THE EXPERIMENT: According to one scientific study, little research has occurred exploring links between fathering and youth stress. So I thought, what the hell, for the glory of science and all that, why don’t I take my 19-year-old on a five-day exercise in physical attrition across Tasmania’s revered and feared – nominally a walk; more accurately a finger-shredding, rockface exposure-ridden scramble – Western Arthurs? This ‘walk’ is viewed by many outdoors cognoscenti as Australia’s toughest on-track hike.
I mean, what could go wrong?
How did it go, I hear you ask. Well, the experiment was a raging success, thanks. A feast of data was captured. The father-son relationship itself? That chemical stress bomb? Yep, it went off, so success of sorts.
Nineteen is a prime pain-in-the-arse age for the male of the human species. Knows it all. Bullet proof. Not agile in mind. Doesn’t like surprises. Life defined by screen and socials.
The upside? Strong as an ox. Agile in body. Experienced in multi-day walks. Enjoys being in the high country: The views and openness there induce a sense of freedom, maybe even of possibility, and also offer a release from the constraints imposed upon us by urban and digital living (the latter being a toxic, psychological soup for teenagers in particular—this toxicity hyper-charged for those who, like my son, were at their most vulnerable through COVID’s face-to-face social-separation years).
The Western Arthurs were the perfect place for his high-country fix; not sure what he ended up complaining about, really.
Okay, maybe it was Day Four, when we combined two days’ walking into one 7AM to 10PM push. Or the final day—the supposedly easy leg—when a raging bowels-of-hell gale unleashed utter carnage upon us on the Arthur Plains. Antarctica had come north. Our situation had gone south. Horizontal rain hammered us like a Gatling gun spray of bullets. The wind was a
