Run 2407 – 19th Aug 2013

Swampy Out of His Natural & Neutral Territory
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To understand what you were served up with last Monday, for good or for worse, one must understand the genealogy of our hare.

He’s an odd one to say the least as his ancestry is not just a little obscure and bizarre.
So…his name is Swampy, which immediately conjures up a variety of images. So let’s start off with the obvious. A simple definition: – Swampy =

Marshy, Boggy, Muddy, Wet, Moist, Damp and Slimy.

An area of land which is usually large, always wet and overgrown with various aquatic trees sedges, reeds, rushes and other macrophytic species.

A transitive verb to overwhelm somebody by being too much or too many things to cope with.
Now this last definition is getting close to the mark, I would say.
Swampy….Marshy, boggy wet, damp and slimy
It’s definitely organic and certainly animated. A place where dark and
dangerous creatures lurk.
And if you cast your mind back to your innocent school days you may
even remember that cute little charismatic crocodilian… You know the
little fella,……….. called Swampy
But if you think this was our hare for the night, you would be Mighty
Mistaken!
Just as the Neanderthals lost their way in the evolutionary chain, so we have a Swampy like creature who was created by a monumental scientific stuff up by a mad and nutty scientist working way out in the fetid swamps of Florida. His secretive and evil bomb was accidentally detonated killing this nutty scientist and blasting his torn shredded body into the murky, stinking swamp.
The corpse was drenched in a bio-restorative formula, and this
infected the swamp’s plant life where the remains of the body landed. The plant life then formed into a semblance of a human with the incarnated consciousness of the scientist, which rose up from the bog as the ………Swamp Thing.
And that my friends is who set the run last Monday.
So when you cast your mind back to where you ran on Monday you will
quickly realise that the Swamp Thing was completely outside his natural territory when setting his run.
Dazed by the flashing lights, hard, dry concrete and bitumastic surfaces, noisy vehicles and the screaming miasma of a 21st century urban metropolis, the poor creature went into a total panic.
And what else would you expect?. Now if my elementary school maths still serves me well, the run had 2 halves this week….well…..sort of.
The first half of the run started off on high dry, ground making its way its way up and over one of the busiest and nosiest highways in Sydney, the Bradfield Highway and into a park (surprisingly, called North Sydney Oval).
Still lost and bewildered the Swamp Thing ran out of the park desperately looking for marshy, slimy murky water to hide in, but instead he followed the ridge line of Neutral Bay, otherwise known as Military Road, or close to it. Another noisy and bewildering strip with stress defying levels.
The hash boys followed The Swamp Thing’s intermittent and semi-scrubbed out trail but were decidedly unimpressed. Actually, …not just a little pissed off. Just like the Swamp Thing, they much prefer the green, peaceful and romantic places through which to canter on their precious Monday evenings. The more so if the trail is liberally filled with gorgeous young damsels who are lost and need a helping hand or caring words of direction.
Sensing their mounting dissatisfaction and gloomy mood which hovered over 40 or so shuffling and hobbling hashmen, the trail shortly crossed back to lower ground on the south side of Military Road.

This started the second half of the run. Or should I say the last ¾ of the run. Maybe the Swamp Thing had an inbuilt water divining sensor which would drive him towards the scenic harbour water front with limpid water to cool his shattered nerves. . We all hoped desperately that he would do this. And so with high hopes we followed what might be called the remnants of a semi marked out trail, because it certainly wasn’t a trail of true POSH standards.
Slowly we worked our way towards the becoming waters of Mosman
Bay, but Alas ! Clearly Calcium carbonate (Chalk) is to The Swamp
Thing as Kryptonite is to Superman. The poor creature must have been
lost, confused, exhausted and totally disorientated and was clearly
unable to find his beloved water’s edge, harbour front and world
renowned zillion dollar views across Sydney Harbour along the shores
of Cremorne and Neutral Bay. Such a loss indeed. Instead us poor
pack runners were driven along more by the stand in Walkers TM, Druid. Little Shit summarised it succinctly by saying “We didn’t know when we were on the trail and we didn’t know if we were off the trail”.
Many were lost and others threw the rag in for want of a trail and a defined run, smarting at a litany of missed opportunities in territory which could have delivered everything a hashman dreams of.

So sadly we headed our way home uphill through more streets than I care to recall in the freezing cold, returning at 8pm to where it started hours before…. and the place was almost deserted. Many were still out whilst the walkers and the SCB’s had long headed for the warmth and light of the club house.
The hot food was Chicken schnitzel, chips and salad and bread and butter pudding (but not as good as Pilko’s). However the sting was that the promised cost of grog at members’ prices was another Swamp
Thing myth.
We had a visitor for the night….’Missed Her Bullseye’
(Gerold Bright) from exotic Guam of the Agana H3. And just to prove
it we had a photo of the group with his clan’s banner.
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