Woodhill Diary

(return to index page)

Saturday 10 May 2008

The major feature of this day was that shortly after I returned home I suffered a prolonged attack of superventricular tachycardia (SVT), which resulted in an ambulance trip and an overnight stay at North Shore Hospital Emergency Care Centre, precariously perched on a bed that was too narrow for my arms to lie flat beside my body, and parked in a corridor near the nurses' station with full lighting and foot traffic.

Regular readers of this diary will understand immediately that this was in some fashion the sole fault of Carter Holt Harvey, their (non) management of Woodhill forest tracks, and their general venality, and that my 12 year history of occasional SVT attacks had nothing to do with it at all.

Not much in the way of photos. My chief delight on the walk was in spotting three magpie moths, the first I have seen in years. In fact the last one I saw was on the St James Walkway. There's an extremely common tall weed currently in flower in the forest open space that looks at first glance a lot like the groundsel that magpie moths and their woolly bear caterpillar offspring favour, but search as I might, no woolly bear caterpillars to be found. Nevertheless, I was delighted to see what might be a small renaissance of an insect that was almost an icon of my childood.

The other event of significance was seeing, in the middle of a large patch of this weed, a couple of antlers poking up. Next minute, about 8 deer, headed by the stag, came bounding out of it, veering away from me about fifteen metres away. God they are beautiful. No pictures of them either. Just too damned fast.

Over the back of the Short Loop walk I discovered a second community of kidney fern growing, and thanks to the recent downpours, they were fresh and strident in their greenness. Given ample water, anything as translucent as they are simply captures and holds sunlight. The parched crispness of the dead leaves, and the fine sandy dust of the last visit has gone, and, though how it happens is still a mystery to me in that sand, all the old puddles are back for young dogs to swim in and splash through.

On my last visit I spotted a car parked across the road from the old walkers carpark and speculated whether perhaps a kind of de facto "as you were" was creeping back among walkers in the forest.

So much for nostalgia. Somebody else must have been speculating along the same lines, for now, instead of a strand of number eight wire barring access, requiring only a decent set of pliers to deal to, somebody has felled a bunch of pine trees about 400-500mm diameter and placed them in line where the fence used to be to deter such blatant criminality. Instead of pliers you'd now require a chainsaw to use the old spot. And I wouldn't be in a hurry to park my car on the side of the road just there.

(I notice that presumably the same somebodies - which rather takes it out of the Bikeparks department - have done the same at the old Rimmers Rd carpark, reducing it's capacity by about three quarters.)

The Bikeparks carpark area has, if possible, grown even uglier.

Though if you are an accountant the possibility that some of the cost of the containers can be offset by covering them with paid advertising would probably sound attractive.

As I stroll up the hill, I notice that it is mushroom time again. As far as I know, Woodhill does not host the psychedelic variety found at Riverhead, but there are plenty of interesting varieties to be found, especially as you head further up South Head. Here are a couple of the more common types.

The fly agaric, below, is allegedly poisonous, but specialist mushroom websites suggest that the toxic elements are water soluble and can be removed by careful preparation. I think I'll stick to the supermarket or farm varieties. I'm not much taken with the idea of eating that Japanese fish either.

And then there's the lovely story about shamans and their totems. Shamanic healers, we are told, employed these totems as a vehicle to the spiritual insight needed for healing. Typically in their clothing they would incorporate elements that celebrated their totem, and in this case, the story goes, they often wore red clothing with a white trim.

The preparation of this mushroom involved feeding it to reindeer, and drinking their urine, which contained, dissolved, the "desirable" intoxicating elements. The resultant trance often, it is said, contained the illusion of flying or of defying gravity in one way or another. Combine the images of an old man, red clothing and white trim, reindeer and flying and you have an interesting precusor to a more more modern myth.

NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME - OR ANYWHERE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER. THIS IS ENTERTAINMENT, NOT INFORMATION.

I must head out into the forest on a proper mushroom sortie, soon. April through July is the best possible time to see them at their best and most varied.