North Coast Rescue

The stressed damsel, me, escapes Sydney destined for a North Coast wedding. The rescue begins beyond city limits as I glide down the freeway in my white steed 4x4.

I disembark at Breakfree Moby’s Resort, Boomerang Beach where beatific staff and my modern cabin, complete with garden and resident bush turkey, instantly revive.

Shower, bubbles and perfume then trot to the reception under The Green Cathedral, literally, nature’s church. Palm trees, serene lake, black swans, Kamakawiwo’ole’s Over the Rainbow and glimpses of a white maiden through the trees.

Rainforest stroll the next morning, refreshing swim at Shelly Beach (hangover cure) and, I bid, Adieu.

Rapunzel who?  

Bear Boy

I recently completed a tornado tour of my home province in Canada. One main difference when compared to other trips home? Escorting my Kiwi boyfriend through bear country.

The majority of the trip seemed to be spent in the car listening to my wide-eyed, unscathed by the threat of dangerous wildlife (there's nothing scary in New Zealand), boyfriend talking non-stop about how excited he was to finally get to Canada and see a bear. Wait, not bear...bears. In fact, he was expecting the countryside to be riddled with them. He kept saying: "Well, where are they? Where ARE they? Where are they hiding?"

Things had become increasingly desperate as we'd already been at my father’s rural British Columbia home for a week and not one sighting. Dad had explained that the orchard apples weren't ripe yet and bears usually appeared at the end of August when the scent of ripened apples hanging low on trees would be too much to resist. But behind closed doors it was non-stop: "WHEN ARE WE GOING TO SEE A BEAR?

Finally, after he'd barely been tied over with a few squirrel, deer, gopher, coyote and mountain goat sightings (actually it was a white speck on the side of a mountain that I claimed was a goat, but in truth was probably a rock), not to mention oodles of bear stories from my cheeky cousins (oh, and some dried up bear poop), we hit the road and headed for the Rockies. Please God, I thought, let there be bears.

It took a full day of driving to cross the Alberta border into Banff and, you guessed it, not one bear, but plenty of traffic, hot sun, no air conditioning and constant, seemingly delirious, babble about bears. Never mind the alpine scenery: towering mountains, wildflowers, turquoise rivers and the endless road winding ahead, the boy had bear on the brain big time.

Ironically, as we rolled into the first campsite of our trip, the Ranger told us to be careful about keeping food in the car and never to leave anything unattended since a Grizzly bear had prowled through camp the night before. He handed us a pamphlet about ‘bear proofing' our campsite and I'm pretty sure Bear Boy read it word for word.

After locating our campsite and pitching the tent it was time for a fire and some campfire grub. I began unloading the cooler and other amenities from the trunk of the car, but no sooner had I set everything up on the picnic table, I spotted Bear Boy packing everything back in.

"What are you doing?" I asked calmly.

"Didn't you hear the Ranger? We have to bear proof our campsite" he replied.

"Yes, but how do you propose we eat with everything packed into the car?"

Blank stare.

Lesson 1: For those of you planning a camping trip in bear country, food can be out if you are present at the campsite, you only have to put everything away if you are leaving the campsite unattended for ANY length of time or going to sleep for the night.

Needless to say, Bear Boy spent the entire night starting at every rustle and twig cracking outside our tent. Apparently it's okay to see a bear from the car, but not from inside the tent.

After an average sleep we set out the next day and struck gold. My savior: a little black bear patrolling the ditch alongside the highway for berries.

Lesson 2: When you spot a bear…don't get out of the car.

Okay, so he didn't get out of the car to go and stand next to the gawping Americans with their five foot camera lenses, but he wanted to.

Five minutes later we saw another smallish black bear and some big horned sheep. At last Bear Boy was satisfied and turned back into my sweet boyfriend...for half a day. Then he was on to the Grizzlies: "Where ARE they? Do you think we'll see any? How BIG are they? Bigger than a Black bear? Do they attack people? Should we go hiking? I want to pat one..."

Fight or Flight?

Every woman, at some point in her life, probably wonders what she would do if she caught an intruder in her home. You know, those nights alone, when you relish having the place to yourself. You might take a long bath, watch a film or burrow into the sofa with a good book. Then it comes time to switch off the lights and snuggle into bed. You hear a strange noise and your imagination runs rampant on your nerves. You check and re-check the locks, windows, closet, bed, bath tub, sink…Yes, some of you, even CEO’s of your own companies, can be this irrational. You may even imagine what you would do if someone broke in. Would you scream, hide, chase the intruder with a baseball bat, puke, sneak out the window and run to the neighbours? Pee your pants and cry? How would you handle such a terrifying situation?

