School Adventure Course: Bush Walking the Back Fields

I wrote this two days ago but had an assignment and test yesterday and did some French summarising last night so didn't get around to it. So, here's me from two days ago:


I’m going to need to give a little bit of background on this one. For about two years, my friends and I were part of a school environmental group, which was part of a larger regional environmental group. We had a list of tasks to complete, such as implementing better energy-saving strategies, ensuring that all toilets are dual-flush, etc. Part of it was the clichéd but still important task of planting trees. A few years ago about twenty trees on the back fields were removed so a fence could be built; our vice principal always planned to then replant native trees in their place. So, we decided to do that as part of our program and planted small trees before watering them etc. Being a high school, people reacted…like high school students sometimes do. A lot of the trees were destroyed or mucked around with, with some students continuously putting rubbish in one particular tree, etc. One particular group of year nine students practically unofficially declared war on us, constantly putting rubbish in or messing around with this tree on this small knoll thing we have (our group nicknamed it One Tree Hill). Anyway, I think I started rambling about irrelevant but hopefully slightly interesting stuff.

The point was that we planted some trees and not many of them are still around. We were going to replant some of them but never ended up doing so because we weren’t sure whether people would decimate them again. As this is the first year that our school has had a year nine elective geography class for a while, our teacher supervisor decided to make the program part of the curriculum and that, as we only met one day a term anyway, the old group wasn’t going to be a part of it (most of us were in year twelve anyway and she probably figured that we were too busy or that she needed to establish a younger group – hopefully the year nines will continue as part of the group for a few years).

So two of my friends and I decided to go check on them today. Umm…it’s been raining a bit recently. We remembered that when we were trudging through the mud, with me holding my pants up, Sadia giving up on keeping herself clean and Megan probably grateful that she was wearing a skirt. Sadia’s foot slipped out of her shoe on the way over. On the plus side, the trees that are still there are generally looking really good. The pile of feathers that we passed? Not so much. The bird that then decided to fly at us? Not so much either. We decided that the prospect of a bird swooping us (even though it’s not yet spring) was enough to deter us from finishing the rounds, so we hurried back to this big weird thing that used to be a scoreboard or something and is now just an iron contraption, all the while panicking. Fortunately, the bird wasn’t in sight when we got there. The idea of getting back to the buildings trumped the idea of hiding with this metal thing in the hopes that it would stop the bird from getting to us, at least with any real speed or force, so we trudged back through the mud again (at least that time we were more aware from the get-go and so tried to avoid sloshy mud as much as possible) and my foot almost slipped out of my shoe.

Our careers advisor was doing playground duty. Her words when we got back: “That’s why you stick to the concrete paths.”

We showed our friends before Sadia and I went to the bathroom to get as much of the mud off our shoes as possible; Megan’s plan was to wear them home so she could show her mum and see her reaction (I think her mum recently cleaned her shoes or something).

I figure: mud-ridden paths (except without the paths), dead animals, a motley-looking assortment of trees, a wild animal attacking you…we went bush walking.

Also, I totally recommend school environmental groups. They’re really productive and great fun until your teacher kicks you out because she wants to make it part of the year nine curriculum. Nah, no bitterness there.             (Actually, there’s not; she’s a lovely woman and while I would have preferred to still be a part of it, even if they were doing it three times a week and we helped out once a term, we were becoming a bit less productive and more focussed on the art competitions in the last two meetings and it’s more important for her to work on building a younger team so that it lasts for the next three years rather than clinging to the old team, the vast majority of whom are in their final year).

My French Continuers trial and HSC speaking exams are both next week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Also, I’ve started rewatching Supernatural with my best friend. I’ve seen up until the end of season four (but most of it is a blur – though I am actually remembering more than I thought that I would) and she has never watched any of it, so every now and again we’re visiting one another’s house to watch it. Well, I visited her house (Sherlock, Buffy and Supernatural) then she visited mine (Supernatural), but we’re hoping to organise another session sometime in the next few weeks, either as a okay-trials-have-started-now-let’s-have-a-study-session-then-a-Supernatural-session or as a yay-trials-are-over-lets-have-a-Supernatural-sleepover-session.