have come across such incredible albeit dangerous animals if I hadn’t been wearing such inappropriate clothing. Just as they say you should carry an umbrella if you don’t want it to rain, perhaps if you head into the wilderness completely unprepared you will come face to face with some of the world’s most impressive creatures. I’m not condoning this behavior – but I do wonder …

Tagged as: ACT, animals, australia, canberra, carly, carly wilson, dingo, namadgi, naturalist, sex, snake, snake sex, tiger, tiger snake, tiger snakes, wild, wildlife, wilson