Recently, having just returned from a three week holiday home in Canada, and on hiatus from work, I was camped at my Mum’s small one bedroom apartment overlooking the water. Her verandah juts out over lush, overgrown, shrubby bush land, a seemingly impossible place for anyone to navigate without a machete, and certainly not in pitch black darkness. For this reason Mum had been fairly slack about locking the verandah door at night.

My boyfriend, Tim, had been over and the three of us had shared a meal before Mum and I settled in for the night. She was exhausted and went to bed early. I stayed up surfing the net looking for jobs, before going to shower just before 11pm. I left my laptop, wallet and jewelry on the dining table facing the glass verandah doors. Due to some unexplainable intuition I locked the front door next to the bathroom before showering. Afterward I slipped through the well-lit apartment wrapped in a towel and, while rummaging around the dark bedroom searching for PJs and bruising my shins, heard a thump from above as though someone upstairs had knocked something over. Only there was no floor above us, just the landlord’s verandah, and they were asleep. I thought this was odd since I had never heard sounds from above in the two years Mum had resided there owing to the thick stone separating her unit from the main house. I kept rummaging…and bruising.

Shortly thereafter I heard a clicking noise from the kitchen. I stopped rummaging long enough to ponder the noise, but shrugged it off as the clicking of the refrigerator. Then there was a loud ‘POP!’ The distinct sound of the verandah door popping open that I’d heard countless times during previous visits. I stood up straight, frowning, and peered out the bedroom door to the kitchen. I could see a man’s leg highlighted by the white running shoe on his foot reflected from the dark glass in the oven door.

Disbelief prompted me to step into the bedroom doorway and I locked eyes with the intruder, a skinny young man wearing a grey beanie, black hooded sweatshirt, black jogging pants and white gloves. He was frozen in mid step toward the jack pot on the dining table and his wide eyes looked back at me in surprise. Mum slept soundly behind me and what can only be described as the need to protect my family prompted me to yell in a strong, masculine voice (or what I would hope to be masculine)…

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?! GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR HOUSE!”

The sound of my voice must have shocked him into action because in one smooth movement he turned and gracefully leapt onto the verandah railing before gliding down into the night and out of sight. I was left gawking in my towel as Mum, roused by my yelling, jumped out of bed proclaiming like Lion out of the Wizard of Oz, “Let me at ‘im, let me at ‘im”. Okay no, it was more like high pitched, “Who was it?! Where is he?! On the verandah?! What?! Are you okay?!” in a rapid fire of maternal questioning, before running out to the verandah and screaming out into the blackness “You cocksucker! I’m calling the police!” Now, my Mum is no redneck, she’s a petite woman with delicate features and the kindest heart, but I learned from a young age not to mess with her. I’m pretty sure between the two of us we could have taken on the skinny runt had he chosen to stick around.

Mum immediately called the police who, shockingly, arrived within minutes, but due to the dense brush and darkness, not shockingly, couldn’t find our intruder. He had left a flashlight at the bottom of the outside stairs leading up to the drive and they collected it for fingerprinting. Forensics arrived the next day to look for DNA, but so far we haven’t heard of any progression in the case.

What’s odd is the fact that my heart didn’t leap in my chest. I didn’t faint, scream, puke, freeze, pee my pants and cry or cower under the bed. I faced my fear head on. According to Wikipedia, women are more likely to flee from a stressful situation and men are more likely to fight. I realize now that there is no way to gage what reaction anyone will have to danger since there are certain factors that influenced my reaction, but that I had no control over.

Firstly, when I saw the intruder I was standing between him and my Mother in the bed behind me. My immediate reaction was to protect her, but what if I had been alone? Would I still have gone into fight mode? Secondly, the intruder wasn’t a large, intimidating man. He was slight, not overly tall and he was just as shocked to see me as I was to see him. He even looked mildly afraid and humiliated. I have to pose the question that, had he looked like Mike Tyson during the infamous Tyson vs. Holyfield match, would I have stood my ground?

My Mum, friends and family maintain that I’m a hero in their eyes, but I don’t feel like a hero. It seems there are too many uncontrollable variables in this type of situation to dictate how a person would react. I feel like I got lucky and that my intuition to lock the front door before showering means that the evening could have played out differently. Think about it, if the front door had been unlocked, perhaps the intruder would have tried that point of entry first. Meaning I could have still been in the bathroom tweezing my nose hairs when he entered the house. Okay, for the record, I don’t tweeze my nose hairs. Gross! If I had come out and caught him then, he may have felt trapped and therefore tried to attack me in his effort to exit through the front door. Who’s to say that had he tried to attack me I would have fought back? Maybe I would have gotten scared, locked myself in the bathroom, peed my pants...towel…and cried?

