Common Sense Ain't Common

I've found my way into outdoor education here, traveling each week to run programs for kids ranging from nine to 15 years old. The industry is different from home: every year starting in fourth grade, kids go to camp as part of school curriculum to engage in teamwork activities, development challenges and outdoor recreation pursuits. Whereas Outdoor School in Oregon centers strongly on field science, community, expanding social and environmental awareness, here it focuses more on teamwork and leadership development through structured, sometimes expeditional, outdoor rec. My work is an odd mashup of everything I've been doing in the past few years, drawing on ODS experience working with school groups, Asia Outdoors work guiding climbing and kayaking, Search and Rescue navigational skills and lifelong pursuit of... following fun outside the city.

The everyday differences? I've shifted from mandatory long pants and rain coats to sunscreen and hat checks, from raccoons and deer and coyotes to kangaroos and killer snakes and spider webs with a tendency to rebound like trampolines. I've relearned how to bandage snake bikes from venom that simply dissolves your flesh in ugly fashion to venom that works it way through your lymphatic system in uglier, faster fashion.

The work has been an awesome introduction to the local industry, allowing me to explore how centers situate themselves, how their views and methodology differ and how they treat their staff. I also get to travel and meet people-- although I'm based out of Brisbane at the moment, I work in a three-hour radius from the city. My first week had me headed north to a place called Brooyar, teaching kids to belay each other and climb on deep red sandstone cliffs. Our base sprawled beneath rolling hills alongside a creek filled with fish that nibbled the dead skin off our feet as we relaxed under a full moon after sending kids to bed.

I stayed on to climb that weekend on undulating sandstone with a coworker named Paul, one of those guys who's kind of hard to figure out at first but offers so much goddam knowledge and skill and life experience you just want to hang out and explore and learn from and do things with the guy. I returned with some new friends from Brisbane to set highlines in the same spot, called Point Pure, and stand in the sky for the first time since mid-2014.

Photo: Nico Torres-Don

I spent my birthday with a few friends from my first week of work in a small coastal community called Noosa North, eating proper pizza, napping in the sun on the sand and "learning to surf"– code for I just got my ass kicked by the water, a lot– on my first beach full of breakers and currents and waves in recent memory.

A couple weeks later work took me south to Tyalgum Ridge, nestled into the edge of an ancient, sprawling caldera surrounding Mt. Warning– a basalt plug known as the first place in Australia to see the sun every dawn. During the day I ran kayaking beneath paddocks filled with horses, goats, alpacas and oreo cows. After work we gathered to drink beer and chat as we watch clouds boil into thunderheads, giving way to brilliant lingering double rainbows over the mountain. Crimson and green king parrots foraged amongst nearby shrubbery as black macaws emerged from the mountains,  forewarning imminent rain with their descent into the caldera.

Being foreign in this field has proved something of both a blessing and a curse. In a lot of ways, I'm able to lean on my nationality to bond with my kids. We argue the merits of Shapes vs Goldfish, Vegemite and Butter vs PB & J (Jam, as they call it here, because Jelly is in fact Jello on this side of the world). Occasionally the tactic backfires, though: at one point my 8th-grade girls inform me with the most blasé attitude ever that goannas are super tame, and you can totally walk up to them and put your hand in their mouths. (You can't; their claws are no joke and their bites are ugly as sin.)

While my coworkers field quintessential pesky 9th-grade curiosity (How many dreadlocks do you have? How many girlfriends have you had? Do you have a girlfriend for every dreadlock? How many times have you done drugs?), my personal FAQs center on "world politics" more often than not (What do you think of Donald Trump? Are you going to vote for Donald Trump? Do you like Donald Trump? Have you met Donald Trump?). And, very, very occasionally, "Have you ever seen a bear?"

Interesting enough, I have similar conversations with so many people I work with here. "I would never come to America," they tell me... "you guys have bears there!!" And in Oz you have brown snakes and taipans and redbacks, all of which I'm willing to bet are more common here than bears in the states.

I've never really worried about bears or raccoons (really, if you're going to worry about something, make it the raccoons!) because I've simply grown up playing in places where we coexist and securing food in potentially troublesome territory. West coast wildlife safety is second nature to me. Here in Australia people don't worry (too much) about snakes and spiders because they're part of the natural web amongst which they've grown. We walk heavy and keep from sticking hands blindly into hot crannies. And somehow, that means more hard-to-see little things that kill you faster are way less scary than big, easy-to-see things that run away from you. Chilly nights are natural to me and 90°F weather unbearably hot just as the kids I work with bask in summer heat and perceive snow as alien.

That's just it, though. Wherever we live we contend with hazards of some sort, which can be pretty much eliminated through a little education, logic and common sense. We just have this skewed, glorified perception of the unfamiliar, whether it be politicians or environment or wildlife, abroad or closer to home in settings we're unaccustomed to.

I should write a book of Classic Kid Experiences, including but not limited to:

• The girl who tried to pet a horse after we told her not to. The horse very nearly took off her boob... (As terrible as it sounds, it was really, really hard not to laugh after the fact.)
• The boy who spent 20 minutes crouched under a shack composing a motivational speech for his raft building team. The text in its entirety? "Men, keep doin' what you're doin'."
• The 6th grader who actually took some personal responsibility: "I did something stooooopid in the bushes and now my boat is covered in spiders!"
• The other 6th grader who curled in on herself on high ropes while belting, "I came in like a wreeeecking baaaaallllll!"
• The girl who came up with her group's teamwork motto: "Cheating is more efficient than doing it the right way!"
• The 11-year-old boy who told his instructor, "With all due respect sir, you're not in the military any more and neither am I. You can't teach me anything, old man!"
• The girl who insisted I should have whisked the deadly snake away from her tent's vicinity with a stick instead of letting it go on its way. 
• The boy who got sent home for exploding bottles of hair spray in campfires, after letting loose language that made Game of Thrones look mild.

And on that note, as a long-time mentor back home has been reminding me since I was nine: Common Sense Just Ain't Common.