29 May, 2010 @ 7:23 am |

All this rain. What happened to Sydney’s dry autumns of a few years ago?

 

I buy Mountain Biking-UK magazine from time to time, plus a few Trailflix riders are from the ‘mother’ country or have spent some time there, and one very common theme that keeps coming up is rain. And, like the fluoride in Colgate toothpaste, rain really does get in. Turns dirt to mud, bike parts to rust, forks & shocks to fail, and eventually gets into or under whatever wet weather gear you can buy…

 

And I know wet. In my teens, my younger brother and I would ride the motorbikes from Christchurch to the West Coast of the South Island in New Zealand on a regular basis. Locals in Canterbury call it the Wet Coast because it seems to rain there a lot. A whole lot.

 

We either camped, or if it didn’t stop raining, found a cheap motor camp cabin and bunked. No second-guesses why my camping skills are not up to scratch.

 

In those days the Coast was nearly devoid of cars and people, having had its heyday in the gold rush… then the greenstone (jade) rush… and later the coal mining boom. The lot of them now all-but disappeared. I still remember my Uncle taking my brother and I – at age 8 – over to our second cousins in the small West Coast town of Dobson for a week in the summer holidays, when the coalmine there was still open. I recall the sky in Dobson was a featureless grey, mainly because it never stopped raining the whole time we were there. Luckily, though, it was warm or the holiday itself would have been miserable. The highlight of our stay was the time we managed to get on board a tram that went down into one of the mines. It was an incredible experience: Helmets and lamps on, we boarded the carriage, on a 45-degree angle at the mouth of the mine. A single row of dim yellow lamps tracked our descent and water dripped from the roof almost all the way down. Luckily none of us was claustrophobic because the slow rail trip seemed endless. I remember looking back at the disappearing hole of grey light behind us, obscured by my uncle, steam rising from his body, and pondering about where we were headed. I’d seen the pictures of the earth with the yellow-hot lava in the centre and the cooler red lava just under the surface, so my 8-year-old-volcanic-obsessed mind was thinking we were heading down to this cauldron. Fortunately we stopped some way before the lava started oozing out of the coal…which was both a disappointment and a relief.

 

Apart from the subsequent showering with about 200 miners – with coal-black faces and arms, white eyes and the rest pink & hairy - my next memory was swimming at night with a million frogs.

 

With all that rain, backyard cricket and BBQ’s were, sadly, not an option. Tattered old war comics and ancient board games like Monopoly and Cluedo kept us amused, while my uncle and his cousins drank, smoked and played cards in the kitchen every night ‘til the early hours. Adult card playing was interesting to us kids mainly because we got to stay up late - which was a big thing to an 8-year-old - but mainly because I was co-opted into helping my 2^nd cousins sneak sips of beer and drag on cigarettes when the adults weren’t looking. One night after we were shuffled off – reluctantly - to bed, our 2^nd cousins and my elder brother and I climbed out the bedroom window in singlets and shorts in the pouring rain, through the mud patch that used to be the garden, and snuck along the barely lit streets, heading for the huge open water reservoir, used to supply the mine. Being the height of summer, it was like the tropics, so we were both drenched and (almost) warm.

 

Ignoring the ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’ sign (what kid understands ‘prosecuted’ anyway?), and climbing over the mesh fence at the reservoir, we stared into the huge pool, lit by a single arc lamp. It was writhing with black, slimy legs and tails. Large tadpoles and baby frogs with tails seemed to cover almost the entire surface, but the bright light was so strong, the white tank made the water underneath luminescent. I cupped my hand, dipped it in the water and caught a few, which were as cold and slimy as they looked and highly fascinating, but too frenetic to remain in my hand. Further along the pool edge, one of the cousins threw off his clothes and jumped into the pool, making a splash and joining the million throng. He didn’t appear to be being eaten alive so we all followed, a tad more tentatively, into the warmish water. Feeling the mucusy, shiny creatures swim past us was an eerie feeling – they all seemed to be on a mission – but to where? I never did find out..

 

As it was, though, if we’d been caught sneaking out at night it would’ve been a lot more painful… I remember the next day, wanting to ask my hungover uncle about the fate of the frogs, but it was either fear of being discovered or the threat of my brother’s fist, so I never did.

 

One day when the rain eased off to a drizzle, we biked around the streets on old rusty ladies bikes which were way too big for me and either had no gears or had rusted-out 3-shift Sturmey-Archer ones. I was barely able to look over the handlebars & steer let alone change gears and they were heavy and very sturdy so the couple of roller derby crashes did them (and luckily us) no harm at all…

 

These days, Sydney seems almost as wet as that summer, more like the UK than the Sydney of a few years ago. Global Climate Change means this might be it for a while, which would be unfortunate since neither the trails nor our bikes are ideal for riding in the wet. Whereas UK trails have had any clay and soli washed away eons ago, that’s our bread & butter.

 

Roll on the big dry. On weekends, at least.

 

 

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