The point is we don’t know how we handle a situation until it happens so there’s no point wasting time considering it. All we can do is try to make our homes safe. That means locking doors and keeping outside areas well-lit. Had the verandah door been locked my ‘heroism’ would never have occurred because he probably would have tried the door and, seeing it locked, moved on to the next house.

Moral of the story: Billy don’t be a hero. Lock the freakin’ doors!

Does this pie make me look fat?

Have you ever opened the freezer and reached for that pint of Ben and Jerry's after dinner and your boyfriend gives you a withering look as if to say: are you seriously going to eat that? But you make love to the ice cream anyway…on the couch, pants half undone, while absorbing old Sex and the City reruns and absent mindedly texting a girlfriend. Who says men are better at multi-tasking?

The next morning you're squeezing into your pencil skirt before work and he has to help you get the zipper up. His ingrained masculine sense of bad timing causes him to say: maybe you should think twice about the Chunky Monkey next time Babe. Your immediate inclination is to turn and wrap your stockings tightly around his neck. Then you probably spend your coffee break fuming to a colleague about what an insensitive brute your boyfriend is: I mean can you believe he said that?

Recently the male partner of my Mother's friend was discussing relationship issues over tea. The subject of what he dubs, Male Fix It Syndrome, came up. According to him, when a couple first enters a relationship, the man usually spends time complimenting the woman on her beauty, sexy curves or her hot legs and, unless the woman is an ultra-confident sex bomb, she may have a hard time accepting it. Her response might be something like: Are you kidding? My legs look like two frankfurters wrapped in scrambled eggs…or, er, something along those lines.

The male brain backlogs these comments and thinks: how can I fix this? If the woman had complained of a broken cupboard door the man might take note and arrive with a screw driver next time he dropped by, but how can he fix a woman's poor body image?

If we look below the surface and consider the differences between the male and female psyche and how each sex solves problems it would appear, grudgingly, that men are not as insensitive on this subject as we may think. Their approach to a problem is simply logical: I tell her she's beautiful and she says she's fat. How can I help her feel better about herself? She's reaching for the ice cream. She's going to hate herself tomorrow. If I give her a stern look maybe she'll think twice...aaaand she's inhaling the ice cream anyway. Great. Now I'll have to deal with the "I'm fat" parade in the morning. Maybe if I call her on it she'll exercise some self-control next time.

We interpret their “fix” as a round-a-bout way of telling us we're fat. We perceive it as them validating every bad thing we already think about our bodies.

My boyfriend and I went through this exact issue a few years ago. It was a vortex of squabbling. I would complain about not fitting into my bikini and he would tell me I was gorgeous. I would request an ice cream at the beach an hour later and he would cringe, thus triggering me to bludgeon him with insults about what a mean and insensitive person he was. I would berate him for his stomach that remained perfectly flat even after he'd inhaled a mammoth bowl of spaghetti followed by giant servings of rocky road and blueberry crumble. How could he not understand how difficult it was for me when his boy metabolism meant he could eat one hundred Krispy Kreme donuts and not gain a Brazilian badonk-a-donk behind?

He would endure my blitzkrieg, let me pout and then comfort me. Eventually I saw through my haze of self-pity and realized that he wasn't trying to change me…he was trying to help me. We discussed the issue and realized that I had to cure my own diseased self-image, but slapping my hand for munching Tim Tams after a stressful day was giving the opposite result he desired. It was pushing our relationship to a precarious edge.

So where is my little tangent leading to?

How about some food for thought ladies? If you have body image issues and can't accept a compliment, you complain to your boyfriend, husband, fiancée, bus driver that you just can't bear your tuck shop arms anymore, but no sooner does the complaint leave your mouth and you're filling it with apple pie, here's some advice.

Put down the pie.

Until you can eat that pie without looking in the mirror in disgust then you don't deserve the pie.

If you love your body, cellulite and all; if, when waving goodbye, your arm wobbles and you laugh about it instead of sticking your finger down your throat...you deserve the pie. Eat the pie. Relish the pie. Love the pie and love yourself for loving the pie. Life and food go together. They are to be enjoyed together. Men adore us when we take delight in a meal and instead of degrading ourselves in the morning we go for a walk. We are sexier when we cherish food and ourselves.

For inspiration go and digest some 19th century French art. The women depicted aren't thin, but they are beautiful. Beauty is perception. Change your perception to that of Edgar Degas back in 1876 and you're on a roll woman.

Let them eat pie.