The 3am Coolum Shuffle

It started, as all great mistakes do, with an idea that seemed perfectly reasonable at 2:47am.

"I'll walk to Mount Coolum," I told no one, because no one was awake to talk me out of it. "Barefoot. In the dark. For wellness."

The air was thick and warm, the kind of Sunshine Coast night that smells like frangipani and bad decisions. I padded along the path feeling very spiritual, very primal, very connected to the earth right up until the earth connected back.

I was mid-stride, mentally composing the Instagram caption ("3am. Barefoot. Just me and the mountain. No filter needed."), when something cold, wet, and deeply uninvited landed squarely on top of my foot.

Time stopped.

My brain, working with the limited information available at 3am, ran through its threat assessment in approximately 0.003 seconds and arrived at one conclusion:

SNAKE.

What followed cannot be described as running. It cannot be described as jumping. What it can be described as is a full-body exorcism a shrieking, airborne, flailing sequence of limbs that had no business belonging to a single human being. I leapt approximately four feet straight up. I made a sound that started as a scream, passed briefly through yodel, and landed somewhere near the noise a kettle makes when it's deeply offended. My arms did things arms aren't designed to do.

I came back down doing what witnesses  had there mercifully been none would later describe as the dance.

The dance had no rhythm. The dance had no genre. It was one part hokey pokey, one part man-on-fire, and three parts pure ancestral panic. Both feet left the ground no fewer than six times. I spun. I actually spun. I shook my foot like I was trying to fling it off my own leg.

And then I looked down.

A cane toad fat, unbothered, magnificently stupid sat on the path staring up at me with the blank, heavy-lidded expression of someone who has seen things and felt nothing. It blinked once. Slowly. The way a toad blinks when it has just watched a grown adult nearly achieve flight over six inches of amphibian.

Then it hopped away. Not quickly. Not nervously. It just ambled off, the way you leave a party when things get weird.

I stood there, chest heaving, barefoot on a dark path at 3am, completely alone, having just performed an interpretive dance for an audience of one toad who had already left the venue.

The mountain loomed ahead, silent and ancient, utterly unimpressed.

I looked back toward home. Then I looked up at Coolum, dark and massive against the ink-blue sky.

And I kept walking.

Because here's the thing about surviving a near-death toad experience at 3am it recalibrates you. My heart was already hammering. My bare feet already knew every rock on this path. I'd already made the sound. I'd already done the dance. What exactly was I going home to? A ceiling? Blankets? Dignity? That ship had sailed on the back of a cane toad.

So I walked. Up through the scrub, where the darkness got thicker and the trees leaned in like they were listening. My feet found the trail without being asked, reading the warm dirt and cool rock like braille. Something rustled in the bush to my left and I did  briefly, just briefly perform a small, private reprise of the dance. No one saw. The mountain didn't count.

Higher up, the wind picked up and the Sunshine Coast sprawled out below, all scattered amber lights and the long dark line of the ocean sitting heavy under the stars. Coolum Beach was down there somewhere, sleeping, completely unaware that one of its residents was barefoot on a mountain at 3am because a toad had personally challenged his nervous system.

I sat on the summit rocks and caught my breath. 

The sky was enormous. The kind of enormous you forget about until you're alone in the dark with nothing between you and it. The stars did what stars always do when nobody's watching they showed off.

I thought about the toad. Honestly, fair play to him. He'd touched my foot and triggered a full spiritual awakening. That's powerful work for something that weighs 400 grams.

I sat up there for a long while, barefoot on ancient rock, the coast glittering below, the sky blazing above.

Eventually I walked back down, calm and quietly ridiculous, feeling every bit like a man who had been profoundly humbled by a toad and had somehow turned it into a moment.

The caption, when I finally wrote it, just said:

"3am. Worth it."