Walk #62 - Mountain Cool

Beautiful day for a walk. Cool and overcast and quiet.

It started off rather crappily. Couldn't sleep again, feeling rather grim, guts aching like buggery and so on. But I'm buggered if I'm going to let that crap stop me from finishing this Walk when I planned to finish it (end of September). Won't be letting it keep me from History Week either.

Anyways. It was cool, even slightly nippy. The cloud cover had come over at dawn and was keeping the temperature down. The birds were twittering and flitting about the trees. There were plenty of native trees for them to flitter and twit in. The first street in my walk went up to the foot of the ridge. There were a lot of seventies houses at the end and seventies houses tend to have gums or paperbarks in their gardens. And there was a park on the corner and a creek winding its way round the foot of the ridge. With the cool and the low clouds and the ridge rising almost vertical from the end of the street, it was like being in the mountains. Very nice.

The feeling didn't fade over the length of the walk. I walked a long lazily-curved street glorying in the name of Greenhaven. It was hilly at either end and ran beside the creek in the middle. The few cars that passed me went up onto the ridge and the sound of their engines straining up the incline just added to the impression of mountains.

The creek was pretty dry. A few stagnant puddles here and there, the lantana making a dense prickly tangle of undergrowth, the dead dry leaves lying thick in the creek bed. But the magpies were leaping about on the bank, examining things and staring in the way magpies always do and when I stood still for a few minutes I could hear a brush turkey scratching about in the leaves on the other side of the creek.

Up at the end of Greenhaven there were two more turkeys. The male I could see. He was wandering about on the slope of someone's front yard. He stopped when he saw me and watched me from behind a small bush. Then I heard the female scratching in the leaves on the ridgeside. The male saw me look at her and started stamping about, kicking the leaves up and generally trying to distract me from her. I see the ducks on my foreshore walks doing the same thing. As soon as you look at the female duck she freezes and the male duck starts quacking and flapping. I don't know much about animal behaviour but I remember reading that in a Gerald Durrell when I was at school.

Walking back along Greenhaven I looked up at the top of the ridge ahead. All over the ridges and hills of the Peninsula there are outcrops and small cliffs of grey rock. There were maybe a dozen of these cliffs along the bit I was looking at. Most of them had a house or two built on top of them. That must be The Rampart up there. The last big hill of my Walk. At the base of some of these little cliffs there were dark holes and crevices. Must be deep overhangs. Not caves. It's the wrong sort of rock for caves. But if you were a kid a deep overhang at the bottom of the cliff under your house would make a great cubbyhouse. The views'd be great too. You're gonna like the photos I take when I walk up there.

I wanted to walk up there this morning. I was tired but I was just as tired when I did the Plateau walk and I managed that fine. But I had to go to Whatsit Street and see the bloody doctor. More bloody tests. Do I look like a fucking guinea pig or something? On the plus side, I got the all-clear from an on-the-spot test for something or other.

This afternoon is just as pleasant as this morning. Still nice and cool. Cooler actually and it's raining now. Got all my pot plants pushed to the railing of the balcony to get a thorough wetting, got the kettle on and got a packet of biscuits to eat. I'm good.

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