Last night I’m pretty sure I did something no other human on this planet has ever done before.
In a world where the limit of human performance is constantly redefined, where the likes of Killian Jornet, Ueli Steck and countless others are forever going faster, higher and further, it’s easy to overlook some of the worlds smaller, more humble “firsts”.
Take last nights wild camp in some local woods for example.
Now, I know that I was certainly not the first person to ever camp in those woods (evidence of that was sadly strewn around parts of the woodland) but I am pretty certain for a start that I was the only person daft enough to wild camp there that particular night! But as I lay in my hammock, strung between two unlikely looking trees, the wind fluttering gently against my tarp, a thought occurred to me. I may not be the first person ever to camp in these particular woods but there is a very good chance that I’m the first person to ever have decided to string up a hammock and spend the night hanging between the two specific trees I happened to choose.
I was well off the beaten track, one tree (although sturdy) was quite small and not the obvious choice to anchor a hammock and the other looked relatively young compare to the thicker trees elsewhere in the woods.
So maybe, just maybe, in the middle of a small woodland in Kent on a windy December evening, I managed to (quite by accident) take a couple of lungfulls of that rarefied air usually tasted only by those sportsmen, those athletes we often revere as being superhuman and in the course of that one long and dark night set my own world first – the first person to ever set my hammock up between random tree a and random tree b.
Of course, world first or not it’s all just a bit of good fun, I’m not seriously comparing myself to Ueli Steck! The above simply goes to highlight the power of microadventures, of getting outdoors and letting your imagination run wild. Give it a try sometime, you might make history! 😉
The Angry Nomad 