Sunday, June 22, 2008 Covington: Outdoors By Gary Covington Looking In
I WOKE up this morning with a head cold. Not a rip-snorting Omigod pass-the-tissues variety but a lesser evil. The snuffles. And I know why.
Saturday, I was all over the city and here and there I sat in air-conditioned rooms. Air-cons and me don't get on; dehydrated air-conned air means the tubes dry up, nasties whistle down the unprotected passageways and the next morning I've a cold. Office workers develop a tolerance for air-conditioning, a tolerance I'm lacking. Thanks to my parents, I'm an outdoor person.
The Covingtons were working class. Not poor, not comfortable but somewhere in between. Dad was a policeman, an ordinary copper; our annual holidays were taken with one eye on the purse. We'd go camping. The tent and flysheet were homemade, the cooking kit and camp beds army surplus. It was camping, as camping should be -- zero mod cons.
We'd camp in farmer's fields, in the wide open spaces of Wales and England's west country (which later became national parks) or now and again a proper camping site. It never rained -- who remembers rainy days? -- and my brother and I ran wild; exploring, climbing, poking our noses into everything and coming to love the outdoors (My brother -- younger, dammit -- is now a senior ranger with the Australian Parks Service and you can't get more outdoor than that).
We lived in the country too -- right opposite brickworks with its kilns and drying sheds, a tiny railway and claypits -- a paradise for little lads.
And in those days, parents weren't concerned with dietary supplements or disinfecting hand gels. We boys were left to be boys -- falling out of trees, into streams, bicycling filthily in and out of clay pits. Grazed knees and elbows were par for the play -- and we learnt respect for the outdoors and a curiosity for all about us.
An early childhood memory -- I must have been eleven or twelve -- is of lying in a hayfield in midsummer and realizing how many varieties of grass there were. Previously grass was a chore, a lawn to be cut every week but here, merely by turning my head, I could pick out ten or twelve varieties. Feathery grass. Itchy grass. Grass with prickles. Grass that chewed well. I was intrigued and ran home to badger my parents into buying me the Observers Book of Wild Flowers, a cheap and colorful pocket guide.
Outdoors too steered me into a profession. Like most lads at fifteen I hadn't a clue what to do. I wasn't academically bright (nothing's changed), further education was a closed door, when one day, larking about on the school's games field, I saw a party of surveyors working their way along an adjacent lane.
One guy was holding a great tall pole inscribed with numbers while the other peered through an instrument and booked down his observations. The day was warm, they'd taken off their jackets and there was no foreman or manager around cracking the whip. A survey party, it seemed, was dispatched into the field and left to get on with it. That was the life for me -- out in the open, time to look at the flora and fauna and no one peering over a shoulder.
That's pretty much how it turned out and I spent the next thirty years or so working outdoors. Miles away from air-conditioners and, do you know, my snuffles have gone. It's the fresh air.
