Alison (Lyn) Armstrong

At the reunion Graeme Smith said to me that he thought I hadn’t changed all that much, that I was alternative then (ie school) and that I’m alternative now. The comment only surprised me in that I had been trying so hard at school to be ‘normal’. Who was I kidding? Certainly not anyone else though I did kind on convince myself for a few years. I even got married briefly when I was 21., and in retrospect understood that I only did it because that’s what ‘normal’ people do. I also went to library school and qualified as a librarian. You can’t get much more conventional than that. It now feels as if that was some other person in some other lifetime.

When I was 23 I started travelling and that was the end of any pretence to myself, or anyone else, that I was ‘normal’ — whatever that means... anyway whatever it means Graeme obviously recognised it.

I travelled extensively for about ten years through North and South America, Europe and Africa and then emigrated to Canada where I lived for long periods of time in wilderness hunting camps in the Yukon. I wasn’t going to write anything for publication but Jim Gillespie convinced me that I should share some of my adventures. Actually he bribed me. I wrote a book last Canadian winter and I needed a little extra help with the formatting to get the manuscript publisher-ready, and he said he’d do it if I wrote something for the reunion!

I walked the Inca Trail in Peru — four days hiking through the Andes, often on original Inca highways, to the lost city of Macchu Picchu. The highest mountain pass we crossed was 14,000ft. I explored some of the tributaries of the Amazon by native canoe, and camped for a few days at the Moreno Glacier in Argentina — the only growing glacier in the world. Iguacu Falls (forming the border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay) is one of the most spectacular and beautiful sights I have ever seen.

Africa was a different kind of travel altogether. In the final analysis, the only thing that mattered in travelling overland through Africa was whether or not you would even get there. We spent some time in the game parks and camped for a few days on the white sand beaches of the Jade Sea. We crossed the central African jungle at the end of the rainy season and found roads turned to rivers and bridges washed away. We did make it through (even at times literally building bridges to get the truck over swollen rivers) and eventually crossed the Sahara into Algeria and Morocco. I loved the Sahara, so clean and spacious and empty. After the closeness and mud of the jungle it was a real gift. I look back on my time in Africa as one of the most exciting adventures of my life.

The decision based purely on intuition, I emigrated to Canada in 1984, and started working for my sister and her husband in their northern wilderness hunting camps cooking for big game hunters. It was a wonderful and unique lifestyle, living in log cabins in the bush, hauling water from the lake, splitting wood for the cook stove, and of course cooking — everything from roast moose to huckleberry pie. I really enjoyed it. We rode a lot as horses were the only form of transport in most of the camps, and I got to see a lot of the far north west of Canada and the wildlife — moose, caribou, mountain sheep and goats, wolf, wolverine, marmot, lynx, and of course black bears and grizzly bears.

In the beginning sheer ignorance kept me from being afraid of bears. But it didn’t take long for me to hear enough ‘bear stories’ to realise that bear attacks are a very real part of the Canadian wilderness experience, and that they are occasionally fatal. I guess I’ve now spent enough time in the wilderness to have my own ‘bear stories’ — like the time we got into camp in the spring to find the cook cabin interior destroyed by a hungry bear who’d just woken from hibernation. The bear had, among other things, picked up a full size propane fridge and hurled it across the cabin, completely destroying it. Another spring, another camp, and I’m in the kitchen quietly cooking when something made me look up — there was the face of a black bear pressed against the window. It seems just about every summer we’d see bears, they were always there. Sometimes it was scary hiking alone, but I decided I had to take the risk rather than staying put all day. Besides, in the hunting camps the cook is left in camp alone all day and the cook cabin is so rich with food smells that if a bear came to camp it would be the first place it would go.

The guys taught me how to use a gun one summer, and I got to be a pretty good shot lying down, or if I had something to rest my gun on. But I never got to feel really familiar or comfortable with guns, and decided I was more scared of guns than I was of bears. Also, it is hard to kill a bear. They have very thick skulls and most bullets bounce off. It’s best to go for the shoulder/chest region, but if you end up wounding, rather than killing it, you would have one very angry bear and that would be a whole lot worse. Nothing much stops an angry bear.

Eventually I came to the end of my time in camps and moved first to Whitehorse for a year and then to Vancouver for several. As I write this it is one week until I return to Canada (I came back to Australia for the reunion and stayed six months) though at this point I haven’t decided if I’ll go back to Vancouver or back up north again. There is something very special about northern Canada, especially in the summer when it is daylight for almost 24 hours a day.

My book is called ‘How to get where you’re going’ and I’ve submitted it to Allen & Unwin for publication. It is about personal and spiritual development. For all my external adventures, my life has really been, and continues to be, about the inner adventures — who are we really, why we are here, why we aren’t happy, how to be happy, or at least how to be true. Maybe one day I’ll write a book about my external adventures and call it ‘How to get where you’re going, part II’. It’s all the same thing anyway.

In really really enjoyed the reunion. It was wonderful to see you all again, and it was definitely worth coming over from Canada. Besides, I was overdue for an Australia summer! To those of you who didn’t got to the reunion I recommend it for the next one. It was a heet. It was really interesting to see how people had changed, or not. But most of all it was warm and friendly and welcoming, and good fun. See you all at the next one.

Alison (Lyn) Armstrong